Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [48]
Al Sanders was immediately promoted to coanchor, and left no doubt that he had been sent in to clean up the mess. “I’ve been in this business seventeen years,” he said, drawing a stark contrast to Oprah’s lack of experience. “Whenever you replace anybody on a job and people think that things weren’t quite right before, there is pressure. But I’m comfortable.”
He and Jerry Turner swiftly resurrected the ratings and then dominated the landscape for the next decade. “They were the best local news team in America,” said William F. Baker. Until their deaths—Turner died of esophageal cancer in 1987, Sanders of lung cancer in 1995—WJZ reigned as the number one station in Baltimore.
At the time of Oprah’s severe demotion, the station tried to counter the obvious. “We can’t account for what people will think,” said the general manager, Steve Kimatian. “But we believe this is an opportunity for her to develop herself, to work more on her own. When people see how Oprah does in the assignments she is given they will be convinced that the profile we have of Oprah is a high one.”
Translation: Oprah was a goner.
For someone who had given herself three years to become television’s black Barbara Walters and anchor the news in a top ten market at a network-owned station, or else to take Joan Lunden’s place as the cohost of Good Morning America, Oprah had been brought low. The self-confidence that had hurtled her upward seeped away like a big hot-air balloon dropping from the sky. She was no longer a star. While her contract guaranteed twenty-five more months of pay, she had no standing at the station. Yet she couldn’t quit, because she needed the money. Promotion to a news job in a larger market was out of the question, and to go to a smaller market would dash all of her exalted dreams. For the first time in her life she had no upward options to dodge the fireball of failure rolling her way. Her father and her friends advised her to stay put and hold on. After all, they said, she was still in television in a large market, and getting paid. So Oprah picked up the only mop and pail available. In addition to doing the local cut-ins for Good Morning America, she became “weekend features reporter,” which, as she said, was the lowest position on the newsroom food chain.
“I did mindless, inane, stupid stories and I hated every minute of it,” she said, “but thought even while I was doing it, ‘Well, it doesn’t make any sense to quit because everyone else thinks this is such a great job.’ ”
No longer a show horse, she trudged into work at six every morning and stayed all day, taking every dreary assignment thrown at her. She covered a cockatoo’s birthday party at the zoo, did live shots of elephants when the circus came to town, and chased fire engines. She also took guff when she interviewed the organizer of the Mr. Black Baltimore contest.
“In the newsroom she was asked, ‘Did you go for the Miss Black America title?’ ” recalled Michael Olesker. “If she boasted about it, she had no sense of nuance. If she joked, she understood she was in a business where everyone had an ego.”
Oprah rose to the occasion. “Yeah, honey,” she said, patting her rear end, “but I’ve got the black woman’s behind. It’s a disease God inflicted on the black women of America.”
Open and cheerful, she was eager to please and desperate to be liked. “I’m the kind of person who can get along with anyone,” she said. “I have a fear of being disliked, even by people I dislike.” She made friends with everyone at the station and treated her camera crews well. “In those days when we used film, a film editor could make or break a reporter who was on a tight deadline,” said Gary Elion. “They always busted their backs to help Oprah because she was so nice to them. Some people would try to get their way by being tough and nasty and aggressive. Oprah was just the opposite.… She made it a point to get along.”
Most important, she hid her resentment toward Jerry Turner and Al Sanders. That bitterness she confided only to her closest female friends, Gayle King and Maria Broom,