Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [182]
Later, André Leon Talley, Vogue’s editor at large, and quite sizable himself, told Oprah, “Most of the Vogue girls are so thin, tremendously thin, because Miss Anna don’t like fat people.”
Like a fashion slave hearing her master’s voice, Oprah rushed off to a weight-loss boot camp and began sipping broth, climbing mountains, and running eight miles a day to get down to 150 pounds. Only then did Ms. Wintour allow her to pose for noted photographer Steven Meisel, a favorite of Diana, Princess of Wales. Oprah’s Vogue cover, in October 1998, sold 900,000 copies and became the top seller in the magazine’s 110-year history. Oprah later told Sheila McLennan from BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that the idea of being on the cover of Vogue wasn’t even a fantasy for a little girl who claimed to have been called “colored,” “ugly,” and “Buckwheat.” Oprah devoted one of her shows to her Vogue makeover and flew to New York when Wintour hosted a cocktail party at Balthazar Restaurant during Fashion Week to unveil the cover.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Stedman Graham when he first saw the photo of Oprah lounging seductively in a black strapless Ralph Lauren gown. “It’s like the culmination of all that she’s worked for.… From being overweight to this point is one of the greatest victories a person can have.”
It may have been this kind of thinking—putting the glamour of a weight-loss makeover on an equal footing with overcoming slavery—that caused the publicity and promotion surrounding Beloved to backfire.
In addition to Vogue, Oprah promoted her film by posing for the covers of TV Guide, USA Weekend, InStyle, Good Housekeeping, and Time, which heralded her with four articles and eleven pages as “The Beloved Oprah.” Days after the film’s release, she arranged a special showing for New Age guru Marianne Williamson’s Church of Today in Detroit and told the congregation, which included Rosa Parks, sitting in the front row, “Beloved is my gift to you.” On the day the film opened, The Oprah Winfrey Show presented the cast of Beloved and the making of the movie. “I’m having my baby,” she told her audience. That same day launched publication of Journey to Beloved, by Oprah Winfrey, with photographs by Ken Regan—a forty-dollar coffee-table book of the daily diary Oprah kept during the three months of filming, in which she also recorded her shock over the murder of the designer Gianni Versace in Miami and the startling death of the Princess of Wales in a Paris tunnel. But most of her entries concerned filming Beloved, which Oprah said was the only time in her life, other than filming The Color Purple, when she was truly happy. A few excerpts:
Tuesday, June 17, 1997: The tree [prosthetic scars] went on my back. I wept. Could not but tried to stop myself. Couldn’t. There’s a tree on my back. Felt it. I pray to be able to trust to go all the way there. To feel the depth, power of what it all means.
Tuesday, July 1, 1997: The morning was abuzz with talk of a meeting in my trailer. Word was we needed a conference about me looking “too pretty.” This is a first! In all my days I have never been called too pretty or expected this to be a subject of discussion. My teeth are too white. I’m too “luminescent.” I need more sweat.… Lord, it is a new day.
Friday, September 12, 1997: It’s a bittersweet time. My final day of shooting in the summer of my dreams. A dream bigger than anything my heart can ever hold. It will be a long time before I