Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [94]
Over the years, Oprah became a prized commencement speaker at colleges and universities, including Wesleyan, Stanford, Howard, Meharry, Wellesley, and Duke. In each speech, she cited her personal connection to the school through a friend or a relative, and she shared her beliefs about achieving greatness through service. She always invoked the glories of God and the need to give praise. Then, at some point, she frequently descended from the lofty to the low.
When her niece Chrishaunda La’ttice Lee graduated from Wesleyan in 1998, Oprah spent part of her ten-minute speech talking about “peeing.” “All I can remember ten years later is Oprah talking about herself going to the bathroom,” said a member of the class of ’98. “Very uncommencement-like.”
At the Stanford graduation of Gayle King’s daughter, Kirby Bumpus, in 2008, Oprah quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “Not everyone can be famous.” Then she added, “Everybody today seems to want to be famous. But fame is a trip. People follow you to the bathroom, listen to you pee. It’s just—Try to pee quietly. It doesn’t matter. They come out and say, ‘Ohmigod, it’s you. You peed.’ That’s the fame trip so I don’t know if you want that.”
A country girl with bathroom humor, Oprah liked to shock the prissy by announcing at every turn she had “to pee” or “go wee willie winkle.” Over the years she softened her rough edges and learned company manners. She mastered thank-you note etiquette and the art of the hostess gift, instructing her audiences never to arrive at someone’s home empty-handed. “Bring soaps—really good soaps,” she once advised. She thumped gum chewers and smokers, and always tipped well. She sent lavish bouquets for special occasions and never forgot her friends’ birthdays. She once spent $4 million to rent the yacht Seabourn Pride for a week’s cruise for two hundred guests to celebrate Maya Angelou’s seventieth birthday. But for all her social niceties, Oprah still lapsed into potty talk on occasion, and the occasions were often public ones that were supposed to be uplifting.
Some people found these restroom riffs to be funny and a part of her basic, earthy appeal, perhaps attributable to her outhouse years in Kosciusko and having had to empty the slop jar. Others found her comments coarse, jarring, and inappropriate.
To a paying audience at the Kennedy Center for the Nation’s Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Oprah shared her moments in a bathroom stall at O’Hare Airport. She gave similar information to six thousand people gathered for the American Women’s Economic Development Corporation in New York City. In between inspiring quotes from Sojourner Truth and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she told the thunderous crowd, “I can’t even pee straight, you see, because everywhere I go, people in the bathroom want me to sign their toilet paper.”
Her compulsion to talk about bodily functions once gave her best friend pause when she heard that Oprah had shared with her national television audience the graphic details of watching Gayle give birth to her second child. “She said I pooped all over the table during the birth,” Gayle recalled during a Q&A session with Oprah. “People literally stopped me on the street after that one.”
“You know in retrospect I might have thought a little more before saying that,” said Oprah. “But I was talking about pregnancy, what actually happens, and that’s one of the things people never tell you. Gayle goes, ‘Well listen …’ ”
“[I told her the] next time you’re talking about shitting on a table, keep my name out of it,” said Gayle. “I was a news anchor [WSBF-TV in Hartford, Connecticut] by then. ‘I’m Gayle King. Eyewitness News.’ And I’d get people saying: ‘Yes, I saw you on the news. I didn’t know you pooped all over.’ ”
During a speech at a fund-raising luncheon for the Holocaust Memorial