Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [76]
Oprah lost Best Supporting Actress to Anjelica Huston (Prizzi’s Honor) and in one of the most stunning shutouts in the Academy’s history The Color Purple did not win one of its eleven nominations, while Out of Africa won seven awards, including Best Picture. “I could not go through the night pretending that it was OK that Color Purple did not win an Oscar,” Oprah said. “I was pissed and I was stunned.”
Whoopi Goldberg blamed the Hollywood NAACP. “They killed the chances for me, Oprah, Margaret Avery, Quincy, everybody—I truly believe that. And blacks in Hollywood paid a price for years to come. Because after all the hell that was raised, the studios didn’t want to do any more black movies for fear of the picket lines and boycotts.”
The movie’s loss did not dampen Oprah’s intention to become a great star. “When you mention great actresses, you’ll have to say my name: ‘Meryl … Oprah,’ ‘Hepburn … Oprah.’ That’s what I want. What I am is an actress. I don’t get paid for acting. But I was born to act.” She continued her publicity blitz long after the movie’s run, and piled up reams of reverential press in time for the September 1986 launch of her talk show. Her laudatory media coverage hit its first speed bump when Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, assigned Chicago writer Bill Zehme to profile Oprah. He accompanied her on her rounds of the good and the great, and described how, “with unabashed lustfulness,” she pawed through the possessions of rich Chicagoans and poked in their closets, counting their shoes.
“She was like a little kid running around my apartment just oohing and aahing,” said Rockefeller heiress Abra Prentice Anderson Wilkin. Chicago socialite Sugar Rautbord, who had profiled Oprah for Interview, Andy Warhol’s monthly magazine, said, “There’s a wonderful hunger about her. Some people yearn to be free. Oprah yearns to be rich.”
Oprah did not hide her acquisitiveness from Zehme, who wrote that within the first hour of their meeting she had told him she was a millionaire. “ ‘I knew I’d be a millionaire by the time I turned 32,’ she said … again and again.… By the second hour she had added, puffing up with purpose, ‘I certainly intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul.’ ” Zehme captured Oprah’s obsession with money but lacked the sensitivity to note that for a descendant of slaves, money would mean freedom from servitude forever.
She told him about her many fur coats (“I say minks were born to die!”) and her immense income (“Money just falls off me, I mean it falls off!”). She opened the doors to her new $800,000 lakefront condominium, a marbled palace with a dripping crystal chandelier in the dressing room and ornate gold swans on the bathtub spigots, and led him into her bedroom, with its panoramic view of the city.
“She is sprawled lumpily across her bed at this point and I sit on its lower edge,” he wrote as Oprah continued her me-me-me monologue: “ ‘I transcend race, really. I believe that I have a higher calling. What I do goes beyond the realm of everyday parameters. I am profoundly effective. The response I get on the street—I mean Joan Lunden [former host of Good Morning America] doesn’t get that and I know it. I know people really really love me, love me, love me. A bonding of the human spirit takes place. Being able to lift a whole consciousness—that’s what I do.’ ”
Describing her as “an economy size glamour puss” and a “hyperkinetic amalgam of Mae West, Reverend Ike, Richard Simmons and Hulk Hogan,” Zehme mentions her trademark “big mama earrings” and the way “she will name-drop unashamedly—the most frequent is ‘Steven,’ her director in The Color Purple.”
What the writer found most curious about Oprah was her conquest of the Kennedy compound