Oprah (60 page)

F
IRST, LAST
, and always was
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Even during the years when she pursued a film career, she never let go of her television show. “It’s the foundation for everything,” Oprah said. When she finally stopped chasing her dream of becoming “a great movie star,” she reclaimed her standing as America’s number one talk show host. To stay on that pedestal, she allotted $50 million a year for her show’s production costs and hired the best producers she could get, paying them top dollar to move to Chicago; then she supplemented their salaries with a system of bonuses to make sure they worked hard enough to give her the ratings she needed to stay on top.

A team of creative producers helped launch the new and improved Oprah as a beloved philanthropist. David Boul came up with the “World’s Largest Piggy Bank,” which enabled Oprah to collect coins from her audience to fund college scholarships for needy students. Kate Murphy Davis proposed Oprah’s Angel Network, an ingenious way to raise millions from viewers and direct the monies in Oprah’s name to Oprah’s favorite charities. Alice McGee left her imprint by creating Oprah’s Book Club, and Ellen Rakieten, who Oprah said was one of her best producers, thought up “Acts of Kindness,” “Oprah’s Favorite Things,” “Thank You Day,” and “The Big Give.”

Oprah also solicited ideas on her website, urging visitors to “Call Harpo Productions Anonymous Confession Hotline”:

Most of “the girls” from the early days who had launched Tabloid Oprah had burned out or been kicked out to make room for the coronation crew, who carried the crown and the ermine-trimmed robe. The
Oprah
shows on nudists, porn stars, and prostitutes now shared the spotlight with “uplifting shows” on God, giving, and giveaways. Some people marked this as the start of Saint Oprah; others saw it as the Dawn of the Diva. Whatever it was, it signaled a sharp departure from Down-Home Oprah, especially in the newsrooms of Chicago.

“I saw it coming in 1994 when Colleen Raleigh [Oprah’s chief publicist for eight years] sued her,” said Robert Feder, TV critic for the
Chicago Sun-Times
from 1980 to 2008. “When I reported that lawsuit, and I had to report it because it was in the public domain, Oprah froze me out. No more Christmas cards. No calls returned. Nothing. Up to that point I had seen her at least once a week and talked to her all the time….But as she got more powerful, she pulled back from the press and now she ignores all Chicago media because she doesn’t need us anymore.”

The change from girlfriend to goddess became obvious to those who covered television and noticed that Oprah no longer spent time with her audience after every show. In her early, eager days she shook hands with everyone as they left, hugged them, gave autographs, and posed for pictures. Now she considered such personal interaction a waste of her time and energy, and photographs were no longer permitted because she considered her image her brand. “No telling where those pictures might turn up later,” she said. “I don’t want to wind up selling Aunt Bessie’s cookies somewhere in Minnesota.”

Photojournalists also noted the change in Oprah. “I photographed her quite a few times—shot her first cover for
People
—but I like this one because I’d never seen a picture like that,” said Harry Benson, describing a candid shot of Oprah in 1996, wearing workout togs and looking very slim. “You can’t do pictures like this of her anymore. She lets herself be shot only by her own photographers. She was fine back then, but other people around her were closing in….She wanted to buy my pictures so nobody would see them. Just a complete control freak. And this is not a mean picture! Now she’s hiding all her fat.”

Oprah was so adamant about protecting herself from enthusiastic fans that she insisted her studio audiences be searched by security guards before entering the building and give up their cameras, tape recorders, packages, and even pens and pencils before being seated.

In the old days it would never have occurred to her to put an
R
with a circle around it next to “You go, girl,” the phrase most associated with her then, but once she became a brand, she began registering her utterances and applied for trademarks on “Aha! Moment” and “Give Big or Go Home.” She also registered:

• Oprah
  
• The Oprah Winfrey Show
  
• Oprah Radio
  
• Make the Connection
  
• Oprah’s Book Club
  
• Live Your Best Life
  
• Oprah’s Favorite Things
  
• Oprah’s Ambassadors
  
• Wildest Dreams with Oprah
  
• Oprah Boutique
  
• Harpo
  
• The Oprah Store
  
• Oprah.com
  
• Oprah’s Big Give
  
• Expert Minutes
  
• The “Oprah” signature
  
• The “O” design
  
• Oprah’s Angel Network
  
• Angel Network
  
• Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls
  
• O, The Oprah Magazine
  
• O at Home
  
• Oprah Winfrey’s Legends Ball
  
• Oprah and Friends
  

The Oprah who had been open and accessible now seemed aloof and slightly haughty, especially to the press. Having appeared on twenty covers of national magazines by 1995, she was accustomed to demanding (and getting) complete control over what was written about her in
exchange for being on the cover. Frequently, she was allowed to choose the writer, and she always dictated the photographer. Most of the media accommodated her, except in Chicago, where reporters sought unfettered access.

“I wrote a piece on ‘The 100 Most Powerful Women in Chicago,’ and of course Oprah was named number one,” said Cheryl L. Reed, former editorial page editor of the
Chicago Sun-Times.
“I called Harpo, but she wouldn’t give us an interview. I tried everything—phone calls, letters, emails, even flowers—but her publicist said she was too busy. Finally I asked if I might send some questions for her to answer. What came back to me was a bunch of regurgitated junk that had been printed a million times before. So I called back and asked, ‘Why did you send answers that are computer-generated and published in previous interviews?’

“ ‘Well, Miss Winfrey says she is always asked the same questions and so she has put together answers that represent her thoughts on various subjects, and that’s what she has to say in response to your questions.’

“ ‘I thought you said that my questions would be put before her and she would answer them.’

“ ‘I’m very sorry. That’s how Miss Winfrey prefers to respond.’ ”

Reporters from the
Chicago Tribune
and
Chicago
magazine ran into the same stone wall at Harpo. Only the gossip columnists thrived, because they dutifully printed items fed to them by Oprah’s publicists about Oprah’s charitable good works, the celebrities coming to town for Oprah’s shows, and Oprah’s splendid trips for her employees. To their credit, the city’s reporters did not allow personal pique to surface in their stories, and while gossip columnists such as Bill Zwecker of the
Chicago Sun-Times
and WBBM-TV acknowledged that Oprah had “become impossible to deal with,” he said her continuing presence in the city was a boon to Chicago.

“It was after the Raleigh lawsuit that she slammed the door on everyone,” said Robert Feder. “She felt her employees would sell her out and she became paranoid and even more controlling, forcing people to sign contracts that tied them in knots forever.”

Feder did not exaggerate. Oprah made all her employees, even
those on probation for the first thirty days, sign confidentiality agreements that bound them to the grave. The contracts read, in part:

Most former employees admit that fear enforces Oprah’s contract, even for those who have been out of her employ for years. “All you need to know is her net worth [$2.7 billion in 2009], which can buy more lawyers than anyone can afford,” said one former producer. “That, plus Elizabeth Coady.”

The Coady case is known to all Harpo employees. “I was producing shows, conceiving shows, supervising a team of other assistant producers, coming up with guest ideas, doing research on guests and topics,” said Coady, former senior associate producer who worked for Oprah for four years. She resigned in 1998 with the intention of writing a book about her experiences at Harpo. A trained journalist, Coady wrote an article in the
Providence Journal
titled “World-Class Phoney Oprah Winfrey and Her Sycophants,” about what it was like to work for “the
high priestess of hype, a living laminated product that loses luster once the bright lights and makeup are off.” Because of the confidentiality agreement Coady had signed, Oprah threatened to sue her if she proceeded to write the book. Instead, Coady sued Oprah and took her to court to challenge the confidentiality agreement as an unenforceable restrictive covenant.

“I wanted people to be able to talk freely,” Coady said. “No one will talk at Harpo. People are afraid for their careers. I didn’t want them to fear Oprah coming after them.” Coady characterized Harpo as “a very cynical and narcissistic place,” and said that Oprah fed off the narcissism.

“Oprah doesn’t believe what she says. Everything she says is intended to promote herself, not her female fans. She loves that they worship her and she believes they do so rightfully….There’s no sense of justice inside [Harpo], which is ironic in light of the public image of someone who touts herself as an advocate for business ethics and spirituality. This is not a spiritual place.”

Describing Oprah as a master manipulator of the media, Coady said that her immense influence within ABC, Viacom (which owned CBS and King World), the Walt Disney Company, Hearst, and Oxygen immunized her against criticism and prevented anyone from stepping forward to reveal the “intrigue and deception” in her workplace. Oprah realized that a book such as Coady’s threatened to strip the bark off her carefully constructed public image while making her words during the “mad cow” trial look hypocritical when she said: “This is America. People are allowed to say things we don’t like.”

“There is an audience for a book [like mine],” said Coady, “but [Oprah] has a stranglehold on the publishing industry because of the popularity of her book club.” The writer did acknowledge the good that Oprah had done and said she saw people whose lives had been positively affected by her. “She gives a lot of people the belief that there’s some magic in the world.” Yet, overall, Coady felt that Oprah held sway over her gullible audience because of her “constant references to a higher power and her pandering to stay-at-home moms.”

Elizabeth Coady never got the chance to write her book because the Illinois Appellate Court ruled against her and upheld Oprah’s confidentiality agreement as “reasonable and enforceable.” The court made
its decision based on contract law, which left Coady, a free speech advocate, asking, “Why does a woman with unprecedented influence over so many communication companies have to silence her employees? Why does a woman who has made her millions telling people’s stories deserve this level of protection from the courts?”

Scores of producers flocked to Harpo to work for Oprah, leaving network jobs in New York City to relocate to Chicago because, as one former employee said, “Her salaries are terrific.” In a confidential interview another said, “As much as the money, I signed on because I believed in her message—to do uplifting television. I thought I would be working for the warm and fuzzy person I saw on television. But, God, was I conned….It’s a cult at Harpo. So oppressive it’s frightening…Oprah is ruthless about protecting her brand and she’s so concerned—obsessed, really—about who she hires that she has Kroll Associates [worldwide detective agency] vet every potential employee, including a review of their financials. She’s worried about moles in her company who might talk to the press about what goes on, and that would definitely damage her image. If you pass Kroll, you are put on one month’s probation and in that thirty-day period you are watched by the Harpo elders—the ones who long ago drank the Kool-Aid. If you disagree with a proposed show or express doubt about production values or story ideas, you’re viewed as a possible troublemaker….I got so spooked that even after I was on staff, I began to believe the stories about our phones being tapped and our emails being read….If America really knew how this woman operated behind the scenes, they’d be shocked, but no one inside will tell you, because they’d be canned, and those who’ve escaped to the outside don’t want to risk being sued. Oprah has lawyers straining at the leash like pit bulls to go after anyone who might diminish her brand.”