Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [189]
“ ‘Hey. You’ve kept me waiting for over thirty minutes.’ Her security guards moved in, and Deborah started laughing. ‘C’mon,’ I said to Oprah. ‘I need to show you your paintings so I can get to my own appointment.’ With that I started to walk her out of the shop.
“ ‘Oprah does not walk,’ she said.
“ ‘Aw, c’mon. It’s only a few yards,’ I said with my hand on her shoulder, steering her across the street. She started screaming at her secretary.
“ ‘Who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. Who is he? Tell me what’s going on here.’
“I said, ‘Your people made appointments for you, insisted on absolute times, and said that we all had to be ready for your arrival and let nothing interfere, so I’m doing exactly what your people told me to do.’
“The secretary was so frightened she couldn’t speak and she started shaking so hard her notebook bobbed up and down. This only incensed Oprah more. I thought she was going to swat the secretary and then decapitate me. Just as this was happening, a busload of kids passed by. They immediately recognized Oprah and started screaming. Then the most amazing thing happened: Oprah stopped hissing and spitting, and her serpent eyes softened as she waved and beamed. ‘Hi, y’all.’… She actually turned from screeching harridan to sweet goddess in less time than it takes to blink. I swear I thought I was in the middle of an alien attack.… Then I marched her into my gallery, trailed by her pilot, her secretary, her hairdresser, her makeup man, and two big security guards. She walked through the front door and started waving her hands over her head like she was doing a very slow St. Vitus’ dance.
“ ‘I just don’t feel it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just don’t feel it. The vibrations aren’t right … they’re not speaking to me.… ’
“ ‘You’ll feel ’em once you see the paintings we’ve assembled for you,’ I said, pointing up the stairs where the Court oils had been hung.
“ ‘Oprah does not do stairs,’ she said. Before I could even respond to this one, my assistant let her have it.”
“Yes, I’m afraid I did,” recalled Maureen Taylor. “She had been so impossible to deal with even before she arrived, and then after all the trouble she had put Peter to for that appointment, she came in here waving her hands like some kind of mumbo jumbo mystic, saying, ‘I just don’t feel it.… I just don’t feel it.’ When she said, ‘Stairs? Stairs? Oprah does not do stairs,’ I lost it. I said, ‘Well, maybe you should try them, sister. You certainly could use the exercise.’ ”
“That did it,” said Colasante. “Oprah flounced out of the gallery, and I followed her down the street to her limousines. She yelled at her pilot. ‘Get the plane … Get the plane. We’re leaving.’ And that was the end of Oprah Winfrey and her spirits and her vibrations.”
To reporters, Oprah tried to dismiss the avalanche of criticism about her “Change Your Life” shows by suggesting it might be a matter of overexposure. “Was it too much Beloved publicity? Was the so-called backlash because I did the [theme] song the same year I was on the Vogue cover?” Most of that “so-called backlash” came from white male critics, who had trouble understanding the increasing “Oprahfication” of female America. As the comic Jimmy Kimmel joked when introducing The Man Show on Comedy Central, “We’re here because we have a serious problem in this country—and her name is Oprah. Millions and millions of women are under Oprah’s spell. This woman has half of America brainwashed.”
Several critics, some within her own family, took Oprah to task when, in 2007, she promoted The Secret, a DVD and book by Rhonda Byrne, as the answer to living a good life. “I took God out of the box,” Oprah told her viewers before pushing The Secret, which describes Jesus Christ not as divine or as the son