Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [58]
Oprah was still raw from being rejected by Watts when she told Cosmopolitan magazine in 1986, “If I start to talk about it, I’ll weep on the floor. But I tell you, I will never travel that road again. The next time somebody tells me he’s no good for me, I’m gonna believe him. I’m not going to say to myself, ‘Well, maybe I’m too pushy, or maybe I don’t talk enough about him, or maybe, maybe, maybe. I’m not racing home to meet him there and then not hear from him until midnight. Uh, uh. Too painful.”
Even when she was supposedly happy in a committed relationship with Stedman Graham, she continued to refer to her doormat days with Tim Watts. In 1994 she told Entertainment Weekly that she was reading her journal from that time and was chagrined by her pathetic musings: “ ‘Maybe if I was rich enough or famous enough or was witty, clever, wise enough, I could be enough for you.…’ This is a guy I used to take the seeds out of the watermelon for so he wouldn’t have to spit!”
Twenty years after the affair she was still talking about him, unable to put the past to rest. In 2005 she told Tina Turner, “I just ran across a letter I wrote in my 20s, when I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. I’d written 12 pages to one of the great jerks of all time. I wanted to burn the letter. I want no record of the fact that I was ever so pitiful.” In 2006 she told London’s Daily Mail, “I will never be in a position where I love someone else more than myself, where I give over my power to someone else. I will never be in a position where I get in my car and follow them to see if they are going where they said they were going. And I’ll never be in a position where I’m looking in someone’s pocket or their wallet, or checking who they are on the phone with. And I will never be in the position where, if they lie to me more than once, I don’t end that relationship.”
During her affair with Watts, Oprah was living well in Baltimore, making $100,000 a year. She described herself then as young, attractive, and still slim. “I had so much going for me, but I still thought I was nothing without a man.” She had moved into a pretty two-bedroom apartment in Cross Keys and bought a BMW. “I still remember one day we were hanging out and she transferred five thousand dollars from her savings account to her checking account just for the thrill of being able to do it,” said Barbara Hamm.
Professionally, Oprah’s star was shining. She and Richard Sher had become the toast of Baltimore as their show began outdrawing Phil Donahue’s in the local ratings. They were so successful that their producers decided to go for syndication, which for Oprah rang the bells of big money and national recognition. It was the main reason she stayed at WJZ after her close friends Maria Shriver and Gayle King moved on to bigger markets.
Oprah and Richard shared the same agent, Ron Shapiro (“That’s Sha-pie-row,” the lawyer instructed), and she insisted he write into her new contract that if she wasn’t working on a syndicated show, she could leave the station at the end of two years (1983) instead of three. So confident was everyone of syndication success that they signed off on the clause without objection.
In March 1981, the staff of People Are Talking went to New York