Oprah (16 page)

“He taught me how to be Jewish,” said Oprah. “He also taught me to swear.”

“Oprah and Richard had a very close relationship,” said Barbara Hamm, an associate producer for
People Are Talking.
“They were like brother and sister, although they had creative disagreements about what guests should be on the show and the line of questioning.” She preferred movie stars, rock stars, and soap opera stars; he wanted government officials and corporate moguls. She asked questions that made him squirm.

“Oprah liked to have fun,” Hamm said, “get the audience into the show. Richard wasn’t so sure. He didn’t want to lose control. During one show she got the audience literally dancing in the aisles. It was wild and it worked.”

Unlike her cohost, Oprah was not overly concerned about her professional image. Nor was she afraid to ask naive questions and look silly, even undignified, on occasion. She exercised with manic fitness guru Richard Simmons, danced with ethnic dancers, and interviewed a prostitute who had killed a client. She also decorated cakes, basted turkeys, and bobbed for apples. When Richard Sher entered into a ponderous discussion about television journalism with Frank Reynolds, the network anchor for ABC-TV, Oprah sat on the couch listening quietly.

“Her cohost was asking all these serious, boring questions,” recalled Kelly Craig, a nineteen-year-old college student who later became a reporter on WTVJ in Miami. “When it was Oprah’s turn, she asked, ‘So what does Frank Reynolds eat for dinner?’ ” The young woman was impressed by Oprah’s off-the-wall query because she felt this was what the audience really wanted to know. Craig decided if she ever got the chance to interview celebrities, she’d ask questions like Oprah’s.

“Oprah had to be taught how to ask those questions,” recalled Jane McClary, “and you have to give the producer Sherry Burns credit for training Oprah to be Oprah….I can remember Sherry screaming and yelling and swearing at Oprah day after day. ‘Oprah, what the hell were you thinking? What was in your head? Why didn’t you ask that obvious question? You should always ask the first thing that comes to mind. Just say it. Say it. Say it. Put your gut out there, girl. Don’t be afraid. Just do it.’ ”

One morning
People Are Talking
booked conjoined twins as guests, thirty-two-year-old women attached at the tops of their heads. They talked about going through life sharing everything. Oprah was intrigued. “When one of you has to go to the bathroom at night, does the other one have to go with her?” she asked. Richard Sher nearly fell off his perch.

Oprah soon saw herself as the audience’s back-fence neighbor. “I was dishing the dirt and meddling in other folks’ business which is what I do best. My acting came in handy. In acting you lose your personality in favor of the character you’re playing but you use it to provide energy for your character. The same way on [a talk show]. I…use it to concentrate on bringing the most out of my guests.”

She certainly did that with the poultry mogul Frank Perdue. “He was a difficult guest, almost surly,” recalled Barbara Hamm. “Toward the end of the show, Oprah asked if it bothered him when people said he looked like a chicken. He took offense and asked if she minded people saying she looked like a baboon. Oprah couldn’t believe…that he would make such a racist remark. Her chicken comment may have been a little rude, but to come back with that…We cut to a commercial. Oprah took it graciously and let it go. It was a stunning moment.”

Years later, when she became overly concerned about her public image and did not want to be seen as a victim of racism, Oprah denied the exchange had ever taken place. “Frank Perdue did not call me a baboon,” she told
Vibe
magazine in 1997, dismissing the story as an urban myth. Those at WJZ who saw the show, such as Barbara Hamm and Marty Bass, could not explain her denial. Bob Leffler, a public relations executive in Baltimore, said, “I forget now whether Frank Perdue called her a gorilla or a monkey or a baboon. But it was some
kind of primate….I saw the show and have never forgotten it.” The incident was not covered in the Baltimore papers, and few tapes of
People Are Talking
exist. “We used two-inch tapes then,” said Bill Baker. “They were very expensive, so we reused them and recorded over [everything].”

WJZ’s essayist, Mike Olesker, mentioned the Frank Perdue show in his book about television news, but the most indelible show was the one on which Oprah and Richard interviewed the famous fashion model Beverly Johnson.

“I like handsome, sexy men,” she said.

“What’s your ideal first date?” Oprah asked.

“To be taken to a nice restaurant and to be wined and dined. And then have the man take me home…”

“Yes?”

“And give me an enema,” she said.

Richard Sher immediately broke for a commercial. “He and Oprah hooted about the remark for years,” said Olesker. “But at that moment, it was another reminder for Sher: Could he talk to fashion models in the morning, risking diarrheic confessions, and maintain credibility in the evening [reporting the news]?”

Even in retirement, Sher was unapologetic about the tabloid-like shows that he and Oprah did on
People Are Talking.
“When sex got big, we did shows on the man with the micro-penis. We did the thirty-minute orgasm. We did a lot of the tough topics—the transsexual mother with brittle bone disease.”

One of their most exploitive shows became meaningful to Oprah and altered her way of thinking. The guest was a transsexual quadriplegic whose boyfriend’s sperm was inserted into her sister. The quadriplegic became the biological aunt/uncle and also adopted the child. The show was criticized when it aired, but afterward Oprah happened to see the child with the transsexual quadriplegic.

“It was just a moving thing,” she said. “I thought, ‘This child will grow up with more love than most children.’ Before, I was one of those people who thought all homosexuals or anything like that were going to burn in hell because the Scriptures said it.”

At the time, Oprah’s strong Baptist beliefs were being tested
because of her intimate involvement with Tim Watts, a married man with a young son and no intention of leaving his wife, Donna.

“He was her first real love,” said Oprah’s sister, Patricia Lee Lloyd.

“Oh, God,” said Barbara Hamm, remembering when Oprah was so depressed over Tim Watts’s breaking up with her that she could not get out of bed for three days.

Arleen Weiner, the producer of
People Are Talking
, recalled “the many, many tearful phone calls at one, two, three, four in the morning.”

The women on the production staff were sympathetic and did all they could to help Oprah, who was so obsessed with the six-foot-six disc jockey that she once ran after him in her nightgown and threw herself on the hood of his car to try to make him stay with her. Another time she blocked the front door of her apartment, screaming, “Don’t go, don’t leave,” and then threw his keys down the toilet. This was the story she later told Mike Wallace on
60 Minutes,
attributing it to her more benign relationship with Bubba Taylor.

After Watts walked out on her at 3:00
A.M.
, she called her best friend, Gayle King, who she knew had been in a similar situation. “For her it wasn’t throwing keys, it was checking the odometer,” Oprah said of King. “We both have done equally crazy things. I was on the hood, but Gayle was on the bumper. So because she has been there and lived in that place, she never judged me. But she was always there to listen and support me.”

The men on staff were not so tolerant of Oprah’s hysterics. More than two decades after working with her, Dave Gosey, the director of
People Are Talking,
could not say one kind word about her. “My mother told me if you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing at all. So I have nothing at all to say about Oprah Winfrey.”

Her volcanic affair with Tim Watts started in 1979 and crested and cratered for five years, even after she left Baltimore and moved to Chicago. “Those years were the worst of my life,” she said. “I had bad man troubles.” Being in love with a married man meant snatched hours, empty weekends, and lonely holidays that left her feeling desperate and forlorn.

“Poor thing. She had to spend Thanksgiving with us one year [1980] because she had no place else to go,” said Michael Fox, whose
parents, Jim and Roberta Fox, were close to Richard and Annabelle Sher. “We didn’t know her until the Shers brought her to our house….I sat next to her at dinner. She ate so much food that night I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never seen a human being eat as much as Oprah did….Paul Yates [WJZ’s general manager] told me about her affair with Tim Watts and how miserable she was.”

Oprah did not mind being seen in public with a married man, but when she found out that he was also having an affair with a pretty young blonde, she said she felt “devastated” about being “two-timed.”

“My affair with Tim started in 1980 [in the midst of his with Oprah],” said Judy Lee Colteryahn, the daughter of Lloyd Colteryahn, a former football star from the University of Maryland who played for the Baltimore Colts. “Tim always said that Oprah couldn’t know about us because it would ruin his business opportunities [with her]….He led me to believe that he was only seeing her to get a job at Channel 13….He did get a weekly Sunday show there for a while….So I didn’t pay much attention at first, but then my friends started seeing Tim and Oprah having dinner at The Rusty Scupper when he was supposed to be with me….He played basketball for the station on Friday nights, so one night I walked into the gym [unexpectedly] just as they were finishing up a game. I saw Tim walk over to the bleachers with his cowboy boots and hand them to Oprah. He leaned over, whispered in her ear, and she started walking out with his boots. Then he saw me. ‘What are you doing here? You need to go home right now. Right now. I’ll be over later.’ That’s when my jealousy of Oprah started….Then I found her credit cards in his pockets….She really took good care of him….He was always broke….But he returned the favor later by keeping his mouth shut.”

When Oprah became famous the tabloids pursued Watts and offered to pay him for the story of their love affair, including details of their drug use. “He called Oprah, said he didn’t want to talk but he was strapped for cash,” said Judy Colteryahn. “He said, ‘Look at it from my point of view. I don’t want to talk to these people, but I sure could use some money. I’ve got kids, I’ve got bills, but I am a friend to you….What can we work out?’ That’s what he told me.

“That Christmas [1989] Gayle King delivered a gift-wrapped box
to Tim in Baltimore, and Tim called me down on the Eastern Shore, where I was staying with my parents. He said, ‘Oprah came through. Big-time. She really came through. Fifty thousand dollars, cash. Get your butt back here. We’re going out for New Year’s Eve.’

“Naturally I drove right back to Baltimore. Like Oprah, I was always available for Tim. Like her, I was always hanging out the window waiting for him to drive up in his blue Datsun. But…she was smarter than me. She only wasted five years of her life on him. I wasted more….I did not intend to fall in love with a black man….Tim is very light-skinned, so I told my friends that he was mulatto….I nearly fainted the first time I saw a picture of Stedman Graham, because he looked exactly like Tim: tall—six-foot-five or six-foot-six—handsome, with a mustache, and very light-skinned. I thought, ‘Wow. Oprah has found a replica for Tim in Stedman.’ ”

That New Year’s Eve, Oprah’s gift of $50,000 in cash financed her former lover’s trip to Atlantic City with Judy Colteryahn. “Tim got a limousine and we had a big fancy hotel and front-row seats in Remo, a black jazz club….At the time I thought he was a great guy for not selling Oprah out, especially on drugs, which we did all the time in those days….Now that I’m older I realize how much power Oprah had and what she could have done [to him]. So they probably both had nooses around each other’s necks.

“I asked [him] what he could say [to the tabloids] that would make Oprah pay him fifty thousand dollars in hush money not to talk….That was big money then [$50,000 in 1989 equals $86,506.85 in 2009]….I was wondering what he knew about her….He said she did not want him to talk about her brother being gay [Jeffrey Lee died of AIDS December 22, 1989]. It’s no big deal to have a brother who is homosexual, but apparently it was to Oprah….Tim also said he knew about some lesbian affairs or whatever….But that’s all he said, and we never went into it.”

Oprah never revealed Tim Watts by name as the man who had brought her so low in those years. Over the next two decades she referred to him on television as a “jerk,” frequently telling her audience of the debasements she had endured because of him. “I was in love; it was an obsession,” she said. “I was one of those sick women who believed
that life was nothing without a man….The more he rejected me, the more I wanted him. I felt depleted, powerless….There’s nothing worse than rejection. It’s worse than death. I would wish sometimes for the guy to die because at least I could go to the grave and visit….I have been down on the floor on my knees crying so hard, my eyes were swollen…then it came to me. I realized there was no difference between me and an abused woman, who has to go to a shelter—except that I could stay home.”

African American women understand in their bones the slave mentality that leads sisters like Oprah to give their all to a man in complete subordination. One friend explained Oprah’s obsession with Tim Watts and his rejection of her by citing Toni Morrison’s novel
A Mercy,
in which a freed black man rejects a slave woman for not owning herself and for being a slave to her desire for him. Oprah tried to fight her own slave mentality but acknowledged through the years that she struggled not to surrender. “There’s always a teeny, tiny little conflict that says, ‘Maybe you already have enough. Why do you keep pushing?’ That comes from lack of self-esteem, from what I consider to be a slavery mentality.” Three years later she was still fighting it. “Every year I ask God for something. Last year it was love. This year it’s going to be freedom…from everything that’s kept me in bondage.”