Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [132]
A week later she got slammed with the second installment of her “shameful secret past,” in which her sister popped all the bubbles Oprah had blown about her poverty-stricken childhood. Patricia also revealed the “lies Oprah told that made Mom cry,” and the stories Oprah had never told, about how she “pawned Mom’s ring, stole her money and ran away from home.”
Suddenly the mythology Oprah had created for herself started to unravel. “She told a hundred reporters about her pet cockroach, Sandy,” recalled the novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, then a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. “She told me the Sandy story, too … back when she was only an upstart young television host giving Phil Donahue a headache.… Even back then, there was a drivenness about her that seemed not fully explained even by her towering ambition. She was an enigma, a high-flying solo pilot full of rehearsed one-liners but uncomfortable with too much introspection. And as any therapist can tell you, the people who run hardest usually are trying to outrun something, almost always something that was not their fault, almost always something in the past.” In a sympathetic column titled “Maybe We Know Now What Makes Oprah Run,” Mitchard wrote that if Oprah could embrace the truth of her life she would be able “to caution young girls in tough places to avoid early pregnancy.” Interestingly, Mitchard’s novel The Deep End of the Ocean became the first choice for the book club Oprah started six years later, but Oprah “fortunately” did not make the connection between the columnist and the novelist.
Pressed by her sister’s tabloid revelations, Oprah issued a public statement: “It is true that when I was 14 years old I became pregnant. The baby was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. I had hoped this matter could stay private until I was fully able to deal with my own deep emotions and feelings. It saddens me deeply that a publication would pay large sums of money to a drug-dependent, deeply disturbed individual and then publish her remarks. My heart goes out to my half sister.” Oprah later told reporters that she had paid for her sister’s drug treatment at the Hazelden clinic. “[I told her] I’m going to spend whatever it costs. But if you blow it, you can die a junkie on the street. And I mean that with all my heart.” Oprah did not speak to Patricia for two years after her tabloid revelations, but she generously paid for the education of her sister’s two daughters, Alisha and Chrishaunda.
“[That article] was the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. The hurt, the feeling of betrayal was as bad as it gets,” said Oprah. “But I kept reminding myself to look for the lesson—and all of a sudden something clicked for the first time. I connected my own sexual promiscuity as a teenager with the sexual abuse I had suffered as a child. Strange as it may seem, I had never seen the connection between the two before. It took that terrible article in the tabloids to make me realize I was still carrying that guilt around with me. I know that there are other lessons for me to learn, but the first one was that I was not responsible for the abuse and that I had to get rid of the shame I was carrying.”
Finally, Oprah invited