Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [79]
She began by buying herself a Mercedes and a Jaguar, and then she lavished mink coats on everyone—her mentor Maya Angelou; her cousins Jo Baldwin and Alice Cooper; and her female staff, who were accustomed to her extravagance. The year they had been denied Christmas bonuses by WLS station bosses, she had stepped in, giving each $10,000 in cash stuffed inside rolls of toilet paper. She also gave her producer, Debbie DiMaio, a fox jacket as a “thank you for getting me the talk show.” Now she gave DiMaio a six-carat diamond bracelet. (“Brilliance deserves brilliance,” Oprah wrote on the card.) She gave the only male on her staff, Billy Rizzo, the keys to a Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. She sent two producers to Switzerland on vacation, paid for the wedding of another, and took them all on a shopping spree in New York, where she turned them loose in three stores—an hour at a time—with orders to buy anything they wanted. “I get the biggest kick out of buying great presents,” she said, listing her largesse for reporters. “That’s why I’m a great friend to have. Once I gave my best friend [Gayle King] and her husband [William Bumpus] an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe for two weeks in all first-class hotels—and money to spend. But my best present to date was when I gave her a nanny to care for her two babies.” Gayle recalled the day Oprah visited her and her husband in Connecticut, arriving in a stretch limo. “She was wearing one of her five fur coats, probably a $25,000 number, and white tennis shoes with rhinestones on them and a red sweat shirt that said, ‘Husbands Can Be Temporary but Best Friends Last Forever.’ ” The story that she gave Gayle a check for $1,250,000 for Christmas so they could both be millionaires is also part of the Oprah legend. Years later she bought Gayle a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, for $3.6 million.
She made sure the media knew that Phil Donahue offered congratulations when she won Daytime Emmy Awards in 1987 for Best Talk Show and for Best Talk Show Host. “He kissed me,” said Oprah. “Yep. That’s right, Phil kissed me.” She was so grateful for his public acknowledgment that she sent him twenty bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal Champagne to mark the twentieth anniversary of his talk show, pointing out to reporters that Cristal sold for eighty dollars a bottle.
She bought her father a new set of tires and a large television set for his barbershop, so he could watch her show, because he’d said that was all he wanted. She later bought him and his wife, Zelma, a new twelve-room house in Brentwood, Tennessee. “I called him and said, ‘Dad, I’m a millionaire! I want to send you and your friends to any place in the world you want to go.’ He said, ‘All I want is some new tires for my truck.’ I was so upset.” Her mother, Vernita Lee, was another matter.
“I retired her, bought her a house, bought her a car and pay her double the salary that she made all of her life,” Oprah told the Chicago Sun-Times. “So now she has no bills to pay and nothing to do all day. And you know what she said to me? ‘Well, I’ll try to make it.’ Can you believe that? I said, ‘You’re going to try to make it? See if you can, Mom.’ Then just the other day, she called me up to say, ‘I need a new coat.’ So I said, ‘Go to Marshall Field’s and get you one.’ She says, ‘I don’t need a Marshall Field’s coat. I need a fur coat.’ So I said, ‘Nobody needs a fur coat, Mother. Nobody needs one.’ Well, I did buy her a mink coat. So now she has a fur coat, a new car, a new house, no bills and double her salary. And she’s gonna try to make it.”
But that, apparently, was not enough for Vernita. “Oprah told me that her mother stole her personal checkbook,