Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [133]
A few years later Oprah again cut off all communication with her sister. “I told her in the last conversation we had that we don’t share the same moral code, so there’s no reason to pretend in ‘sisterhood,’ ” she told reporters. “I bought her a home and provided her with hundreds of thousands of dollars to get set up, but she said she didn’t need to work.” Oprah disagreed—strongly. “I think people need to [work].”
Patricia continued to bounce in and out of rehab until 2003 when, at the age of forty-two, she died of an accidental drug overdose. “I had just put her through rehab [again],” Oprah told reporters, “and what happens is, if you’ve been used to taking a certain amount of a drug and then you go back to taking that same amount after you’ve been off it for a bit, it’s too much.”
Oprah had expected to be shunned after her sister’s tabloid revelations. “I imagined that every person on the street was going to point their finger at me and scream, ‘Pregnant at fourteen, you wicked girl.…’ No one said a word, though—not strangers, not even people I knew. I was shocked. Nobody treated me differently.”
It’s impossible to estimate how many women Oprah helped with the story of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but she must have been a beacon to those who had endured similar sadness and shame. Because of her reach and visibility, her words carried weight with her audiences, who saw her as a woman of courage and determination. Having refused to be defeated by her searing childhood, she inspired hope, and women everywhere could look at the success she had made of her life and believe in a similar salvation for themselves. In sharing her own shame, Oprah inevitably touched thousands and helped them release their guilt by showing them they were not alone. In that sense her show became the healing ministry she had always claimed it to be.
The public humiliation she endured during this time seemed to lead to a more empathetic Oprah, one who showed a new sensitivity to the exploitation of some of her “conflict” programs. “The day I felt clearly the worst I’ve ever felt on television was in 1989, when we were still live and we had the wife, the girlfriend, and the husband, and on the air the husband [unexpectedly] announced to the wife the girlfriend was pregnant. And the expression on her face … I looked at her and felt horrible for myself and felt horrible for her. So I turned to her and said, ‘I’m really sorry you had to be put in this position and you had to hear this on television. This never should have happened.’ ” Still, Oprah would continue her “conflict” programming for another five years of rocketing ratings.
Months earlier, the Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic Tom Shales had sounded the first knell against the “talk rot” infecting airwaves and polluting the atmosphere. “Hours and hours are frittered away on shock, schlock and folly,” he wrote in The Washington Post. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader singled out The Oprah Winfrey Show as the number one polluter. “They get all their ideas from the National Enquirer,” Nader said. As an example of the shows Shales said Oprah was spoon-feeding “boob tube boobs,” he cited a few weeks of her topics: subservient women, paternity fights, infidelity, man-hunting, threesomes, wife beaters, and shopaholics.
Even Erma Bombeck took a soft swipe at Oprah in her syndicated column. “I find myself grabbing for the listing every day to see what will come up next,” she wrote. “Recently Oprah had a panel of men who thought their aunts were their mothers. Where do they find these people? Do individuals with unusual circumstances write the producers of the show and say: ‘Hey, if you ever do something on spaceship babies trying to find their mother, I’m living in Chicago and would love to talk about it’? Or does a call