Oprah (48 page)

During their interview Jamie Foster Brown asked Oprah, “How important is sex?”

Oprah said, “It’s a natural part of the process. I mean I’m not one of those women who feels like I gotta have it all the time….I wouldn’t consider myself a very sexual being.”

Some who knew Oprah well during her Baltimore years agreed with her assessment, speculating that her tormented four-year love affair with Tim Watts, who was married at the time, plus seriously involved with another woman when he was seeing Oprah, had so blindsided her that she was wrung out, emotionally and sexually, and never able to make herself vulnerable to any man again. Instead, she poured all her sexual energies into her career. Her conflict over submission and control found its resolution in her work, and soon the investment of time and energy in herself became its own reward, and her own survival.

With the retirement of Phil Donahue and the growing prestige of her book club, Oprah’s show became the first stop for celebrities who wanted to promote their films, their albums, their tours, and themselves. She increased her star shows in 1996, but got off to a rocky start when she covered the red carpet for the Sixty-eighth Annual Academy Awards.

“The moment you realized it was going to be a long show [was] when a star-struck Oprah Winfrey acted as if she’d never handled a
microphone or asked a question before in public,” wrote the TV critic for the
Hartford Courant.

“Hey, Brad [Pitt]! Oh, gosh. It’s great to see you.”

“Nicolas [Cage], hey! Great to see you!”

“Ron [Howard]! Hi, Ron. How are you? How are you? It’s a long way from Mayberry.”

“Hi, Jimmy [Smits]. We wanted to say, on behalf of all my friends, you’re a babe, and we don’t mean the pig. How cool is he? Oh!”

The critic from
The Buffalo News
said the first misstep of the evening was “the decision to have Oprah Winfrey fawn over celebrities as they entered the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. ‘Oh my God, Elisabeth [Shue]. What a year.’ ‘To die for [Nicole Kidman], that’s what you look like.’ Ohmygod, indeed. There hasn’t been anything this embarrassing since, well, since Letterman opened last year’s show with his ‘Uma, Oprah’ bit.”

A British critic even took a whack at what Oprah wore. “The worst-dressed woman of the evening [was] Oprah Winfrey,” wrote Stuart Jeffries in
The Guardian,
“…in a décolleté, backless dress that still contrived to have sleeves and shoulders.” After viewing her role as the official greeter at the Oscars, Howard Rosenberg, TV critic of the
Los Angeles Times,
recommended, “Um, maybe she should keep her day job.”

Oprah was more comfortable and in control in her own setting, with producers to prepare her, stylists to dress her, soft lights to frame her, and, most important, an audience to applaud her. What the critics did not appreciate was that she was not a journalist, she was a saleswoman, and like her twenty million viewers, she, too, was agog over celebrities. She brought them all to her stage with gushing introductions, conveyed with whoops and hollers, before she sat them down to wheedle out the most intimate details of their personal lives.

“We want to believe you are running Annette’s bathwater on a regular basis and dropping rose petals along the side so she can…you know, whatever,” she said to Warren Beatty.

“We have our moments,” he said.

Oprah pressed. “You have your moments.”

Beatty smiled. “We have our moments.”

George Clooney told her, “I’m never going to get married”; Eddie Murphy said he preferred black women to white women; Kate Winslet said she was never going to have plastic surgery: “Why would I want to look like a wrapped testicle?” Britney Spears said she was “going to try” to remain a virgin until marriage; and Diane Keaton said shoes were her favorite accessory because “they’re penis substitutes.” Bicycling with Lance Armstrong around her estate in Montecito, Oprah asked, “How come your butt doesn’t get sore?” She asked Jim Carrey, “Why do you think you are good at sex?” She asked Janet Jackson about her pierced nipples. “At any given moment of the day,” said the singer, “a lot of it [body piercing] can be very sexual.”

Oprah told Cybill Shepherd, “You can say
penis
and
vagina
on this show.” So Shepherd proceeded to do so as she discussed her love affair with Elvis Presley. “A few things he had to be taught; he liked to get himself a big plate of chicken-fried steak, but there was one thing he wouldn’t eat.”

The audience gasped. “Did you teach him?” asked Oprah.

“I sure did.”

When Lisa Marie Presley appeared on the show Oprah asked her why she had married Michael Jackson. “Was it a consummated marriage?” Again, the audience gasped, but Oprah admonished them. “You all damn well know you want to know.”

“Yes,” said Lisa Marie. “It was.”

Oprah invited Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes to discuss their movie about drag queens (
To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
). “I want to hear about the gender-benders,” she said, “because how did you tuck in the penises? How did you keep them down—the peni? I mean—oh, God—is the gender-bender the same as a jock strap? Is it…sort of the same thing?”

“Sort of,” said Swayze, “but it just yanks the other way.”

“Yeah,” said Snipes, “it’s like a sock.”

Despite her predilection for the risqué, Oprah dropped basketball’s bad boy Dennis Rodman from her show because she said his book,
Walk on the Wild Side,
was too raunchy. “After reading the book, I did not feel that it was appropriate for my viewers,” she said.

Over the years
The Oprah Winfrey Show
became a Mecca for celebrities: Ben Affleck, Kirstie Alley, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, Bono, Lynda Carter, Cher, Bill Cosby, Kevin Costner, Billy Crystal, Matt Damon, Johnny Depp, Cameron Diaz, P. Diddy, Robert Downey, Jr., Clint Eastwood, Michael J. Fox, Richard Gere, Robin Givens, Hugh Grant, Tom Hanks, Florence Henderson, Julio Iglesias, Michael Jordan, Ashton Kutcher, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jennifer Lopez, Susan Lucci, Paul McCartney, Matthew McConaughey, George Michael, Bette Midler, Demi Moore, Mike Myers, Paul Newman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt, Sidney Poitier, Lionel and Nicole Richie, Chris Rock, Diana Ross, Meg Ryan, Brooke Shields, Jessica Simpson, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, Steven Spielberg, Jon Stewart, Barbra Streisand, Luther Vandross, Denzel Washington, Robin Williams, Stevie Wonder, Tiger Woods, and Renée Zellweger. They all understood that by appearing with Oprah they would be safe, secure, and swaddled—able to sell their shows, films, records, products, and, most important, themselves.

Wynonna Judd came to talk about her weight; Julia Roberts announced she was pregnant with twins; Madonna denied she’d adopted a baby from Malawi as a publicity stunt. Later, in reviewing all the celebrities she knew, Oprah told her audience, “Céline Dion, Halle Berry, and John Travolta really became friends of mine.” She interviewed Tom Cruise nine times over the years and gave an entire hour to reuniting the cast of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
because, as she said, “I wanted to be Mary Tyler Moore.”

“My wife [Academy Award–winning actress Shirley Jones] and I did the
Oprah
show a couple of times,” recalled Marty Ingels from his home in Beverly Hills. “Once was: ‘Couples Who Have Some Secret to Hide.’ We were on with Jayne Meadows and Steve Allen. She found him in bed [with another woman]. Blew us away…I made a big mistake by trying to kid around with Oprah. I said, ‘C’mon, Oprah. You don’t like Jews. You won’t let me talk.’ Whoa. Big mistake. Apparently, she’s been accused of being anti-Jew—Anyway, we never got on again and here’s the reason: we didn’t get paid by Oprah.”

Ingels explained that according to AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), all performers are to be paid a
minimum fee ($537 in 1997) for their appearances, whether or not they perform, but Oprah claimed to have a special arrangement with the local union and didn’t pay anyone. Ingels demanded an investigation by AFTRA. “It’s wrong that this billionaire lady should make her own rules different from any other talk show….Why should she walk over her fellow performers? It’s chicken feed to her, but some actors rely on that occasional check. For her to screw them is not right….Is it a mortal sin? No. But it’s small and nasty and told me something petty and mean about her. I remember her once saying control is ownership….Despite her reputation as St. Oprah she’s really all about money….Yeah. Shirley finally got her check and so did all the other people who hadn’t been paid, because I called
The Hollywood Reporter
and got publicity over the matter. And that’s what Oprah didn’t want. Publicity. That’s a big disinfectant.”

One of the biggest celebrity “gets” for
The Oprah Winfrey Show
was not a member of AFTRA but could have used the $537 check, after being shortchanged by the House of Windsor in her divorce. Sarah, Duchess of York, was better known as Fergie, a name inextricably linked to the phrase “toe sucking” because of photos taken of her with her lover, which led to the dissolution of her marriage to the queen’s favorite son, Andrew, Duke of York.

“Oprah almost lost that interview because her producers insisted that Sarah appear on the show wearing a tiara,” said an ABC executive involved in the negotiations. “Oprah’s producers do Oprah-speak: ‘Oprah wants,’ ‘Oprah says,’ ‘Oprah insists.’ On this issue Oprah was
really
adamant.

“ ‘Oprah thinks it would be quite royal.’

“ ‘No way,’ said Sarah’s publicist.

“ ‘No tiara, no interview,’ said Oprah’s producers.

“This bubbled up into a real crisis,” said the network executive. “Oprah’s producers were dead serious about the tiara and pushed until Sarah’s publicists almost canceled. There were two days and nights of high-level fits around here….Finally Oprah’s side gave in and Sarah appeared on the show to promote her book—without a tiara.”

The disgraced duchess was as close as Oprah ever came to interviewing British royalty. She had met Diana, Princess of Wales, in April
1994, when she lunched with her at Kensington Palace. “We had an honest and fun conversation when I came over for BAFTA,” said Oprah. (The British Academy of Film and Television Awards had named
The Oprah Winfrey Show
“Best Foreign TV Program.”) “I found her so charming, but she wasn’t interested in doing an interview, so I didn’t push it.” After their lunch, the princess, still married to the Prince of Wales, sent Oprah a black-and-white photo of herself signed simply “Diana x” in a sterling-silver frame monogrammed with the initial
D.
She later gave her tell-all interview to the British broadcaster Martin Bashir.

“The Princess chose him over Oprah because she felt she’d make more impact in Britain with a flagship programme such as
Panorama,
and because it was the BBC,” said Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell in an email. “Martin Bashir also promised her full control. It was nothing to do with Oprah and everything to do with [Diana’s] focus on the British market and sending out her deliberate message to the British people. It was a carefully managed event and the location/context was upper-most in her mind.”

When Sarah Ferguson first appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
she was promoting her book
My Story,
which touched on her conviction that Buckingham Palace had plotted to destroy her. She appeared a year later as a spokesperson for Weight Watchers and mentioned moving back in with Prince Andrew. She drew audible gasps from the audience when she discussed how she and her ex-husband shared the same house with their two daughters and accommodated each other’s liaisons, a titillating revelation that gave Oprah the kind of news coverage she and her producers craved.

Oprah’s producers were known to make outrageous demands of guests. “If she wants you on her show, her producers possess your life for weeks beforehand, and you and your family and your friends must be available twenty-four hours a day every day that they want you,” said a publishing executive who has booked many authors on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
“If it’s three weeks, then you must be available morning, noon, and night for twenty-one days, but it’s usually well over a month of your time. Her producers want the most intimate look at your life imaginable, and sometimes they go to places that can be considered
exploitive, invasive, and quite painful. For example, Oprah’s producers wanted Elizabeth Edwards [the wife of former senator John Edwards] to take them to the spot in the road where her son had been killed. Her publicists demurred. ‘I don’t think that will work,’ they said, not even checking with Elizabeth….Harpo producers root through everything, but the end result is not ‘gotcha’ television. Oprah is not about that. Rather, she wants to give her audience a personal experience they cannot get anywhere else, and of course most people agree to her demands because they want to get on her show.”

There was one guest of whom absolutely nothing was demanded but his handsome presence. “I was really thrilled about John F. Kennedy, Jr.,” said Oprah. “We had been asking and asking to have him on so many times, and this time he called us. I think he agreed to do it because it was convenient.” Oprah cut short her vacation to fly back to Chicago in August 1996 to tape the interview when Kennedy was in town for the Democratic National Convention. She even ordered two new chairs for her set, but after the white upholstery got lint all over Kennedy’s suit she had them re-covered in leather. Four years after he was killed piloting his plane, Oprah sold “the chairs that John F. Kennedy, Jr., sat in” in a charity auction on eBay for $64,000.

At the time of the interview Kennedy was considered the most eligible bachelor in the country, but Oprah, who asked intimate questions of everyone, would not ask him about his personal life. “I didn’t ask him when he’s getting married because it’s the No. 1 question everyone asks me and it’s nobody’s business but his.” Instead, she showed him the provocative video of Marilyn Monroe appearing in a low-cut flesh-colored sequined dress that looked sprayed on and singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to his father at Madison Square Garden. Young Kennedy smiled but did not take the bait. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen that many times.”