Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [56]
“It was just a moving thing,” she said. “I thought, ‘This child will grow up with more love than most children.’ Before, I was one of those people who thought all homosexuals or anything like that were going to burn in hell because the Scriptures said it.”
At the time, Oprah’s strong Baptist beliefs were being tested because of her intimate involvement with Tim Watts, a married man with a young son and no intention of leaving his wife, Donna.
“He was her first real love,” said Oprah’s sister, Patricia Lee Lloyd.
“Oh, God,” said Barbara Hamm, remembering when Oprah was so depressed over Tim Watts’s breaking up with her that she could not get out of bed for three days.
Arleen Weiner, the producer of People Are Talking, recalled “the many, many tearful phone calls at one, two, three, four in the morning.”
The women on the production staff were sympathetic and did all they could to help Oprah, who was so obsessed with the six-foot-six disc jockey that she once ran after him in her nightgown and threw herself on the hood of his car to try to make him stay with her. Another time she blocked the front door of her apartment, screaming, “Don’t go, don’t leave,” and then threw his keys down the toilet. This was the story she later told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, attributing it to her more benign relationship with Bubba Taylor.
After Watts walked out on her at 3:00 A.M., she called her best friend, Gayle King, who she knew had been in a similar situation. “For her it wasn’t throwing keys, it was checking the odometer,” Oprah said of King. “We both have done equally crazy things. I was on the hood, but Gayle was on the bumper. So because she has been there and lived in that place, she never judged me. But she was always there to listen and support me.”
The men on staff were not so tolerant of Oprah’s hysterics. More than two decades after working with her, Dave Gosey, the director of People Are Talking, could not say one kind word about her. “My mother told me if you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing at all. So I have nothing at all to say about Oprah Winfrey.”
Her volcanic affair with Tim Watts started in 1979 and crested and cratered for five years, even after she left Baltimore and moved to Chicago. “Those years were the worst of my life,” she said. “I had bad man troubles.” Being in love with a married man meant snatched hours, empty weekends, and lonely holidays that left her feeling desperate and forlorn.
“Poor thing. She had to spend Thanksgiving with us one year [1980] because she had no place else to go,” said Michael Fox, whose parents, Jim and Roberta Fox, were close to Richard and Annabelle Sher. “We didn’t know her until the Shers brought her to our house.… I sat next to her at dinner. She ate so much food that night I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never seen a human being eat as much as Oprah did.… Paul Yates [WJZ’s general manager] told me about her affair with Tim Watts and how miserable she was.”
Oprah did not mind being seen in public with a married man, but when she found out that he was also having an affair with a pretty young blonde, she said she felt “devastated” about being “two-timed.”
“My affair with Tim started in 1980 [in the midst of his with Oprah],” said Judy Lee Colteryahn, the daughter of Lloyd Colteryahn, a former football star from the University of Maryland who played for the Baltimore Colts. “Tim always said that Oprah couldn’t know about us because it would ruin his business opportunities [with her].… He led me to believe that he was only seeing her to get a job at Channel 13.… He did get a weekly Sunday show there for a while.… So I didn’t pay much attention at first, but then my friends started seeing Tim and Oprah having dinner