Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [171]
During their interview Jamie Foster Brown asked Oprah, “How important is sex?”
Oprah said, “It’s a natural part of the process. I mean I’m not one of those women who feels like I gotta have it all the time.… I wouldn’t consider myself a very sexual being.”
Some who knew Oprah well during her Baltimore years agreed with her assessment, speculating that her tormented four-year love affair with Tim Watts, who was married at the time, plus seriously involved with another woman when he was seeing Oprah, had so blindsided her that she was wrung out, emotionally and sexually, and never able to make herself vulnerable to any man again. Instead, she poured all her sexual energies into her career. Her conflict over submission and control found its resolution in her work, and soon the investment of time and energy in herself became its own reward, and her own survival.
With the retirement of Phil Donahue and the growing prestige of her book club, Oprah’s show became the first stop for celebrities who wanted to promote their films, their albums, their tours, and themselves. She increased her star shows in 1996, but got off to a rocky start when she covered the red carpet for the Sixty-eighth Annual Academy Awards.
“The moment you realized it was going to be a long show [was] when a star-struck Oprah Winfrey acted as if she’d never handled a microphone or asked a question before in public,” wrote the TV critic for the Hartford Courant.
“Hey, Brad [Pitt]! Oh, gosh. It’s great to see you.”
“Nicolas [Cage], hey! Great to see you!”
“Ron [Howard]! Hi, Ron. How are you? How are you? It’s a long way from Mayberry.”
“Hi, Jimmy [Smits]. We wanted to say, on behalf of all my friends, you’re a babe, and we don’t mean the pig. How cool is he? Oh!”
The critic from The Buffalo News said the first misstep of the evening was “the decision to have Oprah Winfrey fawn over celebrities as they entered the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. ‘Oh my God, Elisabeth [Shue]. What a year.’ ‘To die for [Nicole Kidman], that’s what you look like.’ Ohmygod, indeed. There hasn’t been anything this embarrassing since, well, since Letterman opened last year’s show with his ‘Uma, Oprah’ bit.”
A British critic even took a whack at what Oprah wore. “The worst-dressed woman of the evening [was] Oprah Winfrey,” wrote Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian, “… in a décolleté, backless dress that still contrived to have sleeves and shoulders.” After viewing her role as the official greeter at the Oscars, Howard Rosenberg, TV critic of the Los Angeles Times, recommended, “Um, maybe she should keep her day job.”
Oprah was more comfortable and in control in her own setting, with producers to prepare her, stylists to dress her, soft lights to frame her, and, most important, an audience to applaud her. What the critics did not appreciate was that she was not a journalist, she was a saleswoman, and like her twenty million viewers, she, too, was agog over celebrities. She brought them all to her stage with gushing introductions, conveyed with whoops and hollers, before she sat them down to wheedle out the most intimate details of their personal lives.
“We want to believe you are running Annette’s bathwater on a regular basis and dropping rose petals along the side so she can … you know, whatever,” she said to Warren Beatty.
“We have our moments,” he said.
Oprah pressed. “You have your moments.”
Beatty smiled. “We have our moments.”
George Clooney told her, “I’m never going to get married”; Eddie Murphy said he preferred black women to white women; Kate Winslet said she was never going to have plastic surgery: “Why would I want to look like a wrapped testicle?” Britney Spears said she was “going to try” to remain a virgin until marriage; and Diane Keaton said shoes were her favorite accessory because “they’re penis substitutes.” Bicycling with Lance Armstrong around her estate in Montecito, Oprah asked, “How come your butt doesn’t get sore?” She asked Jim Carrey, “Why do you think you are good at sex?” She asked Janet Jackson about her pierced nipples. “At any given