Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [64]
“I usually don’t do homework,” said Oprah. “I really have learned that for me and my style of interviewing, the less preparation I do, the better because what everybody is now calling Oprah’s success is me being spontaneous and that’s all it is.” The Chicago Sun-Times’s Richard Roeper disagreed. He said her success was due “largely to loud, self-centered and often cheesy programming.”
In your face and up your nose, Oprah left her audiences (and eventually Donahue’s) gasping and begging for more. “The difference between Donahue and me is me,” she said. “He’s more intellectual in his approach. I appeal to the heart and relate personally to my audiences. I think it’s pretentious to think you can go into a lot of depth on a subject in only an hour.” Never plagued by self-inflicted doubts, Oprah appeared supremely confident, especially after Donahue moved from Chicago to New York City. The only signs of her internal combustion were nail-biting and nonstop eating. Otherwise, she seemed unintimidated by the talk show king. “We’re stomping him in the ratings, you know, and suddenly he’s gone [left town]. It was maaaahvelous.”
Publicly she flicked Donahue a modicum of respect (“He listens”), but privately she complained that for the six months they were both in Chicago he did not contact her. “He never called just to say ‘Hi Ope, welcome to town.’ ” She never forgot the slight.
Everyone else called, though, including Eppie Lederer, aka Ann Landers, the city’s most famous resident. Oprah sent her a $1,000 jeweled Judith Leiber bag to say thank you, and invited the advice columnist to be a frequent guest on her show. The welcome call that paid pure gold came from Dori Wilson, a former model who owned her own public relations firm. “As a black woman I wanted to reach out and help Oprah feel good about our city. So I invited her to lunch.… She was the most driven person I ever met. Wanted to go straight to the top.… I rifled my Rolodex for her and helped with publicity here and there, pitching stories to various publications.… We became good friends for several years. Then, well, I guess you could say she dropped me.”
During their first lunch, in 1984, Oprah asked Dori to recommend a lawyer/agent, and Dori called her friend Jeffrey D. Jacobs. (“The D is for dependable,” Jacobs told clients.) “Jeff was then with Foos, Meyers and Jacobs and represented a lot of talent in Chicago, including Harry Caray [broadcaster for the Chicago Cubs] and the boxer James ‘Quick’ Tillis.”
In Jacobs, Oprah found a Moses to lead her to the Promised Land. It was like Sears meeting Roebuck. Over the next eighteen years Winfrey and Jacobs built the House of Oprah, but then, just as Sears dropped Roebuck, Winfrey jettisoned Jacobs. Their friendship fractured over professional jealousies, and Oprah decided to reign over her own kingdom—one monarch, not two. She no longer wanted a partner, especially a hard-charger like Jacobs, whom she once described as “a piranha, which is what I need.” By 2002 she was ready to be her own piranha. Following their acrimonious split, the lawyer was able to walk away from Harpo having earned approximately $100 million, with Oprah worth $988 million. “One of the reasons she is so financially successful,” said Jacobs before their split, “is that we understand it’s not just how much you make, but how much you keep.”
Fortune magazine described Jeff Jacobs as “the little known power behind the media queen’s throne”; others called him “Oprah’s brain.” As her consigliere