Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [186]
One of her most colorful “life strategy experts” was Dr. Phil, who had guided her through the cattlemen’s lawsuit. She introduced him as “the deepest well of common sense I’ve ever encountered.” At first the big, bald, blunt practitioner of tell-it-like-it-is therapy jolted her audience by telling them they were “way wrong,” “full of crap,” and “wimpin’ out.” He didn’t spare Oprah, either. In a segment about weight, he said, “We don’t use food, we abuse food. It’s not what you eat, but why you eat that has you in the problem you’re in.”
“Well, there are some people who are just genetically disposed to being smaller,” said Oprah.
“But the fact is that ain’t you!”
He told one member of the audience, “You talked about flowers and cake and wedding and dress. You’re preparing for the wedding but not for the marriage.”
“Mercy,” said Oprah. “That is a good statement. That is so good!”
Dr. Phil said, “People say, ‘time heals all wounds.’ Let me tell you, time heals nothing. You can do the wrong thing for ten years, and it doesn’t equal the right thing for one day. And the fact that—”
“Whooo,” yelled Oprah. “That’s good, Phil! Whooo! That’s a good Phil-ism.”
Soon Dr. Phil owned Tuesdays on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he appeared for three years before entering into negotiations with Harpo to have his own talk show, which started in 2002.
Oprah concluded her “Change Your Life” shows with a segment called “Remembering Your Spirit,” which she introduced with soft lights and New Age music, saying, “I am defined by the world as a talk show host, but I know that I am much more. I am spirit connected to the greater spirit.” She ended one segment sitting in a bubble bath, surrounded by candles. “The bathroom is my favorite room in the house,” she told Newsweek, which reported her bathtub sits like a small pond with water pouring out of the rocks that surround it. “I had this structure added on,” she explained, “and the tub was sculpted to fit my body. My favorite thing to do is take a bath.” On the air she sat in her marble tub filled with bubbles and recited a mantra to the spirits; then she addressed the camera. She urged her viewers to sit in their bathtubs for fifteen minutes every day. “Your day will undoubtedly be more focused, more centered,” she said. “Things tend to fall in line.” She talked about her spirit in interviews, saying, “I think I’m just becoming more of myself, which is better than anybody can imagine. By 50, 52, I just can’t wait to see me.”
The bubble bath segment unleashed a torrent of “Deepak Oprah” criticism, comparing her to New Age guru Deepak Chopra. There was a severe media backlash, especially in Chicago. “[A]s I stand in the eye of this latest hurricane of national [self-] worship, may I point out one thing,” wrote Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. “She’s getting really goofy with all the spiritual questing.” Oprah had told TV Guide she was so happy she was “splendiferous,” but Roeper disagreed. “It seems to me we’re watching a woman go through an almost frantic search for spiritual bliss and higher consciousness.”
The Sun-Times later reported that a seventy-three-year-old woman following Oprah’s advice to light scented candles and “be reminded of the essential qualities of your light” had accidentally set fire to her retirement high-rise, sending a dozen people to the hospital.
The Chicago Tribune’s TV critic, Steve Johnson, advised Oprah-holics to draw a bubble bath for their guru. “Her spirit—battered of late by indifference, criticism and the befuddlement on the faces of all those devotees who don’t even know what she means when she preaches ‘remembering your spirit’ on her show every day—just might need it.” He pronounced Oprah’s “Change Your Life” television “a fairly skin-crawling thing.
“Winfrey, by