Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [66]
Yet she understood the commercial advantage of being a woman of color. “There aren’t a lot of black women in the Chicago media,” she said. “When I came on the air here it was like you could hear TVs clicking all over the city.” She entertained her audiences with stories about being “a little nappy-headed colored chile,” and gave them just enough shuffle and jive to feel hip. More important, though, she brought a heartwarming black presence into white suburban homes that lacked diversity. Debra DiMaio said the station manager was delighted he had managed to find someone who wasn’t an “Angela Davis type who’d picket the station with a gun in her hair.”
Oprah became the first black woman to successfully host her own daytime talk show on national television, although Della Reese had hosted a daytime variety show from 1969 to 1970. Oprah arrived at a time when African Americans were finally triumphing on the air: Bryant Gumbel reigned over the number one–rated network morning program, The Today Show, and Bill Cosby dominated prime time with The Cosby Show, the country’s most watched television program. As a black female, Oprah benefited from affirmative action, but she also brought immense talent to her place at the table.
Much too shrewd to leave success to serendipity, she became the grand marshal of her own parade. She courted the Chicago media, befriended columnists, and burbled to reporters, granting every interview requested. She even gave full access to a waiter who wanted to write about her. “I had never done a one-on-one interview before I met Oprah,” said waiter-turned-writer Robert Waldron. “I first called to do a piece for Us magazine, and was given four days of interviews, but then the piece was killed by the owner, Jann Wenner. Alice McGee, who handled Oprah’s fan mail then, wanted me to place it elsewhere, so she helped me get the article on the cover of The Star [tabloid]. Oprah was delighted. Then I went back and proposed writing her biography. I nearly fainted when she said yes.” The book, titled Oprah!, was published in 1987.
“Oh, those were the good old days,” said Robert Feder, former television critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. “Oprah was a reporter’s dream then … open, accessible, genial, and extremely cooperative.… I could always get her on the phone.… She’d call and leave me voice messages.… We’d lunch once a week in her office, where she’d pad around in bare feet or prop her cowboy boots up on her messy desk.” At the start of each television season she sat down with Feder for a Q&A session about her plans and projects. For years he kept on his office wall a framed photo of the two of them that she had signed: “Hey, what a team! Oprah.” Feder, her biggest cheerleader for a decade, removed the photo in 1994, the year many Chicago reporters call “The Dawn of the Diva.”
Upon her arrival in town, Oprah saturated the media with so many items about herself and her thighs and her eating binges and her nights without a man that by the end of 1985, Clarence Petersen of the Chicago Tribune pronounced her “the city’s most over-celebrated celebrity.” Even Feder wrote, “Cool it on any more stories about Oprah Winfrey—until she wins an Oscar.” But reporters could not get enough of Oprah, who was as enthralled with herself as they were. During an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine she gushed like a geyser:
I’m very strong … very strong. I know there is nothing you or anybody can tell me that I don’t already know. I have this inner spirit that directs and guides me.… I’ll tell you what being interviewed has done for me. It’s the therapy I never had.… I’m always growing. Now I’ve learned to acknowledge and accept the fact that I’m a kind person. I really like me, I really do. I’d like to know me, if