Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [45]
After driving her to Baltimore and helping her unpack, her Nashville boyfriend, William “Bubba” Taylor, was ready to return home. “We agreed she had to make the move and I had to stay,” he said many years later. “It was too small a TV market for her in Nashville, and I had many things to keep me here, such as my family’s funeral home.”
The couple had been dating semi-seriously since Oprah had gotten Taylor a job at WVOL radio. “I hired Billy just to keep Oprah’s sanity,” recalled Clarence Kilcrease, the station manager. “She kept pushing me to do it. She was gaga over him.” They had met at the Progressive Baptist Church when Taylor, a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam vet, was attending John A. Gupton Mortuary College.
“She was just nineteen but she was driven even back then,” Taylor said. “She’d tell me: ‘Someday, I’m going to be famous!’ You could see that she meant it.” So he was not surprised to see Oprah on 60 Minutes a decade later, but he was floored by her melodramatic recollection of their parting in Baltimore.
“Lord, I wanted him,” Oprah told Mike Wallace. “I threw his keys down the toilet, stood in front of the door and threatened to jump off the balcony if he didn’t stay. I was on my knees begging him, ‘Please don’t go, please don’t go.’ ”
Bubba Taylor chuckled, knowing he had not been the man who had sparked those theatrics. “When she took me to the airport for my flight back to Nashville, her eyes glistened and she squeezed my hand before kissing me goodbye. We promised to stay in touch, of course, but I guess we both knew it was over.” Oprah later fell in love with a married disc jockey in Baltimore who would bring her to her knees, and it was her desperation over losing him that she recounted on 60 Minutes, to illustrate how far she had traveled from her doormat days. Some might consider that recollection an example of what Oprah’s “aunt” Katharine Esters called another one of “Oprah’s lies,” while others would accept her tendency to rearrange the truth as her way of telling a good, if inconsistent, story. Or perhaps the only way Oprah can deal with a painful truth is by attributing it to a situation that doesn’t hurt (Bubba) rather than to one that still pains (the Baltimore disc jockey).
In the 1970s, local news became a real moneymaker for television, especially in Baltimore, where Jerry Turner anchored on WJZ-TV every night, and consistently outdrew Walter Cronkite, then the Brahmin of broadcasting.
“You cannot overstate the stature of Jerry Turner in this town at that time,” said WJZ’s weatherman, Bob Turk. “He simply had no peers.”
The former general manager of WJZ concurred. “Jerry Turner was as superb an anchor as you could find anywhere in the business,” said William F. Baker. “He was appealing, authoritative, and, most importantly, he was adored by the Baltimore community. Absolutely worshipped. He was the reason WJZ ranked number one in the market for years, and as you know, news is the jewel of the crown in television, and determines how a station fares in terms of money and prestige.”
In 1976 the station decided to go to an hour news format, which was too much for one person to anchor. So they announced they were launching an “intensive search” for a coanchor to share Turner’s throne. This was tantamount to a trumpet throughout the kingdom: the forty-six-year-old prince is looking for a princess to wear the glass slipper. (The assumption then was that since Turner was a white male, his coanchor had to be a black female.) Seven months later the so-called search