Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [39]
Feeling spurned, the promoter sold his story and some of his photos to the National Enquirer, which ran the headline “Oprah Stole Beauty Contest Crown!” Her publicist denied the story: “Oprah was never told of any alleged problems with any pageants she was in at any time.”
Maude Mobley, described in the 1992 story as the “rightful pageant winner,” sounded fearful. “Oprah’s a rich and powerful woman. I would rather not talk about this. It might anger her.”
Maude’s mother was not so cautious. “I knew something wasn’t right when they called out Oprah as the winner,” she said twenty years after the pageant. “After I talked to Maude, I was so angry that I wrote to everybody I could think of to get the situation righted. But no one was interested. It’s true that Oprah stole that crown.”
Another version of the switched-votes story surfaced when Patrice Patton, the first runner-up for Miss Black Nashville, noticed Gordon El Greco Brown’s tabloid story when she was grocery shopping. “I already knew that the scores had been switched, and that Oprah had not won,” she said in 2008, “but I don’t believe what Gordon is quoted as saying in that story.… I don’t believe for one minute that Oprah knew about the switch or that Gordon ever confronted her. I was told by the pageant coordinator that Gordon was the one who switched the votes on Miss Black Nashville. The pageant coordinator said she had confronted him at the time, and when he didn’t step forward to correct the situation, she quit. I ran into her a few years later and she told me the truth: that I had actually won Miss Black Nashville and Oprah had been the runner-up. I never said anything, because it was five years after the fact and I would’ve looked like a sore loser. Besides, I liked Oprah. She was good folks.…
“She had a following in Nashville at the time, from all the publicity she got being the first black girl to be Miss Fire Prevention, plus she had her own radio show. It’s my opinion that if Oprah hadn’t been declared the winner of Miss Black Nashville, Gordon wouldn’t have been able to sell tickets to the Miss Black Tennessee pageant. So he made her the winner.…
“After the pageant coordinator quit, Gordon gave me the job and we traveled all over Tennessee just trying to get girls to participate. Even then we only got a few. A few days before the pageant, Gordon moved out of his house in Nashville and we moved in so I could get everyone ready to make the rounds of radio stations and churches and department stores. Oprah drove some of us in her father’s pickup truck.… Is till remember how determined she was to get into shape for competition. She wanted to be a certain size, so she had started dieting.… She was the first black person I ever saw to eat yogurt. We just didn’t eat yogurt in those days. But she did and she lost a bunch of weight.”
Oprah said she was as surprised as anyone to be crowned Miss Black Tennessee. “I didn’t expect to win, nor did anybody else expect me to, because there were all these vanillas and here I was a fudge child. And Lord, were they upset, and I was upset for them, really, I was. I said, ‘Beats me, girls. I’m as shocked as you are. I don’t know how I won, either.’ ”
As Miss Black Tennessee, Oprah flew to California in August 1972 to compete for the crown of Miss Black America. For the talent portion of the pageant, she sang “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a spiritual dating back to slavery. Her chaperone, Dr. Janet Burch, a Nashville psychologist, recalled for the writer Robert Waldron how focused Oprah was on becoming successful. “I have never seen anybody who wanted to do well as much as Oprah did. She used to talk about things, like how one day she was going to be very, very, very wealthy. The thought always precedes the happening. If you really think you’re going to be very wealthy, and very popular, and prominent, and