Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [78]
Most damning was the writer’s assessment of Oprah’s dangerous influence on the millions of her viewers “who lonely and uninstructed draw sustenance from her, from the flickering presence in their living rooms they call a friend.” Obviously Barbara Grizzuti Harrison did not believe that false comfort is better than no comfort at all.
As a media darling accustomed to ribbons of praise, Oprah was irate. It wasn’t just the writer’s bite or her disdain for what she called Oprah’s “superficial quality,” it was also the prestigious placement of the profile. Getting shredded in a satirical magazine like Spy was one thing, but to be dissected on the cover of the country’s most important Sunday magazine was intolerable.
“Oprah was furious about that article,” said Erica Jong, “and she told me she did not want anyone writing about her, especially a white woman for a white publication. ‘I don’t need a honky magazine to canonize me,’ she said. I assured her I would not be writing about her negatively, but she did not trust Tina Brown.
“ ‘What if she tells you to put in barbs? Will you be able to resist?’ She said she’d pray on it and call me back, which she did, but in the end I was not able to give her the editorial control that she demanded.”
Later, when Tina Brown left The New Yorker and started Talk magazine, she again wanted to profile Oprah. Sitting with several art directors to discuss possible covers, Tina said, “Oprah has really gotten full of herself.… Who the hell does she think she is? Let’s do Oprah Pope-rah.” The artists whipped up a mock cover of Oprah’s black face half-covered with the white ceremonial miter of the Pontiff. “We couldn’t put her whole face on the cover because we had to leave room for a big fat halo,” said one of the artists. But the profile never got written because by then Oprah had stopped giving interviews.
After Talk folded, Brown wrote a book about Diana, the Princess of Wales, but could not get booked on The Oprah Winfrey Show. When she started her news site, The Daily Beast, she again took a poke at Oprah, for getting hoodwinked in 2008 by a Holocaust memoir that Oprah had recommended on her show but that had turned out not to be a true story. “You have to wonder why the big fat budget of that show doesn’t at least extend to a fact checker,” Brown wrote. In 2009 she dismissed Oprah as a “juggernaut business franchise” whose “authenticity can’t help transmuting into something manufactured.” She wrote that Oprah had become a brand, no longer a person. “[She] might as well have a little R in a circle next to [her] name.”
Later in 2009, Brown’s Daily Beast devoted a web page to “Oprah’s Bad Press,” with links to stories about a poet’s $1.2 trillion lawsuit against Oprah for plagiarism; the lawsuit of a flight attendant on Oprah’s plane who claimed she was wrongfully fired by Oprah; two deaths at a spiritual retreat led “by [an] Oprah-approved author”; the sex scandal at Oprah’s school in South Africa; and Oprah’s “ill advice,” saying “she’s not a doctor but plays one on TV.”
Like Inspector Javert chasing Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Tina Brown seemed more than a little preoccupied with Oprah, but when asked to discuss the matter, Brown avoided further controversy by responding through her assistant, who said, “Tina has never been a big student of Oprah and has no time to spend answering questions about her.”
By then Oprah Winfrey was in total control of her public image. She had become exactly what she wanted—a gigantic mogul. She had her own media empire: her own television network, her own radio show, her own website, her own daily talk show, and her own magazine, whose every cover featured … her.
AFTER THE seedling years of 1984–1986, Oprah burst into full bloom. She flowered as a national success at the age of thirty-two, and money rained down on her in torrents. Variety reported she would earn more than $31 million