Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [131]
Oprah probably felt more discrimination for being fat than she ever did for being black. The African American community was far more accepting of large-scale women than the white stick world, which prized anorexics as straight as a fork tine.
As a black woman who broke the tape in her sprint to success, Oprah was universally applauded and rewarded for her professional triumph, but as a fat woman, she felt excluded from the fork-tine world, and the exclusion was painful. “People take you more seriously [when you’re thin],” Oprah said. “You’re more validated as a human being.…” “I hate myself fat.… It’s made me terribly uncomfortable with men.” “I don’t believe fat people who say they’re happy. They’re not. I don’t care what they say.”
Over her career she would win seven Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show Host, nine Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show, seven NAACP Image awards, Broadcaster of the Year from the International Radio and Television Society, the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America. Yet, sadly, she felt her greatest accomplishment in life was losing sixty-seven pounds, and her biggest failure was regaining it.
“I remember [before she went on that fast] being at Oprah’s show in Washington, D.C., when I was the research director for WUSA-TV,” said Candy Miles-Crocker, a beautiful black woman. “Oprah wore a bright yellow knit suit and she must’ve weighed close to 275 pounds then. She was huge, and that knit skirt clung to her like the wrapper on a sausage. It was also slit up the front so that when she sat down the slit spread, as did her fat … and … oh, dear … it was horrible. I felt awful for her. She knew what was happening, so during the break she went off to the side and turned the skirt so the split wouldn’t be in the front. Watching her try to maneuver that skirt over her thunderously fat thighs was like watching a ship try to dock in a slip for a rowboat.”
Oprah’s weight hung like a harness around her neck, but as beleaguered as she felt, she did not completely give up. She continued going to health spas, where she eventually met Rosie Daley, who became her chef, and later, Bob Greene, who became her trainer. Together, they managed to alter her lifestyle and her size in time for her fortieth birthday, but even then it was not easy.
“Before Rosie arrived, Mrs. Eddins [Oprah’s honorary godmother from Nashville] did all the cooking, and every lunch was fried chicken, potato salad, heaping bowls of macaroni and cheese with freshly baked pies for dessert—and Oprah ate it all,” recalled her landscape architect James van Sweden. “Rosie introduced her to fresh fruits and vegetables, but it took Oprah a while to make friends with food that wasn’t fried or sauced.” Oprah said herself that Rosie worked with her for two years before she ever lost a pound.
During the time she was regaining her weight in 1990, she was sledgehammered by her sister, who told the tabloids the long-held family secret of Oprah’s pregnancy at the age of fourteen and of the baby boy she had given birth to. This tell-all came after Oprah had discontinued her sister’s $1,200-a-month allowance because she was using it to buy drugs, so Patricia Lee Lloyd went to the National Enquirer, which paid her $19,000 to reveal details about Oprah’s so-called “wild and promiscuous early years,” when she sneaked older men into the house and did “The Horse” while her mother was at work.
“She said that’s what she used to do,” Patricia Lee Lloyd told the tabloid, “and I realized that all those afternoons she was making out with her men.”
Oprah was so humiliated by her sister