Oprah (30 page)

“The hardest part of my job, in addition to the terribly long hours,
is the reading I have to be continually doing,” said Dianne Hudson, the only African American on staff then. “We all read the tabs, like
The Star,
the
Globe,
and the
Enquirer.
”

Alice McGee, who started as an intern at WLS and became a publicist for Harpo and later a producer, worried about people kissing Oprah instead of just hugging her. “We gotta watch that,” she said.

The “girls” were so devoted to Oprah in those days that they were afraid they sounded like Moonies when they talked about her. Some people referred to them as “the Oprah-ettes.”

When Oprah took over ownership and production of her nationally syndicated show in 1988, she became CEO of Harpo Productions and started signing their checks. “Everybody tells me that you cannot have true friendships with people whose salaries you control,” she said. “But I just don’t think that’s true in my case. Because they were my friends before I signed their paychecks. We sort of all grew up together with this show.”

Within six years that loving family of best friends was split by discord and death. They buried Bill Rizzo, who died of AIDS in 1990, and four years later Debra DiMaio, “the mother of us all,” was forced to resign following a staff coup in which she was branded as tyrannical. “Either she goes or we go,” the producers told Oprah. So Oprah paid DiMaio $3.8 million [$5.5 million in 2009 dollars] to resign in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement that she would “never speak or publish or in any way reveal” details about her personal or professional relationship with Oprah. More staff resignations followed, including Oprah’s cousin Jo Baldwin, who had been vice president of Harpo, Inc. One employee sued Oprah for $200,000 in severance pay, and another said that “working for her was like working in a snake pit.” Oprah settled the lawsuit out of court—quickly and quietly. With the forced resignation of Debra DiMaio in 1994, Oprah decided to back away from the trough of trash television.

“That’s when she started getting into celebrities and New Age gurus,” said Andy Behrman, a publicist who had worked closely with the show. “Before that it was heaven for me, because I could book anyone on Oprah, absolutely anyone.”

The publicist’s claim seemed preposterous given the numerous
books, articles, and websites (28,100 by 2009) dedicated to getting on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
but even Oprah admitted having to do on-air promotions to get guests in the early days and to drag audiences off the street. “Now getting a ticket to the show is like winning the lottery,” said a staffer in 2005. By then Oprah’s production company was receiving thousands of phone calls each week requesting tickets to the show.

“In the early years her show was easy to book because she and her little girls’ club didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” said Behrman. “They were all young with hay behind their ears—unsophisticated small-town, small-time girls just trying to find husbands….Don’t forget that Oprah’s first national show [September 9, 1986] was entitled ‘How to Marry the Man of Your Choice,’ which should tell you something.”

Reminded that the “girls” were producing a number one–rated television talk show in syndication, the publicist maintained that “Oprah’s sorority” merely slapped together local shows for national consumption on a daily basis. “For the most part her early years were devoted to tabloid sex trash that got huge ratings,” he said, “and shows about getting a man and keeping a man, and, of course, losing weight, because that’s all she and her little cult really cared about. Unlike Phil Donahue, they didn’t know anything about current affairs, politics, or the larger world around them, and they didn’t care.”

A survey conducted by the Harvard Business School of topics covered in the first six years Oprah went national showed that she concentrated primarily on victims: rape victims, families of kidnapping victims, victims of physical and emotional abuse, teenage victims of alcoholism, female victims of workaholism, obsessive love, and childhood wounds. She also covered therapy for husbands, wives, and mistresses; infidelity among traveling businessmen; and the worlds of UFOs, tarot cards, channelers, and other psychic phenomena.

“Oprah’s shows back then, and even now,” said Andy Behrman in 2009, “are all about Oprah and her issues….Back then it was all victims all the time, plus boys, clothes, and diets. Now that Oprah is going through menopause her show has become a way station for middle-aged women with PMS. It’s all about health and hormones. When I was in my
Oprah
-booking prime I worked with Ellen Rakieten, who I’d talk to almost every day. I became her go-to guy in New York City, which
was another planet for those girls. And Los Angeles? Forget it. That was an alternative universe. Most of them had never even been to Europe. They thought they’d hit the big time when they moved to Chicago and started shopping at Marshall Field. They loved to shop, but they were dull gray dumplings with no sense of style. Their idea of chic was an Ann Taylor dress, a little Echo scarf, black patent leather heels, and some plastic button earrings. Pathetic. They couldn’t stay on diets, so they started going to spas….Oh, the stories of Oprah and the girls at the fat farm…That’s how I got all my diet-book clients on the show. I threw them Suzy Prudden and Blair Sabol—God, Oprah loved Blair because she was so smart and funny. She must’ve booked her three or four times. I even got the late Dr. Stuart Berger on
Oprah
to talk about dieting and—God help us—he weighed 350 pounds at the time. No matter who my client was, I simply pegged my pitches to Oprah’s obsessions with getting a man or buying clothes or losing weight. Sometimes I had to stretch, but it always worked….Most of my clients got on one, two, and three times, especially my plastic surgeons, diet doctors, and shrinks, some of whom were out-and-out frauds. Once I got them on
Oprah,
I could always book them on
Sally Jessy Raphael,
who picked up all of Oprah’s crumbs.”

Tall, handsome, and devilishly clever, the publicist said he became a regular booker for Oprah’s show for several years. “With the exception of Debbie DiMaio, who cracked a mean whip, those girls didn’t know what was good and what was bad, which made it easy for me. I even booked my best female friend on the show, to talk about the pick-up lines guys use to get girls. I did that just to prove to her I could get anyone on
Oprah.
I was so close in those days that I was invited to Ellen Rakieten’s wedding, where I stood with Oprah and Stedman and Rosie, the chef. Boy, was that a lifetime ago….

“Early on, Ellen told me the sorority was worried about some guy dating Oprah for her money, and so I immediately suggested doing a show on gold diggers.

“ ‘Oh, that’s great,’ Ellen said. ‘But how do we do it?’

“ ‘You get a guy like my client, who has written a book on neuro-linguistic programming, and he’ll be able to tell you who is after money and who isn’t based on scientific research….I’ll give you the questions
Oprah can ask him and then she can take some prescreened questions from her audience, which I’ll send to you. Then you get a panel and blah, blah, blah.’ By the end of the conversation I had laid out the entire show for her.

“Now, of course, there’s no science to determine whether or not someone is a gold digger, but I had to get my client on a national show, because I didn’t want to drag him around on a fourteen-city book promotion tour. Who needs
Good Morning Cincinnati
and
Hello Peoria
when you can do
The Oprah Winfrey Show
?”

That gold-digging show was not an unqualified success for the author, who recalled the experience as “terrifying, not terrific.” “I had written a book entitled
Instant Rapport
on neuro-linguistic programming, which had to do with how you verbally influence people,” recalled Michael Brooks. “I was given the whole show—one hour with just me and Oprah—to talk about ‘Secret Admirers,’ which is how they spun the subject to dumb it down for her audience. I wasn’t in any position to object, as this was my first national show.

“The Oprah that I met back in the 1980s was vastly different from the Oprah you see on television today. Back then, she was very dark-skinned—Sidney Poitier dark—and now she’s very light-skinned. I know that makeup and lighting can do a lot, but I think she might’ve had some kind of skin bleaching…like Michael Jackson.

“The audience was interested in my subject—to a point—but when I lost them, I lost Oprah. She’d jump over to their side and belittle me if I made a dumb point. If I made a good point and the audience clapped, she’d jump back to my side. It was unnerving.”

Even after an hour on
Oprah,
his book did not become a bestseller. “It did well, but it didn’t make the list,” he said.

“You had to get your book up to Oprah’s breasts to become a bestseller,” said the writer Blair Sabol. “Our publicist’s rule was if she holds it in her lap, you’d make the list in two weeks. If she holds it at her waist, you’d be on in a week. If she clutches it to her bosom, you’re headed for number one. So, naturally, we all aimed for Oprah’s boobs.”

In the early days, guests were allowed to sit and talk to Oprah as she was being made up before the show. “I was mesmerized by her hair and makeup guys,” said Sabol. “They were nothing short of miracle
workers, because Oprah without hair and makeup is a pretty scary sight. But once her prep people do their magic she becomes super glam….They narrow her nose and thin her lips with three different liners. They shade her large round cheeks, contour her chin with some kind of glowing stuff, and apply double-decker eyelashes that cost five hundred dollars apiece…and her hair. Well, I can’t even begin to describe the wonders they perform with her hair.

“Those guys—Reggie and Roosevelt and Andre—have been with her from the beginning, and she takes them everywhere she goes. I would, too. In fact, I’d ditch Stedman and Gayle before I ever let those prep guys go.”

Perhaps because of Oprah’s need for daily makeovers, she was susceptible to guests who were attractive and natural. With her arresting good looks and witty repartee, Blair Sabol was easy to book. “She was not like Marianne Williamson, who always wanted to take over the show from Oprah,” said Behrman. “Blair was lively enough to keep it going and entertain Oprah….I booked her for a show on ‘Being a Bitch,’ in which she appeared with Queen Latifah, and she was very funny. When I got Blair on with her book,
The Body of America,
in 1987, Richard Simmons got his panties in a knot because Blair had written that Simmons found ‘a way to reduce fitness to a Vegas stand-up comic routine.’ She put down the national obsession with diet and exercise, and was way ahead of the curve on that one.”

After several sit-downs with Oprah before, during, and after her shows, Blair Sabol came to see the difference between the on-camera persona and the off-air presence. “Oprah gives it all to the camera, so there’s very little left over. In person she’s shut down, aloof, a bit standoffish. She likes to laugh, but she’s not really funny. I liked her because she was a girl’s girl. Seeing her on television, though, you think she’s warm and affectionate, but that’s the persona. There’s a sheet of ice between the person and the persona.” The author Paxton Quigley also found Oprah cold off-camera. “I went on her show with my pro-gun book,
Not an Easy Target,
but her producers said I couldn’t mention guns because Oprah is against guns. I was only allowed to talk about self-defense for women, so that’s what I did….I was surprised that I did not like Oprah at all. She only came to life when the camera was
on; otherwise, she ignored me. That kind of treatment makes you feel so diminished. You realize that she’s using you, but then that’s why you’re there—it’s a mutual using, but I think guests expect her to be like the warm and cozy Oprah they see on the air. She isn’t—at all.”

Oprah’s executive producer from her
People Are Talking
years in Baltimore explained the difference between Oprah on- and off-camera as an element of performance. “I’d say this about most on-air talent,” said Eileen Solomon, now a professor of broadcast journalism at Webster University in St. Louis. “They save their best stuff for the camera, and that’s how it was with Oprah. Off the air she was much quieter. Pleasant and perfectly collegial, but in no way effusive.”

Occasionally the audience gets a glimpse of the two different Oprahs, which can be unsettling for those who expect a warm, huggy presence off-camera. “I attended a makeover show several years ago, and during the commercial break the charming Oprah became charmless,” recalled Peggy Furth, a former Kellogg executive and now co-owner of the Chalk Hill Vineyards in California. “Oprah did not enjoy those of us in the audience in any way, until the camera went back on. Then she was terrific. Engaging and funny,
but
only on-camera.”

Most viewers found the chemistry between Oprah and her guests to favor women over men, especially those with an issue she shared. “Because she was obsessed with losing weight, I booked Suzy Prudden, with her book
MetaFitness,
which was some kind of mumbo jumbo about using your mind to change your body through guided imagery and hypnosis,” said Behrman. “Oprah fell for that one hook, line, and sinker….Suzy had already done Oprah a few times in Baltimore, with
People Are Talking,
and then
A.M. Chicago,
so she wasn’t such a tough sell for the national show.”

Suzy Prudden’s appearance on
Oprah
was so successful that one of the tabloids offered her a weekly column, in which she was promoted as “Oprah’s diet guru.”

“I became persona non grata after that,” Prudden said years later. “Oprah was furious at me, and rightfully so, although I wasn’t responsible for advertising myself that way….I apologized and apologized, but it did no good. She never spoke to me again….It was a horrible experience….At first I was highly regarded by Oprah, and then I was
dirt….It wasn’t that she said anything or screamed and yelled….It was that the door once open to me was closed and it never opened again….It was one of the worst experiences in my life.”