Oprah (32 page)

“I like the way you speak of ‘them,’ ” Oprah said. “It’s like black people are from Mars or something.” Becoming exasperated, she asked, “Does everyone in this town never even come in contact with black people? Do you not even watch
The Cosby Show
?”

Oprah’s show from Forsyth County received national press coverage, blockbuster ratings, and a tip of the rabbit ears from TV critics. “For sheer audacity and sweeps smarts,” wrote Howard Rosenberg in the
Los Angeles Times,
“nothing has topped black Oprah Winfrey’s venture into an area whose white-might ugliness has recently attracted global media attention.” The
Chicago Sun-Times
applauded her for keeping her dignity and composure as she stood among some of the nation’s most notorious racists. “So it seems Winfrey accomplished precisely what she had set out to do,” wrote Robert Feder. “She served up an hour of sensational television about an explosive issue while generating tons of publicity.”

After doing the show in Forsyth County on a Monday, Oprah returned to Chicago and devoted the rest of her week to drag queens, women murderers, religious fundamentalists, and sexy clothes. Each week, TV critics received an Oprah advisory about her upcoming shows. “Here are my top 10 favorites from recent weeks,” wrote Jeff Jarvis of
People,
never a big Oprah fan:

1. Hairdresser Horror Stories
   
2. Housewife Prostitutes
   
3. Men Who Can’t Be Intimate
   
4. Men Who Fight Over Women
   
5. Man-Stealing Relatives
   
6. Polygamy
   
7. Unforgivable Acts Between Couples
   
8. Sexy Dressing
   
9. Get Rich and Quit Work
   
10. Women Who Are Allergic to Their Husbands
    

During the November 1987 sweeps, Oprah headed for Williamson, West Virginia, a town on the Kentucky border that was in the clutches of AIDS hysteria. A young man with the disease had come home to die. He went swimming in the public pool, and the mayor ordered it closed for a week of “scrubbing” after hearing rumors that the young AIDS victim had purposely cut himself to infect others. The town went on a witch hunt. The young man, who died nine years later, appeared on Oprah’s show and faced his accusers, who spat out fear, ignorance, and homophobia.

“God gave him AIDS for a reason,” said one. “It’s His way of saying, ‘What you’re doing is no good.’ ”

Another said, “You want us to hug him, to let him babysit our kids. We can’t handle that. I’m not afraid of this man. I am repulsed by the man’s lifestyle. I am repulsed by his disease. I am repulsed by him.”

Oprah let everyone speak before she made her own observation. “I hear this is a God-fearing community. Is that right?” she asked. The crowd clapped and cheered to signal affirmation.

“So where is your Christian love and understanding?”

Again, she received rave reviews and rocketing ratings. Several months later, the
National Enquirer
reported that her brother, Jeffrey Lee, was dying of AIDS and had given an interview saying he felt abandoned by Oprah. “She’s virtually disowned me,” he said. “She’s made it clear that AIDS or not, I’m on my own….Her attitude is, ‘It’s your own fault. It serves you right.’ Oprah believes that every gay is going to get AIDS eventually….I don’t think homosexuality as such offends Oprah. What really upset her was my lifestyle—partying, running around, not holding down a job. Oprah told me, ‘You need to get
God in your life. You really need Jesus.’ ” Perhaps this was a step forward for Oprah, considering that she first told her brother that as a homosexual he would never go to Heaven.

Three days before Christmas 1989, Jeffrey Lee died in Milwaukee, with only his mother and his lover at his side. Two weeks later Oprah issued a statement: “For the last two years my brother had been living with AIDS. My family, like thousands of others throughout the world, grieves not just for the death of one young man but for the many unfulfilled dreams and accomplishments that society has been denied because of AIDS.”

In the hope of generating more bombshell ratings for the February ’88 sweeps, Oprah booked her first big celebrity interview with the woman once described as the most beautiful in the world. Elizabeth Taylor, then fifty-six, had lost forty pounds, divorced her sixth husband, and written a book titled
Elizabeth Takes Off.
She launched its publication with Oprah, who flew her staff to Los Angeles to tape the show at the Hotel Bel-Air, without a studio audience.

“[It] was a very high-pressure situation,” recalled the former Harpo photographer Paul Natkin. “I was told before we left Chicago that I would be allowed to shoot ten photographs and I would have approximately two minutes to do that….As soon as I clicked the shutter the tenth time [Taylor’s publicist] reached over, put her hand in front of the camera, and said, ‘Sorry. That’s it. We’re done.’ ”

The photos show the slim and lovely star sparkling with glamour. In contrast, the talk show host looks like an electric dandelion, with a teased hairdo of scrambled ringlets sticking out of her head as if she’d stuck her finger in a socket. The interview was equally disastrous. Oprah could not cajole anything out of the Hollywood diva, and La Liz dismissed the electric dandelion as “cheeky” when she asked her about her romances with Malcolm Forbes and George Hamilton. “None of your business,” Taylor snapped. She was so terse and unresponsive to questions that Oprah tried a little humor. “You’re so revealing—you just tell everything! I declare you’ve got to stop talking so much, Ms. Taylor!”

Not in the least amused, the movie star looked at Oprah with icy hauteur.

“It was the worst interview of my life,” Oprah said years later. “It’s still painful to watch.”

At the time, Oprah looked like an overfed, overdressed country girl overawed by a Hollywood legend, who could not have acted haughtier had she been handed a script. When the actress appeared on
Donahue
two weeks later, she opened up like a flower to the sun, and critics agreed that Oprah was just not ready to do celebrity interviews, something her executive producer had previously acknowledged. “We like to stay away from celebrity-oriented shows,” said Debra DiMaio. “Oprah does better with controversial shows, with guests that have some kind of passion and emotion and a story to tell….We call them true-life stories….We always kid her, but Oprah has had such an incredible life that no matter what topic we do, it’s usually something that happened to her in some way or another.”

Still chasing fireworks for February sweeps, Oprah returned to Chicago and waded into a confrontation with white supremacist skinheads that made her tussle with Elizabeth Taylor look like a taffy pull. Security at the station had been increased for the show, requiring everyone to pass through a metal detector to make sure no weapons were smuggled into the studio. Racist comments and profane threats were spewed with abandon. At one point Oprah placed her hand on the arm of one of the skinheads, who yelled, “Don’t touch me.” Another called her “a monkey.”

“You think…because I’m black [I’m] a monkey?”

“It’s a proven fact,” said the skinhead.

After the break, Oprah told her audience that “Mr. Monkey Comment” had been asked to leave. She admitted later that halfway through the show she regretted doing it. “In terms of racist hatred it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I have never in my life felt so consumed by evil. Any one of those kids would have taken great pride in slashing my throat. And I know it….They have no concept of what life is about, so they don’t care about going to jail for killing a black person or a Jewish person.”

The critic for the
Chicago Sun-Times
wrote, “So does all this soul-searching mean Oprah will finally quit subjecting herself to such indignities for the sake of ratings? Don’t bet on it.”

Booking bigots, self-proclaimed porn addicts, and witches as guests gave Oprah, then thirty-four, soaring ratings over fifty-two-year-old Phil Donahue, whose talk show the writer David Halberstam once described as “the most important graduate school in America,” informing millions about changes in society and modern mores. For over twenty years Donahue had treated his female audience like intelligent women, and had reigned as the number one talk show host in the country. Having paved the way for a competitor who was now tromping him, he, too, began dipping into tabloid sleaze. “I don’t want to die a hero,” he said, explaining why he cross-dressed as a woman to do a show on transvestites. He later acknowledged that as a white male, he lacked Oprah’s ability to get cozy with a female audience about finding a good man, a foolproof diet, or a bra that fit. While Oprah was besting Donahue at every turn,
The Wall Street Journal
reported on critics who called her show “Nuts ’n’ Sluts” and “Freak of the Week.” Her executive producer defended the tabloid programs, saying when viewers complained about a show on sex, it was only after they’d watched every minute of it. When she was asked about a show on child murderers, Debra DiMaio asked for clarification: “Are you talking about kids who kill kids, or kids who kill their parents?” Oprah had done shows on both.

She said she would never do another show with white supremacists, but she resented being criticized for doing tabloid television. “It bleeps me off when you guys write as if I do shows about how to dress your parakeet,” Oprah told one critic. “I was uncomfortable doing ‘Women Who Have Obnoxious Husbands,’ but I turned down [televangelists] Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Won’t talk to them. And I won’t do ‘Is Elvis Alive?’ ”

During the May sweeps of 1988, she stunned everyone when she chose to air a show on teenage boys who’d died of autoerotic asphyxia, a sexual practice that sometimes involves tying a noose around the neck during masturbation. By then she was not just competing against Phil Donahue, but also contending with the talk shows of Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Morton Downey, Jr., and Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, with Joan Rivers, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Ricki Lake, and Montel Williams waiting in the wings. The pressure to top previous sweeps ratings and trounce the competition led Oprah
to present a controversial show featuring the parents of two young boys who had accidentally strangled themselves as a result of the extreme sexual practice.

Dr. Harvey Resnik, a clinical psychiatrist, also appeared on the show. As former chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Center for Studies of Suicide Prevention, he had published a paper on erotized repetitive sex hangings in which men bind their necks, or cover their heads in a plastic bag pulled tight with a drawstring, and achieve an intense high through masturbation while reducing the supply of oxygen to the brain. “When oxygen is depleted, more carbon dioxide is retained, causing an altered state of consciousness. The result is a light-headed giddiness known as a head rush, something that skin divers and pilots who lose oxygen also report. This altered state can affect the sexual pleasure center of the brain. The risk is that with diminished blood flow, the person passes out, slumps forward, and completely obstructs the airway, which results in death from asphyxiation. The behavior is well known to medical examiners.”

As a consultant to survivors of victims of autoerotic asphyxia, Dr. Resnik understood the shame attached to that particular kind of death. “Just as with other problems we have in mental health, we know that self-help groups and the ability to share grief and to share information is quite helpful,” he said.

The day before the show aired, Oprah’s executive producer, Debra DiMaio, called Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist, criminologist, and professor of biobehavioral sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine. He warned her about broadcasting such a graphic subject. “I had a heated discussion with the producer. I argued that television is not a suitable medium for discussing this subject, because the risk of people imitating it is too high,” he said. “I told her that if the show were aired, it would foreseeably result in one or more deaths.” Dr. Dietz added that if anyone sued Oprah for reckless and negligent conduct, he would testify to a jury that he had warned the producer against airing the show. Oprah later said she had “meditated” on the matter and concluded that they should proceed. Months later DiMaio regretted the decision. “It was a dangerous thing to do,” she said. “You never want to give that one kid the idea to go ahead and try it.”

At the time, Dr. Resnik said the producer agreed to issue a parental warning before the show to restrict TV access to children. “Still, I don’t think she or Oprah was prepared for such a powerful subject,” he said, “but I applaud them for having the courage to bring the issue to the public.”

That afternoon, May 11, 1988, after watching the show, thirty-eight-year-old John Holm retreated to the garage of his father’s house in Thousand Oaks, California. When his father returned home hours later from an Elks meeting he could not find his son. “The television was still on Channel 7—the channel he’d watched
Oprah
on,” said Robert Holm. “The garage lights were on, but the door was locked from the inside. I banged on the door, but there was no answer. I had to break in. That’s when I found his body. It was horrible. I thought John had killed himself. But when the rescue squad came, one of the workers said he knew how my son had died because he’d seen the
Oprah
show that afternoon. I blame the
Oprah
show for my boy’s death. I lost my son and my best friend in the world.”

Mr. Holm hired a lawyer to investigate suing Oprah. “Her show led to John’s death—and I will never forgive her for that,” he said. In the end he decided not to put his wife through the pain of a lawsuit. “He was our only son and a beautiful person. We can’t bring him back.”

Publicly, Oprah defended her show. “What I got afterward were responses from grieving parents: ‘Thank you for explaining to us what happened to our boy.’ They felt a lot better knowing, they said. Before, they had been torturing themselves that they were to blame.” Privately, she worried about the possibility of having to defend a wrongful-death suit.

“I got a call after the show from her producer, saying parents might sue and asking if I would serve as a witness for Oprah,” recalled Dr. Resnik. “I said I would because I believe that having information about such risky behavior is better than not having any information at all.”