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“ ‘Right now, ma’am. That dog will get sucked up. We can’t have you out here. It’s regulations.’ She was furious.… I had to report the incident.”

The sense of entitlement that accompanies the life of a billionaire celebrity seemed to surface shortly after Oprah purchased her first plane (a $40 million Gulfstream GIV). “She was going in and out of Signature then, a field-based operation for private jets, which is separate from the commercial airport,” said Laura Aye, “and she did not want the fuelers around because she didn’t like the smell of gas and grease. Her pilot would radio her arrival, and the fuelers would all be banned from the hangar. The guys inside quickly whipped up a batch of popcorn to cover the fumes. That way she wouldn’t have to smell anything for the thirty feet she had to walk from her plane to her security van.”

During her Gulfstream days she gave an interview to Harry Allen of Vibe, who asked how much her plane had cost. Oprah said, “I’m not going to discuss that. Jet etiquette means you never discuss how much the plane costs.… But sometimes, and I get a kick out of this—there’s all black people on the plane. Just the other day the flight attendant was passing out some lobster and I said, ‘We still black! It’s not like we turned white! We still black, y’all. Oprah’s still black.’ It’s like, who knew?”

The Vibe writer said, “Do you understand the effect of stories like these? You’re the richest black person in the universe.”

Sounding disingenuous, Oprah said, “Am I? Let me think.… I always think of other people as being rich. It’s not a concept that I’m attuned to.”

Always particular about her food, Oprah retained three chefs for her private plane. She instructed the flight attendants on the menus she preferred, saying, according to Corinne Gehrls, “White folks don’t know what southern food should taste like.”

When Oprah upgraded from her $40 million Gulfstream to her $47 million Global Express, she moved hangars and secured a new space near the Sara Lee jets. “It was an old, dilapidated warehouse with sliding doors—imagine a garage for an airplane,” said one airport employee. “She poured a million dollars into it, completely refurbishing the place. She carpeted the concrete floor, redid the walls and cuttings and doors. She even built offices upstairs with elaborate fittings and got the City of Chicago to put in a parking lot, and then she redid the parking lot.… She tapes her shows in Chicago on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and flies to Santa Barbara every Thursday night, arriving back in Chicago on Sunday at nine P.M.” If Oprah is asleep on either leg of the flight, her pilots are under orders not to disturb her until she’s slept eight hours.… They must sit and wait until she wakes up.

Oprah could not force celebrities to sign her confidentiality agreements, so she frequently isolated herself at galas and benefits. “When we performed The Vagina Monologues at Madison Square Garden [February 2001], the one person with a private entrance and a private dressing room was Oprah,” recalled Erica Jong. “The rest of us—me, Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Rita Wilson, Calista Flockhart, Shirley Knight, Amy Irving, all the rest—were girls together in our panty hose getting dressed and made up gratis by Bobbi Brown. No one was paid. No one had star privileges, except Oprah. She was separate and apart from all of us, and I think it was because she was afraid and not confident, but why, I don’t know.”

That evening Oprah had used the Garden’s rock star entrance—with an elevator big enough to accommodate limousines—so that she could bypass fans and be driven from the street to her dressing room. A friend later suggested she might have removed herself from the rest of the cast because she felt self-conscious about her size. “Maybe she was uncomfortable being the only heavy black woman among all those skinny white girls.”

Race was definitely the reason Oprah cited when she was barred from Hermès in Paris. She and Gayle arrived at the luxury retail store fifteen minutes after closing