Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [67]
The writer ended her profile by saying: “Thank you, Oprah. Now, please, hush up.”
But Oprah didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t hush up. Instinctively she knew that talking, talking, talking kept people from probing, probing, probing. The more she seemed to reveal about herself, the more she could hide, and still appear to be open and forthcoming. Her stories—the ones she chose to tell—were winning and farm fresh, which always left audiences rooting for her success.
“My greatest gift is my ability to talk,” she told the writer Bill Zehme, “and to be myself at all times, no matter what. I am as comfortable in front of the camera with a million people watching me as I am sitting here talking to you. I have the ability to be perfectly vulnerable at all times.”
Most of the media welcomed her self-promotion. What they may have branded as arrogant in someone else, they accepted as authentic in Oprah. She was allowed to play in the same league as baseball great Dizzy Dean, who said, “If you done it, it ain’t braggin’.” Shining her own star paid off so well that when she went national in 1986, she demanded control of her own public relations so she could continue shaping that image.
As the local host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she received her first national publicity in Newsweek, when she dethroned Phil Donahue in the ratings. She was thrilled to get a full page in the national newsmagazine, but she resented being described as “nearly two hundred pounds of Mississippi-bred black womanhood, brassy, earthy, street smart and soulful.”
“I did not like it,” she told the writer Robert Waldron. “I don’t like the term ‘street smart.’ I think it’s a term that gets put off on black people a lot. Rather than say intelligent, it’s easier to say we’re street smart and that kind of explains a lot of things. ‘Oh, well, she made it because she’s street smart.’ Well, I am the least of the street smarts. I’ve never lived on the streets. I don’t know anything about it. I never was a hustling kid. I mean, I had my days of delinquency. But I was never like a hustling kid, or streetwise. I wouldn’t last ten minutes on the streets.”
Despite her defensiveness, she admitted that the Newsweek article “opened a lot of doors for me,” including the ultimate in celebrity beatification: an invitation to appear on The Tonight Show.
“They said if I appeared with [substitute host] Joan Rivers, I could come back and appear with Johnny Carson. I said, ‘Nooo problem.’ ”
The warden of the Cook County Jail was so taken with Oprah that he allowed inmates to stay up past their regular curfew to watch her that night.
Jeff Jacobs, who accompanied Oprah and her staff to LA, told her to tape a couple of shows to promote ABC’s miniseries Hollywood Wives. This would ingratiate her with the network that owned and operated WLS, bring a little glamour to her local audience, and promote her appearance on television’s premier late-night show. So with her camera crew in tow, Oprah lunched at Ma Maison and strolled the shops of Rodeo Drive with Angie Dickinson, Mary Crosby, and author Jackie Collins, sister of movie star Joan Collins.
The night before, she met her friend Maria Shriver and then-fiancé Arnold Schwarzenegger for dinner. “We sat in a restaurant booth and Arnold played Joan Rivers. He kept pumping me. ‘Why are you successful?’ ‘Why did you gain weight?’ ”
At the time, Joan Rivers was famous for skewering Elizabeth Taylor with fat jokes: “She’s got more chins than the Hong Kong phone book.…” “Her bumper sticker says, ‘Honk if you have groceries.’ ” “The three biggest boobs in Virginia are John Warner [husband number six] and Elizabeth Taylor.” So it was inevitable that the subject of Oprah’s weight would come up during her seven-minute appearance on The Tonight Show.
Standing behind the curtain on January 29, 1985, Oprah listened to Joan Rivers’s introduction: “I’m so anxious to meet her. They talk about her as streetwise, brassy, and soulful. Please help me welcome—Miss Oprah Winfrey.”
Oprah felt put