Oprah

by Kitty Kelley

  “ ‘Please, get out of the area right away, ma’am,’ I said.

  “She roared back, ‘I beg your pardon?…’

  “ ‘Right now, ma’am. That dog will get sucked up. We can’t have you out here. It’s regulations.’ She was furious….I had to report the incident.”

  The sense of entitlement that accompanies the life of a billionaire celebrity seemed to surface shortly after Oprah purchased her first plane (a $40 million Gulfstream GIV). “She was going in and out of Signature then, a field-based operation for private jets, which is separate from the commercial airport,” said Laura Aye, “and she did not want the fuelers around because she didn’t like the smell of gas and grease. Her pilot would radio her arrival, and the fuelers would all be banned from the hangar. The guys inside quickly whipped up a batch of popcorn to cover the fumes. That way she wouldn’t have to smell anything for the thirty feet she had to walk from her plane to her security van.”

  During her Gulfstream days she gave an interview to Harry Allen of Vibe, who asked how much her plane had cost. Oprah said, “I’m not going to discuss that. Jet etiquette means you never discuss how much the plane costs….But sometimes, and I get a kick out of this—there’s all black people on the plane. Just the other day the flight attendant was passing out some lobster and I said, ‘We still black! It’s not like we turned white! We still black, y’all. Oprah’s still black.’ It’s like, who knew?”

  The Vibe writer said, “Do you understand the effect of stories like these? You’re the richest black person in the universe.”

  Sounding disingenuous, Oprah said, “Am I? Let me think….I always think of other people as being rich. It’s not a concept that I’m attuned to.”

  When she upgraded from her $40 million Gulfstream to her $47 million Global Express, she moved hangars and secured a new space near the Sara Lee jets. “It was an old, dilapidated warehouse with sliding doors—imagine a garage for an airplane,” said one airport employee. “She poured a million dollars into it, completely refurbishing the place. She carpeted the concrete floor, redid the walls and cuttings and doors. She even built offices upstairs with elaborate fittings and got the City of Chicago to put in a parking lot, and then she redid the parking lot….She tapes her shows in Chicago on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and flies to Santa Barbara every Thursday night, arriving back in Chicago on Sunday at nine P.M.” If Oprah is asleep on either leg of the flight, her pilots are under orders not to disturb her until she’s slept eight hours….They must sit and wait until she wakes up.

  Oprah could not force celebrities to sign her confidentiality agreements, so she frequently isolated herself at galas and benefits. “When we performed The Vagina Monologues at Madison Square Garden [February 2001], the one person with a private entrance and a private dressing room was Oprah,” recalled Erica Jong. “The rest of us—me, Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Rita Wilson, Calista Flockhart, Shirley Knight, Amy Irving, all the rest—were girls together in our panty hose getting dressed and made up gratis by Bobbi Brown. No one was paid. No one had star privileges, except Oprah. She was separate and apart from all of us, and I think it was because she was afraid and not confident, but why, I don’t know.”

  That evening Oprah had used the Garden’s rock star entrance—with an elevator big enough to accommodate limousines—so that she could bypass fans and be driven from the street to her dressing room. A friend later suggested she might have removed herself from the rest of the cast because she felt self-conscious about her size. “Maybe she was uncomfortable being the only heavy black woman among all those skinny white girls.”

  Race was definitely the reason Oprah cited when she was barred from Hermès in Paris. She and Gayle arrived at the luxury retail store fifteen minutes after closing and expected to be admitted because they saw shoppers inside. Oprah said she wanted to buy a particular watch for Tina Turner, with whom she was having dinner that evening, but the salesclerk at the door would not let her in, and neither would the store manager. Later Hermès said the store was preparing for a special event that evening.

  “I saw it,” said Gayle King, “and it was really, really very bad. Oprah describes it herself as one of the most humiliating moments of her life….We are calling it her Crash moment [referring to the film detailing racism].” She added, “If it had been Céline Dion or Britney Spears or Barbra Streisand, there is no way they would not be let in that store.”

  Some news reports said the Hermès salesclerk did not recognize Oprah (The Oprah Winfrey Show is not seen in France), and the store had been “having a problem with North Africans.” Oprah called the U.S. president of Hermès and said she had been publicly humiliated, and although she had recently bought twelve Hermès handbags ($6,500 apiece), she would no longer be spending her money on the firm’s luxury goods. The company immediately issued a statement of regret for “not having been able to welcome Madame Winfrey” to the store, saying that “a private public relations event was being prepared inside.”

  Je suis désolée, monsieur. Oprah issued her own statement, saying she would address the matter on her season’s opening show in the fall, giving people weeks to weigh in on the international furor.

  “Had Winfrey been turned away in regular hours, the racism charge might have traction,” wrote Anne Kingston in Canada’s National Post. “But she wasn’t, which suggests other ‘isms’ might be at play. Maybe it was celebrity-ism.”

  An editorial in the Montreal Gazette accused Oprah of being quick to “play the race card,” saying, “Everyone has endured something like this. Fortunately few of us fly into ‘don’t you know who I am?’ mode. This is Paris, Madame Winfrey, not Chicago. Even if they know who you are, they just don’t care.”

  The conservative National Review said, “What she should have done, in our opinion, is buy Hermès on the spot.” The comic strip The Boondocks showed the ten-year-old black radical Huey Freeman watching television news and hearing:

  Oprah Winfrey is so convinced that her denial into the Paris Hermès store was race-related that she will be discussing it on her show.

  In other news, Hermès has announced a huge “Going Out of Business” sale.

  The comedian Rosie O’Donnell wrote in her blog:

  I cannot wait to hear

  all the details—

  one of the most humiliating moments of her life…

  oprah

  a poor overweight

  sexually abused

  troubled black female child

  from a broken home—

  that oprah

  suffered ONE of the most HUMILIATING moments of HER life

  at hermès in paris.

  hmmmmm.

  Orlando Patterson, Harvard’s eminent professor of sociology, later asked in The New York Times, “Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age—being waited on in luxury stores after hours—but had she been the victim of racism?”

  Richard Thompson Ford, a law professor at Stanford, answered the question in his provocative book The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse: “If the reason for Oprah’s humiliation was that the incident at Hermès triggered memories of her past experiences with racism, then Oprah’s race was the reason she felt humiliated. In that sense, Oprah was humiliated because of her race.”

  In the early part of her career Oprah maintained she had never experienced racism. “I transcend race, really,” she said in 1986. Yet the following year she told People she had been refused entrance to a Manhattan boutique. In 1995 she told The Times Magazine (London) that she had been barred from “one of Chicago’s ritziest department stores.” She laughed as she told the writer, “They didn’t recognize me because I was wearing my hair all kind of [bouffant]. I was with my hairdresser, a black man. They hummed and they hummed and then they said that they’d been robbed the week before by two black transvestites. ‘And we thought they’d come back.’ ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘I’m changing my hair-do.
’ Then I turned to my hairdresser and said, ‘I think we are experiencing a racial moment….So this is what it’s like. Oh, man!’ ”

  Six years later she retold a similar version of that same story, but by 2001 it was a Madison Avenue boutique that had kept her out. She said she had seen a sweater in the window and rang to be buzzed in, but the door was not opened. Then she saw two white women entering the store. So she rang again, but still was not admitted. “I certainly didn’t think, ‘This is a racial moment!’ ” she said. She called from a pay phone to make sure the store was open. “We started banging on the windows.” Nothing. Back in Chicago she called the store. “This is Oprah Winfrey. I was trying to get in your store the other day and…” She quoted the manager as saying, “I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but we were robbed last week by two black transsexuals—and we thought they’d come back.”

  Whether these stories were real or rhetorical, Oprah certainly was accustomed to celebrity treatment from stores that opened their doors after hours so she could shop. In Chicago, Bloomingdale’s had extended this courtesy and even accommodated her insistence that all nonessential employees be kept off the floor so they would not gawk or report what she had purchased. (She was irate when the National Enquirer revealed the Christmas presents she had bought for her employees at the studio and the magazine—fourteen-karat gold and diamond O initial pendants.)

  A few days before her season’s opening show in September 2005, billed as “Oprah’s 20th Anniversary Season Premiere,” her publicist announced that Robert B. Chavez, the president and CEO of Hermès USA, would be Oprah’s guest, stirring speculation about a monumental slapdown on national television.

  Oprah opened the show by joking about what she did on her summer vacation and later launched into her version of what had happened in Paris. She claimed that most of the press reports were “flat-out wrong,” although her best friend had been the source of those reports. She scolded her audience for thinking she might have been upset for not being able to get into a closed store to shop. “Please,” she said. “I didn’t get to be this old to be that stupid. I was not upset about not getting to buy a bag—I was upset because one person at the store was so rude, not the whole company.”

  Mr. Chavez looked at Oprah as she continued to berate his company. “There were reports that I was turned away because the store was closed. The store was in the process of being closed—the store was very active….The doors were not locked. My friends and I were standing inside the doorway and there was much discussion among the staff about whether or not to let me in. That’s what was embarrassing….I know the difference between a store being closed and a store being closed to me.

  “Everybody who has ever been snubbed because you were not chic enough or thin enough or the right class or the right color or whatever…you know that it is very humiliating, and that is exactly what happened to me.”

  The whipping boy from Hermès sounded contrite: “I would like to say to you we’re really sorry for all of those unfortunate circumstances that you encountered when you tried to visit our store in Paris,” he said. “We really try to service all of our clients all over the world.” Then he stubbed his toe. “The woman who turned you away did it because, honest to God, she didn’t know who you were.”

  “This wasn’t even about, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ” Oprah snapped. “I wasn’t trying to play that celebrity card.”

  Chavez quickly apologized. “You did meet up with one very, very rigid staff person.”

  “Rigid or rude?” asked Oprah.

  “Rigid and rude, I’m sure,” he said.

  Having pilloried the firm’s president, Oprah now pardoned him and commended his company for instituting sensitivity training for its employees. She concluded the segment by hugging Chavez and urging her viewers to shop at the luxury goods emporium, where alligator Kelly bags cost $18,000 to $25,000. Oprah, too, resumed shopping there, and when she gave a “girlfriend” party for twelve at her Montecito estate in honor of Maria Shriver, she had the invitation stitched on twelve Hermès scarves ($375 apiece).

  Mr. Chavez was one of the few guests to get out of Harpo without having to sign a confidentiality agreement. Most who appear on Oprah’s show are sworn to secrecy, but they are so grateful to be there that they willingly sign away their rights. “My publisher told me the difference between Oprah and other shows is the difference between a lightning bug and the sun,” said a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, too scared to be quoted by name. “So, of course, I want to be in the sun.”

  Swallowing professional reservations, most writers sign Oprah’s binding agreements, but one man objected on principle. “I just couldn’t do it,” said Chris Rose, a prizewinning columnist for New Orleans’s Times-Picayune. “It struck me as wrong and ran counter to everything that I believe as a writer and a journalist and a human being.”

  Rose had written moving columns about the harrowing depression he suffered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. His columns were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and later published in a book titled 1 Dead in Attic. On the second anniversary of the hurricane, he was contacted by Oprah’s show to discuss post-traumatic stress disorders among Katrina survivors. “They wanted my expertise, not as a book writer or even a newspaper columnist, but as the city’s most famously depressed resident, by virtue of my columns about battling the disease,” he said. “Yet they would not allow me to mention my book or even show a copy of it on the air, although the subject of their show and my book was the mental health crisis in New Orleans. At the end of a long and excruciating day—ten hours—revisiting the emotional wreckage of the hurricane, Oprah’s producer pulled out a sheet of paper and said I had to sign it….Now, I was willing to give her the right to use my name, my image, my story, even footage of my youngest child, but I could not give her the right to void my experience for the last ten hours….I explained that writing is my life and writing about my experience is what I do for a living.

  “ ‘If you don’t sign, we don’t run the segment,’ ” the producer said.

  “They had just sucked out of me my inner darkness and were exposing my personal struggles to the entire country,” Rose recalled. “As exhausted as I was I was not going to cave in to this kind of brinksmanship.” The producer panicked, and for the next three hours Rose was peppered with calls from various producers up the chain of Oprah’s command, insisting that he sign the confidentiality agreement, and threatening to cut his segment if he didn’t.

  “Trust us,” they said. Rose held firm. That night he wrote a column about the experience of dealing with Oprah and her producers, which was posted on the newspaper’s website.

  “The next morning I found out what it meant to ‘go viral,’ ” he said. “I had stuck my hand into a hornet’s nest of anti-Oprah sentiment on the Internet that pushed my book from number eleven thousand on Amazon to number eighteen by the end of the day and then on to The New York Times bestseller list. I was stunned because I had always considered Oprah to be an engine for good….I had no idea there were negative feelings about her and her confidentiality agreements out there, but I received calls and emails from writers all over the country saying they were going to buy my book that day to send her a message….The irony is that my segment did run on Oprah [“Special Report: Katrina—What Will It Take to Recover?”] and my book was posted on her website—at least for a while. But I guess I go down as the guy whose book became a bestseller for not having been seen on The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

  Harpo producers consistently presented shows with quality production values—arresting visuals, fast-paced segments, and exclusive interviews tailored to a female audience looking for entertainment, diversion, and self-improvement. Because of Oprah’s big-money bonuses for those who gave her high ratings, there was fierce competition among her producers to get their stories on the air. Consequently, they took no prisoners in their negotiations.

  “They are bullies,” said Rac
hel Grady, who with her partner, Heidi Ewing, runs Loki Films, which produced The Boys of Bakara and Jesus Camp, the latter of which was nominated for an Academy Award. “Oprah and her producers feel like everyone owes them for the privilege of being on their show, and they expect you to work for free for the honor.” Loki Films was called in the summer of 2006 to produce the ABC prime-time special on Oprah’s school in South Africa. “We were to do the job but not be given credit for our work,” said Grady. “So we asked for double the money. They [Harriet Seitler and Kate Murphy Davis] gave us a contract that said they could fire us without cause at any time. They also refused to speak with our lawyer because they said it was better for their budget that way. ‘Besides,’ they said, ‘we usually end up firing everybody anyway and having to do it ourselves.’ That’s the way they put it….

  “I think Oprah’s school is a wonderful idea, but having worked in that poor country I think it’s crazy to spend $40 million on one school when $75 million could probably eradicate poverty throughout all of South Africa. But Oprah lives in such a gilded cage she no longer has a grip on reality. We had to fly to Chicago three times at her request….