Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [42]
Patty Outlaw agreed. “She was real confident for her young self—ambitious, yes, but not a backstabber. I liked her a lot.… I saw her every day in those years, because I worked on the floor above the newsroom. It was just nuts working at that station. Drugs, drugs, drugs all the time—drugs all over the place. They were even selling ‘windowpanes’ [LSD] in the hall.” Drugs were so prevalent that the news staff gave Vic Mason, Oprah’s coanchor, a coke spoon as a gift. “Chris and I looked the other way,” said Jimmy Norton, who confirmed that station management removed a vending machine once they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana. Years later Oprah indicated that her own drug use started in Nashville, with cocaine, and continued during her years in Baltimore and later in Chicago.
“I remember raving on the elevator about a guy I was dating, and Oprah listened to me carry on for two floors. As she got off, she said, ‘Ooooh, girl. He sounds like Jesus’ brother,’ ” said Patty Outlaw. “In those days Oprah and I talked about boys, diets, and makeup. That’s all we cared about then.… Funny, isn’t it, but she’s still talking about the same things on her show three decades later.”
“She was a little heavy then, but nothing like now,” Patty said in 2008. “I had started taking ballet and mentioned my lessons to Jimmy Norton. ‘Ballet must be big,’ he said. ‘Oprah did a little story during the newscast last night. She did it in her tutu or, in her case, her four-four.…’ Oprah lived on junk food then, and nobody got between her and her Ding Dongs.”
Harry Chapman, who coanchored the weekend news with Oprah, recalled her fondness for Chicken Shack chicken. “They used cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce—hottest chicken I ever put in my mouth. We’d have that on weekends, in between newscasts.”
As the thirtieth-largest television market, Nashville was a training ground for many young broadcasters. “It was a very exciting time to be in TV,” said Elaine Ganick, former news anchor for the NBC affiliate, WSMV, and later a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight. “I started out about the same time as Oprah; Pat Sajak was a weatherman; and John Tesh, our news anchor, hit the big time in New York before his ten years with Entertainment Tonight.”
Tesh, the tall (six foot six), handsome, blond anchorman for WSMV, once described his Nashville days and nights with Pat Sajak, Dan Miller, and Oprah: “We were all single, ran in a pack, and got into a lot of trouble acting like jerks.” Some time after he became the news anchor for WCBS-TV in New York City, Tesh told a woman he dated seriously that when he was in Nashville he had lived with Oprah for a short time, at her apartment in Hickory Hollow. “He said one night he looked down and saw his white body next to her black body and couldn’t take it anymore. He walked out in the middle of the night.… He told me he later felt very guilty about it.” The social pressure then, in Nashville, Tennessee, concerning an interracial couple was extreme. In 2010, Tesh publicly confirmed his affair with Oprah.
Toasting her talk show’s tenth anniversary in 1996, she invited her former lover to appear with his ET cohost Mary Hart, and reminded him of what she called their “one date—strictly two friends having dinner.” More than three decades later some people who worked with them in Nashville found their intimate relationship hard to believe. “[I would’ve thought] Oprah would’ve been leery about dating a white person … interracial dating was not acceptable then,” said Jimmy Norton. “After all, we were just ninety miles south of Pulaski, home of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Patty Outlaw acknowledged that the coupling