Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [60]
At 8:30 P.M. on September 8, 1981, she wrote a note to Gayle King, saying that personally and professionally her life did not seem worth living. “I’m so depressed, I want to die,” she wrote. She told Gayle where to find her will and her insurance policies. “I even told her to water my plants,” Oprah said later. She told the writer Barbara Grizzuti Harrison that she had not considered the ways and means to accomplish her death. “I didn’t even have the courage to end the relationship,” she said. Years later Gayle returned the note to Oprah, who said, “I see it now as a cry of self-pity. I never would have had the courage to do it.” She told her audience: “The whole idea that you’re going to kill yourself and they’re all going to be mourning—that’s not really the reality. I realized that if he even came to my funeral he would go on with the other girl and on with his life and still be happy.”
The one-two punch of losing syndication, plus the love of her life, seemed unbearable at the time. Her friends were concerned enough to keep a quiet suicide watch, and one gently suggested that she seek psychotherapy, but Oprah refused. “I was so adamant about being my own person that I wouldn’t go for counseling,” she said. Her only solace was her star status in Baltimore. “She was known and loved throughout the city,” said WJZ’s former executive producer Eileen Solomon. “In that era Baltimore was still pretty much a town that saw itself in the shadow of Washington, D.C., with more of a blue-collar sensibility.” And Oprah was its queen.
“She was a very big deal here,” said Bob Leffler, “and we’re a sports town, where the biggest celebrities are baseball and football stars.… I remember seeing Oprah at Ron Shapiro’s spring party, where everyone ignored legendary Orioles like Eddie Murray and Jim Palmer and flocked to her.… Now that’s saying something for Baltimore.”
As a testament to Oprah’s popularity, she was chosen by the students at Goucher, a prestigious women’s college in Maryland, to deliver the commencement address in 1981, a huge honor for a twenty-seven-year-old woman, only five years older than most of the graduates. She spoke to them about her dreams as a little girl growing up in Mississippi and wanting what they had—the chance to go to a fine school, to graduate, and to begin life with the full expectation that all her dreams would come true. “When I became old enough or wise enough to know I couldn’t be just like you, I wanted to be Diana Ross, or just be somebody’s Supreme.” Finally, she said she realized that wasn’t going to be possible, either, so she learned to accept the numerators that set her apart—sex, race, education, talent, economics, family background. She said that even with all the differences that separated her from them, the Goucher graduates, they were more alike than unalike in their struggle to be good human beings. She said the struggle was harder for them as women, powerless in a man’s world.
As if advising herself, she urged the graduates to nurture themselves. “Because unlike our mothers, we know that by the time we are middle-aged we have more than a fifty percent chance of never being married, divorced, widowed, or separated. So there’s no denying the obvious. We have to take care of ourselves.”
Her experience as an emotionally abused woman seemed to inform her speech. “I found myself one black woman rendered powerless. Being preyed upon by other people who were not only unreasonable, but just unfair. Powerless because I kept trying to be liked by people who didn’t even like themselves. Powerless! Because I believed the world was one big popularity contest that I had to win or accept failure as a woman—as a human