Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [85]
Inadvertently, Oprah had initiated the double-dealing by hiring Armstrong to be her conduit to the tabloids—to feed them stories about her good works. “I can assure you that Oprah definitely knew Armstrong was working with us for her, but she didn’t know he was also working for us, and dishing her,” said a senior tabloid editor involved with the relationship. “Oprah became so obsessed by our coverage that she had Jeff Jacobs call us to start a dialogue. We did not reach out to her. She reached out to us, to try to get some sort of control on what we were doing. We talked to Jacobs and agreed to give him a comment call within forty-eight hours of publication on any Oprah story. He told us there were hot-button issues, especially about her weight, but he wasn’t crazed on the subject like she was.… Jacobs never dished Oprah, but Armstrong did and he was a great source for us for a long, long time.… He even put me on the phone with Stedman at one point and we solidified a relationship with him as well.”
Stedman moved to North Carolina in 1988 to work with B&C Associates’ Bob Brown, once a police officer like him, and he easily assumed Brown’s conservative politics. “I can tell you Stedman is a Republican through and through,” said Armstrong Williams. “Oprah is influenced by Hollywood politics. She can’t help it. It’s just the way she is. Stedman isn’t. He’s a very conservative dude.”
Oprah admitted her political differences with Stedman when she was asked whether she would have an abortion if she discovered in pregnancy that her child might be born without arms and legs. “Yes, oh yes,” she said. “I know that will stir a lot of folks up but I am real clear on this. I want my child to come into the world with every possible opportunity that nature can give him. Of course once the child is born you deal with what nature has given you but if I knew ahead of time that my child would be handicapped, I would definitely want an abortion. Stedman, however, does not agree with me at all. It would be a BIG DISCUSSION. It’s terrifying when you think about it, to love somebody that you disagree with on such a pivotal issue.”
As a couple, Oprah and Stedman were melded by their devotion to the gospel of self-help. Both upwardly mobile, they read everything on self-improvement, from Creative Visualization and Psycho-cybernetics to The Nature of Personal Reality and The Road Less Traveled. They shared similar religious beliefs—Oprah claimed they knelt every night to say their prayers before bed—and for eight years they attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church in Chicago. Both had suffered from the insidious demarcations of color within their own culture: Oprah feeling she was too dark, and Stedman envied for being too light. Stedman’s father, a housepainter, and his mother, a housekeeper, were first cousins, according to Carlton Jones, Stedman’s third cousin, who said Stedman’s parents had married each other to preserve the light skin that ran in the family.
“There’s a lot of intermarriage in our family,” Jones said. He later sold a sensational story about Stedman to a tabloid but was accused of lying for the money. “I’m related to Stedman through my mother’s side of the family. She was a Spaulding. The Spauldings, Grahams, Mores, and Boyds from these parts were all light-skinned people. And they’ve been marrying each other for over a hundred years.
“We’ve produced folks who look as white as any white man—even with Caucasian features. But we’ve also produced retarded kids—and they marry, too. That’s why there’s so many retarded people in our family tree. First and second cousins got married to each other because