Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [126]
Oprah could not comprehend that the failure of Brewster Place might have been in its conception, or the script, or maybe even the acting. She had said over and over again, “God is with me. That’s why I always succeed.… I am God-centered.”
She did not believe that bad things could happen to good people. Nor did she accept the anarchy of fate or wicked chaos, even bad luck. She totally dismissed good luck as having any part in her success. “Luck is a matter of preparation,” she said. “I am highly attuned to my divine self.” She believed that everything was dictated by holy design, including the 157 miracles she told viewers she had experienced. She told Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel that his surviving the Holocaust was a miracle, but he disagreed. “If a miracle of God to spare me, why? There were people much better than me.… No, it was an accident,” he said. Oprah looked at him incredulously.
Having credited her “triumphal” life to God’s plan for her success, she now accepted her Brewster Place setback as another message from on high. “I truly understand that there is a lesson in everything that happens to us,” she said. “So I tried not to spend my time asking, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ but trying to figure out why I had chosen [to do the series]. That’s the answer you need. It’s always a question of accepting responsibility for your choices. Anytime you look outside yourself for answers, you’re looking in the wrong place.”
In analyzing Oprah’s beliefs for The New York Times Magazine, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison had written that her “knotty contradictions” and simplistic truths often collided with each other but were perfect for sound-bite television: “They make up in pith what they lack in profundity.” The writer later admitted she could not bear to watch Oprah’s show. “You’ll forgive me, but it’s white trailer trash. It debases language, it debases emotion. It provides everyone with glib psychological formulas. [These people] go around talking like a fortune cookie. And I think she is in very large part responsible for that.” The writer Gretchen Reynolds agreed, if not quite so harshly. “[S]he is a true adherent … of the squishiest sort of self-help dogma. She believes you can ‘get to know yourself by facing your fears.’ ”
Yet Oprah’s little homilies touched her audiences and reflected their own spiritual quest. As she evolved from a child of Old Testament preachers into a New Age theorist who loosely defined God as a vague force of the universe, she gave her viewers what she called “a spiritual reawakening,” so that they could all, in her words, “live your best life.” That phrase became such an Oprah mantra that she had the four words trade-marked by Harpo, Inc., as her own. She led Live Your Best Life seminars across the country, charging as much as $185 per person, and attracted thousands of women. She passed out Live Your Best Life journals and encouraged everyone to write their aspirations in order to realize them. She distributed Live Your Best Life gift bags filled with scented candles and tea bags. She preached like an old-fashioned Baptist minister, but her Live Your Best Life sermons did not contain fire and brimstone. Instead, she offered huggy, feel-good messages about “living in the present moment” and “following your dream” and “listening to the voice,” which, she promised, would lead you to “live your best life.” And to the hordes of paying participants who wrote down every word she said in their Live Your Best Life notebooks, there was no better proof of this than Oprah herself.
DURING THE summer of 1988, Oprah heard a voice that led to the biggest change in her life and gave her the highest ratings of her career. It was the voice of Stedman Graham, who Oprah said had been sent to her by God after she had formally prayed on her knees.
Over dinner one night she asked if her size ever bothered him. He paused—a little too long. Then he said: “It has