Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [8]
“With so many quality subjects, why go to the bottom of the barrel?”
DiMaio fielded that question: “What’s bottom of the barrel for one person may not be for someone else. We feel good about shows in which we talk about problems, whether it’s incest or agoraphobia or lack of orgasm.”
Oprah stepped in. “It bothers me when we’re accused of being sensational and exploitive. We are not. We are a caring group of people.” A brief pause. “Sometimes we make mistakes.”
Oprah might have been referring to one of her earlier shows, titled “Does Sexual Size Matter?” During a discussion about penis size, she had blurted out, “If you had your choice, you’d like to have a big one if you could. Bring a big one home to Mama!” You could almost hear the collective gasp of 2.95 million TV households in the Chicago market. When the local media had picked themselves off the floor, most were sputtering. P. J. Bednarski said that Oprah had “stretched the limits of taste,” but Alan G. Artner wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Oprah was simply being natural in the way that many people are when “blindly and without guile their self-absorption leads them to play the jester.”
Later Oprah promised reporters that when she went national she would not say the word penis without giving her audience fair warning. “Now I can say penis whenever I want. There. I just said it,” she whooped. “Penis, penis, penis.”
By then she had reporters dancing on strings. They loved her colorful copy and could not conjure adjectives fast enough to describe her. “Big, brassy, loud, aggressive, hyper, laughable, lovable, soulful, lowdown, earthy, raw, hungry,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, TV critic for the Los Angeles Times. Another critic confessed, “I don’t care if she’s a mile wide and an inch deep, she’s irresistible.” The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine dubbed her show the National Enquirer of the Air. “It raises the Lowest Common Denominator to new and lower depths. It’s a yeasty mix of sleaze, freaks, pathos, tack, camp, hype, hugs, hollers, gush, fads and tease marinated in tears.”
Her audience was intoxicated by her raunchy brew. Taping bumpers for an upcoming show, she was supposed to read, “Tuesday on A.M. Chicago: Couples who suffer from impotency.” After flubbing the line twice, she said, “Next week on A.M. Chicago: Couples who can’t get it up.”
Discussing a new diet, she turned to her audience and said, “Oh, yeah. That’s the one that makes your bowel movements smell better.”
During the show on impotence, a solemn middle-aged man said that following his corrective surgery, his testicles had inflated to the size of basketballs. “Wait a minute,” hollered Oprah. “How do you walk with testicles the size of basketballs?”
On another show she interviewed a woman who claimed to have been seduced by seven priests. “What did you do when the priest pulled his pants down?”
“Nothing,” said the woman. “But then he took my hand.” Oprah rolled her eyes, and her audience roared. They loved her irreverence, her inappropriate comments, and her outrageous questions.
“Why did you become a lesbian?” she asked one woman.
On another show, a sociologist described how having a roommate could lead to having a lesbian relationship, and Oprah emphatically announced, “Then I’m never getting a roommate.”
During an interview with a department store official in charge of loss prevention, she asked, “What happens when you catch people stealing? Do they really lose body control? I mean, do they break down and wet themselves?”
Not even celebrities were spared. She questioned Brooke Shields: “Are you really a nice girl?” She asked Sally Field if Burt Reynolds wore his toupee in bed. She blasted Calvin Klein for his advertising. “I hate all those jeans ads. They all have tiny little butts in those ads.” She queried Dudley Moore how a man as short as he was could sleep with women who were so tall. “Luckily,” said the movie star, “most of the extra length seems to be in their legs.” Indeed, she seemed preoccupied with short men in bed. While