Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [99]
Oprah had moved so far beyond the life of her grandmother’s farm that there was nothing left for her in Kosciusko. After one of her visits she told a luncheon audience, “I was recently back in my hometown … and some of the people that I grew up with are still sitting on the same porch, doing the same thing. It’s like time stopped and continues to stand still in parts of Mississippi. There’s not a day that I’m not on my knees thanking God that I was one of the blessed ones to be able to leave that place and do something with my life.”
Yet there was something she needed from the past, which she said she finally found in a $1 million mansion on a sprawling 160-acre estate in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. Having invented a family she could love, she now decided to invent her ideal home, with rolling hills, meadows of purple flowers, stables, a heated dog kennel, twelve bedrooms, a heliport, nine palomino horses, ten golden retrievers, three herds of black-faced sheep, one eight-room guesthouse, a log cabin, a pool, tennis courts, and pretty blue hydrangeas.
“I’ve never loved a place the way I love my farm,” she said. “I grew up in the country, which is probably why I’m so attached to the land. I love it. I love the lay of the land. I love walking the land. And I love knowing that it’s my land.… When I’m pulling into the gate and my dog comes running out to meet me because he knows the sound of the truck, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I walk in the woods. I do Tai Chi Ch’uan by the pond. I grow my own collards.”
“The landscaping alone for that farm was a four-year project and cost nine million dollars,” said the landscape architect James van Sweden of Oehme, van Sweden and Associates. “I met with Oprah every three weeks for four years to discuss the design. We had a wonderful time bricking the parking area, erecting limestone walls, laying flagstone walkways, grassing the pond, moving the tennis court and the swimming pool. I built her an eighty-five-foot-long pool, but the poor thing could not use it because she was at her heaviest then—she was hugely heavy—and the paparazzi were always buzzing the farm in helicopters and hiding across the lane with cameras that could catch a perfect picture from three thousand feet away. There was no way she could go into her pool without having her three-hundred-pound self splattered all over the tabloids. We also built a twelve-hundred-square-foot pool house so she could hold meetings. She was totally involved in the project from start to finish, and spent three to four hours with me at every meeting. Then I would spend weeks at the farm.…
“I remember when I first walked into her Indiana living room and saw those overstuffed couches and plump tufted chairs and what looked like one million pillows strewn everywhere. That’s her decorator Anthony Browne’s idea of ‘Country English,’ which poor Oprah bought into totally. She liked puffy things. Big puffy things.… Browne put fringe and ruche and piping and ruffles and cording on everything.” The internationally acclaimed van Sweden is known for sleek, uncluttered design. “All of Oprah’s servants are white, but her walls are black. She’s got paintings of black shepherds and black farmers and black angels—all very tacky, but that, too, might’ve been Anthony Browne’s fault for steering her to junky art. The color, though, Oprah insisted on. She said, ‘I’m not going to have counts and countesses on my walls. Just black folks.’
“After our first lunch at the farm we walked outside and she told me I had to transform her meadows into The Color Purple. She insisted that she be able to see purple flowers from every angle of her bedroom. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t plant that meadow (forty acres) as fast as Steven Spielberg did for the movie. ‘It only took him three weeks,’ she said. I tried to explain that was