Oprah (17 page)

Oprah was still raw from being rejected by Watts when she told
Cosmopolitan
magazine in 1986, “If I start to talk about it, I’ll weep on the floor. But I tell you, I will never travel that road again. The next time somebody tells me he’s no good for me, I’m gonna believe him. I’m not going to say to myself, ‘Well, maybe I’m too pushy, or maybe I don’t talk enough about him, or maybe, maybe, maybe. I’m not racing home to meet him there and then not hear from him until midnight. Uh, uh. Too painful.”

Even when she was supposedly happy in a committed relationship with Stedman Graham, she continued to refer to her doormat days with Tim Watts. In 1994 she told
Entertainment Weekly
that she was reading her journal from that time and was chagrined by her pathetic musings: “ ‘Maybe if I was rich enough or famous enough or was witty, clever, wise enough, I could be enough for you….’ This is a guy I used to take the seeds out of the watermelon for so he wouldn’t have to spit!”

Twenty years after the affair she was still talking about him, unable to put the past to rest. In 2005 she told Tina Turner, “I just ran across a letter I wrote in my 20s, when I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. I’d written 12 pages to one of the great jerks of all time. I wanted to burn the letter. I want no record of the fact that I was ever so pitiful.” In 2006 she told London’s
Daily Mail,
“I will never be in a position where I love someone else more than myself, where I give over my power to someone else. I will never be in a position where I get in my car and follow them to see if they are going where they said they were going. And I’ll never be in a position where I’m looking in someone’s pocket or their wallet, or checking who they are on the phone with. And I will never be in the position where, if they lie to me more than once, I don’t end that relationship.”

During her affair with Watts, Oprah was living well in Baltimore, making $100,000 a year. She described herself then as young, attractive, and still slim. “I had so much going for me, but I still thought I was nothing without a man.” She had moved into a pretty two-bedroom apartment in Cross Keys and bought a BMW. “I still remember one day we were hanging out and she transferred five thousand dollars from her savings account to her checking account just for the thrill of being able to do it,” said Barbara Hamm.

Professionally, Oprah’s star was shining. She and Richard Sher had become the toast of Baltimore as their show began outdrawing Phil Donahue’s in the local ratings. They were so successful that their producers decided to go for syndication, which for Oprah rang the bells of big money and national recognition. It was the main reason she stayed at WJZ after her close friends Maria Shriver and Gayle King moved on to bigger markets.

Oprah and Richard shared the same agent, Ron Shapiro (“That’s Sha-pie-row,” the lawyer instructed), and she insisted he write into her new contract that if she wasn’t working on a syndicated show, she could leave the station at the end of two years (1983) instead of three. So confident was everyone of syndication success that they signed off on the clause without objection.

In March 1981, the staff of
People Are Talking
went to New York City for the annual NATPE (National Association of Television
Program Executives) convention, where syndication deals are made. They rented a suite in the New York Hilton decked out with signs that read: “The Show That Beats
Donahue.
” Richard and Oprah held court with programming executives from around the country and sold the show in Rockford, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California, with potential deals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Bangor, Maine; Santa Rosa, California; and Casper, Wyoming. Unfortunately, none of the prospective buyers was a number one station offering a good time slot, but the producers still remained encouraged.

In anticipation of national exposure, Arleen Weiner hired an image consultant to help Oprah achieve a more sophisticated look. Up to that point she had been shopping at funky little stores such as The Bead Experience. “We were close to WJZ, a one-size-fits-all kind of store with gauzy, flowy tunics and caftans and palazzo pants,” said Susan Rome, who was sixteen years old when she helped Oprah. “I tried to get her away from always buying fat-lady clothes in dark colors because she really wasn’t fat—just a bit chunky and thick—but she was very uncomfortable with her size.”

When the paid image consultant arrived, she met Oprah at her apartment and tore through her closet. “I was hired to give her an easier, more comfortable fit, and a look that was more stylish but would still play in Peoria,” said Ellen Lightman. “There was a little trepidation on her part in the beginning, which is only natural for someone who has been directed to update her style and improve her image….We retired all her beiges and camels, got her into jewel tones and clothes that fit better and were more flattering to her full figure.”

The show also began booking more celebrities, for a broader appeal, which gave Oprah the chance to meet and interview Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Pearl Bailey, Dick Cavett, Uri Geller, Jesse Jackson, Erica Jong, Ted Koppel, Barry Levinson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
People Are Talking
also became a major stop for authors on book promotion tours. “I remember being interviewed by Oprah the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president,” said the writer Paul Dickson. “During a commercial break she talked about how awful Reagan was going to be for the country. She was very upset. ‘This man will not be good for my people,’ she said.” But she said nothing on air because
she was prohibited by contract from publicly expressing any political opinions.

Within six months it became clear to the producers that syndication was not going to happen. At its peak, the show was aired by only seventeen stations. Despite Oprah’s great warmth on air,
People Are Talking
was simply too parochial to go national.

“The general manager after me was Art Kern, and he sold the show to half a dozen stations, but there was resistance within Westinghouse,” said William F. Baker, by then chairman of Group W. “The guy in Hollywood below me did not think Oprah would make it as a talk show host….I told Baltimore we were not to lose Oprah because she was a massive asset, but Baltimore was our smallest station and so the one I paid least attention to.”

On Monday, September 7, 1981, the dreaded headline appeared in the TV and Radio section of
The Baltimore Sun:
“ ‘People Are Talking’ Flops as Syndicated Show.” Richard Sher was disappointed, but Oprah was devastated. This was her second big public failure in Baltimore. That evening she had another row with Tim Watts and he walked out on her, slamming the door on her hand.

“The problem with you, baby doll, is you think you’re special,” he said. As Oprah recalled, she was on the floor crying: “ ‘I’m not, please. I don’t think I’m special. I don’t, please come back.’ Then, as I went to pick myself up, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I saw an image of my mother and I remembered her screaming one night when her boyfriend had left her. And I remembered my cousin, Alice, saying, ‘It’s all right. He’s coming back.’ That same cousin was in an abusive relationship. Her boyfriend had knocked her down the stairs and broken her leg and arms, and she still took him back. I saw myself through their eyes in that mirror. I always said I would not be a battered woman. I would not be screaming for some man. And when I heard myself saying, ‘Come back. I don’t think I’m special,’ I’d become that. I got myself up, washed my face and said, ‘That is it.’ ”

At 8:30
P.M.
on September 8, 1981, she wrote a note to Gayle King, saying that personally and professionally her life did not seem worth living. “I’m so depressed, I want to die,” she wrote. She told Gayle where to find her will and her insurance policies. “I even told her
to water my plants,” Oprah said later. She told the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison that she had not considered the ways and means to accomplish her death. “I didn’t even have the courage to end the relationship,” she said. Years later Gayle returned the note to Oprah, who said, “I see it now as a cry of self-pity. I never would have had the courage to do it.” She told her audience: “The whole idea that you’re going to kill yourself and they’re all going to be mourning—that’s not really the reality. I realized that if he even came to my funeral he would go on with the other girl and on with his life and still be happy.”

The one-two punch of losing syndication, plus the love of her life, seemed unbearable at the time. Her friends were concerned enough to keep a quiet suicide watch, and one gently suggested that she seek psychotherapy, but Oprah refused. “I was so adamant about being my own person that I wouldn’t go for counseling,” she said. Her only solace was her star status in Baltimore. “She was known and loved throughout the city,” said WJZ’s former executive producer Eileen Solomon. “In that era Baltimore was still pretty much a town that saw itself in the shadow of Washington, D.C., with more of a blue-collar sensibility.” And Oprah was its queen.

“She was a very big deal here,” said Bob Leffler, “and we’re a sports town, where the biggest celebrities are baseball and football stars….I remember seeing Oprah at Ron Shapiro’s spring party, where everyone ignored legendary Orioles like Eddie Murray and Jim Palmer and flocked to her….Now that’s saying something for Baltimore.”

As a testament to Oprah’s popularity, she was chosen by the students at Goucher, a prestigious women’s college in Maryland, to deliver the commencement address in 1981, a huge honor for a twenty-seven-year-old woman, only five years older than most of the graduates. She spoke to them about her dreams as a little girl growing up in Mississippi and wanting what they had—the chance to go to a fine school, to graduate, and to begin life with the full expectation that all her dreams would come true. “When I became old enough or wise enough to know I couldn’t be just like you, I wanted to be Diana Ross, or just be somebody’s Supreme.” Finally, she said she realized that wasn’t going to be possible, either, so she learned to accept the numerators that set her apart—sex, race, education, talent, economics, family background. She
said that even with all the differences that separated her from them, the Goucher graduates, they were more alike than unalike in their struggle to be good human beings. She said the struggle was harder for them as women, powerless in a man’s world.

As if advising herself, she urged the graduates to nurture themselves. “Because unlike our mothers, we know that by the time we are middle-aged we have more than a fifty percent chance of never being married, divorced, widowed, or separated. So there’s no denying the obvious. We have to take care of ourselves.”

Her experience as an emotionally abused woman seemed to inform her speech. “I found myself one black woman rendered powerless. Being preyed upon by other people who were not only unreasonable, but just unfair. Powerless because I kept trying to be liked by people who didn’t even like themselves. Powerless! Because I believed the world was one big popularity contest that I had to win or accept failure as a woman—as a human being.”

Having grown up watching
The Donna Reed Show,
Oprah gently pricked the fantasy balloon of girls like herself who imagined themselves growing up, becoming Donna Reed, and living happily ever after as wives and mothers. She told them not to believe that Mr. Right was the answer to their prayers. She recited a Carolyn Rodgers poem about lonely women who are powerless because they judge their self-worth by the kind of man they attract. She spoke of the inequities facing women in the marketplace, making less money than men in the same jobs. Having experienced a secret and unwanted pregnancy, she chided the men who made policies that denied women the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. She did not use the word
abortion,
but she said those same men were denying women equality, rendering them powerless. Her wealthy white audience cheered when she repeated the words of slaves: “Ain’t nobody free til we all is free.” She recited Maya Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman,” and concluded with the proud words of Sojourner Truth: “Everywhere I go people wants to talk to me about this women’s rights. I tells them just like I’m telling you now. It seems to me if one woman, Eve, was able to turn this world upside down all by herself, then all of us womens in here together ought to be able to turn it right side up! And now that we’s
askin’ to do it, y’all mens better let us.” The ovation was long and loud and deserved. While Oprah would deliver many more commencement addresses over the years, none would be as heartfelt as that first one at Goucher College.

Around this time Oprah and Judy Colteryahn had to deal with the news of their lover getting his wife, Donna, pregnant and having a second son. Later, Tim Watts would have another child with a woman not his wife. Court records indicate that he had two children out of wedlock, plus two children with Donna, who eventually divorced him. “When his daughter was born on Oprah’s birthday [January 29], Tim told me that Oprah took it as a sign she had been forgiven by God,” said Judy Colteryahn. She had had to terminate a pregnancy and assumed that Oprah did as well. “She became the child’s honorary godmother, and when her dog had puppies, she flew Tim and the little girl to New York City to give them a puppy. Tim showed me the pictures of all of them standing outside the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.”

In spite of her previous resolve, Oprah resumed her rocky relationship with Watts in 1981, but this time she tried to protect herself with a workload that would leave less time to think about him. “I remember waiting for phone calls and being afraid to run the bathwater because I wouldn’t hear the phone,” she said. Still, she woke up on her twenty-eighth birthday and wept for hours because she had no one with whom to share her life. From 1982 to 1983 she appeared on the air three times a day. “She did the early-morning news, the hour talk show, and then the noon news,” said Eileen Solomon. “That’s an incredible amount of work every day, but she did it, and she won all her time slots against the competition.”