Oprah (38 page)

A week later she got slammed with the second installment of her “shameful secret past,” in which her sister popped all the bubbles Oprah had blown about her poverty-stricken childhood. Patricia also revealed the “lies Oprah told that made Mom cry,” and the stories
Oprah had never told, about how she “pawned Mom’s ring, stole her money and ran away from home.”

Suddenly the mythology Oprah had created for herself started to unravel. “She told a hundred reporters about her pet cockroach, Sandy,” recalled the novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, then a columnist for the
Milwaukee Journal.
“She told me the Sandy story, too…back when she was only an upstart young television host giving Phil Donahue a headache….Even back then, there was a drivenness about her that seemed not fully explained even by her towering ambition. She was an enigma, a high-flying solo pilot full of rehearsed one-liners but uncomfortable with too much introspection. And as any therapist can tell you, the people who run hardest usually are trying to outrun something, almost always something that was not their fault, almost always something in the past.” In a sympathetic column titled “Maybe We Know Now What Makes Oprah Run,” Mitchard wrote that if Oprah could embrace the truth of her life she would be able “to caution young girls in tough places to avoid early pregnancy.” Interestingly, Mitchard’s novel
The Deep End of the Ocean
became the first choice for the book club Oprah started six years later, but Oprah “fortunately” did not make the connection between the columnist and the novelist.

Pressed by her sister’s tabloid revelations, Oprah issued a public statement: “It is true that when I was 14 years old I became pregnant. The baby was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. I had hoped this matter could stay private until I was fully able to deal with my own deep emotions and feelings. It saddens me deeply that a publication would pay large sums of money to a drug-dependent, deeply disturbed individual and then publish her remarks. My heart goes out to my half sister.” Oprah later told reporters that she had paid for her sister’s drug treatment at the Hazelden clinic. “[I told her] I’m going to spend whatever it costs. But if you blow it, you can die a junkie on the street. And I mean that with all my heart.” Oprah did not speak to Patricia for two years after her tabloid revelations, but she generously paid for the education of her sister’s two daughters, Alisha and Chrishaunda.

“[That article] was the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. The hurt, the feeling of betrayal was as bad as it gets,” said
Oprah. “But I kept reminding myself to look for the lesson—and all of a sudden something clicked for the first time. I connected my own sexual promiscuity as a teenager with the sexual abuse I had suffered as a child. Strange as it many seem, I had never seen the connection between the two before. It took that terrible article in the tabloids to make me realize I was still carrying that guilt around with me. I know that there are other lessons for me to learn, but the first one was that I was not responsible for the abuse and that I had to get rid of the shame I was carrying.”

Finally, Oprah invited her sister to her farm in Indiana to try to make amends. “We spent the whole weekend talking,” Patricia said later. “Oprah let me have it. She said I was a letdown, she was disappointed in me and I hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped. I had no degree, no career, no nothing.”

A few years later Oprah again cut off all communication with her sister. “I told her in the last conversation we had that we don’t share the same moral code, so there’s no reason to pretend in ‘sisterhood,’ ” she told reporters. “I bought her a home and provided her with hundreds of thousands of dollars to get set up, but she said she didn’t need to work.” Oprah disagreed—strongly. “I think people need to [work].”

Patricia continued to bounce in and out of rehab until 2003 when, at the age of forty-two, she died of an accidental drug overdose. “I had just put her through rehab [again],” Oprah told reporters, “and what happens is, if you’ve been used to taking a certain amount of a drug and then you go back to taking that same amount after you’ve been off it for a bit, it’s too much.”

Oprah had expected to be shunned after her sister’s tabloid revelations. “I imagined that every person on the street was going to point their finger at me and scream, ‘Pregnant at fourteen, you wicked girl….’ No one said a word, though—not strangers, not even people I knew. I was shocked. Nobody treated me differently.”

It’s impossible to estimate how many women Oprah helped with the story of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but she must have been a beacon to those who had endured similar sadness and shame. Because of her reach and visibility, her words carried weight with her audiences, who saw her as a woman of courage and determination. Having
refused to be defeated by her searing childhood, she inspired hope, and women everywhere could look at the success she had made of her life and believe in a similar salvation for themselves. In sharing her own shame, Oprah inevitably touched thousands and helped them release their guilt by showing them they were not alone. In that sense her show became the healing ministry she had always claimed it to be.

The public humiliation she endured during this time seemed to lead to a more empathetic Oprah, one who showed a new sensitivity to the exploitation of some of her “conflict” programs. “The day I felt clearly the worst I’ve ever felt on television was in 1989, when we were still live and we had the wife, the girlfriend, and the husband, and on the air the husband [unexpectedly] announced to the wife the girlfriend was pregnant. And the expression on her face…I looked at her and felt horrible for myself and felt horrible for her. So I turned to her and said, ‘I’m really sorry you had to be put in this position and you had to hear this on television. This never should have happened.’ ” Still, Oprah would continue her “conflict” programming for another five years of rocketing ratings.

Months earlier, the Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic Tom Shales had sounded the first knell against the “talk rot” infecting airwaves and polluting the atmosphere. “Hours and hours are frittered away on shock, schlock and folly,” he wrote in
The Washington Post.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader singled out
The Oprah Winfrey Show
as the number one polluter. “They get all their ideas from the
National Enquirer,
” Nader said. As an example of the shows Shales said Oprah was spoon-feeding “boob tube boobs,” he cited a few weeks of her topics: subservient women, paternity fights, infidelity, man-hunting, threesomes, wife beaters, and shopaholics.

Even Erma Bombeck took a soft swipe at Oprah in her syndicated column. “I find myself grabbing for the listing every day to see what will come up next,” she wrote. “Recently Oprah had a panel of men who thought their aunts were their mothers. Where do they find these people? Do individuals with unusual circumstances write the producers of the show and say: ‘Hey, if you ever do something on spaceship babies trying to find their mother, I’m living in Chicago and would love to talk about it’? Or does a call go out for ‘Women Who Raise Their
Husbands as an Only Child,’ encouraging them to submit résumés?” The beloved humorist may have thought she was poking gentle fun, but Oprah’s producers do maintain a huge computerized retrieval system from on-air solicitations, plus the two to four thousand letters they receive every week, many of which run to several pages of intimate revelations. There are also several separate databases for potential interviewees, guests, and experts on every subject imaginable. Erma Bombeck did not live long enough to see Oprah’s show of April 3, 2008, in which Oprah interviewed a transgender man who became pregnant so he and his wife could raise a child. He explained that he had taken male hormones, had his breasts removed, and legally changed his gender to male, but he decided not to have his female reproductive organs removed. He subsequently gave birth to a girl. That show provided Oprah with a 45 percent ratings increase over the previous week of shows.

Normally, she shrugged off her critics by citing her huge ratings; only occasionally did she admit to being “galled” by their criticism. “My answer to those who say [my] show is exploitative is that life is exploitative, sensational, bizarre, filled with trash and weird things. Television is where these subjects should be discussed.” After all, she added, she didn’t do bigots, racists, and sadomasochists anymore. “And I’ll never do devil-worship again,” she said. It would take her a few more years to acknowledge her embarrassing contributions to trash television. At the time, she maintained that her tabloid shows were educational.

But it wasn’t all squalor all the time on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Though never as substantive as Donahue, she still presented a few serious subjects in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the escalating crisis in American education and declining literacy among the young. (She promoted that show by looking into the camera and asking, “How dumb are we?”) She explored drunk driving in a show with offenders and victims who had been catastrophically injured by intoxicated motorists. Later she said if she had a twenty-year-old son who got drunk, got in a car, and killed a pedestrian, she would testify against him in court. “I would put his ass in jail. I would say ‘I love you, but your ass is going to jail.’ I haven’t even lost anybody in this way, but the soft laws on this make me crazy. I think when someone is a drunk driver, he should
hang. And since I don’t believe in capital punishment, that means you just hang him till he turns blue, then revive him for a while, and then put him back up to hang some more. Then you tie a knot around his privates….I have no tolerance on this issue.”

She was one of the first to examine sexual abuse of children by the clergy, and she told the story of AIDS in several different shows, including one about whether networks should run commercials advertising the use of a certain brand of condom as protection against AIDS. Despite those in her audience vehemently opposed to such advertising, Oprah announced that she was handing out free samples of “safe-sex kits” that included condoms. She even ventured into public service with shows such as “What to Do in an Emergency,” demonstrating artificial respiration and the Heimlich maneuver. She raised more than $1 million in credit-card donations for Hurricane Hugo victims during a show from Charleston, South Carolina. “This is the quickest response from individuals that we have ever seen in a fund-raising effort,” said James Krueger of the Red Cross.

“The subjects for discussion change over the years,” she said in 1989. “It used to be better sex and the perfect orgasm. Then it was diet. The trend for the nineties is family and nurturing.” To that end she presented shows such as “How to Have a Happy Step Family,” “The Family Dinner Experiment,” “In Search of Missing Children,” and “How to Find Loved Ones,” in which she showed viewers how to track down long-lost relatives.

Her most effective shows continued to be those that touched her own life and explored the personal issues she was coping with at the time, including her continual struggle with weight, the damage of sexual molestation, and the ravages of racism. She took her audience inside the life of an obese person by introducing twenty-five-year-old Stacey Halprin, who weighed 550 pounds the first time she was on the show. Stacey returned after losing 300 pounds following gastric bypass surgery and came back again after losing another 60 pounds to get an Oprah makeover, which also became one of the show’s most popular staples.

In her 1989 show titled “Date Rape,” Oprah said, “I know it will have liberated a lot of women who have been raped and never called it that. A major survey showed that eighty-seven percent of high-school
boys believe they have the right to force a woman to have sex if they have spent money on a date—and forty-seven percent of girls agreed. It’s amazing to me that women buy into that attitude.”

On Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday in 1992 she announced that she would present shows throughout the year devoted to “Racism in America”:

• “Racism in the Neighborhood”
  
• “I Hate Your Interracial Relationship”
  
• “Japanese Americans: The New Racism”
  
• “Are We All Racist?”
  
• “The Rodney King Verdict I and II”
  
• “My Parent Is a Racist”
  
• “An Experiment in Racism”
  
• “Too Little, Too Late: Native Americans Speak Out”
  
• “I Refuse to Date My Own Race”
  
• “Unsolved Hate Crimes”
  
• “White Men Who Fear Black Men”
  

She took her cameras to South Central Los Angeles in the wake of the riots that followed the acquittal of the white police officers who had beaten Rodney King, an African American. Bloody chaos erupted after the 1992 verdict, with the violent deaths of fifty-four people in one of the most deadly riots in U.S. history. South LA ignited into an inferno of 4,000 fires damaging 1,100 buildings, causing 2,382 injuries, and resulting in 13,212 arrests. That evening, television viewers watched in horror as Reginald Denny, a white man, was dragged from his truck and beaten by a black mob. President George Herbert Walker Bush finally sent in federal troops to restore order.

With the best of intentions, Oprah assembled a multiracial audience of whites, Asians, blacks, and Hispanics for her first taping in Los Angeles, but she ended up with a show of shrill militants, which prompted Howard Rosenberg to write in the
Los Angeles Times
that she was “overmatched in this withering onslaught of anger and outrage, watching helplessly as her studio full of warring multicultural guests screamed sound bites at each other.” One black woman justified the riots by saying, “We had to do something to get Oprah into LA to get
people talking.” Rosenberg nearly despaired. “If this is talking,” he wrote, “bring back shouting.”

Despite the critics, Oprah maintained her position as the country’s number one talk show host among a growing field of competitors. Her program’s popularity and the intense loyalty of her female viewers made her the most influential voice in daytime television, and her made-for-television movies and specials had extended her audience, but she still wanted to engrave her presence in prime time. So, for her next network special, she and her executive producer, Debra DiMaio, cast their lines for a prize catch and managed to reel in Michael Jackson, the self-styled “King of Pop, Rock, and Soul,” who was then the subject of international curiosity. He had not done a live interview in fourteen years, but because it was Oprah offering ninety minutes of prime-time television, and possibly because his record sales had dropped along with his popularity, he agreed to sit down with her at his Neverland ranch in Santa Ynez, California. Oprah promised not to ask him if he was gay, but she said she wanted to give him a chance to address the bizarre rumors about him bleaching his skin, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, and having serial plastic surgeries.