Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [174]
There was one guest of whom absolutely nothing was demanded but his handsome presence. “I was really thrilled about John F. Kennedy, Jr.,” said Oprah. “We had been asking and asking to have him on so many times, and this time he called us. I think he agreed to do it because it was convenient.” Oprah cut short her vacation to fly back to Chicago in August 1996 to tape the interview when Kennedy was in town for the Democratic National Convention. She even ordered two new chairs for her set, but after the white upholstery got lint all over Kennedy’s suit she had them re-covered in leather. Four years after he was killed piloting his plane, Oprah sold “the chairs that John F. Kennedy, Jr., sat in” in a charity auction on eBay for $64,000.
At the time of the interview Kennedy was considered the most eligible bachelor in the country, but Oprah, who asked intimate questions of everyone, would not ask him about his personal life. “I didn’t ask him when he’s getting married because it’s the No. 1 question everyone asks me and it’s nobody’s business but his.” Instead, she showed him the provocative video of Marilyn Monroe appearing in a low-cut flesh-colored sequined dress that looked sprayed on and singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to his father at Madison Square Garden. Young Kennedy smiled but did not take the bait. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen that many times.”
Although Oprah was unable to coax anything out of the dashing young man, his mere presence gave her record-breaking ratings, which were not topped until Barbra Streisand appeared two months later. Streisand returned in 2003 and topped her previous ratings by singing on daytime television for the first time in forty years. Still, Oprah was most ecstatic about the Kennedy interview. “I thought I loved him,” she said after the taping. “Now I know I do.”
Oprah was at the top of her game in 1996, making more than $97 million a year and stacking up Daytime Emmys like firewood. She ruled talk show television then because she gave her viewers compulsively watchable programming. It was not all celebrities all the time but a combination of pop culture and dramatic first-person stories of abuse and survival intermixed with books, movies, music videos, beauty makeovers, fad diets, and psychics, plus pressing issues of the day.
Shortly after the outbreak of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in Britain was linked to a neurological disease afflicting humans, Oprah presented a show on April 16, 1996, titled “Dangerous Foods” in which she asked if the fatal incurable disease that attacks the brain and leads to a slow excruciating death could spread to the United States. The first guest was a British woman who said that her dying eighteen-year-old granddaughter had fallen into a coma after eating hamburger tainted by a mad cow. Film footage showed stumbling, disease-ridden cattle in Britain. The second guest was a woman whose mother-in-law had died from the debilitating disease, which she felt was contracted from eating beef in England. The next two guests were Gary Weber from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, who said government regulations ensured that U.S. beef is safe, and Howard Lyman from the U.S. Humane Society, who said the human form of the disease could make AIDS look like the common cold. The reason, he said,