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By Root 1053 0

… Back then it was all victims all the time, plus boys, clothes, and diets. Now that Oprah is going through menopause her show has become a way station for middle-aged women with PMS. It’s all about health and hormones. When I was in my Oprah-booking prime I worked with Ellen Rakieten, who I’d talk to almost every day. I became her go-to guy in New York City, which was another planet for those girls. And Los Angeles? Forget it. That was an alternative universe. Most of them had never even been to Europe. They thought they’d hit the big time when they moved to Chicago and started shopping at Marshall Field. They loved to shop, but they were dull gray dumplings with no sense of style. Their idea of chic was an Ann Taylor dress, a little Echo scarf, black patent leather heels, and some plastic button earrings. Pathetic. They couldn’t stay on diets, so they started going to spas.… Oh, the stories of Oprah and the girls at the fat farm … That’s how I got all my diet-book clients on the show. I threw them Suzy Prudden and Blair Sabol—God, Oprah loved Blair because she was so smart and funny. She must’ve booked her three or four times. I even got the late Dr. Stuart Berger on Oprah to talk about dieting and—God help us—he weighed 350 pounds at the time. No matter who my client was, I simply pegged my pitches to Oprah’s obsessions with getting a man or buying clothes or losing weight. Sometimes I had to stretch, but it always worked.… Most of my clients got on one, two, and three times, especially my plastic surgeons, diet doctors, and shrinks, some of whom were out-and-out frauds. Once I got them on Oprah, I could always book them on Sally Jessy Raphael, who picked up all of Oprah’s crumbs.”

Tall, handsome, and devilishly clever, the publicist said he became a regular booker for Oprah’s show for several years. “With the exception of Debbie DiMaio, who cracked a mean whip, those girls didn’t know what was good and what was bad, which made it easy for me. I even booked my best female friend on the show, to talk about the pick-up lines guys use to get girls. I did that just to prove to her I could get anyone on Oprah. I was so close in those days that I was invited to Ellen Rakieten’s wedding, where I stood with Oprah and Stedman and Rosie, the chef. Boy, was that a lifetime ago.…

“Early on, Ellen told me the sorority was worried about some guy dating Oprah for her money, and so I immediately suggested doing a show on gold diggers.

“ ‘Oh, that’s great,’ Ellen said. ‘But how do we do it?’

“ ‘You get a guy like my client, who has written a book on neuro-linguistic programming, and he’ll be able to tell you who is after money and who isn’t based on scientific research.… I’ll give you the questions Oprah can ask him and then she can take some prescreened questions from her audience, which I’ll send to you. Then you get a panel and blah, blah, blah.’ By the end of the conversation I had laid out the entire show for her.

“Now, of course, there’s no science to determine whether or not someone is a gold digger, but I had to get my client on a national show, because I didn’t want to drag him around on a fourteen-city book promotion tour. Who needs Good Morning Cincinnati and Hello Peoria when you can do The Oprah Winfrey Show?”

That gold-digging show was not an unqualified success for the author, who recalled the experience as “terrifying, not terrific.” “I had written a book entitled Instant Rapport on neuro-linguistic programming, which had to do with how you verbally influence people,” recalled Michael Brooks. “I was given the whole show—one hour with just me and Oprah—to talk about ‘Secret Admirers,’ which is how they spun the subject to dumb it down for her audience. I wasn’t in any position to object, as this was my first national show.

“The Oprah that I met back in the 1980s was vastly different from the Oprah you see on television today. Back then, she was very dark-skinned—Sidney Poitier dark—and now she’s very light-skinned. I know that makeup and lighting can do a lot, but I think she might’ve had some kind of skin bleaching