Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [198]
She and Stedman taught their leadership course for two fall semesters, and Oprah sent her plane to bring in guest lecturers such as Coretta Scott King, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
“I was Stedman’s guest the evening Kissinger spoke to their class,” recalled Fran Johns, a Chicago businesswoman. “Kissinger had come as a favor for Oprah.… We were sitting behind the students when Oprah came running up the steps. ‘Wait. Wait,’ she yelled to Kissinger. ‘I can’t see.’ She sat down next to me and kept saying throughout his lecture, ‘Isn’t he great? Isn’t he great?’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘Great? He’s a murderer, a creep, Machiavellian … but he’s an interesting speaker because he’s got all these incredible inside stories about things.’ ”
Oprah was so grateful to Kissinger that she commissioned an oil painting of his Labrador and flew to Connecticut to personally present it. “The dog unveiling took place one weekend when Isaac and I were in the country [Connecticut] and the Kissingers invited us over,” recalled Mrs. Isaac Stern, widow of the famed violinist. “Isaac went and met Oprah. I stayed home and took a nap.”
Having steeped herself in the legacy of slavery to film Beloved, Oprah now became even more committed to helping African American children. Years later she explained her commitment: “The reason I spend so much of my money on educating young black children—$10 million to A Better Chance, which takes inner-city children out of the ghetto and puts them in private schools—is because I know that lives will then forever be changed.” While heavily publicized, Oprah’s giving in the early years of her career was minimal—less than 10 percent of her incredible income. In 1998 she began increasing her charitable contributions and making more sizable donations to her charitable foundation:
Oprah’s polestar for giving was Nelson Mandela, whom she had met through Stedman after he accompanied Mandela’s daughter and son-in-law to South Africa for her father’s release from prison on Robben Island. Although she had financed that trip in 1990, she did not meet Mandela until 2000. By then he had received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Frederik Willem de Klerk for their efforts in uniting South Africa after years of apartheid. The following year, Mandela was elected the first black president of the country and served until 1999. When he left office he toured the United States to raise money for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, dedicated to educating his country’s children. “It’s not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education,” he said. “Those who do not believe this have small imaginations.”
During his U.S. visit he appeared on Oprah’s show, on November 27, 2000, and when he arrived for the taping, all three hundred employees lined the hallway at Harpo to shake his hand. “It was the interview of a lifetime,” Oprah said later. When she visited South Africa she asked Mandela what gift she could give him and his country. He said, “Build me a school,” and she agreed. His gift to her was a drawing of hands that he had done in prison. “She has lots of art in her home,” recalled former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “When I was visiting my friend Mary Dell Pritzlaff, her next-door neighbor in Montecito, Oprah heard I was there and insisted we both come for dinner.… It was a wonderful evening and Oprah was delightful.… What I loved most were the four hands she had framed and hanging on one wall. They were drawn by Nelson Mandela during his time on Robben Island.”
Before Oprah embraced the project that would lead to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, she embarked on another project for Mandela and began planning “A Christmas Kindness” for fifty