Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [223]
“Are they real?” asked author Terry McMillan.
“They are black diamonds, crazy love! Of course they’re real!”
During the “Legends” weekend, even the wealthiest stars were dumbfounded, especially when they saw the trolley Oprah had installed on the grounds for guests to tour “The Promised Land,” as Oprah called her rolling estate with its various promenades, pools, ponds, rose arbors, romantic bridges, and winding trails, all bordered by five thousand white hydrangeas and two thousand white flowering trees. She called her equally luxurious home in Hawaii “Kingdom Come.” As she told reporters, “I’m very biblical, you know. I got two roads to my [Hawaii] house … Glory and Hallelujah.”
But it was her home in Montecito that left guests breathless. “The driveway is five miles long, and every stone was cut by hand,” said one. “Her bathtub is a solid piece of jade, and her bathroom overlooks the entire forty-two-acre estate and gives her an eighty-degree view of the ocean. Her closet is three thousand square feet and she has a thousand drawers for everything—yes, one thousand—sweaters and T-shirts and one hundred hats. Each drawer has a glass front so nothing gets dusty and she can see what’s inside.… Gayle has her own room in the main house with rose wallpaper, and Stedman’s study overlooks the Montecito Mountains.… The views throughout are magnificent.… I think it’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”
The following night (Saturday, May 14, 2005), Oprah invited 362 people to a white-tie dinner dance at the Bacara Resort and Spa in Santa Barbara. She ordered 80 cases of champagne flown in from France, 120 pounds of tuna flown in from Japan, and 20,000 white peonies flown in from Ecuador. Entertainment was provided by Michael McDonald and a twenty-six-piece orchestra. Her party planner had sent his two hundred servers to waiter boot camp for three days to properly serve Oprah’s A-list celebrity guests. As everyone sat for dinner, a drum rolled and the black-tied waiters laid down 362 plates at the same moment. It was another JDM. Oprah expected no less.
That night, after a sumptuous meal and dancing, guests returned to their hotel rooms to find on their pillows a gift-wrapped souvenir photograph of the evening in a sterling-silver frame from Asprey, the jeweler who carries royal warrants from Queen Elizabeth II and the Prince of Wales. Oprah had instructed the women to wear black or white gowns for the ball, while she appeared in flaming red, just like Norma Shearer did at a black-and-white ball she threw—so everyone would look only at her. The following morning (Sunday, May 15, 2005), Oprah wore a tall feathered hat to host a gospel brunch at “The Promised Land,” where Senator Barack Obama, wearing sunglasses, stood under a tree a few feet away from Oprah, who had her arm draped around Barbra Streisand, swaying to the music.
Later Oprah approached Obama, who had been sworn in as a U.S. senator four months earlier. “If someone were to announce one of these days that he was going to run for president,” she said, “don’t you think this would be a sweet place to hold a fund-raiser?”
Senator Obama grinned.
BY THE twenty-first century, Oprah was omnipresent, if not omnipotent. She appeared on television five days a week, claimed 44 million viewers in the United States, and was broadcast in 145 countries, from Saudi Arabia to South Africa. She was a daily presence on satellite radio (Sirius XM) with her own twenty-four-hour channel, Oprah and Friends. Her monthly magazine, with her picture on every cover, had a paid circulation of 2.4 million in the United States and was published also in South Africa. Through her investment in Oxygen she was seen on cable television with segments entitled Oprah After the Show. When Oxygen was sold to NBC Universal, she recouped her $20 million investment and announced plans to start her own television network in 2011, to be called OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network). She produced made-for-television