Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [55]
“Oprah had to be taught how to ask those questions,” recalled Jane McClary, “and you have to give the producer Sherry Burns credit for training Oprah to be Oprah.… I can remember Sherry screaming and yelling and swearing at Oprah day after day. ‘Oprah, what the hell were you thinking? What was in your head? Why didn’t you ask that obvious question? You should always ask the first thing that comes to mind. Just say it. Say it. Say it. Put your gut out there, girl. Don’t be afraid. Just do it.’ ”
One morning People Are Talking booked conjoined twins as guests, thirty-two-year-old women attached at the tops of their heads. They talked about going through life sharing everything. Oprah was intrigued. “When one of you has to go to the bathroom at night, does the other one have to go with her?” she asked. Richard Sher nearly fell off his perch.
Oprah soon saw herself as the audience’s back-fence neighbor. “I was dishing the dirt and meddling in other folks’ business which is what I do best. My acting came in handy. In acting you lose your personality in favor of the character you’re playing but you use it to provide energy for your character. The same way on [a talk show]. I … use it to concentrate on bringing the most out of my guests.”
She certainly did that with the poultry mogul Frank Perdue. “He was a difficult guest, almost surly,” recalled Barbara Hamm. “Toward the end of the show, Oprah asked if it bothered him when people said he looked like a chicken. He took offense and asked if she minded people saying she looked like a baboon. Oprah couldn’t believe … that he would make such a racist remark. Her chicken comment may have been a little rude, but to come back with that … We cut to a commercial. Oprah took it graciously and let it go. It was a stunning moment.”
Years later, when she became overly concerned about her public image and did not want to be seen as a victim of racism, Oprah denied the exchange had ever taken place. “Frank Perdue did not call me a baboon,” she told Vibe magazine in 1997, dismissing the story as an urban myth. Those at WJZ who saw the show, such as Barbara Hamm and Marty Bass, could not explain her denial. Bob Leffler, a public relations executive in Baltimore, said, “I forget now whether Frank Perdue called her a gorilla or a monkey or a baboon. But it was some kind of primate.… I saw the show and have never forgotten it.” The incident was not covered in the Baltimore papers, and few tapes of People Are Talking exist. “We used two-inch tapes then,” said Bill Baker. “They were very expensive, so we reused them and recorded over [everything].”
WJZ’s essayist, Mike Olesker, mentioned the Frank Perdue show in his book about television news, but the most indelible show was the one on which Oprah and Richard interviewed the famous fashion model Beverly Johnson.
“I like handsome, sexy men,” she said.
“What’s your ideal first date?” Oprah asked.
“To be taken to a nice restaurant and to be wined and dined. And then have the man take me home …”
“Yes?”
“And give me an enema,” she said.
Richard Sher immediately broke for a commercial. “He and Oprah hooted about the remark for years,” said Olesker. “But at that moment, it was another reminder for Sher: Could he talk to fashion models in the morning, risking diarrheic confessions, and maintain credibility in the evening [reporting the news]?”
Even in retirement, Sher was unapologetic about the tabloid-like shows that he and Oprah did on People Are Talking. “When sex got big, we did shows on the man with the micro-penis. We did the thirty-minute orgasm. We did a lot of the tough topics—the transsexual mother with brittle bone disease.”
One of their most exploitive shows became