Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [41]
Others recall the hire as very courageous. “No question,” said Patty Outlaw, who did traffic ads for the station. “It was a big risk for Chris.”
“He went out on a limb when he brought Oprah in,” said Jimmy Norton, who worked in production, “especially when he promoted her to coanchor.… There was grumbling in the back of the newsroom.… It bothered some to see Oprah on the air doing news, but you have to remember what Nashville was like in those days.… The N word was still being used freely.”
Ruth Ann Leach recalled her first encounter with the word when Oprah started doing the news. “I accompanied a family member to a pleasant suburban home.… I sat with the … wife. She greeted me warmly and told me she used to enjoy watching me on television.
“ ‘What do you mean “used to”?’ I asked.
“ ‘Well, I cain’t watch your station anymore, now that you have a nigger reading the news.’ ”
Oprah herself got walloped with the hateful word when she went on assignment in a segregated area of Nashville. She introduced herself to a shop owner and extended her hand.
“We don’t shake hands with niggers down here,” he said.
She shot back, “I’ll bet the niggers are glad.”
At TSU her classmates considered her television job nothing but a big wet kiss from the affirmative action fairy. They dismissed her as a “two-fer,” a mere token, and she agreed. “No way did I deserve the job,” she said later. “I was a classic token, but I sure was one happy token.”
“She was so excited to be on television,” recalled the makeup artist Joyce Daniel Hill. “I was with the Joe Colter Agency and had been hired by the station to teach the news team to do makeup and get supplies for them every month. We were just getting used to color cameras in those days and had only a few shades of pancake makeup available.… I blended a special shade for Oprah.… She’s considerably lighter now than she was thirty-four years ago. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just better makeup artists or some kind of skin bleaching.… She took me with her to cover the Ebony fashion fair because we both loved clothes.… She was a joy to work with.”
Hired at $150 a week, Oprah made her television debut in Nashville in January 1974. By the following year she had received several awards as the city’s first black female on television. She was named National Executive Woman of the Year by the National Association of Women Executives. The Middle Tennessee Business Association named her Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year, and she won the Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club award as Woman of the Year in 1975. “She was terrific,” said Chris Clark, “although she wasn’t a great reporter. Couldn’t write. Never could.” In fact, she had so much trouble writing she caused the station to go black for two minutes of a five-minute cut-in one morning because she had not finished typing. “Chris should have fired me that day,” Oprah said.
Instead, Clark concentrated on her other gifts. “She was wonderful with people,” he recalled. “And that was her downfall as a journalist, because she could not be detached. She’d be sent to cover a fire, come back to the station, and work the phones trying to get help for the burnt-out family instead of writing the story for the evening news.”
Easy and casual at work, Oprah kicked off her shoes and padded around the newsroom in bare feet. “She was as country as cornbread in those days,” said one former coworker.
“I think people expected her to be a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ type, you know—very grateful—but she wasn’t that way at all,” said Jimmy Norton. “She was driven.