Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [226]
“I met her that evening,” recalled the art dealer Christopher Addison, who, with his wife, owns the Addison/Ripley Fine Art gallery in Washington, D.C. “I did not recognize her as anybody famous then because I don’t watch daytime television, but the eighty-year-old woman who was my guest that evening told me who she was.… Oprah had brought a little instamatic camera with her and asked me to take her photograph. I thought it was endearing of her to want her picture taken in the White House, almost like a tourist. Very sweet.”
Oprah had charmed them downstairs at the Bush White House by visiting the kitchen staff after the state dinner, but upstairs was another matter: the social staff found her to be overbearing and unreasonable. “She was rude and demanding, impossible to deal with,” Lea Berman, a former White House social secretary, told the Colonial Dames of America. “She insisted she be allowed to bring her own security into the president’s mansion. This is so against White House policy, but Ms. Winfrey became so adamant and shrill that we finally relented and allowed her to be accompanied by her own bodyguards.”
When Oprah issued her invitations to Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush in 2000 to appear on her show, both accepted because the presidential race was close, and each man wanted to reach her large female audience. A Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll had Bush trailing Gore by ten percentage points before the visit with Oprah; days later the same poll showed Bush in a statistical tie. News reports called it the “Oprah Bounce.” The Chicago Sun-Times editorial page saluted her for getting involved in the presidential race, and she hyped her first political foray before her season’s opening show, prompting the comedian Chris Rock to joke, “Both Gore and Bush are going to appear on Oprah, but for different reasons. Gore is trying to appeal to women voters. Bush wants to find out how in the world did this black woman get all that money.”
Oprah welcomed the vice president on September 11, 2000, and he strode onstage, greeting her with a handshake and a one-armed half-hug.
“No kiss? I was hoping for something,” she teased, referring to the exceedingly long on-camera kiss Gore had planted on his wife at the Democratic Convention. “Until today I’ve stayed away from politicians, but after fifteen years I need to try to penetrate that wall,” she told her viewers as she put Gore on notice that she was going to be more grill than gush. Despite twenty-four years in public office, he demurred, “I am a little bit more of a private person than a lot of the people in the profession.” Oprah was having none of it.
“Let’s get to that kiss,” she said. “What was that all about? What did you say to your wife? Was it scripted? Were you trying to send a message?”
“I was trying to send a message to Tipper,” Gore quipped, prompting a huge laugh from the studio audience.
“No, really,” Oprah persisted. To her credit, she interrupted whenever he lapsed into his stump speech, and tried to get something more truthful and heartfelt.
“Well … I … It was an overwhelming surge of emotion. This was a great moment in our lives. I mean, it’s not as if I got there by myself. This has been a partnership, and she is my soul mate.”
The studio audience, mostly female, erupted in wild applause for the romantic robot, usually stiff and awkward, who seemed so in love with his wife after thirty years of marriage.
For an hour Oprah huffed and puffed and tried to blow “that wall” down, but all she got was Gore’s favorite movie (Local Hero), Gore’s favorite music (The Beatles), and Gore’s favorite cereal (Wheaties). “The woman who has persuaded hundreds of people to reveal things about themselves that might better have been kept private couldn’t get Gore out of his comfort zone,” wrote Mark Brown in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Best of all for Gore, he handled her so smoothly that Oprah never seemed to realize