by Kitty Kelley
Making matters worse at the time was losing her status as the country’s number one talk show host. For twenty-five straight weeks Jerry Springer had beaten her in the ratings, and Oprah was reeling. The previous summer she began hinting that she might give up her show, saying she was tired of the grind, but she always made this kind of feint right before contract negotiations.
“I’m not so much saddened by the way [my ratings are] going as stunned,” she said at the time. “Unless you are going to kill people on the air—and not just hit them on the head with chairs—and unless you are going to have sexual intercourse—and not just, as I saw the other day [on Jerry Springer], a guy pulling down his pants and pulling out his penis—then there comes a time when you have oversaturated yourself.” By then what she called Springer’s “vulgarity circus” had beaten her in the ratings forty-six of the previous forty-seven weeks. “I can understand how you can get beaten in the ratings,” she said. “I’m introducing books and they’ve got penises.”
Oprah had come a long way from the days when she, too, loved to shock her audiences. But she no longer wanted to be seen as a vulgarian, hosting shows for nudists and shouting “penis, penis, penis.” She believed that Beloved had transported her to a higher level. “It changed my life,” she said. She told her producers that she felt she now had a moral obligation to change the lives of others. “I want to bring meaning to people’s lives.” She framed a huge photograph of herself as Sethe with “the tree” lashed across her back and hung it outside her Harpo office alongside a big leather whip as a reminder to her staff of her new vision for herself and her show. When Oprah’s protégée Rachael Ray saw the photograph and the whip, she was reported to have said to friends, “Why is she wearing slave drag? She obviously has problems being black.” Ray’s publicist later denied that the TV chef had made the comment.
Oprah announced she would renew her contract with King World through the 1999/2000 and 2000/2001 seasons and begin a new kind of television. She received $130 million in cash advances and 450,000 King World stock options, in addition to the 1,395,000 options she already had from deals made in 1991, 1994, and 1995. By the time CBS took over King World in 1999, Oprah, whose fortune was then worth $725 million, had options on 4.4 million shares, worth $100 million.
Newly enriched and enlightened, she launched what she called “Change Your Life” television. She opened her 1998/1999 season with a new theme song based on an old spiritual, which she sang herself: “I believe I will run on and see what the end will be….Come on and run with me. O-O-O-Oprah!” She introduced New Age guides such as the author John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus) to instruct her audience “to determine for yourself your true soul’s desire and to be on purpose with your life.” He taught her viewers to meditate by saying, “O glorious future, my heart is open to you. Come into my life.” Using colorful props in his presentations, he handed a big stick to one woman, who closed her eyes and sobbed when he said, “I’d like you to go back to your inner child. I want you to imagine Mommy and Daddy coming to you, and I want you to express your feelings to them.”
Believing in spiritual empowerment, Oprah presented the Yoruba priestess and inspirational author Iyanla Vanzant (Acts of Faith) to counsel women on finding love and purpose in their lives. Vanzant advised viewers “to surrender to the god of your understanding.” One audience member asked, “I want to know how do you find total and complete peace?”
“Get naked with yourself,” said Iyanla Vanzant.
Oprah also introduced the financial author Suze Orman (The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom), who preached that “money is a living entity and responds to energy, including yours.” Orman told Oprah’s audience, “Your self-worth equals your net worth.” She said they needed to get rid of their bad emotions and start believing they were destined for wealth in order to become wealthy.
Another regular “life coach” was Gary Zukav, who wrote The Seat of the Soul, which Oprah said was her second favorite book, next to the Bible. She introduced him as a onetime Green Beret and former sex addict who lived on a mountain without television. His purpose was to help Oprah and her audience “delve into their souls” and resolve their fears. “Your feelings are the force field of your soul,” he said, emphasizing that fear is the cause of everything from violence to meanness.
“So,” Oprah said, “fear is the opposite of love?”
“Fear is the opposite of love,” he said.
“And anything that isn’t love is fear?”
“Correct,” he said. “When you really look at your fears and you heal them, you can look at yourself and you’ll be beautiful.”
He and Oprah devoted one entire show to karma. “Energy is energy,” he said, “and you cannot escape it.”
Oprah also embraced Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of Simple Abundance, a spiritual self-help book, from which she advised her viewers to keep gratitude journals. “Every night I write down five things in my journal I’m grateful for,” Oprah said. “If you concentrate on what you have, you’ll end up having more. If you constantly focus on what you don’t have, you’ll end up having less.”
One of her most colorful “life strategy experts” was Dr. Phil, who had guided her through the cattlemen’s lawsuit. She introduced him as “the deepest well of common sense I’ve ever encountered.” At first the big, bald, blunt practitioner of tell-it-like-it-is therapy jolted her audience by telling them they were “way wrong,” “full of crap,” and “wimpin’ out.” He didn’t spare Oprah, either. In a segment about weight, he said, “We don’t use food, we abuse food. It’s not what you eat, but why you eat that has you in the problem you’re in.”
“Well, there are some people who are just genetically disposed to being smaller,” said Oprah.
“But the fact is that ain’t you!”
He told one member of the audience, “You talked about flowers and cake and wedding and dress. You’re preparing for the wedding but not for the marriage.”
“Mercy,” said Oprah. “That is a good statement. That is so good!”
Dr. Phil said, “People say, ‘time heals all wounds.’ Let me tell you, time heals nothing. You can do the wrong thing for ten years, and it doesn’t equal the right thing for one day. And the fact that—”
“Whooo,” yelled Oprah. “That’s good, Phil! Whooo! That’s a good Phil-ism.”
Soon Dr. Phil owned Tuesdays on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he appeared for three years before entering into negotiations with Harpo to have his own talk show, which started in 2002.
Oprah concluded her “Change Your Life” shows with a segment called “Remembering Your Spirit,” which she introduced with soft lights and New Age music, saying, “I am defined by the world as a talk show host, but I know that I am much more. I am spirit connected to the greater spirit.” She ended one segment sitting in a bubble bath, surrounded by candles. “The bathroom is my favorite room in the house,” she told Newsweek, which reported her bathtub sits like a small pond with water pouring out of the rocks that surround it. “I had this structure added on,” she explained, “and the tub was sculpted to fit my body. My favorite thing to do is take a bath.” On the air she sat in her marble tub filled with bubbles and recited a mantra to the spirits; then she addressed the camera. She urged her viewers to sit in their bathtubs for fifteen minutes every day. “Your day will undoubtedly be more focused, more centered,” she said. “Things tend to fall in line.” She talked about her spirit in interviews, saying, “I think I’m just becoming more of myself, which is better than anybody can imagine. By 50, 52, I just can’t wait to see me.”
The bubble bath segment unleashed a torrent of “Deepak Oprah” criticism, comparing her to New Age guru Deepak Chopra. There was a severe media backlash, especially in Chicago. “[A]s I stand in the eye of this latest hurricane of national [self-] worship, may I point out one thing,” wrote Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. “She’s getting really goofy with all the spiritual questing.�
�� Oprah had told TV Guide she was so happy she was “splendiferous,” but Roeper disagreed. “It seems to me we’re watching a woman go through an almost frantic search for spiritual bliss and higher consciousness.”
The Sun-Times later reported that a seventy-three-year-old woman following Oprah’s advice to light scented candles and “be reminded of the essential qualities of your light” had accidentally set fire to her retirement high-rise, sending a dozen people to the hospital.
The Chicago Tribune’s TV critic, Steve Johnson, advised Oprah-holics to draw a bubble bath for their guru. “Her spirit—battered of late by indifference, criticism and the befuddlement on the faces of all those devotees who don’t even know what she means when she preaches ‘remembering your spirit’ on her show every day—just might need it.” He pronounced Oprah’s “Change Your Life” television “a fairly skin-crawling thing.
“Winfrey, by giving it a label, was not just saying ‘I want to help you change your life,’ but making a more aggressive suggestion: ‘You need to change your life.’ And coming from a woman who can snap her fingers and get what she wants, who just signed a $150 million contract to do her talk show through 2002 and whose personal fortune has been estimated at closer to $1 billion than $0, it rings a little patronizing.”
He also took aim at her for presenting blatant medical quackery by endorsing a woman who described herself as a “medical intuitive,” who Oprah said was genuine because the woman had intuited that Oprah was worried about joint pain. As if a medical psychic, this woman diagnosed members of Oprah’s audience simply by having them stand and give their first names and ages. She told a man with chronic migraine headaches: “Life owes me an explanation. That thought is in your liver and so it’s burning. And what happens from the liver is there’s an energetic circuit and it goes right up to the brain channel. And that starts the fire neurologically and that’s why you have migraines.”
Oprah soon became a moving target for the mainstream media. Psychology Today lambasted her for contributing to lunacy. “It is apparently arrogant to think that psychiatrists, physicists, evolutionary scientists, and epidemiologists might know more about their areas of expertise than say, Oprah,” wrote Gad Saad, PhD, in an article about narcissistic celebrities who play doctor. A decade later Newsweek put Oprah on the cover (June 8, 2009), with an eleven-page article that castigated her for “crazy talk” and “wacky cures.” Like the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales who sold fake relics and spurious indulgences, Oprah was blasted as irresponsible for not knowing the difference between useful medical information and New Age nonsense. This was a complete turnaround for the magazine that had lauded her eight years before with a breathless cover story proclaiming “The Age of Oprah,” saying, “She’s changing more lives than ever.” During her “Change Your Life” phase the magazine nicked her with a “Periscope” item titled “Oprah-Di, Oprah Da,” giving five takes on “The Big O”:
1. Good Riddance. It’s Springer time! Oprah’s feel-good blab is passé. What we require now is fights and sluts. Jerry! Jerry!
2. She’s a Ratings Martyr. She knew she’d lose fans with her self-help focus, and knew Beloved was a tough sell. But she needs to better us!
3. O Is for Get Over Yourself. Oprah gets preachier every year. She’s a cult leader, a self-proclaimed guru. And besides…
4. She’s Telling Us How to Live? Can’t keep the fat off? Can’t tie the knot? Girl, your life’s a mess.
5. Don’t You Say That About Oprah! Survived poverty and abuse, saved the book biz, uses TV for good, cares about her fans and looks fly! You go, Oprah.
It was not just the Chicago critics who came down on Oprah for presuming her viewers needed their lives changed. She took it on the chin from the Orlando Sentinel’s Hal Boedeker, who said her bubble-bath segment screamed for a parody on Saturday Night Live. He suggested an appropriate topic for her next show would be “Celebrity Run Amok” with a new theme song, “You’re So Vain,” which, he said, Oprah could sing to herself. “Her confident style has given way to arrogance.”
Perhaps the cruelest blow came when Wiley A. Hall III compared Louis Farrakhan to Oprah in the Afro-American Red Star. Hall wrote that with his “feel-good” Million Man March on Washington in 2000, the Nation of Islam leader was “trying to position himself as another Oprah Winfrey….[Like Oprah] he’s become a master of the obvious, earnestly stated, passionately put….With Oprah Winfrey and her new clone Louis Farrakhan, I have this strong sense that we’re being manipulated. I just can’t tell whether it’s for good or ill.” The kicker came the following week, when Hall reported that followers of Farrakhan, known for race-baiting and virulent anti-Semitism, felt he was being insulted to be compared to Oprah.
In The New York Times, the newspaper she cared most about, Jeff MacGregor dismissed Oprah’s “Change Your Life” television as “host worship,” filled with “mind numbing clichés of personal improvement.” He said that “like many gurus and circuit riders before her, Oprah has found a way to shamelessly market the history of her own misery and confusion as a form of worship.”
Yet what sounded loopy to critics resonated with many in Oprah’s audience, who shared her hunger for greater meaning in their lives. “I was a rural mail carrier in Stem, North Carolina,” said Susan Karns, who runs the beauty shop at Hillcrest Convalescent Center in Durham, “and if it wasn’t for Oprah and her ‘Change Your Life’ television, I would never have gone to beauty school at night and gotten this great job….It was scary to change my life but I’m so glad I did. I love what I do now because I make people feel good every day and they are so grateful.”
While some questioned Oprah’s common sense, none doubted her sincerity. “I want people to see things on our show that makes them think differently about their lives,” she said. “To be a light for people. To make a difference…to open their minds and see things differently…how to get in touch with the spiritual part of their life.” However, she disliked being called a “New Ager.” She told one woman in her audience, “I am not New Age anything and I resent being called that. I am just trying to open a door so that people can see themselves more clearly and perhaps be the light to get them to God, whatever they may call that. I don’t see spirits in the trees and I don’t sit in the room with crystals.”
“Oh, but she does invoke spirits,” insisted Peter A. Colasante, owner of L’Enfant Gallery in Washington, D.C. He then added facetiously, “She probably speaks in tongues, too….I do know she waves her hands above her head like a Pentecostal when she says she feels vibrations. At least that’s been my personal experience with her.”
After buying some oil paintings through her decorator Anthony Browne, Oprah wanted to purchase more by the same artist [John Kirthian Court], so she contacted the L’Enfant Gallery directly. “Her people from Harpo called endlessly to set up an appointment on the same day she was going to Deborah Gore Dean’s shop, across the street from mine in Georgetown. We were both told to deliver photos of what Oprah wanted to see, and the photos were to be awaiting her arrival at the Four Season Hotel the night before. We were told to have our galleries ready for her arrival and her viewing because she did not have much time…We were told that Oprah is micromanaged to the minute, like the president of the United States. We received a partial schedule:
2:17 P.M.: Oprah’s limousine arrives at L’Enfant Gallery
2:20 P.M.: Oprah walks into gallery
2:30 P.M.: Oprah views paintings
3:00 P.M.: Oprah leaves L’Enfant Gallery
“Well, you don’t just consign a few paintings by John Kirthian Court for a viewing. He’s the grand-nephew of James McNeill Whistler two times removed and is considered a great painter and portraitist in his own right. He lives in San Miguel. You must buy his paintings outright [$60,000–$80,000 average price] and then sell them after you’ve air-freighted them from Portugal and insured their transport for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s what I did: I purchased three paintings for Oprah’s
two thirty viewing.” The gallery owner admitted feeling tentative about the investment because he’d had “trouble getting paid for the first three paintings” he had sold to Oprah a year or so before. “But I went ahead and did it,” he said.
“Because her secretaries told me she only had a few minutes and would be gone by three P.M., I made a three thirty P.M. appointment with another client. The day arrived and we waited and waited and waited for Oprah. Finally, we saw her two limousines pull up to Deborah’s shop at two thirty-five P.M. Time was passing, so around two fifty-five P.M. I went across the street, where Oprah was bellowing at Deborah for not having had her photos delivered to the hotel the night before. Apparently, when she walked into the shop, she said to Deborah, ‘Are you Anthony’s girl?’ Deborah, who owns her own store, naturally got a little huffy. ‘No. I’m not Anthony’s girl. I’m not anybody’s girl.’ Oprah berated her for not having anything ready and kept yelling about how precious her time was. That’s when I interrupted.
“ ‘Hey. You’ve kept me waiting for over thirty minutes.’ Her security guards moved in, and Deborah started laughing. ‘C’mon,’ I said to Oprah. ‘I need to show you your paintings so I can get to my own appointment.’ With that I started to walk her out of the shop.
“ ‘Oprah does not walk,’ she said.
“ ‘Aw, c’mon. It’s only a few yards,’ I said with my hand on her shoulder, steering her across the street. She started screaming at her secretary.
“ ‘Who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. Who is he? Tell me what’s going on here.’
“I said, ‘Your people made appointments for you, insisted on absolute times, and said that we all had to be ready for your arrival and let nothing interfere, so I’m doing exactly what your people told me to do.’