Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [118]
To the contrary, people seemed genuinely delighted by Oprah’s success and inspired by her gospel: “If I can do it, you can do it.” She sparked the imagination, especially of women twenty-five to fifty-four years old, television’s most precious demographic. She was heralded for personifying the American Dream with all its honeyed promises of equal opportunity. Yet she told the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison she felt hurt by “negativity from black women,” obviously forgetting that in 1988 she had told Barbara Walters on national television that as a little girl she had always wanted to be white. “[I]t’s the kind of thing that I hesitate to say because when you say it, all the black groups call and say, ‘How dare you say it?’ But yes, I did [want to be white].”
Understandably some black women felt bruised, but Oprah did not see why. She asked former television correspondent Janet Langhart Cohen if she, too, had the same problem. “Did you have black women calling you up and telling you you weren’t black enough and asking why you don’t have more blacks on the show?”
“Oh, don’t tell me you’re having that problem?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Oprah. “I’ve had it in Chicago for two years. It’s a small segment. Once it spreads, though, it becomes an issue. I mean, like on black radio stations—it’s like the nighttime discussion. They call in and ask: ‘Is Oprah Winfrey black enough?’ ”
“It’s just plain jealousy,” said Janet Langhart Cohen.
“That’s what it is,” said Oprah. “The hardest thing to come to terms with has been the jealousy.”
Most of Oprah’s worshipful audiences (predominantly white women) enjoyed her enthusiasm over her new riches and relished her reports of shopping and buying and spending, although on the air she carefully confined herself to girlish confessions about not having to buy panty hose at Walgreens anymore rather than discussing her more extravagant purchases, such as the $470,000 she spent at one furniture auction. “She paid two hundred forty thousand dollars for a little Shaker chest of drawers, and it’s in her kitchen now,” said her decorator Anthony Browne. “Why did she buy it? Because her idol is Bill Cosby [who collects Shaker furniture]. Everything he does, she has to do.”
What many people missed in Oprah’s rags-to-riches story was the towering ambition that motored her. Her drive was insatiable. Fueled by long days of hard work, she never stopped barreling forward—always reaching, stretching, extending. A self-propelled whirlwind of industry, she slept only four or five hours a night and rarely relaxed. During one week in 1988, she flew to Mobile, Alabama, to give a speech, then to Nashville, to give another speech. She returned to Chicago to tape back-to-back shows, flew to Cleveland for another speaking engagement, and then flew to Greensboro, North Carolina, to meet Stedman for dinner. She left the next morning for New York to accept an award, flew back to Nashville for a charity baseball game with Stedman, and returned to Chicago the next day. She pushed herself constantly, and she pushed everyone around her, which was probably necessary to achieve her kind of stratospheric success.
After filming The Color Purple she announced her plan to pursue a movie career in addition to her talk show. “I want it all.… I intend to be a great actress,” she told Ladies’ Home Journal. “A great actress.”
Having undergone tortuous negotiations with WLS to get her the time off to make her first movie, Jeff Jacobs proposed she take ownership of her talk show so that she, and not WLS, could set her schedule for future films. The station