Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [37]
Years later Oprah attributed her unpopularity in college to envy. “My classmates were so jealous of me because I had a paying job. I remember taking my little $115 paycheck, and at the time I was trying to appease them. Anytime anybody needed any money I was always offering, ‘Oh, you need ten dollars?’ or taking them out for pizza, ordering pizza for the class, things like that. That whole ‘disease to please.’ That’s where it was the worst for me, I think, because I had wanted to be accepted by them and could not be.”
Her classmates did not recognize her behavior as insecurity. “She acted as if she knew she was going to be someone and stick it to all of us later on,” said Sheryl Atkinson. “She walked down the hallway with her head up in the air and swishing from side to side as if to say, ‘I’m the best thing walkin’.’ When people saw her coming, they avoided her. She had the kind of confidence that said, ‘I don’t care that you don’t like me—I’m going to be someone big and you’ll be sorry.’ She did become someone very big, but I’m not sorry. I applaud her, and I commend her on the good works she’s done. I just wish she weren’t so bitter about our school. But that springs from stuff deep inside Oprah, from secrets that are too dark and deep to look at.… People struggle with that kind of stuff their entire lives.… Maybe her dark stuff was connected to her father’s strictness. I know she disliked him intensely when we were in school.”
Later in life Oprah publicly thanked Vernon for saving her. “Without his direction, I’d have wound up pregnant and another statistic.” But that gratitude was a long time coming. When she turned eighteen, she broke away from his strict control and moved out of his house.
“I had to help her, because Vernon was so pissed off he wouldn’t lift a finger,” said Luvenia Harrison Butler. “We moved her into an apartment on Cane Ridge Road in Hickory Hollow.” In later years, Oprah maintained that she continued living under her father’s roof and the whip of his midnight curfews until she left Nashville at the age of twenty-two. “I don’t know why she’d say something like that—maybe to put forward the image of a good little girl.… Whatever the reason, it’s probably connected to those damn secrets of hers.… That’s why she makes everyone who works for her sign those confidentiality agreements that forbid them from ever breathing a word about their personal or professional experiences with her. I guess it’s her way of keeping control over what people find out about her.… It’s kind of sad.”
Soon after Oprah moved into her own apartment she called upon Gordon El Greco Brown, a local promoter who had purchased the franchise for Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennessee in 1972. “Her stepmother, Miss Zelma, had first brought her to meet me for Miss Fire Prevention.… When she started at TSU she enrolled in my modeling school near campus. She waltzed in one day and announced, ‘Hi. I’m going to be a big star someday. Where do I sign up, baby?’ She was only 17 and not beautiful. But I could tell she had something. She was very poised and had a great speaking voice.”
The deep timbre of Oprah’s voice never failed to impress. In high school her rich vocal range was compared to that of the American contralto Marian Anderson. For a teenager, Oprah’s commanding voice was always a revelation.
“Miss Black Nashville was the first time there had ever been a beauty pageant for black girls. In the past it was white girls only,” said El Greco Brown. “Oprah [saw] that contest as a stepping stone for the big career she so desperately wanted.… I had to practically beg everyone else to participate because there was no cash incentive. No scholarship. No record deal. No Hollywood contract. Just a title, a sash and a bouquet.”
Oprah filled out the pageant application, stating her height: 5′6½″; weight: 135 lbs.; measurements: 36–25–37; shoe size: 8–8½. She listed her hobbies: swimming and people;