Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [65]
Within months of their meeting in 1984, Oprah became a full-time job for Jeff Jacobs, and by 1986 he had left his law firm to become her in-house counsel. He negotiated her contracts, supervised her staff, and oversaw production of her show. He also managed her endorsement opportunities, her speaking engagements, and her charitable contributions. He foresaw the future market for branding and pushed her to establish Harpo, Inc. (Oprah spelled backward); she was so grateful that she gave him 10 percent of the company and made him president. Having refused to hire an agent, a manager, or an attorney—“I don’t get why anyone would want to pay 40 percent of their earnings in commissions and retainers”—she felt she got full value from Jeff Jacobs. “If something were to happen to him, I don’t know what I would do,” she said. “I don’t know.”
Oprah’s cousin, Jo Baldwin, recalled Jacobs as a negotiating machine. “He was brilliant at making deals for her—that’s what gave him his adrenaline. He once took Oprah from making $11 million in one week to making $33 million—in one week.… Yet she came to me and said she was going to fire Jeff. Stedman told Oprah to let him go because he put his name on the door without asking her permission. I told Oprah that I had sat on the plane with Jeff and heard his visions for her and the empire he wanted to build in her name. I told her if she had a brain in her head she’d go to Jeff and tell him his name on the door was too small. Make those letters bigger. All that she has was Jeff’s doing, and pushing him out like she did … well, that showed what Oprah was.”
Oprah became an immediate sensation in Chicago, leaving in her wake nothing but breathless admirers. Cabbies honked, bus drivers waved, and pedestrians hugged her. People on the street ran into restaurants just to watch her eat. “These are the glory days, I’ll tell you,” she told the writer Lyn Tornabene. “I walk down the street and everyone is saying, ‘Opry, how ya doin’?’ ‘Hey, Okra, how ya doin’?’ ” She even surprised herself with her success. “I’ve always done well,” she said, “but I didn’t expect it to happen this fast. I even did well in Nashville. People would call and say, ‘You’re all right for a black girl.’ The callers meant well.”
Oprah enjoyed playing with the subject of race. “ ‘I say, Mabel, is that girl colored?’ ‘Why, ah believe she is,’ ” she would say, imitating an imagined viewer first tuning in to her show. “When I give a speech, the little old ladies say, ‘What’d she say?’ ‘She said she used to be colored?’ ” Depending on which publication she was talking to, she either emphasized or dismissed her struggle as a black woman in broadcasting. She told African American magazines she found it tough to watch white news-people advance ahead of her, although none ever had. “There was another obstacle,” Oprah said, voicing her deepest insecurity. “I was too black-looking. A lot of producers and directors were looking for light skin, tiny noses, small lips. It was a heartache for me and a source of anger as well.” To white reporters she claimed she never experienced discrimination. “Even when I was growing up on a farm in Mississippi I believed I would do great things. Everybody was talking about racism, but I always believed I was as good as everybody else. It never occurred to me that I was less than all the little white kids.” She told Cosmopolitan: “Truth is I’ve never felt prevented from doing anything because I was either black or a woman.”
Oprah identified herself as a woman first and then as a black woman, but certainly not as a black spokeswoman. “Whenever I hear the words ‘community organization’ or ‘task force,’ I know I’m in deep trouble. People feel you have to lead a Civil Rights movement every