Oprah (37 page)

Lost in the hullabaloo of headlines from coast to coast was the ill-timed salute of
Ms.
magazine (November 1988) to Oprah as one of six women to receive its 1988 Woman of the Year Award:

“In a society where fat is taboo, she made it in a medium that worships thin and celebrates a bland, white-bread prettiness of body and personality….But Winfrey made fat sexy, elegant—damned near gorgeous—with her drop dead wardrobe, easy body language, and cheerful sensuality.”

Oprah wanted no part of the tribute to her weight. “I never was happy when I was fat,” she said. “And I’ll never be fat again. Never.” She became irritated with people who asked if she would maintain her new size. “Asking me if I’ll keep the weight off is like asking, ‘Will you ever be in a relationship again where you allow yourself to be emotionally battered?’ ” she said. “I’ve been there—and I don’t intend to go back.” She said her romance with Stedman would keep her highly motivated. “I feel so much sexier….We’re just sexy, sexy, sexy now. My weight loss has just absolutely changed our relationship.”

In a stand-up routine, Rosie O’Donnell said she was sick of hearing about Stedman. “Now that Oprah’s thin, she talks about Stedman all the time. Every five minutes it’s Stedman this and Stedman that. If she mentions Stedman one more time, I’m gonna fly to Chicago and force-feed her Twinkies through an IV tube.”

Oprah vowed never to blimp up again because she was afraid of the grocery store press. “I have fear of tabloids because of the stories they would print.” But the pressure became intense, and the press began piling on. For the next year she was subjected to a national Amber Alert on her food intake, not simply from the tabloids but from the mainstream media, which also hounded her. Within weeks of unveiling her new starvation size, she was caught in a gluttonous feast by the syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, who wrote in the New York
Daily News:

The next week,
People
reported Oprah was eating goat-cheese pizza at Spago in Hollywood. Then
Vanity Fair
weighed in: “Oprah Winfrey seems to be fleshing out a pair of larger than size 8 jeans,” adding, “Forget the Optifast—we prefer the grand old Oprah.” In its “Conventional Wisdom Watch” column,
Newsweek
said, “Oprah Winfrey—built terrific studio but working overtime at the dinner table again.” The unkindest cut came in August 1989, when
TV Guide
decided that Oprah’s body was not good enough to illustrate its cover story on her: “Oprah! The Richest Woman on TV? How She Amassed Her $250 Million Fortune.” So the magazine put her face on Ann-Margret’s dazzling figure, sitting atop a pile of money. The editor said it was not
TV Guide
’s policy to misrepresent, but he couldn’t see why anyone should complain. “After all, Oprah looks great, Bob Mackie got his gown on the front of the nation’s largest-circulation magazine, and Ann-Margret made the cover—most of her, anyway.”

Oprah did not need the media to keep a death watch on her diet.
She knew she was in trouble just days after she dragged her little red wagon across the stage. In her journal she wrote:

For a few weeks after her “Diet Dreams” show, she savored the delicious sensation of buying beautiful clothes in designer boutiques, no longer having to shop at The Forgotten Woman or buy the two largest sizes of a dress at Marshall Field and have them sewn together to fit her. She indulged in shopping from the couture collections of Christian Dior, Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent. She posed for Richard Avedon in a black silk bodysuit for a national ad as one of Revlon’s most unforgettable women. “I loved doing the Revlon shoot,” she said. “It changed the way I felt about me. I never imagined myself as beautiful. But that ad made me feel beautiful. So for that reason alone it was worth shooting just to feel that.” She felt so good about her new thin self that she gave away all her fat clothes, donating them to the homeless. “It didn’t solve their problem,” she said, “but they’re sure lookin’ good.” She felt that after four months of starvation she had finally conquered her weight problem. So she stopped the Optifast group counseling and discontinued the supervised maintenance program.

Within a year she gained back seventeen of the sixty-seven pounds she had lost. “It’s a battle I’m still fighting every waking minute of my life,” she told her audience, most of whom nodded in sympathetic
agreement. At that point, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, 27 percent of American women and 24 percent of American men were considered to be overweight, bordering on obese. Oprah showed a video of herself chugging up a mountain at a high-priced spa, struggling to burn off calories. She looked defeated as she pleaded with viewers to please leave her alone if they saw her shoveling down mashed potatoes. “I’ve decided I’m not going to go through life depriving myself of things that make me feel good.”

A year later she wrote one of her saddest journal entries:

During the November sweeps of 1990, Oprah acknowledged the nightmare of her “Diet Dreams” with a show titled “The Pain of Regain”: she had gained back all of the sixty-seven pounds, plus more. She would not say how much she weighed, but she later confided it was more than Mike Tyson, boxing’s heavyweight champion. “I will never diet again,” she said. “I certainly will never fast again.”

From her fan mail, Oprah knew her audiences adored her, so she was surprised when most said they preferred the original fat Oprah to the new “lite” version. They said when she was heavy she was more approachable; she laughed easily and hugged everyone. The thin Oprah seemed pinched and strained, as if the effort to diet had sapped her of her cheerfulness. Viewers let her know that they were much more comfortable with hefty Oprah than sylph Oprah, who, they felt, acted a little smug and a trifle self-satisfied. Her bulk had reassured people that looks were superficial, only skin-deep. Now they realized that she never really believed that. Years later she admitted as much. “I do know what it’s like to live inside of a body that’s twice your size….I know that anybody who’s there would want it to be different. Even people who say they’ve made peace with it. You reach a point where you fight it, fight it, fight it, and then you say you don’t want to fight it anymore….

“I can tell you this, even being a famous person, that people treat
you so differently when you’re fat than when you’re thin. It is discrimination that nobody ever talks about.”

As much as Oprah disliked her heavy self, she, too, seemed more at ease with her corpulence than she did without it. “I always felt safer and more protected when I was heavy,” she said, “although I didn’t really know what I was trying to protect, any more than I knew what I was afraid of.” It seemed that the same limitless ambition that had rocketed her to the top of her career had set her appestat: while gaining weight worked to her professional advantage, making her what
Essence
described as “the quintessential mammy figure,” her huge size made her absolutely miserable as a person.
Ebony
suggested that her “touchy-feely” manner toward her predominantly white audiences “is reminiscent of the stereotypical Southern Mammy.”
People
described her as “the powerful mommy figure,” which she did not accept. “A woman told me recently, ‘I used to think you were more compassionate when you were fat because you were like a mother to me. And now you’re this sex thing,’ ” recalled Oprah. “I said, ‘Is it something I said, something I did? Because I never felt like I was your mother.’ ”

Some black comedians were mean-spirited, particularly Keenan and Damon Wayans on
In Living Color,
the comedy show they developed for the Fox Network. In one spoof titled “Oprah on Eating,” the comedians’ sister Kim Wayans imitated Oprah doing an interview: she began eating ferociously until she blew up like a balloon and exploded potato chips all over her audience. Abiola Sinclair pronounced the skit “vicious” in the
New York Amsterdam News:
“Sensible and genuine Black people never were overly concerned about Oprah’s weight. What was of more concern to many of us was her feeling the need to wear funny colored [green] contact lenses, seemingly indicative of some sort of racial dissatisfaction. At her heaviest Oprah never was a slob, and always looked good. In our opinion…a little weight on her looks better than that unnatural skin and bones body, with that big round head sitting on it. She could be a size 14 and still be fit. The key word is fit.”

Oprah probably felt more discrimination for being fat than she ever did for being black. The African American community was far more accepting of large-scale women than the white stick world, which prized anorexics as straight as a fork tine.

As a black woman who broke the tape in her sprint to success, Oprah was universally applauded and rewarded for her professional triumph, but as a fat woman, she felt excluded from the fork-tine world, and the exclusion was painful. “People take you more seriously [when you’re thin],” Oprah said. “You’re more validated as a human being….” “I hate myself fat….It’s made me terribly uncomfortable with men.” “I don’t believe fat people who say they’re happy. They’re not. I don’t care what they say.”

Over her career she would win seven Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show Host, nine Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show, seven NAACP Image awards, Broadcaster of the Year from the International Radio and Television Society, the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America. Yet, sadly, she felt her greatest accomplishment in life was losing sixty-seven pounds, and her biggest failure was regaining it.

“I remember [before she went on that fast] being at Oprah’s show in Washington, D.C., when I was the research director for WUSA-TV,” said Candy Miles-Crocker, a beautiful black woman. “Oprah wore a bright yellow knit suit and she must’ve weighed close to 275 pounds then. She was huge, and that knit skirt clung to her like the wrapper on a sausage. It was also slit up the front so that when she sat down the slit spread, as did her fat…and…oh, dear…it was horrible. I felt awful for her. She knew what was happening, so during the break she went off to the side and turned the skirt so the split wouldn’t be in the front. Watching her try to maneuver that skirt over her thunderously fat thighs was like watching a ship try to dock in a slip for a rowboat.”

Oprah’s weight hung like a harness around her neck, but as beleaguered as she felt, she did not completely give up. She continued going to health spas, where she eventually met Rosie Daley, who became her chef, and later, Bob Greene, who became her trainer. Together, they managed to alter her lifestyle and her size in time for her fortieth birthday, but even then it was not easy.

“Before Rosie arrived, Mrs. Eddins [Oprah’s honorary godmother from Nashville] did all the cooking, and every lunch was fried chicken,
potato salad, heaping bowls of macaroni and cheese with freshly baked pies for dessert—and Oprah ate it all,” recalled her landscape architect James van Sweden. “Rosie introduced her to fresh fruits and vegetables, but it took Oprah a while to make friends with food that wasn’t fried or sauced.” Oprah said herself that Rosie worked with her for two years before she ever lost a pound.

During the time she was regaining her weight in 1990, she was sledgehammered by her sister, who told the tabloids the long-held family secret of Oprah’s pregnancy at the age of fourteen and of the baby boy she had given birth to. This tell-all came after Oprah had discontinued her sister’s $1,200-a-month allowance because she was using it to buy drugs, so Patricia Lee Lloyd went to the
National Enquirer,
which paid her $19,000 to reveal details about Oprah’s so-called “wild and promiscuous early years,” when she sneaked older men into the house and did “The Horse” while her mother was at work.

“She said that’s what she used to do,” Patricia Lee Lloyd told the tabloid, “and I realized that all those afternoons she was making out with her men.”

Oprah was so humiliated by her sister’s revelations that she took to her bed for three days. “I thought my whole life was over,” she said later. “The world’s going to hate me. They’re all going to say, ‘What a shameful, wicked woman. What a little whore.’ But Stedman…got me through it. He helped me to be brave about it….I cried and cried. I remember him coming into the bedroom that Sunday afternoon, the room darkened from the closed curtains. Standing before me, looking like he, too, had shed tears, he handed me the tabloid and said, ‘I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.’ ” Stedman helped her see that what had happened to her happens to many, but he said that as one of God’s special children, she would survive and thrive and be able to help others do the same. “Stedman thinks I’m one of those chosen people,” Oprah said. “You know, hand-picked by the universe to do great things.”