Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [68]
Oprah walked out in a royal blue suede dress dripping with strands of sequins and split up the front to reveal white hose and an $800 pair of blue suede shoes sparkling with rhinestones. In the fashion of the day, her hair was teased and sprayed to a lacquered hardness. Her eyes were painted purple and red, and her red lips were outlined in purple to complement the dress, which she said had been custom-made in Chicago by someone named Towana. Her earrings dripped with dangling rhinestones. She looked like she had come straight from a lounge act, without time to change at the truck stop.
Joan asked about her childhood, and Oprah spun her stories of “whuppins” and “pet cockroaches” before the conversation turned to dieting.
“How did you gain weight?” said Joan.
“I ate,” said Oprah.
“You’re a pretty girl and single. Lose it.”
Oprah said later she wanted to slap the comedienne. “But … I’m on national television for the first time.… Then Joan Rivers, who is this small, made a bet with me to lose weight. I said okay. I’m on national television. What else am I going to say?”
Rivers said she would lose five pounds if Oprah lost fifteen. They shook hands and agreed to meet back on the show in six weeks to see who had won.
Oprah returned to Chicago the next day and made a reservation for her “final feast” at Papa Milano. She invited her staff to join her. “They are my family,” she said. “We eat almost every meal together.” She alerted the media to cover the revel, which Debbi DiMaio said started at 7:30 A.M. with grilled cheese sandwiches. Then came breakfast at the Pancake House. “I ordered real pancakes, potato pancakes, and an omelet,” said Oprah. “When they brought the pancakes out, they said, ‘We made these reluctantly because we want you to win your bet with Joan. Don’t eat them all.’ Then for lunch I had my last superduper order of French fries. So I had my favorite food—potatoes—twice.”
The dinner menu consisted of pizza, pasta e fagioli, garlic bread, sweet peppers, ravioli, salad, cannoli, cookies, and spumoni. The next day a picture appeared in the Chicago Tribune of Oprah feeding a slice of pizza to her then-boyfriend Randy Cook, a tall, light-skinned African American man with a mustache.
“I was Stedman before Stedman,” Cook said many years later. “I lived with Oprah in her apartment from January through May 1985.”
Their five-month affair became a torment for Oprah years later, when Cook decided to go public with their relationship and write a book. By that time Oprah was living with Stedman Graham, who ran Athletes Against Drugs. Cook’s book proposal was titled The Wizard of O: The Truth Behind the Curtain: My Life with Oprah Winfrey. His chapters included:
Oprah Introduces Me to Smoking Cocaine
Oprah: Drugs, Sex, Out of Control
Oprah and Gayle
He described how Oprah introduced him to drugs and freebased her own crack cocaine in her twenty-fourth-floor condo. He wrote graphically that they became “carnally driven monsters” and indulged in “animalistic sex.” He said Oprah regularly gave him her bank card to withdraw money to buy their drugs. She was the financier; he was the supplier. He claimed he became addicted because of Oprah, and his life spiraled out of control. When he bottomed out, he lost his job, declared bankruptcy, and finally got into a twelve-step recovery program. “One of the steps requires me to make amends,” he wrote. “For me this means reaching out to Oprah. I go to her studio to talk but Oprah completely denies my existence.”
Rejected and angry, Cook decided to write a tell-all. He sent his proposal to publishers, but no one wanted to publish a book about a beloved American icon cooking up crack cocaine and smoking herself sky-high. So Cook contacted Diane Dimond, the investigative reporter for Hard Copy, a tabloid news television show devoted to celebrity exposés that ran in