Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [178]
The judge, Mary Lou Robinson, issued a gag order, prohibiting both sides from discussing the case. “Can you imagine how hard it was for me NOT to talk about the trial?” Oprah said. “Can you imagine a gag order on a talk-show host? It was horrible.” She came close, though, as she cleverly presented herself as pro-beef in Amarillo, where the feedlot/slaughterhouse is the single biggest employer. In her first taped show, she had steaks sizzling in the background as she said, “Of course, you’re in Amarillo so there’s beef, beef, and more beef.” Interviewing Patrick Swayze, she said, “You had beef, did you? That’s just fine by me.” He presented her with a cowboy hat and a pair of black Lucchese boots. Then he taught her the Texas two-step. She adopted a countrified Texas accent, and at some point in every show (she taped twenty-nine) she mentioned the nice people of Amarillo. Within days she had the town wrapped around her little finger. The line for tickets to watch tapings of her show began forming at 4:00 A.M. every day and new bumper stickers sprouted up reading, “Amarillo Loves Oprah.”
The female judge refused to allow women to wear pants in her courtroom, so Oprah wore a skirt every day. “I loved the fact no cameras were allowed in the courtroom,” she said. “Those artist renderings made me look skinny.” Even with her trainer and her chef in tow, she still battled her weight—at least for the first few days. Then she said she gave herself over to “Jesus and the comfort of pie.” She gained twenty-two pounds during the six-week trial. “My trainer, Bob Greene, was very upset with me. He said, ‘It’s like you gained it, and you’re very proud of it.’ I’d say, ‘Yes! I ate pie! I ate pie! And we had macaroni and cheese with seven different cheeses!’ ” Her codefendant, Howard Lyman, a cattle rancher turned vegetarian, was not allowed to mention weight or food to her. “Her attorneys told me I couldn’t talk to her about her diet during the trial.… They felt she was under enough pressure.” As director of the Humane Society’s Eating with Conscience campaign, Lyman was covered by legal insurance, which also paid for half the fees of Phil McGraw.
After he was hired, McGraw flew to Chicago to meet with Oprah, but he was told by one of her assistants that she could give him only an hour of her time. “Excuse me,” he said, “it isn’t my ass getting sued. If that’s all the time she’s got, then I don’t want to be part of this.” Before he stomped out, Oprah agreed to give him as much time as he needed to help her drop her defensiveness. “She came across poorly,” he said later, “in a state of disbelief that she was being sued.” Midway into the trial he told her to “snap out of it” or she was going to lose. She had come to his door at 2:30 in the morning, sobbing hysterically and unable to cope with the frustration of being “unfairly” accused. “My advice to her was that ‘right or wrong, Oprah, this is happening. They are well financed, dead serious, and deeply committed.’… I was a wake-up call that said deal with the fairness later, but right now you are in a fire-fight, and you’d better get in the game and get focused.… At that point she became a very different litigant.”
Tall, balding, and broad-shouldered, McGraw walked behind her going in and out of the courthouse every day and never said a word to the news media. He did not even nod hello. Tim Jones of the Chicago Tribune said, “I thought he was one of her bodyguards.”
“Phil met with us and all the lawyers after every day in court,” said Lyman, “and he was worth every nickel he charged. His fee was $250,000—I know because I had to pay half of it—but I do not believe we would have won the lawsuit without the advice we got from him.… Phil said we could defend the case on the facts and march in all of our scientists to swear up and down that everything we said was true, and