Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [77]
“We talked life and perms and spirituality,” Oprah said. “I was moved by her.” She also mentioned that she had sent $650 replicas of a leather sailing jacket she had worn that weekend to Eunice Shriver and Ethel Kennedy because both had admired it. “I love that family,” she said.
Years later few wedding guests recalled Oprah’s poetry recitation as vividly as they remembered Arnold Schwarzenegger’s endorsement of Kurt Waldheim, the president of Austria, who had been exposed for participating in Nazi war crimes during World War II. During the wedding reception Schwarzenegger strolled the broad expanse of lawn at Hyannisport carrying a large papier-mâché statue of himself in lederhosen and his bride in a dirndl. “I want you all to see the wedding present we have just received from my good friend Kurt Waldheim,” Schwarzenegger told the crowd of judges, priests, and politicians. “My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff … but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt.” Waldheim could not attend the wedding because he had been officially declared persona non grata by the United States.
When Bill Zehme submitted his profile to Vanity Fair about the “capaciously built, black and extremely noisy Oprah Winfrey” with “her great lippy smile,” Tina Brown killed the piece, “not wishing to stir racial teacup tempests,” said someone directly involved in the editorial decision. She paid Zehme in full and encouraged him to publish elsewhere. The piece appeared in the December 1986 issue of Spy magazine.
If the profile wasn’t sexist, or even racist, in tone, it was certainly elitist. Zehme seemed to filet Oprah for being fat, famous, and full of herself, something he may have accepted from a fat, famous, full-of-himself white man. Undone by her own messianic pronouncements, she rallied with good humor and fired off a note, saying, “Dear Bill, I forgive you. Oprah.” Zehme sent her flowers to make amends, but she never responded. He should not have been surprised, having written about “disapproving hostesses who carp that Oprah never RSVPs and surmise that she has no notion of thank-you note etiquette.” In later years, when Oprah became omnipotent, Zehme tried to distance himself from the profile and even omitted it from a collection of his published writings. But it did him little good as far as Oprah was concerned. She never spoke to him again.
Years later, when Tina Brown left Vanity Fair to become editor of The New Yorker, she decided again to assign an in-depth profile on Oprah. She called the writer Erica Jong. “Tina knew that I knew Oprah—we had met in the sauna bath at Rancho La Puerta years and years before, and talked about how difficult men were. She invited me to come on her show in Baltimore, which I did.… She was so warm and sweet then.”
Now Oprah was wary. She felt slammed by a cover story in The New York Times Magazine, titled “The Importance of Being Oprah,” by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. While Zehme’s arrow had grazed the good ship Oprah, Harrison’s was a torpedo to the hull. Not only did the writer declare Oprah’s candor to be more apparent than real, but she also branded Oprah’s New Age pronouncements nonsensical and her self-interest extreme. Further, she asserted that Oprah’s message—“you can be born poor and black and female and make it to the top”—was a fraudulent sop to her white audience:
In a racist society, the majority needs and seeks, from time to time, proof that they are loved by the minority whom they have so long been accustomed to oppress, to fear exaggeratedly, or to disdain.