Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [19]
“Gayle is nothing but a street heifer.… I’ve never been talked to like that, so disrespectful, in my life. I told Oprah later the only reason I didn’t cuss Gayle out right then and there and call her the word that begins with B and sounds like witch was because I was cutting a preacher’s hair and didn’t want to talk ugly in front of him. But I told Oprah I would have nothing more to do with Gayle King ever again.
“Oprah said, ‘The people who care about me are watching out for me and protecting me.’
“I said, ‘When we had our troubles when you were a teenager, I left everyone else out of it, and that’s how it should be between you and me now.’ ”
A proud man, Vernon Winfrey chafed under the yoke of his daughter’s control, and they did not speak again for quite some time. “That all happened in May of 2007,” he said. “I was very upset, and I had a stroke a few months later. Took me three months of physical therapy to recover, and I’ve finally calmed down now, but I still feel the same way about that dirt hog Gayle. She called me back after she spoke to Oprah, but even then she did not apologize. She said she did not think she had been disrespectful to me, but she was not the recipient of her words. I was. And in her words she told me I was not worth anything and that my life counted for nothing.”
After Oprah’s public objection to his book proposal, Oprah’s father said that several potential publishers had backed off. “They now want her permission before they will proceed.…” He shook his head at the fear his daughter had instilled. “I’ve put the book aside for the time being because my cowriter is out of the country, but I intend to finish it … despite what Oprah says.…
“It disappoints me that she has changed so much over the years. She’s become too close to that woman Gayle, and she no longer believes in Jesus Christ as her savior. That’s just not how I raised her.”
If Oprah had seen her father’s sixty-two-page book proposal, she would have realized that it was, as he said, as much about his life as the sixth of nine children born to Elmore and Ella Winfrey as it was about raising Oprah. What would concern her, though, was what he wrote about her “secrets, dark secrets. Some I didn’t discover till she was a grown woman, till it was too late.” He also expressed regret for having to be stern and hard on her during her teenage years and for not expressing his love as effectively as his discipline.
Still, he continued to disapprove of the “dark secrets” he discovered about the little girl he had raised. “She may be admired by the world, but I know the truth. So does God and so does Oprah. Two of us remain ashamed.” He pointed to the sign behind his barber chair as if he were sending his daughter a message: “Live So the Preacher Won’t Have to Tell Lies at Your Funeral.”
The television set in Winfrey’s Barber Shop is no longer tuned to Oprah’s show at 4:00 P.M. on weekdays the way it once was, but one of her early publicity photos, unsigned, remains taped to the mirror behind Vernon’s chair, next to a photograph of his Yorkshire terrier, Fluff. When it was noted that the photo of Fluff gets pride of place over Oprah’s photo, Vernon smiled slyly. “So it does,” he said. “I just love that little dog.”
Vernon’s role as Oprah’s revered father came to an end in the summer of 1963, when he drove her to Milwaukee to spend a few weeks with her mother. “I never saw that sweet little girl again,” he said. “The innocent child that I knew in Nashville disappeared forever when I left her with her mother. I shed tears that day because I knew I was leaving her in a bad environment that was no place for a young child, but there was nothing I could do about it.”
Oprah agreed at the end of the summer to stay with Vernita because her mother said she was going to get married and wanted to have a real family. Besides, Oprah’s life with “Daddy” and “Mama Zelma” in Nashville had been a bit too regimented, with only an hour of television