Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [73]
The director had occasion to recall that moment twenty years later, when his friend Tom Cruise, promoting Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, jumped on Oprah’s couch to demonstrate his love for Katie Holmes, soon to be his wife. There had been rumors in the tabloids about Cruise possibly being homosexual, and Oprah seemed to fan that speculation by telling reporters she was not convinced of the star’s heterosexual enthusiasm. “I just didn’t buy it,” she said. “Didn’t buy it.” Following Cruise’s appearance on her show, the phrase “jump the couch,” meaning “strange or frenetic behavior,” jumped into A Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Spielberg was upset by the criticism his friend received and publicly defended him. “Working with Tom is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given by this business,” he said. He did not mention the time Oprah had exhibited similar exuberance by jumping on his couch in 1985, but by 2005, their twenty-year friendship had frayed. Months after the Cruise couch-jumping, Spielberg stayed away from the Broadway premiere of Oprah’s production of The Color Purple—The Musical, and she ignored the presentation of his lifetime achievement award at the Chicago Film Festival.
In the beginning, Oprah had been in awe of Steven Spielberg. “He’s the most wonderful human being I’ve ever met,” she told reporters in 1985, adding that everyone in the cast and crew was “awed out of our brains” to be working for him. “Oh, dear Gawd,” she drawled, “I cans believe we is workin’ for Mr. Steven.” When she saw Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment empire, she elevated him to godlike status. He was the movie mogul she aspired to be. “That’s when I wanted my own production company,” she said. Until then, Harpo, Inc., was simply the corporate entity she needed for tax purposes—to answer her fan mail—but after seeing Spielberg’s operation, she and Jeff Jacobs set about making Oprah the first black woman to own her own studio.
She claimed that as the only non-actor in the cast she was terrified during filming, but her costars laughed at the suggestion that she was intimidated by anybody or anything. Akosua Busia and Margaret Avery jokingly imitated her husky voice to mock her so-called fears: “ ‘I’m so terrified. Look out, everybody, here I come, and I’m scared out of my wits.’ ”
Oprah later criticized the casting of people of different skin tones as family. “[That] was one of the things that bothered me about The Color Purple.” On the set she did not hesitate to tell the director he was making some of her scenes look too slapsticky. He barred her from watching the dailies. In one memorable scene, where her character wallops the white mayor of the town, Oprah admitted she was not acting. Her response was real and visceral. “Steven had told the white actors to call me ‘nigger,’ but he didn’t tell me what he was going to do. ‘You big fat nigger bitch,’ they said.… Nobody had ever called me that, or anything close to it, and I didn’t need to be a method actor to react.… I was so shaken and angry that I … really decked the mayor.” Her character pays with years in jail for assaulting a white man. She emerges broken, empty, and blind in one eye to become a maid for the mayor’s wife. “I’m not a subservient person,” said Oprah, “so playing that part of Sofia was hard for me.”
Spielberg was so impressed by Oprah’s talent for improvisation that he enlarged her part during filming, and drew a magnificent performance out of her that, sadly, she never equaled in subsequent films. But in The Color Purple she was superb. “Unforgettable,” said the Los Angeles Times. “A brazen delight,” said Newsweek. “Outstanding,” agreed The Washington Post. Critics predicted her nomination for a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. The only lackluster review came from her father: “I think I’d put Whoopi Goldberg first, Margaret Avery second, and maybe