Talk shows made Oprah Winfrey rich and famous. It was she who, 14 years ago, invented confessional television. But now – as talk show becomes freak show in the hands of others – she’s having second thoughts. Maya Jaggi reports
It’s her birthday, and Oprah Winfrey is singing lustily in the bathroom of her hotel suite on London’s Park Lane, sounding a homely note amid the ostentatious glamour. She’s in town to promote Beloved, a film she has nurtured for 10 years, and which she also produced and starred in, and is catching the evening flight back to Chicago and the studio she owns. “To make up for the two days I wasn’t there, instead of doing six shows next week, I’ve got nine,” she says. “Soooo, I stay pretty busy.”
Birthday revels evidently take a back seat for America’s Queen of Talk, though, at 45, you’d think she’d have much to sing about. The daily Oprah Winfrey Show has ruled daytime chat for all of its 14 years on air, and has won 32 Emmy awards in the process. With 33-million viewers a week in the United States, where it appears on 206 channels, and is syndicated to 132 countries, her brand of sometimes gushing confessional therapy brushed aside last year’s challenge from the low-brow king of studio brawls, Jerry Springer.
Winfrey is now signed up to host and produce the show until at least the end of 2000. With an estimated personal fortune of 550- million, she is the first woman to head the Forbes list of top-40 richest entertainers. Last year she pushed Steven Spielberg down into second place as the most powerful person in showbiz in Entertainment Weekly’s annual survey. Again, she was the first woman, let alone the first African-American, to get there.
Yet, there are signs she has become disillusioned with the talk show genre: that she will get off the 200-shows-a-year treadmill when her current contract runs out; that she will develop other forms of television that “can make a difference”. She has talked before about giving up her talk show, however, and her present disillusion may have as much to do with the disappointing reaction in America to her “beloved” Beloved as despair over the sensationalist direction in which rival shows are heading.
Winfrey’s influence reaches far beyond showbiz. The US National Child Protection Act is known as “Oprah’s Law”, after President Bill Clinton signed it in her presence in 1993. Her monthly on-air book club – launched in 1996 “to get America reading again” – has made her the most influential bookseller in the US, and her choices overnight bestsellers.
In fact, her word carries weight whatever the subject: US beef prices plummeted to a 10-year low, dubbed the “Oprah crash”, after her show on BSE – “It has stopped me cold from eating another hamburger,” she told the nation.
Her subsequent court victory last February, after Texas cattlemen issued a “veggie libel” writ against her, showed that she is now far freer than politicians to speak her mind.
Lying on the sofa and nursing an outsize mug of tea, Winfrey is funny, given to impersonations and dramatised anecdotes, much like the Baptist orator she seemed destined to be as a child. Yet she is in sombre, if defiant, mood.
Beloved – based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the 1993 Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, and directed by Oscar-winning Jonathan Demme, of The Silence Of The Lambs and Philadelphia fame – opened in the US last October. Despite a lavish $53-million budget from Disney’s Touchstone Studio, an additional $30-million for marketing – Winfrey graced a dozen magazine covers, including Time and Vogue – good reviews and the undoubted power of the film, its box- office returns were dismal: Beloved reached only number five on its opening weekend, making a paltry $8-million. After a month, it had grossed only $21-million.
Winfrey, whose daytime presence has been a hugely influential force in assailing racial barriers in the US, finds the reception to what she terms her Schindler’s List “very sad and very disappointing”. “I will never do another film about slavery,” she says flatly. “I won’t try to touch race again in this form, because people just aren’t ready to hear it.”
She bought the film rights for Beloved after reading the novel in one sitting when it came out in 1987. That same evening, she says, lacking Morrison’s phone number, she rang the author’s local fire department asking them to pass on a message that she wanted to talk. As Morrison has recalled: “She said, `I’m going in my pocketbook and write a cheque.’ It reminded me of myself: a single black woman who said, `I’m doing this; it’s going to be hard for me, but that’s beside the point.’ She was deadly serious.”
Based on a fragment of the true-life story of a runaway slave named Margaret Garner, who tried to kill her children rather than see them recaptured, Beloved is set in the 1870s. It has pre-war flashbacks to the “Sweet Home” Kentucky plantation from which Sethe, the Garner figure, escapes – only to be haunted by the past and the choices to which it drives her. Unlike Amistad’s grand stab at history – with its dubious thrust that one mutiny sounded slavery’s death knell in the land of the free – Beloved’s focus is on how individual characters felt and struggled, remembered and tried to forget.
“Never before had I read a book that allowed me to feel the experience of slavery and reconstruction so personally,” says Winfrey. “It was the realisation that reconstruction was not so much a physical experience as a spiritual and psychological one. Each person in that period had to reconstruct their very being. You had to figure out, what is your soul? Who are you as a free man, as a free woman, with free will? How do you begin again to construct your life? That just fascinated me.
“Sethe’s courage was demonstrated a million times and more by many men and women who managed to cross over to the other side, from slavery to freedom. The relevance in terms of my own life is that I am a descendant of slaves. And to come from no voice, no power – economically or otherwise – and to be able to achieve what I’ve been able to achieve means that only my own personal vision holds me back; anything’s possible.”
Winfrey was born in Mississippi on January 29 1954, her name accidentally transposed on the register from the Biblical Orpah. Her parents were unmarried, and she spent the first six years of her life on her maternal grandmother’s farm near the segregated town of Kosciusko. Her memories of childhood are mixed.
“I grew up not feeling loved,” she says. “My greatest emotion of that time is feeling alone, but I felt special because I was such a good reader. I’d read and recite on cue, any time anybody passed by. In church people would say, `Whoooo, this child sure can read, this child is smart.’ So, all of my feelings of value and of being loved and appreciated came not from being nurtured by my grandmother or feeling loved by my mother, but from being able to read and perform.”
At six, she moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to live with her mother, Vernita, and step- siblings. “I’m in awe of the patience I see from real mothers.” She tells of recently watching her godchild being soothed by its mother: “As a child, I would have been slapped upside the head, number one. Would not even have been allowed to feel cranky. I wasn’t allowed to feel what I felt. I even remember getting whippings where I would cry, then be whipped some more for crying, and then, if I would pout afterwards, get whipped again – `How dare you sit there and pout.’ Well, you just beat me, and I’m now supposed to express no anger or emotion or feeling about the fact that I was beat?”
She has described the writer Maya Angelou as her mother in another life – they even acted together as a mother and grandmother in a television film, There Are No Children Here, set in the Chicago projects. “I call her my mother sister friend, because she’s all of that to me. If I’m in trouble, she would be the first person I’d call.” Angelou’s trauma of being raped as a child, described in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), mirrored Winfrey’s own sexual abuse by family and friends between nine and 14.
“When I first read the Caged Bird, that’s the first time I’d ever heard of something like that happening to another person. Maya was the woman who offered me a sense of hope and belief in myself.”
At 14, and headed for juvenile delinquency (her mother sent her to a juvenile hall where she was turned away for “lack of beds”), Winfrey went to live in Nashville, Tennessee, with her father, Vernon, who “turned my life around”. She won a scholarship to Tennessee State University for her oratory skills, and was crowned Miss Black Tennessee. “I entered a lot of contests: first, I was Miss Fire Prevention, just as a lark, a sport, because I was the first black kid who ever entered – prior to the year I won it, you had to have red hair. And I won beauty pageants, not because I was the most attractive, but because I could always win on the question- and-answer period.”
At 19, she became Nashville’s first black TV news anchor, and went on to read the six o’clock news in Baltimore, until she was “demoted” to a morning chat show, People Are Talking. Then, in 1984, she moved to Chicago to take over an ailing talk show, AM Chicago, and within a month had knocked the legendary Phil Donohue off the top of the ratings.
Renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show (and quickly syndicated nationwide), the show’s success coincided with the 1985 release of Spielberg’s The Color Purple (based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel). Winfrey was Oscar- nominated as best supporting actress for her portrayal of Sofia, the pugnacious foil to Whoopi Goldberg’s put-upon Celie, who punches out her husband when he tries to beat her.
That same year, Winfrey founded her own studios, Harpo (Oprah spelt backwards), and three years later set up Harpo Productions. She now owns not only her show and the studio that records it, but some two million share options in its distributor, King World – “Oprah reports to nobody but God,” one of her staff once said. It would be a tremendous wrench – and not least financially – if she did indeed end the show.
Winfrey has been described as the first person on US television to look like her viewers, and her call to soul-baring, seen in some circles as ushering in the therapy culture, has had cross-racial appeal among the women who are its chief audience (they send most of the 15 000 letters she gets each week).
The show was saved from voyeurism not only by Winfrey’s talents for listening and exuding sympathy, but by her broadcasting her own problems: she dieted publicly (famously, she once came on stage pushing a wheelbarrow of lard to illustrate her – temporary – weight loss); she revealed her rape at the age of nine and the infant death of her premature baby at 14; she told of losing her brother and friends to Aids; and, in 1992, she announced her wedding to former basketball pro, Stedman Graham – which then failed to take place, although they are still together.
Asked if she regrets living her life so much on air, she says, “The only thing I ever regret is bringing up Stedman’s name so much. Some people think that’s some kind of longing I have to be married, but I just mention him because he’s in my life, like Gayle [a close friend] is in my life, like my dogs are in my life.”
Winfrey has been moving up- market for years, and she’s taken her audience with her. Among her highly personal choices for the book club, on which the audience chats with the authors, have been Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (“Sales were thunderous,” said Morrison. “It sold more in three months than it had in 20 years”) and Paradise; Ernest Gaines’ Lesson Before Dying; Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory; and Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River – all of them literary novels.
Mention of Jerry Springer – who is said in some quarters to have shunted Winfrey towards respectability by cornering the moral low ground – elicits a steely but voluble scorn. “Jerry has absolutely no influence on me whatsoever. I’ve often said to my producers that you can’t win any race by looking at what the other guy’s doing. The moment you even take the time to look backwards is when you lose your place. The most you can do is decide who and what you want to be, and then get on with the business.
“I can’t out-Jerry Jerry. I can only go deeper inside myself. So, the only influence, if any, that Jerry has had on me is that he’s helped me to re-focus and decide more clearly who I want to be. I want to be the exact opposite of that – bi-polar. I have no judgment of it. I live in America – free country, free speech – and this time last year I was sitting in a courtroom being tried for speaking my mind, so I certainly believe in his right to do it. But it saddens me that so many people choose to see it. I think it’s nothing short of vulgar. But, obviously, lots of people like vulgarity.”
While Winfrey’s confessional, “letting America know” TV was always more tutelary and reconciliatory, she admits to having had some retrospective doubts: “You learn from your mistakes. The kind of show I was doing 14 years ago – confessional, confrontational television – was fine for its time. I have no regrets about exposing subjects that were once taboo [including incest, wife- battering and date rape], but I have some regrets about particular shows. We did one about adultery – a husband who cheated on his wife confessed to her that his mistress was pregnant, [and] his wife, the look on her face, she was so shocked, embarrassed and shamed that I started to cry for her, and I couldn’t take it back because we were live.
“After that, I went into my producers’ office and said, `That should never happen.’ You should not have to come on television and be publicly shamed and humiliated. The people who go on Jerry Springer, however, know what they’re in for. For a lot of them, this is their 15 minutes of fame, their big, bravado moment. They don’t know any better.”
Last year, Winfrey launched the weekly Change Your Life TV, a move from self-exposure to self-help. Though ratings have been low so far, it may well be a shrewd bid to tap the huge market for self-improvement books and videos. Make the Connection, for example, a fitness manual co-authored with her personal trainer, sold two million copies, while her former cook, Rosie Daley, made publishing history by shifting six million copies of In the Kitchen with Rosie.
Besides giving air-time to self-help gurus such as John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus), Winfrey herself has been shown meditating in a candlelit bubblebath, a move that drew particular flak from the Christian right for veering into New Age spiritualism.
It’s a claim she denies. “My aim is to get people to think about their life and how they choose to lead it. It doesn’t really matter to me if you worship Buddha, Jesus or don’t worship anything at all; if you meditate and say a mantra, or just sit in silence. I believe the ultimate journey is inward, and if I’ve learned anything in life it’s that you really only have control over yourself. Complaining about what the world is doing, what your neighbours are doing, even what your husband is doing, doesn’t change anything.
`The only change comes with your willingness, your choice, to change yourself. Some people claim that to be New Age; to me, that’s just life. It’s commonsense. And I now constantly say, because I’ve been so misinterpreted, `Oh, so we’re supposed to meditate and everything’s supposed to be better?’
“It’s not one thing – no, meditation isn’t by itself going to change your whole life. Keeping a gratitude journal for the things you already have, exercising or eating right aren’t going to change your life if you still have bills to pay and a husband who doesn’t love you. It’s the process of looking inward, of constantly working on yourself so that you can be better for other people.”
Winfrey’s philosophy that “intention rules the world”, that if you want strongly enough nothing can hold you back, is a neat adjunct to the American dream. She supplements it with philanthropy – she makes donations to numerous colleges, and founded the Angel Network to spur viewers to take up voluntary work. However, her failed projects – such as Families For A Better Life, through which she supported a handful of Chicago’s poor, and which was ambitiously pitched at “destroying the welfare mentality” – may be a pointer to the limitations of her individual-centred approach.
Yet, while many Americans who have “made it” seek to “give back” to their “own” communities, Winfrey has always been more inclusive, and more influential. “What we do on a daily basis, just by the fact that I’m a black woman – I own the show, I own the studio from which the show is broadcast, I own the rights and so forth – speaks volumes about the possibility of what a black person, a black female, can do.
“I’ve always thought that introducing a black therapist, or a black father in a show about fathers who care for their children, showing people of different backgrounds expressing the same emotions, does more for improving race relations than, say, a show about the problems of black men. Because the point about breaking down racial barriers is to show that we’re more alike than we’re different; that all feelings, all pain, all joys, all sorrows, bear no colour. The reason I’ve been successful is because I focus on the commonality.
“An American interviewer said that he’d never have believed 14 years ago what I could possibly have in common with a white suburban mother in Oregon. Well, we want the same things. Everybody thinks it’s defined in material things – `Oh, if I had a big house’ – when, ultimately, what you want is contentment, a sense of fulfilment. For many people, it comes from their children, car- pooling. For me, it’s my career.”
To prepare for her role in Beloved, a film that runs to almost three hours, Winfrey re- enacted part of the Underground Railroad, the perilous escape route once used by slaves fleeing the South, during which she was first blindfolded, then threatened and called “nigger gal”. “I’d initially done it to try to feel what it would be like running in the wilderness, not knowing how to find your way. But, out in the woods, what hit me was that the physicality was minor compared with the emotional and spiritual devastation when you know your life is owned.
“When I first read the book, I thought Sethe didn’t have to try to kill her children; I thought there could have been some other way. But, after the Underground Railroad, once you hit that psychic space, you know slavery is a living death, because you have no free will, no choice.
“Sethe says, `I got my children out. It was the first time I did anything on my own, thinking for myself.’ Just that, what it meant for her -Eboy! She realised, `I can do it.’ Maybe that was her first sense of self- esteem.”
The film accords with Winfrey’s sense of mission to spur people to an awareness that they have the freedom to shape their own lives. “Power comes out of powerlessness,” she says. “Look at people who had nothing but their own spirit, their own soul, to build on. They had zero, and look at the power they had. And now look at your own life, look at yourself, and feel the power. Because all our ancestors are a bridge to this moment.
“I always intellectually understood that you would have to be mighty strong to endure and withstand that constant degradation and humiliation and still call yourself a man. What it takes to do that is extraordinary, and beyond anything that any of us alive has ever had to deal with. And what Paul D [Sethe’s lover] tells her, `You your best thing’, is my motto for life that I try to carry to everybody on TV, to make people see that for themselves.”
Little wonder that the film’s low audience has left her feeling bruised. “After Beloved came out, white people said, `I don’t want to be made to feel guilty’, and black people said, `Why do we need to look at that again?’ So, I feel, people are not ready. There’s so much shame still attached to slavery in the States. We’re in a big denial about race, and about where we’ve been and where we need to go. The whole country needs therapy.”
Beloved’s box-office troubles aside, Winfrey has also suffered some bad press of late, in a perhaps predictable backlash against the success that now distances her from her audience. Professor Patricia Williams of Columbia University, who gave the 1997 Reith lecture, senses that an “unfair critique of Winfrey as a controlling cultural figure, a touchy-feely healer, eclipsed the movie”.
But Winfrey remains defiant. Asked how the film might play abroad, she says, “I come with no expectations. It’s a ghost story, a love story, a historical saga, a spiritual odyssey, and Britain and Europe might be able to look at it for what it is, a piece of art, a masterpiece – because you don’t have the ghost of American slavery. I don’t say that modestly, because there’s no reason to be modest. Nothing will I be as proud of as Beloved.”
In the meantime, she is putting a lot of her effort into Oxygen, a cable network co- founded by herself and aimed at women. “It’s supposed to start on January 1 2000, and we’ve got to hire 289 people, so trying to build a network from scratch has got me kind of busy. For the past 14 years, I’ve been dealing with women and their untapped economic power: they control the television sets, they control what’s bought in this country and what’s not.
“I’ve been interested in helping women use that power more wisely. You can do that on a daily basis if you have your own network. You can take every idea you ever had and put in on TV. Doesn’t work? Take it off, try something else. You have no ratings, nobody bossing you around.”
The approach sums up Winfrey’s pragmatism and willingness to take the public temperature – coupled with a genuine desire to use television as a medium for change – that are so crucial to her success. “One article said, `Oprah’s lost the golden touch’. Well, I don’t think I have a golden touch, or any kind of touch.
“Every project, you start out and you do the work, and you hope that it’s received well and that people appreciate it as you appreciate it. It’s about trying to follow your own instincts. Sometimes, you’re right on with the public, and sometimes you’re not. I don’t know anything golden about that.”
As for her plans to use her immense power as a producer: “The whole power label is so foreign to me. I think the only power that happens is your own authentic power. And one of the things Beloved taught me was that until you own yourself, are defined by your own terms, operate from the centre of yourself, are not dictated to by other people’s definitions and expectations, then you are still enslaved. You’re enslaved to what society thinks you should do.” Clearly, Winfrey will be making her own future.