Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [52]
Being hell-bent on cosmetic self-improvement, Oprah had taken herself to New York City, but in her mythology of the makeover supposedly mandated by dunderheaded male management, she wailed, “They wanted to make me a Puerto Rican.… They wanted me to bleach my skin, change my nose.” At this point in her speeches she usually took a swipe at the news director who had hired and fired her. She claimed he had also wanted her to change her name. Sometimes she said he wanted her to call herself Suzie. Putting a hand on her hip, she would grin and ask her audience, “Do I look like a Suzie to you?” Other times she said he wanted her to be called Cathy.
The only reporter who ever questioned Oprah on her fabulist tales was the television critic for The Baltimore Sun, Bill Carter, later with The New York Times. After interviewing her in 1986, when she insisted that Gary Elion had wanted her to change her name, Carter called the former news director, then a practicing lawyer.
“I’m flattered that Oprah even remembers me,” Elion said ten years after leaving the station, “but I never asked anyone to change her name, except my wife when I asked her to marry me.” Remaining gracious as Oprah pounded away at him in interviews and speeches, Elion simply resigned himself to Winston Churchill’s observation that a lie flies halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on.
In the spring of 1977, William F. Baker arrived to become general manager of WJZ, and was soon promoted to president of Westinghouse Television and Group W Satellite Communications. “We all called him Dr. Baker because he had a PhD,” said Jane McClary, who had been hired by Baker in Cleveland. “I got my job right out of college because my brother-in-law was press secretary to Senator John Glenn of Ohio. Bill Baker was so smart that way. He hired Arleen Weiner, whose husband was a big-time lawyer in Baltimore, and he also hired Maria Shriver. He saw the advantage of hiring people with those kind of connections.… Maria wanted to be on the air, but she was too heavy and unattractive then, so Dr. Baker put her in as an associate producer on the Evening Exchange.”
Having created Morning Exchange in Cleveland, Ohio, the highest-rated local morning program in the country and the template for ABC’s Good Morning America, Baker’s mandate was to do the same in Baltimore.
“Daytime television was then an untapped audience of stay-at-home moms, who were completely underestimated,” he said. “All they had were soap operas and game shows. I wanted to give them something more, and after my wife and I had gone to a few parties and gotten to know people at the station, she suggested I consider Oprah. ‘You want to do another Morning Exchange here, and you need a female cohost. I think you should look at Oprah. She wears her heart on her sleeve. Talks all the time, and relates well to people. I think she’d do well for you.’ ”
By then Oprah had worked herself back into news and was anchoring weekdays at noon. She wasn’t permanent and she wasn’t prime time, but she was back in the game. The last thing she wanted to do was to start Dialing for Dollars on a daytime talk show.
“Oh, please, no,” she begged Baker when told that he was buying the popular franchise, and that her new job as cohost of People Are Talking would include giving the Dialing for Dollars password at the start of the program; at the end of the hour she would randomly select a phone number from a bowl of phone numbers previously submitted by viewers. If the selected viewer was watching the show and answered the phone with the correct password, he or she would win money. If the phone was not answered, the money would be added to the jackpot for the next day’s call. It was a forty-five-second device producers used to keep viewers tuned in.
Suddenly cockatoos, circus elephants, and fire engines looked substantive. “The truth is that Oprah was on her way out,” Baker said many years later. “She was simply serving out her contract until she could be let go.… I knew she couldn’t