Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [62]
Dennis Swanson was also dizzy with delight. “He was like a kid in a candy store,” recalled Wayne S. Kabak, then vice president of the talent agency ICM. “I had traveled to Chicago to visit a client I represented named Candace Hasey, who hosted WLS’s morning show. I stopped by to visit Swanson, her boss, who told me he had some bad news. He was going to fire Candy because he had found an extraordinarily talented replacement, who he thought would become a huge star. Notwithstanding that I was sitting in his office feeling rather downtrodden about Candy’s fate, Dennis was so excited about his discovery that he insisted on showing me the tape of the woman who was replacing my client. He put the tape in the machine showing Oprah in Baltimore and, in a flash, I knew he was right. If any executive should have reaped the huge rewards of Oprah when she finally hit syndication, it was Dennis, who sadly did not because the laws at the time prevented companies that owned networks from syndicating shows. Since ABC owned WLS, syndication rights were dealt to King World which made hundreds of millions, if not more, from Oprah.”
After her audition, she returned to Baltimore and called Ron Shapiro to negotiate her new contract. WJZ tried to keep her with inducements of a bigger salary (WLS was offering $200,000 a year), a company car, and a new apartment. “No one wanted her to go,” said Eileen Solomon, “and some tried to pressure her by saying she’d never make it on her own in Chicago.”
Bill Baker, then the chairman of Group W, called. “Oprah, you can’t leave WJZ,” he said. “Baltimore is your home. You’re the leading lady of the city. You must stay.” But Oprah had made her decision. Baker said he saw to it that Paul Yates, the general manager, was fired for letting her go.
Bill Carter felt that Oprah would succeed in Chicago, but he acknowledged that others did not. “There was an undercurrent of feeling here that this woman was not all that special,” he said. “I guess because people are used to turning on their television sets and seeing nothing but attractive women, sexy or whatever. They really didn’t see that substance in her. I think there’s an element of racism in that. Oprah is a very black-looking black woman.… There were expectations that she would flop in Chicago.”
Seeing he was losing her, Paul Yates would not release her until her contract expired at the end of the year. Then he played rough. “There’s no way you can make it in Chicago up against Donahue,” he said. “It’s his home base. You’re walking into a land mine and you can’t even see it. You’re committing career suicide. You’re going to fail.” Yates, an African American, said Chicago was a racist city that had not been entirely welcoming to its first black mayor, Harold Washington, and certainly wouldn’t be welcoming to her. But Oprah had already factored race into her decision.
“I made a deliberate choice about where to go,” she said. “Los Angeles? I’m black and female and they don’t work in LA. Orientals and Hispanics are their minorities. New York? I don’t like New York, period. Washington? There are thirteen women to every man in D.C. Forget it. I have enough problems.” Chicago, the third-largest television market in the country, seemed ideal. “It’s a big little town, sort of cosmopolitan country. The energy is different than Baltimore. It’s more like New York, but you’re not overwhelmed like in New York.”
Having decided to make the move, she now had to wait four months to finish her contract in Baltimore before starting her new job. “I thought the [Chicago] show might not survive without a host for that long. I started eating.