Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [203]
As part of that “outside” focus, Oprah orchestrated a worldwide publicity campaign for her school’s opening that captured more attention than a moon launch, putting her on the cover of People and the front pages of newspapers around the globe. She was featured in a two-hour CNN special by Anderson Cooper and in special reports on all network newscasts, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show on CBS, CNN’s American Morning, ET, and Extra. There were articles in Time, Newsweek, and, of course, O magazine and its spin-off O at Home, and a prime-time special on ABC titled Building a Dream: The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. There was so much hoopla surrounding the opening of Oprah’s sumptuous school that the state funeral of Gerald Ford, the thirty-eighth president of the United States, on the same day seemed merely a somber footnote.
A few weeks before Christmas, on HollywoodReporter.com, Ray Richmond was composing his 2006 gift list “for challenged media figures.” For Oprah he wished “a conversation that isn’t all about her and her uncompromising, sublime wonderfulness.” At the same time, she was sending large, elaborate invitations to two hundred guests to celebrate New Year’s Eve with her in Johannesburg. All received an itinerary of what was in store—elegant hotel suites, high teas, cocktail parties, candlelit dinners in the bush, a safari, and a five-course African feast of food, wine, and music on New Year’s Eve at the Palace of the Lost City, in Sun City, with the Soweto Gospel Choir performing. She asked each guest to bring a personally inscribed book for her school’s library.
Planes began arriving that weekend, disgorging movie stars, rock stars, and television stars: Tina Turner, Chris Rock, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier, Chris Tucker, Tyler Perry, Nick Ashford, Valerie Simpson, Kenneth (“Babyface”) Edmonds, Star Jones, Patti LaBelle, Cicely Tyson, Quincy Jones, Reuben Cannon, Kimberly Elise, Anna Deavere Smith, BeBe Winans, Suzanne De Passe, Andrew Young, India. Arie, Holly Robinson Peete, Al Roker, Diane Sawyer, and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. All came to honor Oprah and her school.
In addition to the celebrities, Oprah invited her father, but not her mother. She paid tribute to Vernon during her opening-day speech by asking him to stand up. “What you have seen I have done, and what you have heard I have done. None of this could have been possible without my father.” Vernon Winfrey was proud to be acknowledged in the presence of Nelson Mandela. “I stood up and turned around real slow, where they could see me well,” he said later. “It brought tears to my eyes, her giving me credit for it. It was true. It wouldn’t have been possible if she had not come back to me, and she gave me credit for that.”
For the grand inauguration on January 2, 2007, Oprah wore a long pink silk taffeta ball gown with her hair softly curled and pulled back from her face to show gleaming dollops of big pink diamonds dangling from her ears. She stood in front of 152 little girls dressed in green uniforms, white blouses, white socks, and brown Mary Janes. They looked like flower girls flanking a bride.
[“In my] pink dress with the pink diamonds and the girls I felt like people say they feel on their wedding day,” Oprah recalled. “I really literally felt I got married 152 times.”
Opening her arms to the girls’ families, her celebrity guests, and reporters from around the world, she said, “Welcome to the proudest, greatest day of my life.” With tears in her eyes, she spoke movingly. “I know what it feels like to grow up poor, to grow up feeling you are not loved. I want to be able to give back to people who were like I was when I was growing up.… The reason I wanted to build a school for girls is because I know that when you educate a girl you begin to change the face of a nation. Girls become women and they educate their girls and their boys. Girls who are educated are less likely to get diseases like HIV and AIDS—a pandemic