Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [102]
When Oprah took over ownership and production of her nationally syndicated show in 1988, she became CEO of Harpo Productions and started signing their checks. “Everybody tells me that you cannot have true friendships with people whose salaries you control,” she said. “But I just don’t think that’s true in my case. Because they were my friends before I signed their paychecks. We sort of all grew up together with this show.”
Within six years that loving family of best friends was split by discord and death. They buried Bill Rizzo, who died of AIDS in 1990, and four years later Debra DiMaio, “the mother of us all,” was forced to resign following a staff coup in which she was branded as tyrannical. “Either she goes or we go,” the producers told Oprah. So Oprah paid DiMaio $3.8 million [$5.5 million in 2009 dollars] to resign in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement that she would “never speak or publish or in any way reveal” details about her personal or professional relationship with Oprah. More staff resignations followed. One employee sued Oprah for $200,000 in severance pay, and another said that “working for her was like working in a snake pit.” Oprah settled the lawsuit out of court—quickly and quietly. With the forced resignation of Debra DiMaio in 1994, Oprah decided to back away from the trough of trash television.
“That’s when she started getting into celebrities and New Age gurus,” said Andy Behrman, a publicist who had worked closely with the show. “Before that it was heaven for me, because I could book anyone on Oprah, absolutely anyone.”
The publicist’s claim seemed preposterous given the numerous books, articles, and websites (28,100 by 2009) dedicated to getting on The Oprah Winfrey Show, but even Oprah admitted having to do on-air promotions to get guests in the early days and to drag audiences off the street. “Now getting a ticket to the show is like winning the lottery,” said a staffer in 2005. By then Oprah’s production company was receiving thousands of phone calls each week requesting tickets to the show.
“In the early years her show was easy to book because she and her little girls’ club didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” said Behrman. “They were all young with hay behind their ears—unsophisticated small-town, small-time girls just trying to find husbands.… Don’t forget that Oprah’s first national show [September 9, 1986] was entitled ‘How to Marry the Man of Your Choice,’ which should tell you something.”
Reminded that the “girls” were producing a number one–rated television talk show in syndication, the publicist maintained that “Oprah’s sorority” merely slapped together local shows for national consumption on a daily basis. “For the most part her early years were devoted to tabloid sex trash that got huge ratings,” he said, “and shows about getting a man and keeping a man, and, of course, losing weight, because that’s all she and her little cult really cared about. Unlike Phil Donahue, they didn’t know anything about current affairs, politics, or the larger world around them, and they didn’t care.”
A survey conducted by the Harvard Business School of topics covered in the first six years Oprah went national showed that she concentrated primarily on victims: rape victims, families of kidnapping victims, victims of physical and emotional abuse, teenage victims of alcoholism, female victims of workaholism, obsessive love, and childhood wounds. She also covered therapy for husbands, wives, and mistresses; infidelity among traveling businessmen; and the worlds of UFOs, tarot cards, channelers, and other psychic phenomena.
“Oprah’s shows back then, and even now,” said Andy Behrman in 2009, “are all about Oprah and her issues.