Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [57]
When Oprah became famous the tabloids pursued Watts and offered to pay him for the story of their love affair, including details of their drug use. “He called Oprah, said he didn’t want to talk but he was strapped for cash,” said Judy Colteryahn. “He said, ‘Look at it from my point of view. I don’t want to talk to these people, but I sure could use some money. I’ve got kids, I’ve got bills, but I am a friend to you.… What can we work out?’ That’s what he told me.
“That Christmas [1989] Gayle King delivered a gift-wrapped box to Tim in Baltimore, and Tim called me down on the Eastern Shore, where I was staying with my parents. He said, ‘Oprah came through. Big-time. She really came through. Fifty thousand dollars, cash. Get your butt back here. We’re going out for New Year’s Eve.’
“Naturally I drove right back to Baltimore. Like Oprah, I was always available for Tim. Like her, I was always hanging out the window waiting for him to drive up in his blue Datsun. But … she was smarter than me. She only wasted five years of her life on him. I wasted more.… I did not intend to fall in love with a black man.… Tim is very light-skinned, so I told my friends that he was mulatto.… I nearly fainted the first time I saw a picture of Stedman Graham, because he looked exactly like Tim: tall—six-foot-five or six-foot-six—handsome, with a mustache, and very light-skinned. I thought, ‘Wow. Oprah has found a replica for Tim in Stedman.’ ”
That New Year’s Eve, Oprah’s gift of $50,000 in cash financed her former lover’s trip to Atlantic City with Judy Colteryahn. “Tim got a limousine and we had a big fancy hotel and front-row seats in Remo, a black jazz club.… At the time I thought he was a great guy for not selling Oprah out, especially on drugs, which we did all the time in those days.… Now that I’m older I realize how much power Oprah had and what she could have done [to him]. So they probably both had nooses around each other’s necks.
“I asked [him] what he could say [to the tabloids] that would make Oprah pay him fifty thousand dollars in hush money not to talk.… That was big money then [$50,000 in 1989 equals $86,506.85 in 2009].… I was wondering what he knew about her.… He said she did not want him to talk about her brother being gay [Jeffrey Lee died of AIDS December 22, 1989]. It’s no big deal to have a brother who is homosexual, but apparently it was to Oprah.… Tim also said he knew about some lesbian affairs or whatever.… But that’s all he said, and we never went into it.”
Oprah never revealed Tim Watts by name as the man who had brought her so low in those years. Over the next two decades she referred to him on television as a “jerk,” frequently telling her audience of the debasements she had endured because of him. “I was in love; it was an obsession,” she said. “I was one of those sick women who believed that life was nothing without a man.… The more he rejected me, the more I wanted him. I felt depleted, powerless.… There’s nothing worse than rejection. It’s worse than death. I would wish sometimes for the guy to die because at least I could go to the grave and visit.… I have been down on the floor on my knees crying so hard, my eyes were swollen … then it came to me. I realized there was no difference between me and an abused woman, who has to go to a shelter—except that I could stay home.”
African American women understand in their bones the slave mentality