Oprah (62 page)

“Everybody who has ever been snubbed because you were not chic enough or thin enough or the right class or the right color or whatever…you know that it is very humiliating, and that is exactly what happened to me.”

The whipping boy from Hermès sounded contrite: “I would like to say to you we’re really sorry for all of those unfortunate circumstances that you encountered when you tried to visit our store in Paris,” he said. “We really try to service all of our clients all over the world.” Then he stubbed his toe. “The woman who turned you away did it because, honest to God, she didn’t know who you were.”

“This wasn’t even about, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ” Oprah snapped. “I wasn’t trying to play that celebrity card.”

Chavez quickly apologized. “You did meet up with one very, very rigid staff person.”

“Rigid or rude?” asked Oprah.

“Rigid and rude, I’m sure,” he said.

Having pilloried the firm’s president, Oprah now pardoned him and commended his company for instituting sensitivity training for its employees. She concluded the segment by hugging Chavez and urging her viewers to shop at the luxury goods emporium, where alligator Kelly bags cost $18,000 to $25,000. Oprah, too, resumed shopping there, and when she gave a “girlfriend” party for twelve at her Montecito estate in honor of Maria Shriver, she had the invitation stitched on twelve Hermès scarves ($375 apiece).

Mr. Chavez was one of the few guests to get out of Harpo without having to sign a confidentiality agreement. Most who appear on Oprah’s show are sworn to secrecy, but they are so grateful to be there that they willingly sign away their rights. “My publisher told me the difference between
Oprah
and other shows is the difference between a lightning bug and the sun,” said a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, too scared to be quoted by name. “So, of course, I want to be in the sun.”

Swallowing professional reservations, most writers sign Oprah’s binding agreements, but one man objected on principle. “I just couldn’t do it,” said Chris Rose, a prizewinning columnist for New Orleans’s
Times-Picayune.
“It struck me as wrong and ran counter to everything that I believe as a writer and a journalist and a human being.”

Rose had written moving columns about the harrowing depression he suffered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. His columns were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and later published in a book titled
1 Dead in Attic.
On the second anniversary of the hurricane, he was contacted by Oprah’s show to discuss post-traumatic stress disorders among Katrina survivors. “They wanted my expertise, not as a book writer or even a newspaper columnist, but as the city’s most famously depressed resident, by virtue of my columns about battling the disease,” he said. “Yet they would not allow me to mention my book or even show a copy of it on the air, although the subject of their show and my book was the mental health crisis in New Orleans. At the end of a long and excruciating day—ten hours—revisiting the emotional wreckage of the hurricane, Oprah’s producer pulled out a sheet of paper and said I had to sign it….Now, I was willing to give her the right to use my name, my image, my story, even footage of my youngest child, but I could not give her the right to void my experience for the last ten hours….I explained that writing is my life and writing about my experience is what I do for a living.

“ ‘If you don’t sign, we don’t run the segment,’ ” the producer said.

“They had just sucked out of me my inner darkness and were exposing my personal struggles to the entire country,” Rose recalled. “As exhausted as I was I was not going to cave in to this kind of brinksmanship.” The producer panicked, and for the next three hours Rose
was peppered with calls from various producers up the chain of Oprah’s command, insisting that he sign the confidentiality agreement, and threatening to cut his segment if he didn’t.

“Trust us,” they said. Rose held firm. That night he wrote a column about the experience of dealing with Oprah and her producers, which was posted on the newspaper’s website.

“The next morning I found out what it meant to ‘go viral,’ ” he said. “I had stuck my hand into a hornet’s nest of anti-Oprah sentiment on the Internet that pushed my book from number eleven thousand on Amazon to number eighteen by the end of the day and then on to
The New York Times
bestseller list. I was stunned because I had always considered Oprah to be an engine for good….I had no idea there were negative feelings about her and her confidentiality agreements out there, but I received calls and emails from writers all over the country saying they were going to buy my book that day to send her a message….The irony is that my segment did run on
Oprah
[“Special Report: Katrina—What Will It Take to Recover?”] and my book was posted on her website—at least for a while. But I guess I go down as the guy whose book became a bestseller for not having been seen on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
”

Harpo producers consistently presented shows with quality production values—arresting visuals, fast-paced segments, and exclusive interviews tailored to a female audience looking for entertainment, diversion, and self-improvement. Because of Oprah’s big-money bonuses for those who gave her high ratings, there was fierce competition among her producers to get their stories on the air. Consequently, they took no prisoners in their negotiations.

“They are bullies,” said Rachel Grady, who with her partner, Heidi Ewing, runs Loki Films, which produced
The Boys of Bakara
and
Jesus Camp,
the latter of which was nominated for an Academy Award. “Oprah and her producers feel like everyone owes them for the privilege of being on their show, and they expect you to work for free for the honor.” Loki Films was called in the summer of 2006 to produce the ABC prime-time special on Oprah’s school in South Africa. “We were to do the job but not be given credit for our work,” said Grady. “So we asked for double the money. They [Harriet Seitler and Kate
Murphy Davis] gave us a contract that said they could fire us without cause at any time. They also refused to speak with our lawyer because they said it was better for their budget that way. ‘Besides,’ they said, ‘we usually end up firing everybody anyway and having to do it ourselves.’ That’s the way they put it….

“I think Oprah’s school is a wonderful idea, but having worked in that poor country I think it’s crazy to spend $40 million on one school when $75 million could probably eradicate poverty throughout all of South Africa. But Oprah lives in such a gilded cage she no longer has a grip on reality. We had to fly to Chicago three times at her request….

“When we realized that we would have to give up six months of our lives for her, get little money and no acknowledgement for our work, plus we had to sign a nondisclosure contract swearing that Oprah’s name would never pass our lips—please! That’s when we said we could not accept the job on those terms. Harriet Seitler went off on us. ‘You are just two little girls in a room in New York City,’ she said. ‘We are Oprah Winfrey. We are Harpo. You need us. We don’t need you.’ ”

Liz Garbus, another documentary filmmaker and daughter of famous First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus, also encountered problems when her film
Girlhood
was featured on an Oprah show titled “Inside Prison: Why Women Murder.” The two young women featured in the documentary—Shanae and Megan—agreed to appear on condition that Oprah not mention the drug addiction of Megan’s mother. Promises were made and then mauled. When Oprah asked Megan on-camera about her mother’s addiction to drugs, Megan walked off the set, providing what one producer later called “good television”—the show’s first priority.

“I’ll say what I want to say,” said Oprah in an unguarded on-camera moment, and with the exception of her celebrity friends like John Travolta and Tom Cruise—neither of whom she ever questioned about Scientology—she spared few others. She drilled Liberace about his palimony suit and how much he was worth, how many houses he owned, how many cars he drove, how many furs he bought, and how much he spent on jewelry. She quizzed Robin Givens about getting beaten up by her former husband, boxing heavyweight champion Mike Tyson: “Is it true that he would hit you until you would vomit?” She asked
Kim Cattrall of
Sex and the City,
“Are you dating? Is it hard because people expect you to put out?” Looking askance at Boy George, the cross-dressing British pop star, she asked, “What does your mother say when you leave the house, honey?” To Jean Harris, who murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Oprah asked, “Do you think that one of the things that hurt you [in the trial] was that you were perceived on the witness stand as being this cold bitch?” To Richard Gere, she said, “I…read that you live like a monk, except for the celibacy part.” She interrogated Billy Joel about the drinking problem that had landed him in rehab: “What’s with all the car crashes?” After Lance Armstrong had radiation therapy for testicular cancer, she asked, “You want more children? Got extra sperm?” When Oscar de la Renta appeared on her show and introduced his adopted son, who was seated in the audience, Oprah looked at the young boy and then asked the designer, “How did you get a black son?”

Behind-the-scenes competition became fierce when the talk show titans battled for exclusive “gets.” In 2003, Oprah and Katie Couric went to the mat over Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old girl who was snatched from her bed in Salt Lake City, hidden in a hole, chained to a tree, and not allowed to bathe for nine months. Upon Smart’s rescue by police, her parents asked the media for privacy so that she might recover. Seven months later, Ed and Lois Smart had written a book,
Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope,
and sold television rights to CBS for a movie. Publication was set for October, to be followed by the movie in November. The promotion campaign set by the publisher (Doubleday) gave Katie Couric, then with NBC, the prime-time interview for
Dateline,
to be followed by Oprah for daytime. The ground rules, set by the Smarts for their interviews, prohibited any on-camera interview with their daughter, although silent footage of Elizabeth was allowed.

The book’s publication created such a media frenzy that CBS decided to air the interview with the Smarts that was to accompany the movie as a network special before Katie or Oprah had aired their interviews. Oprah’s producers flew to Utah to get footage of Elizabeth’s bedroom, zooming in on the white patchwork quilt, ruffled pillows, and Raggedy Ann dolls, and also filmed the filthy hole where she was
chained for nine months. Katie Couric accompanied her producers to Utah, and after interviewing the Smarts, she persuaded them to allow her verbal exchange with Elizabeth to be shown on the air, which gave NBC an exclusive no one else had. Couric tried to circle the subject of sexual abuse with the youngster without getting explicit:

C
OURIC
: How do your friends treat you, Elizabeth? I mean, obviously, you know…

E
LIZABETH
: Regular.

C
OURIC
: Do they ever ask you anything or…

E
LIZABETH
: No.

C
OURIC
: You must have been frightened…

E
LIZABETH
: Yeah…

C
OURIC
: Do you think you have changed?

E
LIZABETH
: No.

Oprah was enraged when she found out about the interview, but instead of calling Katie Couric to scream, she telephoned Suzanne Herz, then head of publicity for Doubleday. “Oprah reamed her,” recalled a Doubleday employee. “Just laid her out…It was quite traumatic for Suzanne to be treated that way by Oprah Winfrey.” Herz later said, “It was more bad behavior on the part of Katie Couric, not Oprah. Katie was the one who broke the rules to get the exclusive. Oprah was angry because she followed the rules and then got screwed….I don’t blame her….In the end, both of them got huge ratings.”

Couric’s interview with Elizabeth Smart and her parents won the hour for NBC, with 12.3 million viewers, handily beating Barbara Walters’s ABC
20/20
interview with Princess Diana’s butler. Oprah retaliated by releasing footage from her show before it aired, for two segments on ABC’s
Good Morning America,
the show that competed directly with Katie Couric and
The Today Show.
“It wasn’t vengeance,” said Oprah’s publicist. “Just promotion.”

Not everybody enjoyed being on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
“I represented Anne Robinson, who wrote
Memoir of an Unfit Mother
in 2001, when she got a call from Oprah’s producers four years later to go on the show,” recalled literary agent Ed Victor. “Anne asked me if she should do it, and I told her yes, because as soon as her publisher [Pocket
Books] heard that Oprah wanted her and her daughter to appear, they offered to publish her book in paperback. So I said she should do the show, sell some books, and get her message out.” Robinson, the curt British host of the weekly game show
The Weakest Link,
had a certain visibility in the United States at the time, but according to her agent, her experience with Oprah was “hellacious.”

“Anne yelled at me after the show,” said Victor. “She hated Oprah and felt she had not been treated right by the Oprah people.” Robinson refused to discuss the matter, but Ed Victor recalled it as “a nightmare all around,” adding, “As a consequence, I no longer represent her.”

Marian Fontana, whose husband, Dave, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, was hounded by Oprah’s producers, who had booked her for an upcoming show. “It was right after Dave’s funeral…and they were calling every ten minutes wanting something else. They wanted wedding videotapes and they wanted family photos and they wanted close-up shots.” When they heard she was holding a service for her husband on the beach where he had been a lifeguard for sixteen years, they insisted on coming. “They were very pushy,” she said, and when she declined, they canceled the booking.

In the spring of 2008, Oprah’s producers began booking for May sweeps and called James Frey to come on the show to talk about the paperback publication of his novel
Bright Shiny Morning.
They knew a rematch between Oprah and the author of
A Million Little Pieces
was a guaranteed ratings geyser, but the writer was not so eager to return to the scene of his reaming. Since getting bludgeoned on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in 2006, Frey and his wife had lost their newborn son, Leo, who died eleven days after birth from spinal muscular atrophy, and the writer was not going to put himself through another one of Her Majesty’s muggings, even to promote his novel, unless there were certain stipulations in place. Oprah’s producers explained the situation to her, and in the end, Frey was not booked, but Oprah did call him to apologize for how she had treated him two years before. She did not use her show to publicly say she was sorry, but Frey told reporters he appreciated her private apology. Oprah’s remorse may have been triggered by reading about a character in Frey’s novel who is embroiled in a scandal and, feeling people turn on him, begins to tape-record his conversations
with the producers and host of a television talk show, including confessions the host made when she called him at home.