Oprah (53 page)

When Oprah introduced the self-help philosophy of
The Secret
to her viewers, she promised they would learn “the secret” to making more money, losing weight, finding the love of their life, and achieving job success, simply by visualizing. They could have it all, just like she had it all. She then introduced the author, who explained that
The Secret
espouses “the law of attraction”: If you think positively, you attract good things to yourself; if you think negatively, you attract bad things. She later cited, as an outrageous example, the massacre in Rwanda, and said the victims’ feelings of fear and powerlessness had led to the carnage.

“The message of
The Secret
is the message that I’ve been trying to share with the world on my show for the past twenty-one years,” Oprah told Larry King on CNN. She presented two shows on
The Secret,
sending the book to the top of the bestseller list, where it sold more than three million copies and spawned “Secret” clubs around the world. She was promptly ridiculed for peddling what Peter Birkenhead described on
Salon.com
as “minty-fresh snake oil.” Comedian/talk show host Bill Maher declared the book “insane,” and
The Washington Post
characterized it as “slimy.”
Saturday Night Live
poked fun at Oprah’s obsession with
The Secret
in a skit in which she interviewed a poor starving man in Darfur. Putting on a deep Old Testament voice, Oprah, played by Maya Rudolph, asked, “Why do you think things are going so bad?” When the poor man couldn’t answer, Oprah scolded him, saying the atrocities were the result of his negative attitude. “When we come back, John Travolta!”

Shortly after, Oprah “clarified” her views on “the law of attraction.” She did not apologize for endorsing
The Secret,
but she now said it was not the answer to everything. “It is not the answer to atrocities or every tragedy. It is just one law. Not the only law. And certainly, certainly, certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme.” Interestingly, in 2009, Oprah declared in court papers that her “reputation depends, in part, on the quality of the products she recommends, which she does only after careful consideration and vetting to make sure such products meet her standards and approval.”

She certainly paid attention to her critics, especially when they reported her viewers were complaining about her meddling with their religious beliefs. Stung by articles about “The Church of Oprah” and “The Gospel According to Oprah,” she dropped “Change Your Life”
television and renamed it “Live Your Best Life” television. She changed “Remembering Your Spirit” to “Remembering Your Joy.”

W
HILE SOME CRITICS
were writing her obituary in 1999, she was empire-building with a media move that would leave them all speechless. Joining with Hearst in April 2000, she launched
O, The Oprah Magazine,
which became the most successful start-up in magazine history. She put herself on the cover of every issue for the next nine years, which further inflamed her critics to produce long essays on her narcissism. They carped about “The Cult of Oprah,” because each issue of
O
carried “The O List” of things Oprah liked (e.g., Burberry dog collars, Fendi sunglasses, Ralph Lauren mules, Rocket e-books), plus two pages titled “Oprah: Here We Go” and “Oprah: What I Know for Sure,” in addition to recipes by Oprah’s personal chef, diet tips from Oprah’s personal trainer, and advice from Oprah experts such as Dr. Phil and Suze Orman, plus ads for upcoming Oprah personal growth summits. In addition, there is an Oprah interview with a high-profile celebrity such as the Dalai Lama, Madeleine Albright, Jane Fonda, Phil Donahue, Laura Bush, Muhammad Ali, Meryl Streep, Martha Stewart, Ralph Lauren.

In her interview with Nelson Mandela, he talked about how he had changed himself in prison and learned to train his brain to dominate his emotions so that he could negotiate with South Africa’s racist white leadership. That interview, published in April 2001, should have been hailed as a journalistic coup for Oprah, but one Chicago critic saw it only as Oprah crowing.

“Sometimes self-esteem can look a lot like pathological narcissism,” wrote Carina Chocano in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“The cover of this month’s
O
reads: ‘O
PRAH
talks to H
ER
H
ERO
, the awesome, inspiring, noble N
ELSON
M
ANDELA
.’ (
OPRAH
and H
ER
H
ERO
are [in] noticeably larger [type] than N
ELSON
M
ANDELA
.) Other articles include ‘O: What I Know for Sure,’ ‘Oprah on Setting Yourself Free,’ and ‘Five Things Oprah Thinks Are Great.’ (These include faux apples and pears, $18 each; a set of Murano glasses, $40 each; and a book called ‘Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred Truth in Everyday Life,’ which helps Oprah ‘see the extraordinary in ordinary experiences.’)”

Editorially, the magazine presented Oprah’s commandments for Living Your Best Life:

Once again David Letterman took a poke at Oprah on his late-night show by announcing “The Top Ten Articles from Oprah’s New Magazine”:

Oprah filled her “personal growth guide,” as she called her beautifully produced magazine, with advice pages from some of her “Change Your Life” gurus, to give “confident, smart women the tools they need to reach for their dreams, to express their individual style and to make choices that will lead to a happier, more fulfilling life.” She advertised
O, The Oprah Magazine,
on her website,
Oprah.com
:

Within a year she had a paid circulation of 2.5 million and had raked in more than $140 million in annual revenues. Her critics were dumbfounded by the spectacular success of her new venture, which enlarged her media conglomerate. But when Chicago reporters tried to interview her about her new magazine, she turned them down cold, still smarting from their negative coverage of her “Change Your Life” television. “I flew to New York for the magazine launch,” said Tim Jones, the business reporter for the
Chicago Tribune,
“and I was desperately trying to get an interview with her. After all, we are her hometown newspaper….She wouldn’t talk to me, but she sure as hell talked to
The New York Times.
” In fact, Oprah called the
Times
’s media reporter, Alex Kuczynski, at home to thank her for a story about the success of
O
magazine. “It was about seven
A.M.
and I said, ‘Oprah. Wow. This is like getting a phone call from Jesus Christ or Santa Claus,’ ” joked Kuczynski.

Soon Oprah would put herself well beyond the reach of all her critics by becoming an international philanthropist whose giving would enshrine her as a global icon.

W
HEN OPRAH
appeared on the
Forbes
list of the world’s 476 billionaires in February 2003, she became what she had set out to be: the richest black woman in the world. “From the very beginning—as early as 1985,” recalled her friend Nancy Stoddart, “she always said she was going to be a billionaire.”

Two years earlier Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET (Black Entertainment Television), had become the first African American man to make the
Forbes
billionaire list. Interestingly, he and Oprah were both born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, eight years apart, and both made their fortunes in television. Beyond that and their dreams, there is no logical explanation for the extraordinary coincidence of these two individuals, born poor in Attala County during segregation, defying all odds to become media titans. Mr. Johnson fell off the billionaire list the year he divorced and split his fortune with his ex-wife, Sheila Crump Johnson. Oprah has remained on the list.

She reveled in her riches as a blessing from God. When she returned to Kosciusko in 1998 to promote
Beloved
and to dedicate a house that she had financed through Habitat for Humanity, she quoted Psalms 37:4 to the hometown crowd: “Delight thyself in the Lord and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” Her visit was
trumpeted by
The Star-Herald
with a front-page headline: “Oprah Comes Home.” Wearing a brown turtleneck sweater, a long tweed skirt, and high-heel boots, plus a big gold Rolex watch and a pinkie ring, she stood in the rain to address the crowd while her bodyguard held an umbrella over her head. “I’m most proud of the fact that I’m one black woman from Kosciusko, Mississippi, with my hand still in God’s hand,” she said. During that visit she told reporters that being one of the most powerful people in television and having great wealth was no problem for her. “You receive in proportion to how big your heart is and how willing you are to extend yourself to other people.”

Deconstructing that statement might lead some to conclude that Oprah believed she was a billionaire because she had more humanity than most, but she softened the impression, if not clarifying it, by adding, “It is why you have to give that comes back to you.”

Always generous, she began giving in earnest in 1997, donating $12 million to the Oprah Winfrey Foundation and forming Oprah’s Angel Network to collect donations from her viewers. “I want you to open your hearts and see the world in a different way,” she told them. “I promise this will change your life for the better.” She started by asking for spare change to create “the world’s largest piggy bank” to fund college scholarships for needy students. In less than six months her viewers had donated more than $3.5 million in coins and bills to send 150 students to college, 3 students from every state. Even the White House contributed, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton flew to Chicago to appear on Oprah’s show with a piggy bank full of coins she had collected from employees.

Deeply affected by the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Oprah wanted to assume her humanitarian role. “We are…grieved by Princess Diana’s death,” she said on
The Today Show,
explaining Oprah’s Angel Network, “and the world was talking about what she did charitably—and I wanted people to know, you can do that yourself in your own space where you are in your life….You can be a princess…by taking what you have and extending it to other people.”

Oprah partnered her Angel Network with 10,000 volunteers from Habitat
for Humanity to build 205 houses, one in every city whose local television station broadcast
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
When Habitat for Humanity built a house for Oprah’s Angel Network, they called the project Oprah’s Angel House, and after the tsunami of 2004 and the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Oprah Angel Houses sprang up like mushrooms. She took her show to New Orleans, pledging $10 million of her own money, and from 2005 to 2006 she raised $11 million more through her Angel Network for rebuilding. She paid the operating expenses of Oprah’s Angel Network so that all donations went directly to the charities she selected. By 2008, her viewers had contributed more than $70 million to 172 projects around the world that focused on women, children, and families; education and literacy; relief and recovery; and youth and community development—all selected by Oprah and donated in her name. She fully understood the goodwill that accrues to those who give, and so when she gave, she did so very publicly. Her philanthropy was not quiet or anonymous.

“She certainly makes an effort to do good deeds,” Steve Johnson wrote in the
Chicago Tribune,
“even if there is often an accompanying effort to make the effort known.” It is true that most of Oprah’s giving was followed by an Oprah press release, plus mentions on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
but perhaps she was setting an example for others to follow and not just being self-aggrandizing.

In recent years she tried to position her initial efforts as unheralded. “Early on in my career, when I first came to Chicago, I had my own Big Sisters club where myself and the producers would go into the projects,” she told
TelevisionWeek.
“Didn’t tell anybody about it. It wasn’t publicized.” Actually, she mentioned the Big Sisters club in almost all of her interviews at the time.

That effort began with a 1985 show taped in Cabrini Green, a low-income housing project on Chicago’s Near North Side, known as one of the most dangerous bullet-strewn ghettos in the country. Mary Kay Clinton, the associate producer of the show, was so moved by the young girls she met that she started a Little Sisters program in conjunction with a Cabrini Green counselor, and Oprah and her staff participated as Big Sisters. There was great enthusiasm at first as the Harpo group met with the youngsters, ten to thirteen years old, every two weeks. Arriving in her limousine, Oprah would gather the girls from their ghetto apartments to go shopping or to the movies or out to dinner. When
Mike Wallace came to Chicago to do a
60 Minutes
segment on her, Oprah invited the Little Sisters for a slumber party at her condominium.

Camera shows Oprah with the group in pajamas, giggling and talking.

Oprah tried to do with the Cabrini Green girls what Vernon had done with her: take them to the library and make them read books. She gave them dictionaries and ordered them to learn five new words a day. She lectured them: “I was like a lot of you. I was a hot little momma.” She told
Ms.
magazine, “I shoot a very straight shot. ‘Get pregnant and I’ll break your face! Don’t tell me you want to do great things in your life and still not be able to tell a boy no. You want something to love and to hug, tell me and I’ll buy you a puppy.’

“When we talk about goals and they say they want Cadillacs, I say, ‘If you cannot talk correctly, if you cannot read or do math, if you become pregnant, if you drop out of school, you will never have a Cadillac. I guarantee it! And if you get D’s or F’s on your report card, you’re out of this group. Don’t tell me you want to do great things in your life, if all you carry to school is a radio!’ ”

Even then Oprah was aware of the steep odds. “One girl on the Cabrini Green show said her goal was to have lots of babies, so she’d get more money from welfare….We have twenty-four in our group. Maybe we’ll save two.”

The group did not last long. After Oprah’s show went national,
she said she no longer had the time, energy, or resources to shoulder a program that she felt needed more structure. “What happened was that when we took the girls out we would do nice things, good things, fun things…[but] what I realized was that those things were just activities. Good things to do but just activities….I wasn’t really able to deeply impact the way the girls thought about themselves. So I failed.”

Oprah withdrew from personal involvement in her giving, but she continued writing checks and making fund-raising speeches and appearances for worthy causes. From what is available in the public record—Harpo press releases, plus Oprah’s interviews with newspapers and magazines—one learns the following:

• In 1986 she earned $10 million and donated $13,000 to buy a mile in the four-thousand-mile chain of hand-holding across America to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness in what was promoted as “the largest number of celebrities ever assembled.” Oprah told
Time,
“My mile will be for people who can’t afford the $10 [standing fee]. No rich people in my mile.”

• In 1987 she earned $31 million and donated $10,000 to the Marva Collins Preparatory School in Chicago and $50,000 to the Vernon Winfrey Scholarships at TSU, for which she would contribute $770,000 over eight years.

• In 1988 she earned $37 million and donated her Revlon fee of $100,000 to Chicago’s Corporate/Community Schools of America. She wrote a check for $2,000 for the Special Olympics and one for $7,000 to provide hot meals for elderly citizens in Alexandra, South Africa, which she continued for three years. For this she received the National Conference of Christians and Jews Humanitarian Award for her “involvement in a college scholarship program and humanitarian aid to South Africa.”

• In 1989 she earned $55 million and wrote a check for $1 million to Morehouse College for the Oprah Winfrey Scholars, to which she’d contributed $12 million by 2004. She also gave $25,000 to Chicago’s House of the Good Shepherd, a shelter for battered and abused women; $10,000 to Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, which provides services for the city’s poor; $25,000 to the Corporate/Community
Schools of America; $1,000 to the Purple Heart Cruise; $40,000 to the combined benefit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); $100,000 to the Rape Treatment Center, Santa Monica, California. In addition, she raised $1 million for victims of Hurricane Hugo during her show from Charleston, South Carolina.

• In 1990 she earned $68 million and wrote checks for $20,000 to the B. Robert Lewis House in Eagan, Minnesota, to open a shelter for battered women; $25,000 to Art Against AIDS/Chicago. In addition, she generated more than $1 million in public donations for the World Summit for Children and UNICEF after a show devoted to the plight of starving children. She pledged $500,000 over two years to the Chicago Academy for the Arts and bought all the Broadway opening night tickets (954 seats) for August Wilson’s
The Piano Lesson
to benefit A Better Chance, or ABC, which provides scholarships to the best schools for students of color who are disadvantaged but academically able. She also flew Nelson Mandela’s daughter and son-in-law from Boston to South Africa to witness her father’s release from prison after twenty-seven years. Oprah’s publicist told the
Chicago Sun-Times
that Mandela wanted to avoid “his children sitting around idle for three or four days while they waited for him to be released.” In a prime-time television salute, Bob Hope presented Oprah with the America’s Hope Award for “her career achievements and her humanitarian endeavors.” She was so grateful for the celebrity tribute that she sent Hope a bouquet of roses every week until his death in 2003.

• In 1991 she earned $80 million and wrote checks for $100,000 to buy books for the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, $50,000 to the Rev. Cecil Williams’s Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, and $1,000 to the Purple Heart Cruise.

• In 1992 she earned $88 million and wrote a check for $50,000 to the LaPorte County Child Abuse Prevention Council in Indiana, near her farm, and $30,000 to Every Woman’s Place, a women’s shelter in Muskegon, Michigan. She also donated twenty Dakota adapters for deaf students for closed-caption TV shows.

• In 1993 she earned $98 million, and after filming
There Are No Children Here
in the Chicago projects, she donated her $500,000 salary
to endow scholarships for low-income children in the Henry Horner Homes through a foundation she named “There Are No Children Here.” She gave $50,000 to the Holy Family Preservation Society, one of Chicago’s oldest churches, and $1 million to the city’s predominantly African American Providence–St. Mel School. “The money will go towards setting up scholarships for disadvantaged children,” she told reporters.

• In 1994 she earned $105 million and donated her $10,000 award from the Council on Women’s Issues in Chicago to Providence–St. Mel. She held her first charity auction of her clothes and raised $150,000, which she divided between Hull House in Chicago and FamiliesFirst in Sacramento. More important, she felt financially secure enough to begin engaging again in her giving. This time she made a gesture that captured the country’s attention: she would single-handedly stop the cycle of poverty in America. She held a press conference to say that she would start in Chicago by setting up a foundation called Families for a Better Life, with the intention of moving one hundred families out of the projects and into private housing, giving them job training, health care, financial counseling, educational assistance, and $30,000 in financial aid for two years. She pledged $6 million to her program. “I want to destroy the welfare mentality, the belief in victimization,” she said.

Oprah had no sympathy for welfare recipients and frequently berated them. “I was a welfare daughter, just like you….How did you let yourselves become welfare mothers? Why did you choose this? I didn’t.” The women looked ashamed that they were not good enough to be accepted by Oprah. “When Welfare Warriors, a Milwaukee group of activist moms in poverty, were invited to appear [on one of her welfare shows], we accepted…despite our anger at Oprah’s betrayal of African American moms in poverty and her frequent attacks on all moms who receive welfare,” wrote Pat Gowens, editor of
Mother Warriors Voice.
“Her contempt for impoverished mothers actually increased Welfare Warriors’ membership when African American moms joined specifically to picket Oprah. (A typical Oprah assault on a welfare mom in her audience: ‘But you sit home with your feet up collecting that monthly check.’).”