Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [183]
Oprah promoted her movie as medicine that is good for you whether or not you like it, and she sat for hours giving newspaper and television interviews. “The thing about this movie is … you really have to pay attention,” she told one reporter. “And that’s why this is probably my 135th interview.… Because I want people to know that there has not been a movie like this before, and you need to be prepared.… People need to know that this is a movie that requires your full attention, just as all art does. That it stimulates, is deep, goes down, down, down and comes back up again.”
She gave these interviews under strict control: she could be quoted, but she would not be photographed unless the photographer agreed to sell her the rights to the images, an almost unheard-of request. Otherwise, all pictures of Oprah—airbrushed and stylized—had to be provided by Harpo. Each article had to run in the local newspaper and could not be put on the wire services, where other newspapers might pick it up. She set similar limitations on The Today Show and Good Morning America, stipulating one-time use of her words and images.
During a 20/20 segment on ABC with Diane Sawyer, Oprah held forth on the subject of race, saying the country still shows the wounds of slavery. “It will be all right if [only] we’re willing to have the courage to open up the wound, look at it. That’s the only way it’s going to get all right.”
SAWYER: What do you see in white people today living with slavery?
WINFREY: Denial. Absolute denial.
SAWYER: But for everyone to go back and see it, it’s probably white America saying, “Again? Go back again?”
WINFREY: That is so ridiculous.
SAWYER: What do we gain by going back to it again?
WINFREY: We haven’t even gone there. Going back to it again? We have not even begun to peel back those layers. We haven’t even ever gone there. This is the first time.
The public, black and white, did not want “to peel back those layers” and wallow in murder, rape, and racial mayhem. Despite efforts by Oprah and Disney Studios to sell the movie as a mother’s love story, nobody was buying, not even Oprah’s core audience of middle-aged women. Within six weeks of its release, Beloved was declared a box office flop, lagging behind the universally panned Bride of Chucky. It ultimately had a domestic box office gross of $22,843,047, after costing $83,000,000 to make and market.
People were astonished that the media Midas had produced and promoted something that had not turned to gold. Oprah, too, was shocked, although to the press she remained defiantly proud, and when promoting the film abroad, she blamed its failure on U.S. audiences. She told the The Times of London, “I think the reason why the film has not been received as well in America as I expected is because people in America are afraid of race and any discussion about race. I don’t think it has anything to do with me in the role. I think for a lot of Americans the issue of race is so volatile that to bring it out front makes people embarrassed.”
She told the Sunday Express that U.S. audiences stayed away because of their guilt over slavery. “The whole country was in denial,” she said. Years later the comedian Jackie Mason rapped Oprah for saying that America was racist. “Please!” he said to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. “There’s very little bigotry against Jews in this country anymore or racism against blacks. Oprah Winfrey stands up and says, ‘This is a racist society.’ She’s got billions. You’ve got a dollar and a quarter, but it’s a racist society. She’s a sick yenta.”
The next day Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column that she did not agree that there was no anti-Semitism or racism in America, “but you’ve got to hand it to Jackie Mason. There aren’t too many people in showbiz who are brave enough to call Oprah a ‘sick yenta.’ ”
At the time Beloved was dying at the box office, Oprah’s friends ached for her. “That film was the dearest thing to her heart,” said Gayle King. “She