Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [69]
“In my experience with Hard Copy, which was owned by Paramount Pictures, there wasn’t anyone we couldn’t cover,” said Diane Dimond. “I did stories on Michael Jackson and Heidi Fleiss [the Hollywood Madam, who went to prison], and she had the names of all my bosses in her little black book. I covered O.J. Simpson and I broke the William Kennedy Smith rape case, so no one seemed off-limits. But I found out fast that Oprah Winfrey was definitely the one untouchable when Linda Bell Blue, my producer … got a call from none other than Jonathan Dolgen, head of Paramount, who screamed and yelled until Linda promised to call me off.… She told me that we could not be seen as attacking one of the most successful black women in America.… I had talked to Cook and his lawyer several times … but at that point I had to drop the story.”
Cook told The Star that Oprah was using her influence to stop him from telling his story. Oprah denied the charge and called him “a liar” and “a drug addict” who could not be trusted or believed. Further, Cook alleged, she said he would be very sorry if he told his story to anyone else. He backed off, eventually relapsed into drugs, and finally reentered recovery.
By then Oprah had learned that someone else claiming to have done drugs with her in Baltimore had also sold a story to the National Enquirer, and while the story had not been published, she felt threatened that soon her drug past would be splashed all over the tabloids. “We did have a story in the works entitled ‘I Was Oprah’s Drug Dealer,’ but it got killed at the last minute,” recalled the Enquirer’s senior editor. “As I recall, he came to us and we paid him, after he passed a lie detector test.”
“I interviewed the guy in Baltimore who claimed he was Oprah’s boyfriend when she worked at the local station,” said the writer Jerry Oppenheimer. “He did coke with her and, as I recall, he had also sold drugs for a living when he was involved with her. He had photographs of the two of them together—that was always a National Enquirer requirement, that and passing a lie detector test—and I felt he was credible … a street guy but pretty articulate and very nice, very likeable.”
Like most celebrities, Oprah came to despise the tabloids. Early in her career she had cooperated with them on stories about herself, even provided personal photographs, and paid someone to plant “do-good” stories about her donations to charities. But once she became famous, she reviled the grocery store weeklies as “verbal pornography” and railed against their coverage of her. She fired employees who leaked information to them and instituted a company rule that no one was allowed to say her name outside of the office. In public they were instructed to refer to her as “Mary,” so that conversations overheard in restaurants or bars would not become tabloid fodder. They also were forbidden to take candid pictures of her. She became obsessed with the coverage of her weight in the tabloids, and their unflattering photos frequently brought her to tears.
“I once put a reporter on twenty-four-hour coverage of Oprah on vacation at Necker Island with Stedman,” said a former assignment editor for the National Enquirer. “When Stedman went out to play golf, Oprah called room service and ordered two pecan pies. Our reporter helped the waiter with delivery. Oprah answered the door. No one else was in the room with her. An hour later she called room service to pick up the empty tins outside her door, which our guy photographed.… Of all the stories we did on Oprah and her weight over the years, that one stands out in my mind because of what it told me about the kind of obesity bingeing she did in secret when no one was around.”
Her dearest friends pleaded with Oprah to ignore the tabloids: “They are not you,” said Maya Angelou. “You are not in those stories.” But Oprah knew that her audience was the tabloids’ audience: they shared the same demographics. The women who watched her show every day shopped for groceries every week, and they saw the sensational stories