by Kitty Kelley
“Mum Oprah” vowed to build “the best school in the world” for the girls she now called “my daughters,” and she promised to support them so they could attend any university of their choosing. She selected the first wave of 152 students (eleven, twelve, and thirteen years old) from 3,500 applicants, each of whom had superior grades and demonstrated leadership potential. None came from families that made more than $787 a month, and most had lives ravaged by AIDS, rape, and disease. Some were orphans, and many lived on only a bowl of rice a day. “I know their story,” said Oprah, “because it is my story.”
Seeing herself in each little girl, she said, “I want them to be surrounded by beauty because beauty does inspire. I want this to be a place of honor for them because these girls have never been treated with kindness….This will be their safe place, a place to flourish free of violence, abuse and deprivation—a place of honor….I want their parents to know they can trust me with their girls.”
At that time, the girls’ impoverished parents saw Oprah as the personification of goodness, for she was giving their daughters a chance for a better life—a gift they could never afford. Only later would some feel anger and bitter disappointment. Oprah would have her regrets as well, and be forced to admit that she had spent too much time prettying her school and not enough effort vetting the faculty entrusted with protecting the girls. “I had been paying attention to all of the wrong things,” she said. “I built that school from the outside in when what really mattered was the inside out.”
As part of that “outside” focus, Oprah orchestrated a worldwide publicity campaign for her school’s opening that captured more attention than a moon launch, putting her on the cover of People and the front pages of newspapers around the globe. She was featured in a two-hour CNN special by Anderson Cooper and in special reports on all network newscasts, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show on CBS, CNN’s American Morning, ET, and Extra. There were articles in Time, Newsweek, and, of course, O magazine and its spinoff O at Home, and a prime-time special on ABC titled Building a Dream: The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. There was so much hoopla surrounding the opening of Oprah’s sumptuous school that the state funeral of Gerald Ford, the thirty-eighth president of the United States, on the same day seemed merely a somber footnote.
A few weeks before Christmas, on HollywoodReporter.com, Ray Richmond was composing his 2006 gift list “for challenged media figures.” For Oprah he wished “a conversation that isn’t all about her and her uncompromising, sublime wonderfulness.” At the same time, she was sending large, elaborate invitations to two hundred guests to celebrate New Year’s Eve with her in Johannesburg. All received an itinerary of what was in store—elegant hotel suites, high teas, cocktail parties, candlelit dinners in the bush, a safari, and a five-course African feast of food, wine, and music on New Year’s Eve at the Palace of the Lost City, in Sun City, with the Soweto Gospel Choir performing. She asked each guest to bring a personally inscribed book for her school’s library.
Planes began arriving that weekend, disgorging movie stars, rock stars, and television stars: Tina Turner, Chris Rock, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier, Chris Tucker, Tyler Perry, Nick Ashford, Valerie Simpson, Kenneth (“Babyface”) Edmonds, Star Jones, Patti LaBelle, Cicely Tyson, Quincy Jones, Reuben Cannon, Kimberly Elise, Anna Deavere Smith, BeBe Winans, Suzanne De Passe, Andrew Young, India.Arie, Holly Robinson Peete, Al Roker, Diane Sawyer, and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. All came to honor Oprah and her school.
In addition to the celebrities, Oprah also invited her father, but not her mother. She paid tribute to Vernon during her opening-day speech by asking him to stand up. “What you have seen I have done, and what you have heard I have done. None of this could have been possible without my father.” Vernon Winfrey was proud to be acknowledged in the presence of Nelson Mandela. “I stood up and turned around real slow, where they could see me well,” he said later. “It brought tears to my eyes, her giving me credit for it. It was true. It wouldn’t have been possible if she had not come back to me, and she gave me credit for that.”
For the grand inauguration on January 2, 2007, Oprah wore a long pink silk taffeta ball gown with her hair softly curled and pulled back from her face to show gleaming dollops of big pink diamonds dangling from her ears. She stood in front of 152 little girls dressed in green uniforms, white blouses, white socks, and brown Mary Janes. They looked like flower girls flanking a bride.
[“In my] pink dress with the pink diamonds and the girls I felt like people say they feel on their wedding day,” Oprah recalled. “I really literally felt I got married 152 times.”
Opening her arms to the girls’ families, her celebrity guests, and reporters from around the world, she said, “Welcome to the proudest, greatest day of my life.” With tears in her eyes, she spoke movingly. “I know what it feels like to grow up poor, to grow up feeling you are not loved. I want to be able to give back to people who were like I was when I was growing up….The reason I wanted to build a school for girls is because I know that when you educate a girl you begin to change the face of a nation. Girls become women and they educate their girls and their boys. Girls who are educated are less likely to get diseases like HIV and AIDS—a pandemic in South Africa….What I wanted to do is give an opportunity to girls who were like me—girls who were poor, who had come from disadvantaged circumstances, but girls who had a light so bright that not even poverty, disease, and life circumstances could dim that light.”
Moved to tears, the audience applauded Oprah, grateful that she had opened her heart to these youngsters who she vowed would save their country and enrich the world. Yet some in Africa later criticized her for spending so much for so few, and others in America, aghast at the luxuries she had bestowed on her “daughters,” berated her for not helping poor children in the United States. “Everybody is calling it lavish,” said Oprah. “I call it comfortable.”
The difference between “lavish” and “comfortable” could be attributed to the difference between ordinary people and a billionaire who paid $50 million for her mansion on forty-two acres in Montecito, California, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, was one of the highest prices ever paid for a private residence in the United States. She then poured $14 million into renovations, making her mansion, which she first named “Tara II” then changed to “The Promised Land,” worth $64 million.
With commendable calm, Oprah explained to her critics that she was giving to South Africa because the country was young, only twelve years out of apartheid. She also said that with an entire generation decimated by AIDS, the country’s children needed to be educated in order to save their nation. When South African reporters asked her why almost all her students were black, Oprah insisted the school was “open to everyone…to all girls who are disadvantaged.” The reporters persisted, asking if there was an attempt to keep out white students. Oprah snapped: “I don’t think I have to appease the white people [9.2 percent] of this country.” Then a white reporter asked about the criticism she was receiving from whites. Again, she responded evenly: “I find it interesting that white people are concerned about me educating black girls.” The chorus of carps continued, and after a few months Oprah spoke sharply in an interview with BET to all her critics: “To hell with your criticism,” she said. “I don’t care what you have to say about what I did. I did it.”
Within nine months of opening the school, she was blindsided by a sex abuse scandal that resulted in a lawsuit against her for libel, assault, and slander by the former headmistress; several firings; and a trial in South Africa of a dorm matron charged with fourteen counts of sexual assault and abasement of the students. A year later seven students were expelled for lesbian liaisons.
“This has been one of the most devastating, if not the most devastating experience of my life,” Oprah said in a press conference with South African reporters. “When I first heard about it I spent about a half hour crying, moving from room to room i
n my house. I was so stunned, I couldn’t even wrap my brain around it.”
Some were taken aback by her comments, feeling that she was personalizing a tragedy in terms of how it might affect her image. “It was tasteless of her to talk about this experience as though it was about her,” wrote Caille Millner in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It made her sound self-absorbed and a little clueless.”
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann agreed. After running the video clip of Oprah at her press conference, he said, “Thank goodness, Ms. Winfrey is okay, since, after all, this was about her.”
In a column titled “Oprah the Avenger,” Eugene Robinson wrote in The Washington Post, “I did wince yesterday when she called allegations of sexual and physical abuse at the girls’ school she founded in South Africa ‘one of the most devastating, if not the most devastating experience of my life’—seeming to make it all about her, not the alleged victims. Still, my heart refused to harden.”
Oprah said she had spent a month at the school before the scandal was reported, but knew nothing about it because the girls had not told her. They had been instructed to always put on happy faces around “Mum Oprah” and never complain to her about anything. It was not until they read an article in the Sowetan [September 27, 2007], a daily newspaper in South Africa, about one child being taken out of the school by her mother after suffering “emotional abuse,” that fifteen students acknowledged the article’s accuracy and stepped forward with their own charges of abuse.
Because of the international publicity surrounding her school, Oprah needed to address the scandal, which she did by satellite from her Harpo studios in Chicago. She then released the tape on November 5, 2007, to U.S. news outlets, with unusual usage rules:
Please note the following per Harpo Productions for the use of Oprah News Conference footage:
Credit: Harpo Productions, Inc.
This footage may be used on our platforms only during the month of November 2007. No further use (including internet archiving) is authorized after November 30, 2007.
“She handled the matter of the sex scandal at her school with seeming transparency,” said one network executive, “but she would not allow the footage to be played over and over again. She distributed the tape with instructions that we could only use it for the remainder of the month, and we could not archive it or show it in perpetuity. That is absolutely unheard-of.”
The extreme control Oprah exercised over the press coverage of the sex abuse scandal stands in contrast to the unlimited press coverage she sought when opening her school. She spent months preparing for a ribbon-cutting that would showcase her dream to the world. She had talked about her school many times on her show, most recently before the official opening, when she introduced her audience to Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. They discussed the evils of moneylenders, and Oprah said she had learned about the practice “when I was in Africa the other day building a school.” She wanted to be accepted by the Nobel laureate as a peer, perhaps because she herself was being put forward as a Nobel candidate.
“I started the Nobel movement after Oprah appeared at the Dream Academy Dinner [May 24, 2005] to raise money for at-risk children whose parents are in prison,” said Washington, D.C., publicist Rocky Twyman. “When she stood up, praised God, opened her purse, and gave the Dream Academy a million dollars, I wanted to get her the Nobel Peace Prize…but the Nobel committee did not want to give it to a celebrity. So I formed a committee, and we talked to Dorothy Height [president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women], who was all for Oprah because Oprah had given Dr. Height two-point-five million in 2002 to pay off the mortgage on the NCNW headquarters….Dr. Height contacted Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu, and we set out to get publicity to collect a hundred thousand signatures for Oprah’s nomination to present to the Nobel committee….
“Unfortunately, we only got forty thousand signatures…because a lot of men, black and white, refused to sign…and a lot of religious people would not sign because they said Oprah was not married to Stedman and she gave a bad example to our young people by her lifestyle. I believe we all sin and come short of the glory of God, but these folks, mostly from black churches, and all conservative and law-abiding, felt very strongly that Oprah had put herself above the laws of God. I was stunned, but I’m afraid there are strong feelings against her in our [African American] community….Of the forty thousand signatures we were able to get, most were white, not black. We got a lot of publicity and raised awareness for her getting the prize, but in the end I guess God did not want it to happen.”
First Lady Barbara Bush on The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 23, 1989, discussing her life in politics. Oprah had asked Mrs. Bush to appear on her show after she attended her first White House state dinner in June 1989.
(Photo Credit: Presidential Library of George H.W. Bush.)
President Bill Clinton greets Oprah and Quincy Jones on June 13, 1994, at the White House state dinner for Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko of Japan. Stedman, a confirmed Republican, would not attend, so Oprah invited her good friend.
(Photo Credit: Presidential Library of William J. Clinton.)
Former South African president Nelson Mandela with Oprah in 2002 when she asked what she could do for him. “Build me a school,” he said. Five years and $40 million later, she opened the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa.
(Photo Credit: Media24/Gallo Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)
Michelle Obama, Caroline Kennedy, Maria Shriver, and Oprah campaigning for Barack Obama on February 3, 2008, at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. After the rally, Oprah, who believed in the tenets of The Secret, returned home and created a vision board (see it, believe it, achieve it). She put Obama’s picture in the middle of the board alongside a picture of the dress she wanted to wear to his inauguration.
(Photo Credit: David McNew/Getty Images.)
The front page of the conservative New York Post interprets Oprah’s political endorsement of Barack Obama for president, December 9, 2007.
(Photo Credit: New York Post.)
The satirical cover of The New Republic following Oprah’s trip to Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel announcing his book Night as her book club selection for May 24, 2006. She sells the DVD of that trip to the concentration camp at the Oprah Store for $30.
(Photo Credit: Drew Friedman.)
OPRAH’S FAVORITE CELEBRITIES
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Tom Cruise
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Maya Angelou
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Michael Jackson
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Diane Sawyer
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Julia Roberts
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John F. Kennedy, Jr.
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Toni Morrison
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John Travolta
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Five days after Oprah apologized on her show for defending James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces and then shredded him and his publisher, Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Luckovich drew this cartoon in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 31, 2006, characterizing President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address.
(Photo Credit: Mike Luckovich.)
After Oprah called into Larry King Live on January 11, 2006, to defend Frey’s book, saying the factual truth was not important given its emotional truth, she was criticized by The New York Times. Two weeks later she backtracked, apologized to her viewers, and called Frey a liar.
(Photo Credit: Scott Wintrow/Getty Images.)
OPRAH THROUGH THE YEARS
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(Photo Credit: Ron Galella Ltd./Getty Images.)
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(Photo Credit: Dave Allocca/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.)
(Photo Credit: Dave Allocca/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.)