Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [74]
In the middle of filming, Oprah flew to Chicago to sign contracts with King World to syndicate The Oprah Winfrey Show in the fall of 1986. At the press conference afterward she told reporters, “I’m thrilled at the prospect of beating Phil [Donahue] throughout the country.” With more than one hundred stations committed to carrying her show, she received a $1 million signing bonus. She called her father, then a councilman in Nashville. “Daddy, I’m a millionaire,” she shouted. “I’m a millionaire.” She returned to North Carolina and told Steven Spielberg that he should reconsider putting her name on the movie’s posters, which he did not.
“I think that hurt Oprah deeply,” said Alice Walker, “and may have been the reason why she took over the theater marquee for the musical of The Color Purple twenty years later.” The theater marquee did indeed read, “Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple.”
Being a part of the film changed Oprah’s life forever. The confluence of her Oscar nomination with the syndication of her talk show produced a perfect storm for star-making, and Jeff Jacobs, in conjunction with King World, mounted what Quincy Jones described as “an unprecedented promotional blitz that started her on the path to where she is now.” Oprah began a round of radio, television, newspaper, and magazine interviews that lasted for months, making her name known from the cornfields of Kansas to the penthouses of Manhattan. She was profiled by Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, Elle, Interview, Newsweek, Ebony, The Wall Street Journal, and People. She was interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show, Good Morning America, a Barbara Walters Special, 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She also appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, and hosted Saturday Night Live. “Seldom before in the history of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences has one Academy Award nominee received so much publicity,” wrote Lou Cedrone in the Baltimore Evening Sun. “Since the day she won the nomination, it has almost been impossible to pick up a newspaper, a magazine or a trade publication without coming face to face with the Winfrey image and attendant stories.”
Oprah’s movie debut had launched her beyond the realm of daytime television, and she could not help but enjoy her elevated status. TV critics who had characterized her as a big, brassy, tabloid talker now treated her with a newfound respect. She was no longer relegated to the entertainment sections of their newspapers; her picture now appeared on the front pages with glowing tributes. She became a full-fledged household name as she crisscrossed the country promoting herself, her movie, and her talk show. She readily acknowledged her new fame—“Ain’t I something, child?”—but she refused to act as though she had been blessed by good luck.
“I had sense enough to know that the movie was something very special,” she told Luther Young of The Baltimore Sun, “and I expected it to do everything it has done for me.”
“Yes, I’m coming into my own,” she told Ann Kolson of The Philadelphia Inquirer, “and it’s a great feeling to know [I’m] not even there yet.” Nonplussed, the reporter wrote, “The world has been good to this big, noisy, hip-shakin’ mama who began life poor on a Mississippi farm.”
When Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis Star Tribune suggested she was an “overnight sensation,” Oprah let him have it. “I resent that,” she said. “I take objection to people saying that because no one gets anywhere overnight. I am where I am just as you are where you are: because of everything you have done up to this moment.”
Writing for TV Guide, R. C. Smith was struck by her immense self-confidence. “She claims to have believed, always, that for her anything was possible because she was just that good.” When asked if she was going to give up her talk show, Oprah said, “I intend to do and have it all. I want to have a movie career, a television career, a talk show career. So I will do movies for television and movies for the big screen and I will