Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [51]
The stories that Oprah and others tell of her battle with food are sometimes comical, but more often sad. “I first met her at Overeaters Anonymous,” said Hilda Ford, the former secretary of human resources for the state of Maryland. “We became close friends, despite our thirty-year age difference.… We were both heavy black women who were outsiders to Baltimore at the time.… We attended OA meetings, worked out at the gym together, and then went to Oprah’s favorite deli in Cross Keys and—can you believe it?—we gorged on fried chicken.”
People from WJZ recall a party thrown by Pat Wheeler, one of WBAL’s producers. “At the end of the evening Pat was ushering everyone out, but she couldn’t get Oprah to leave because there was a huge platter of salmon on the dining room table that hadn’t been touched,” said a reporter. “Oprah, an enormous eater, wouldn’t go until she devoured the whole thing. It was quite an amazing display of gluttony.” Oprah freely admitted to compulsive eating. She said her addiction to chocolate chip cookies frequently led her out of her apartment at night in boots and a coat on top of her pajamas for trips to the bakery. Most people understood that her eating was a substitute for something else. “I would hear stories about how she would have binges of eating when she was lonely,” said Bill Carter.
“After her string of successes, Oprah was ‘devastated’ by [her] demotion,” Gerri Kobren wrote in The Baltimore Sun. “She feared her career was grinding to a halt, and thought briefly about leaving town. Her hair fell out, leaving great bald patches; she had to keep her head wrapped in scarves while working.”
Later, in the first flush of national success, Oprah would put an entirely different spin on losing her hair. Rather than admit to ravaged nerves, she blamed the assistant news director at WJZ, claiming he had sent her to New York City for a makeover after telling her, “ ‘Your hair is too thick, your eyes are too far apart, your nose is too wide, your chin is too long and you need to do something about it.’ ” She said they wanted to perform plastic surgery on her. In her confabulated tales, delivered with gusto to gullible feature writers and adoring audiences, she said the assistant news director came to her one day to announce, “We’re having problems with the way you look. We’re going to send you to New York. They have people there who can help you.” She claimed she was sent to “a very chi chi poo poo lah dee dah salon. The kind that serves you wine, so that when you leave it does not matter what you look like. So … I said, ‘Do you all know how to do black hair?’ And the response was, ‘Oui, madame, we do black hair, we do red hair, we do blonde hair and we do your hair.’ So this French man put a French perm on my black hair. And I was the kind of woman at the time—this was 1977—that I sat there and let this French perm burn through my cerebral cortex rather than tell this man, ‘It’s hurting.’ … He left this perm on my head to the point when I got up out of the chair, the only thing holding my hair follicles in were scabs.”
More amusing than accurate, her exaggerated yarn about getting her head fried until she was “as bald as a billiard ball” was all part of a buoyant performance that took her audiences on a happy ride, but something her “aunt” Katharine Esters might have called another one of “Oprah’s lies.” Truth to tell, she had gone to a high-end beauty salon in Manhattan, but she had not been sent by the station. “We didn’t have the budget for that sort of thing,” said the news producer Larry Singer.
“I have no recollection of her being sent to New York City to have her hair redone by a French hairdresser,” said the news director Gary Elion.