Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [110]
“[It] was a very high-pressure situation,” recalled the former Harpo photographer Paul Natkin. “I was told before we left Chicago that I would be allowed to shoot ten photographs and I would have approximately two minutes to do that.… As soon as I clicked the shutter the tenth time [Taylor’s publicist] reached over, put her hand in front of the camera, and said, ‘Sorry. That’s it. We’re done.’ ”
The photos show the slim and lovely star sparkling with glamour. In contrast, the talk show host looks like an electric dandelion, with a teased hairdo of scrambled ringlets sticking out of her head as if she’d stuck her finger in a socket. The interview was equally disastrous. Oprah could not cajole anything out of the Hollywood diva, and La Liz dismissed the electric dandelion as “cheeky” when she asked her about her romances with Malcolm Forbes and George Hamilton. “None of your business,” Taylor snapped. She was so terse and unresponsive to questions that Oprah tried a little humor. “You’re so revealing—you just tell everything! I declare you’ve got to stop talking so much, Ms. Taylor!”
Not in the least amused, the movie star looked at Oprah with icy hauteur.
“It was the worst interview of my life,” Oprah said years later. “It’s still painful to watch.”
At the time, Oprah looked like an overfed, overdressed country girl overawed by a Hollywood legend, who could not have acted haughtier had she been handed a script. When the actress appeared on Donahue two weeks later, she opened up like a flower to the sun, and critics agreed that Oprah was just not ready to do celebrity interviews, something her executive producer had previously acknowledged. “We like to stay away from celebrity-oriented shows,” said Debra DiMaio. “Oprah does better with controversial shows, with guests that have some kind of passion and emotion and a story to tell.… We call them true-life stories.… We always kid her, but Oprah has had such an incredible life that no matter what topic we do, it’s usually something that happened to her in some way or another.”
Still chasing fireworks for February sweeps, Oprah returned to Chicago and waded into a confrontation with white supremacist skinheads that made her tussle with Elizabeth Taylor look like a taffy pull. Security at the station had been increased for the show, requiring everyone to pass through a metal detector to make sure no weapons were smuggled into the studio. Racist comments and profane threats were spewed with abandon. At one point Oprah placed her hand on the arm of one of the skinheads, who yelled, “Don’t touch me.” Another called her “a monkey.”
“You think … because I’m black [I’m] a monkey?”
“It’s a proven fact,” said the skinhead.
After the break, Oprah told her audience that “Mr. Monkey Comment” had been asked to leave. She admitted later that halfway through the show she regretted doing it. “In terms of racist hatred it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I have never in my life felt so consumed by evil. Any one of those kids would have taken great pride in slashing my throat. And I know it.… They have no concept of what life is about, so they don’t care about going to jail for killing a black person or a Jewish person.”
The critic for the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “So does all this soul-searching mean Oprah will finally quit subjecting herself to such indignities for the sake of ratings? Don’t bet on it.”
Booking bigots, self-proclaimed porn addicts, and witches as guests gave Oprah, then thirty-four, soaring ratings over fifty-two-year-old Phil Donahue, whose talk show the writer David Halberstam once described as “the most important graduate school in America,” informing millions about changes in society and modern mores. For over twenty years Donahue had treated his female audience like intelligent women, and had reigned as the number one talk show host in the country. Having paved the way for a competitor who