Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [213]
Six years later she retold a similar version of that same story, but by 2001 it was a Madison Avenue boutique that had kept her out. She said she had seen a sweater in the window and rang to be buzzed in, but the door was not opened. Then she saw two white women entering the store. So she rang again, but still was not admitted. “I certainly didn’t think, ‘This is a racial moment!’ ” she said. She called from a pay phone to make sure the store was open. “We started banging on the windows.” Nothing. Back in Chicago she called the store. “This is Oprah Winfrey. I was trying to get in your store the other day and …” She quoted the manager as saying, “I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but we were robbed last week by two black transsexuals—and we thought they’d come back.”
Whether these stories were real or rhetorical, Oprah certainly was accustomed to celebrity treatment from stores that opened their doors after hours so she could shop. In Chicago, Bloomingdale’s had extended this courtesy and even accommodated her insistence that all nonessential employees be kept off the floor so they would not gawk or report what she had purchased. (She was irate when the National Enquirer revealed the Christmas presents she had bought for her employees at the studio and the magazine—fourteen-karat gold and diamond O initial pendants.)
A few days before her season’s opening show in September 2005, billed as “Oprah’s 20th Anniversary Season Premiere,” her publicist announced that Robert B. Chavez, the president and CEO of Hermès USA, would be Oprah’s guest, stirring speculation about a monumental slapdown on national television.
Oprah opened the show by joking about what she did on her summer vacation and later launched into her version of what had happened in Paris. She claimed that most of the press reports were “flat-out wrong,” although her best friend had been the source of those reports. She scolded her audience for thinking she might have been upset for not being able to get into a closed store to shop. “Please,” she said. “I didn’t get to be this old to be that stupid. I was not upset about not getting to buy a bag—I was upset because one person at the store was so rude, not the whole company.”
Mr. Chavez looked at Oprah as she continued to berate his company. “There were reports that I was turned away because the store was closed. The store was in the process of being closed—the store was very active.… The doors were not locked. My friends and I were standing inside the doorway and there was much discussion among the staff about whether or not to let me in. That’s what was embarrassing.… I know the difference between a store being closed and a store being closed to me.
“Everybody who has ever been snubbed because you were not chic enough or thin enough or the right class or the right color or whatever … you know that it is very humiliating, and that is exactly what happened to me.”
The whipping boy from Hermès sounded contrite: “I would like to say to you we’re really sorry for all of those unfortunate circumstances that you encountered when you tried to visit our store in Paris,” he said. “We really try to service all of our clients all over the world.” Then he stubbed his toe. “The woman who turned you away did it because, honest to God, she didn’t know who you were.”
“This wasn’t even about, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ” Oprah snapped. “I wasn’t trying to play that celebrity card.”
Chavez quickly apologized. “You did meet up with one very, very rigid staff person.”
“Rigid or rude?” asked Oprah.
“Rigid and rude, I’m sure,” he said.
Having pilloried the firm’s president, Oprah now pardoned him and commended his company for instituting sensitivity training for its employees. She concluded the segment by hugging Chavez and urging her viewers to shop at the luxury goods emporium, where alligator