Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [50]
Long after she left Baltimore, several women recalled her traumatic breakup with Lloyd Kramer, a Jewish reporter who worked for WBAL-TV. Even in the late 1970s, interracial relationships were rare in Baltimore. At the time Oprah was involved with Kramer, a local (white) radio personality viciously joked that “Omar Sharif is dating Aunt Jemima.”
“But that didn’t faze them,” said Maria Broom. “She really loved him. They were so close. I thought they might get married and have children.… [When] Oprah’s confidence was wrecked, that’s when Lloyd really helped her.… It was a deep and caring relationship.”
One of Kramer’s closest friends at the time recalled first meeting Oprah. “Lloyd called me from Baltimore, said he was coming to New York with his new girlfriend and could they stay with me,” said the editor and writer Peter Gethers. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and asked him about her. Lloyd, being Lloyd, hemmed and hawed a bit, then said that she was black and that his parents were really upset that he was dating a black woman. He told me her name was Oprah—which led to a few laughs, because it was not your normal white girlfriend name—and that she was an on-air reporter at a rival station in Baltimore. So a week or two later, Lloyd and Oprah came to New York and stayed with me in my fifth-floor walk-up, West Village, somewhat cockroach-infested apartment. I didn’t have a spare bedroom, or even a spare bed, so they both slept on a pillow couch—which wasn’t really a couch, just a bunch of pillows arranged to be in the shape of a couch—on the living room floor. They spent the weekend, and we had a lot of laughs, hanging out with a few other friends who Lloyd didn’t get to see regularly, having moved to Baltimore.”
The relationship floundered when Kramer left Baltimore for a job at WCBS in New York City and met actress Adrienne Meltzer, whom he married in 1982. “Oprah suffered quietly even though her heart was breaking,” said Maria Broom. “She was hurting, but she moved on with her life.” She also remained grateful and stayed friends with Kramer, later making him a TV director of note. She told Chicago journalist Judy Markey, “Lloyd was wonderful. He stuck with me through the whole demoralizing [Baltimore] experience. That man was the most fun romance I ever had.”
When Oprah joined Bethel A.M.E. in 1976, she arrived with the biblical precepts of a young country girl who had been called “Preacher Woman” by her classmates. A deeply religious Christian who quoted Genesis and Leviticus, she believed that homosexuality was wrong. She was ashamed of her gay brother, Jeffrey, and a year before he died of AIDS she told him he would not go to Heaven because he was a homosexual. In the next seven years she would travel far from the doctrinaire concepts of her Baptist childhood. “I was raised to not question God. It’s a sin,” she said. “[But] I started to think for myself … and that’s when I really started, in my mid-twenties, my own journey towards my spirituality, my spiritual self.”
The journey began when her pastor, Rev. John Richard Bryant, gave a sermon about God being a jealous God. “I was just sitting there thinking for the first time after being raised Baptist … church, church, church, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday … I thought, ‘Now why would God, who is omnipotent, who has everything, who was able to create me and raise the sun every morning, why would that God be jealous of anything that I have to say? Or be threatened by a question that I would have to ask?’ ”
Even bolstered by religion, she found her public humiliation taking its toll, physically and emotionally. “Reporters leaving the building would find her sitting in her car weeping, unable to summon energy to start the engine,” said Michael Olesker.
“The stress was so bad that her hair started falling out,” recalled Jane McClary. “She said later that she had had a bad perm, but it was definitely stress.”
Oprah consoled herself with food, eating around the clock. “I still