Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [184]
When Whoopi Goldberg appeared at Harvard for a campus event a few weeks after the film was released, she was asked whether Oprah represented all of black womanhood. Goldberg giggled, wrinkled her face, and joked that something “flew up my nose.” The crowd in Sanders Theatre laughed.
“It’s great to see that someone can create a frenzy the way Oprah has,” Whoopi said, “but it’s unfortunate it sort of backfired on the movie.”
Sitting in the front row that day, Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr., asked Goldberg why she thought Beloved had failed at the box office.
“I don’t think people are there yet. I believe you have to be very careful when you’re as big as Oprah that your audience doesn’t get lost.” Then she said, “I know if I answer you truthfully I’ll have to answer for it [later] and I don’t want to get into that with her.”
Unfortunately, Whoopi’s remarks were reported in 1998, and seven years later Oprah was still so angry she would not invite Whoopi to the “Legends Weekend” she hosted in 2005 to celebrate the accomplishments of African American women. The rebuke was stunning, considering that few African American women had won more artistic awards than Whoopi Goldberg. She is one of only ten artists to receive the five major entertainment awards: an Academy Award (Ghost), two Golden Globes (The Color Purple and Ghost), an Emmy (Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel), a Tony for producer (Thoroughly Modern Millie), and a Grammy (Whoopi Goldberg Direct from Broadway). In addition, she has won a BAFTA award and four People’s Choice Awards, and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her exclusion from Oprah’s Legends Weekend seemed petty.
After the debacle of Beloved and the collapse of her dream to become a grand movie star, Oprah fell into a deep depression. “I was beyond hurt. I was stunned. I was devastated by the reaction.… I’ve been so in synch with the way people think and I’ve never been wrong. This was a first. The first time in my life … I felt rejected and it was a public rejection.…” She vowed: “I will never do another film about slavery. I won’t try to touch race again in this form.” She said she turned to food for comfort. “Like a heroin addict goes to heroin, I went to carbs,” she said, explaining her macaroni and cheese binges. “I tried praying about it and I gave myself a 30-day limit: If I didn’t feel better, I was heading to a psychiatrist. I asked God what this experience was supposed to teach me. Eventually I realized I was allowing myself to feel bad because of my attachment to an expectation that 60 million people would see the film. When I let go of that, I was healed.”
Making matters worse at the time was losing her status as the country’s number one talk show host. For twenty-five straight weeks Jerry Springer had beaten her in the ratings, and Oprah was reeling. The previous summer she began hinting that she might give up her show, saying she was tired of the grind, but she always made this kind of feint right before contract negotiations.
“I’m not so much saddened by the way [my ratings are] going as stunned,” she said at the time. “Unless you are going to kill people on the air—and not just hit them on the head with chairs—and unless you are going to have sexual intercourse—and not just, as I saw the other day [on Jerry Springer], a guy pulling down his pants and pulling out his penis—then there comes a time when you have oversaturated yourself.” By then what she called Springer’s “vulgarity circus” had beaten her in the ratings forty-six of the previous forty-seven weeks. “I can understand how you can get