Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [54]
“She used to come into the makeup room like a little girl and sit down on a stool while I was being made up and ask questions about people she was interested in,” said Dick Maurice, the entertainment editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a frequent guest. “She had this quest for information about stars.”
After the debut show, Oprah was the only one to walk off the set giddy with delight. “We live,” she yelled as she grabbed a glass of champagne and hugged Richard Sher, who was reeling with misgivings. The producers were also a little shaky, but Oprah was soaring. “I came off the air, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do.… This is it. This is what I was born to do.… It just felt like breathing. It was the most natural process for me.”
Within a week, The Baltimore Sun agreed. “Oprah is rapidly proving that she was an excellent selection for a morning talk show host,” wrote Bill Carter. “She simply looks very good in the morning talk format. She is low key but bright and attractive, and that combination works well over a morning cup of coffee.”
“It took us two or three years to jell,” said Richard Sher, the dominant partner to Oprah’s second banana. “My Afro was as big as hers.” Quick and witty, Sher had been selected because he resembled Phil Donahue and might appeal to Donahue’s female audience, which Sher never disputed, even given a chance. “He was the talent,” joked Oprah. “Just ask him.” As a Southern black woman who shrank from confrontation and described herself as a “people pleaser,” she accommodated her cocky co-host, and gave his ego a wide berth. She had learned from her bruising debacle with Jerry Turner and was determined to make this partnership work.
“We were very close,” recalled Sher. “I’ll never work with anyone again like that. We knew what each other was thinking.… I once took her to the hospital because she had chest pains and she put me down as next of kin. She had her own pretzel and potato chip drawer in our house. She’d jog up, we’d hear the door open, and the drawer open and we’d know Ope was there. She was real close to my wife, Annabelle, and the kids. She used to call me her best girlfriend.”
“He taught me how to be Jewish,” said Oprah. “He also taught me to swear.”
“Oprah and Richard had a very close relationship,” said Barbara Hamm, an associate producer for People Are Talking. “They were like brother and sister, although they had creative disagreements about what guests should be on the show and the line of questioning.” She preferred movie stars, rock stars, and soap opera stars; he wanted government officials and corporate moguls. She asked questions that made him squirm.
“Oprah liked to have fun,” Hamm said, “get the audience into the show. Richard wasn’t so sure. He didn’t want to lose control. During one show she got the audience literally dancing in the aisles. It was wild and it worked.”
Unlike her cohost, Oprah was not overly concerned about her professional image. Nor was she afraid to ask naive questions and look silly, even undignified, on occasion. She exercised with manic fitness guru Richard Simmons, danced with ethnic dancers, and interviewed a prostitute who had killed a client. She also decorated cakes, basted turkeys, and bobbed for apples. When Richard Sher entered into a ponderous discussion about television journalism with Frank Reynolds, the network anchor for ABC-TV, Oprah sat on the couch listening quietly.
“Her cohost was asking all these serious, boring questions,” recalled Kelly Craig, a nineteen-year-old