Oprah

by Kitty Kelley

  “When we realized that we would have to give up six months of our lives for her, get little money and no acknowledgement for our work, plus we had to sign a nondisclosure contract swearing that Oprah’s name would never pass our lips—please! That’s when we said we could not accept the job on those terms. Harriet Seitler went off on us. ‘You are just two little girls in a room in New York City,’ she said. ‘We are Oprah Winfrey. We are Harpo. You need us. We don’t need you.’ ”

  Liz Garbus, another documentary filmmaker and daughter of famous First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus, also encountered problems when her film Girlhood was featured on an Oprah show titled “Inside Prison: Why Women Murder.” The two young women featured in the documentary—Shanae and Megan—agreed to appear on condition that Oprah not mention the drug addiction of Megan’s mother. Promises were made and then mauled. When Oprah asked Megan on-camera about her mother’s addiction to drugs, Megan walked off the set, providing what one producer later called “good television”—the show’s first priority.

  “I’ll say what I want to say,” said Oprah in an unguarded on-camera moment, and with the exception of her celebrity friends like John Travolta and Tom Cruise—neither of whom she ever questioned about Scientology—she spared few others. She drilled Liberace about his palimony suit and how much he was worth, how many houses he owned, how many cars he drove, how many furs he bought, and how much he spent on jewelry. She quizzed Robin Givens about getting beaten up by her former husband, boxing heavyweight champion Mike Tyson: “Is it true that he would hit you until you would vomit?” She asked Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City, “Are you dating? Is it hard because people expect you to put out?” Looking askance at Boy George, the cross-dressing British pop star, she asked, “What does your mother say when you leave the house, honey?” To Jean Harris, who murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Oprah asked, “Do you think that one of the things that hurt you [in the trial] was that you were perceived on the witness stand as being this cold bitch?” To Richard Gere, she said, “I…read that you live like a monk, except for the celibacy part.” She interrogated Billy Joel about the drinking problem that had landed him in rehab: “What’s with all the car crashes?” After Lance Armstrong had radiation therapy for testicular cancer, she asked, “You want more children? Got extra sperm?” When Oscar de la Renta appeared on her show and introduced his adopted son, who was seated in the audience, Oprah looked at the young boy and then asked the designer, “How did you get a black son?”

  Behind-the-scenes competition became fierce when the talk show titans battled for exclusive “gets.” In 2003, Oprah and Katie Couric went to the mat over Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old girl who was snatched from her bed in Salt Lake City, hidden in a hole, chained to a tree, and not allowed to bathe for nine months. Upon Smart’s rescue by police, her parents asked the media for privacy so that she might recover. Seven months later, Ed and Lois Smart had written a book, Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope, and sold television rights to CBS for a movie. Publication was set for October, to be followed by the movie in November. The promotion campaign set by the publisher (Doubleday) gave Katie Couric, then with NBC, the prime-time interview for Dateline, to be followed by Oprah for daytime. The ground rules, set by the Smarts for their interviews, prohibited any on-camera interview with their daughter, although silent footage of Elizabeth was allowed.

  The book’s publication created such a media frenzy that CBS decided to air the interview with the Smarts that was to accompany the movie as a network special before Katie or Oprah had aired their interviews. Oprah’s producers flew to Utah to get footage of Elizabeth’s bedroom, zooming in on the white patchwork quilt, ruffled pillows, and Raggedy Ann dolls, and also filmed the filthy hole where she was chained for nine months. Katie Couric accompanied her producers to Utah, and after interviewing the Smarts, she persuaded them to allow her verbal exchange with Elizabeth to be shown on the air, which gave NBC an exclusive no one else had. Couric tried to circle the subject of sexual abuse with the youngster without getting explicit:

  COURIC: How do your friends treat you, Elizabeth? I mean, obviously, you know…

  ELIZABETH: Regular.

  COURIC: Do they ever ask you anything or…

  ELIZABETH: No.

  COURIC: You must have been frightened…

  ELIZABETH: Yeah…

  COURIC: Do you think you have changed?

  ELIZABETH: No.

  Oprah was enraged when she found out about the interview, but instead of calling Katie Couric to scream, she telephoned Suzanne Herz, then head of publicity for Doubleday. “Oprah reamed her,” recalled a Doubleday employee. “Just laid her out…It was quite traumatic for Suzanne to be treated that way by Oprah Winfrey.” Herz later said, “It was more bad behavior on the part of Katie Couric, not Oprah. Katie was the one who broke the rules to get the exclusive. Oprah was angry because she followed the rules and then got screwed….I don’t blame her….In the end, both of them got huge ratings.”

  Couric’s interview with Elizabeth Smart and her parents won the hour for NBC, with 12.3 million viewers, handily beating Barbara Walters’s ABC 20/20 interview with Princess Diana’s butler. Oprah retaliated by releasing footage from her show before it aired, for two segments on ABC’s Good Morning America, the show that competed directly with Katie Couric and The Today Show. “It wasn’t vengeance,” said Oprah’s publicist. “Just promotion.”

  Not everybody enjoyed being on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “I represented Anne Robinson, who wrote Memoir of an Unfit Mother in 2001, when she got a call from Oprah’s producers four years later to go on the show,” recalled literary agent Ed Victor. “Anne asked me if she should do it, and I told her yes, because as soon as her publisher [Pocket Books] heard that Oprah wanted her and her daughter to appear, they offered to publish her book in paperback. So I said she should do the show, sell some books, and get her message out.” Robinson, the curt British host of the weekly game show The Weakest Link, had a certain visibility in the United States at the time, but according to her agent, her experience with Oprah was “hellacious.”

  “Anne yelled at me after the show,” said Victor. “She hated Oprah and felt she had not been treated right by the Oprah people.” Robinson refused to discuss the matter, but Ed Victor recalled it as “a nightmare all around,” adding, “As a consequence, I no longer represent her.”

  Marian Fontana, whose husband, Dave, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, was hounded by Oprah’s producers, who had booked her for an upcoming show. “It was right after Dave’s funeral…and they were calling every ten minutes wanting something else. They wanted wedding videotapes and they wanted family photos and they wanted close-up shots.” When they heard she was holding a service for her husband on the beach where he had been a lifeguard for sixteen years, they insisted on coming. “They were very pushy,” she said, and when she declined, they canceled the booking.

  In the spring of 2008, Oprah’s producers began booking for May sweeps and called James Frey to come on the show to talk about the paperback publication of his novel Bright Shiny Morning. They knew a rematch between Oprah and the author of A Million Little Pieces was a guaranteed ratings geyser, but the writer was not so eager to return to the scene of his reaming. Since getting bludgeoned on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006, Frey and his wife had lost their newborn son, Leo, who died eleven days after birth from spinal muscular atrophy, and the writer was not going to put himself through another one of Her Majesty’s muggings, even to promote his novel, unless there were certain stipulations in place. Oprah’s producers explained the situation to her, and in the end, Frey was not booked, but Oprah did call him to apologize for how she had treated him two years before. She did not use her show to publicly say she was sorry, but Frey told reporters he appreciated her private apology. Oprah’s remorse may have been triggered by reading about a character in Frey’s novel who is embroiled in a scanda
l and, feeling people turn on him, begins to tape-record his conversations with the producers and host of a television talk show, including confessions the host made when she called him at home.

  In their scramble to give Oprah ratings her producers can be rambunctious. “I found them to be…exceedingly difficult,” said Daniel J. Bagdade, the attorney who represented the first child in the United States to be sentenced as an adult for murder. His client, Nathaniel (Nate) Abraham, shot and killed Ronald Greene in Pontiac, Michigan. At the age of eleven Nate was sent to a maximum-security juvenile detention facility until he was twenty-one. Upon his release, Oprah’s producers were waiting to sign him to do a show, featuring his on-air apology to the family of his victim. His lawyer was not sanguine about putting him in the intense media spotlight of The Oprah Winfrey Show, but Nate was enthralled with the celebrity allure of Oprah. “She’s the person he admires most,” said the attorney. “So I agreed….But once we got to Chicago, well…”

  Seeing that what the producers had in mind for the show would put his client in legal jeopardy, Bagdade revoked Nate’s signed release. “Then it was two days and nights with Oprah and her attorney, a tough older gentleman [William Becker heads Harpo’s legal staff of twenty-five], and her hard-charging producers, who were aggressive and really backed us into a corner. They threatened to sue us for breaking the contract….‘We are not going to leave it here,’ they said. Oprah and I were back and forth on cell phones at midnight as she tried to get the show on the air. When I explained the legal complications to her, she called a lawyer in Michigan to make sure I was telling her the truth. She was reasonable and professional throughout, but I can’t say the same about her staff.”

  In the end the show never aired. Instead, Oprah mediated Nate’s apology to his victim’s family privately, and Bagdade accompanied him and his mother and Ronald Greene’s relatives into Oprah’s office, which, he said, “was the size of a large house. Directly off her office is a wardrobe room, which is the size of another large house….The shoe area alone seems to cover half a block.” Bagdade did not see Oprah’s huge office bathroom with its pond-sized tub of rose-colored marble.

  With Harpo’s lawyer sitting in the corner, Oprah stood at her big desk and proceeded to bring the two families together. “A true apology had never been given before, so this was a very moving experience for all of us,” said Nate’s lawyer. “It’s a good thing it was not on-camera. It would’ve been too exploitive. The two mothers—Nate’s and Mrs. Greene—hugged and kissed. Both are churchgoing ladies, so they talked about God and his forgiveness.”

  Once Oprah realized she was not going to get the gripping television show she wanted, she could easily have sent the Abrahams and the Greenes back to Pontiac, Michigan. But to her credit she chose to complete the stated purpose of the show: to give a young killer the chance to express remorse for his crime by apologizing to his victim’s family, which gave everyone a measure of peace. “Oprah really went out of her way with Nate,” said his attorney. “She gave him lots of advice and took a special interest in him during those couple of days.”

  Not all scrapped shows brought out Oprah’s magnanimity, however, particularly if money was involved. When she got a chance to interview Monica Lewinsky, she said she was thrilled to land the young intern’s first interview about her sexual relationship with President Clinton, which eventually led to his impeachment. Lewinsky, too, was excited, especially when told that Oprah was going to embrace her in front of her studio audience. But when the former White House aide insisted on keeping the foreign distribution rights to that interview after it aired in the United States, Oprah balked. At issue were world licensing fees in excess of $1 million, which Lewinsky said she needed to pay her mounting legal fees. Being one of the world’s most sought-after interviewees then, she was of immense international interest, because no one had ever heard her voice or her side of the story that nearly toppled a president. Oprah insisted on keeping the foreign rights to the interview; Monica said she could not afford to give them up. The next day on her talk show, Oprah announced, “I did have the interview with Monica Lewinsky, and then the conversation moved in a direction that I did not want to go. I don’t pay for interviews, no matter how it’s couched. I’ve taken myself out of the running. I don’t even want the interview now. Whoever gets the interview, God help you in your struggle.”

  The two-hour interview went to Barbara Walters, for a special edition of 20/20 on ABC, and drew forty-five million viewers in the United States, with Lewinsky retaining world rights. Later, in a story titled “How Oprah Dumped Monica,” George magazine recounted that Oprah had “trashed” the former intern when she refused to sign an agreement with Harpo. “[I]n Lewinsky’s eyes, Winfrey proved to be…heartless, treacherous, and disloyal.”

  None of that would be believed by any of Oprah’s adoring fans or the studio audiences, who wait months, sometimes years, for tickets to her show and then stand in line for hours to be admitted. “Everything about The Oprah Winfrey Show is orchestrated right down to the last squeal of the studio audience,” said a publishing executive who has escorted many authors to Chicago over the years. “The drill goes something like this: Once you get through security and get seated, four or five producers—not just one—warm up the audience for about forty-five minutes. We are all given directions on how to act. We’re told to jump and scream. When Oprah says something funny, we’re supposed to laugh and clap. Then we are rehearsed. ‘Now let’s try it. If Oprah is shocked, you are shocked. C’mon. Act horrified. Show it. Let’s do it again. The more you react, the better chance you’ll have to be shown on television. This is important. You are Oprah’s audience. You are her portal to the world. So you must respond.’ These producers are trained to work everyone into a frenzy so the audience is hysterical by the time Oprah comes out of the tunnel. The minute she appears, everyone jumps up and begins cheering and weeping and screaming and stomping.”

  Oprah became so accustomed to rapturous audiences that she reacted negatively if she saw someone not standing to applaud her. “One time she spotted a young black man who just sat there,” said the publishing executive. “She began heckling him. ‘I see someone here who is very brave.’ She began shuckin’ and jivin’: ‘Oh no. I don’t have to stand up and cheer for Oprah. No, sir. Not me. I’m the man. I won’t bow to Oprah.’ She did her whole ghetto shtick. It was ugly, very ugly for about four or five minutes while the poor guy just sat there as she mocked him. She wouldn’t let up….She was pissed that he was not giving her the adoring routine that the rest of the audience was….Turned out the young man was mentally challenged and severely disabled.”

  Part of the excitement in attending one of Oprah’s shows is the possibility of walking away with a fabulous giveaway—TiVos, iPods, Kindles, cakes, clothes, even cars. The most anticipated gift show of every year—“Oprah’s Favorite Things”—started in 1999 as an outgrowth of Oprah’s passion for shopping. For years she had shared her spending orgies with her viewers—her towels, her pajamas, her cashmere sweaters, her diamond earrings—and they enjoyed her unbridled enthusiasm over her newfound wealth. Excited about becoming a millionaire, she constantly asked her celebrity guests, “When did you know you were rich?” “How does it feel to be able to buy anything you want?” “What did you do when you first got real money?” “Has being a millionaire changed your life?”

  When she started “Oprah’s Favorite Things” she called the manufacturer of each item she picked and asked them to send her three hundred freebies to give to her studio audience. The publicity they received in exchange launched many into new levels of profitability because they were then flooded with orders from her viewers. Small businesses such as Spanx, Inc., Thermage beauty treatment, Philosophy skin care, Carol’s Daughter beauty products, and Lafco fragrances became behemoths as a result of making something that Oprah liked; thus few companies ever denied her free merchandise. “My deal is only this: If I’m going to say it’s my favorite thing because
it is my favorite thing, all you have to do is give me three hundred of them, okay? [T]here was this book that somebody had given me—a book called The Way We Live. It was a great coffee table book, and it had pictures from all over the world of different homes and how people live in these different homes. Do you know we called the publisher [Crown] and they said no? They said they didn’t have that many books to give away for free because I think the book is expensive [$75], if you buy it in stores. Can you believe that? So you know what I said, ‘Well, it’s not going to be my favorite thing no more!’ But how dumb is that [publisher]? That’s pretty dumb. It’s a book. How many books could they have sold?”

  Oprah referred to her “Favorite Things” show as “the hottest ticket in television” and kept the airdate secret until the day of the show. Then she devoted an hour to giving away her favorite things of that year, which have included organic cheesecakes, candied popcorn, Ugg boots, CDs, books, coats, laptops, digital cameras, custom-designed Nike shoes, diamond watches, BlackBerrys, and flat-screen TVs. Each year she announced the items with great fanfare and always included the retail price. In 2007 she presented her most outrageously exorbitant item at the end of the show, when she hollered, “This is my most expensive favorite thing ever, ever, ever.” Nearly spent with orgasmic delight over what they had already received, her studio audience trembled as the drums rolled and the velvet curtains opened to reveal an LG refrigerator with a high-definition TV built into the door, a DVD hookup, and a radio, plus technology for a slide show, a five-day forecast, and a laptop holding one hundred recipes. “It [retails for] $3,789.00,” Oprah screamed. The grand total for that year’s Favorite Things was $7,200. Conan O’Brien joked on late-night television, “Forbes magazine released its list of the twenty richest women….Oprah is number one. The rest are in her audience.”