Oprah_ A Biography Part 15

Harpo's opulent facility covers one entire square block and contains three soundstages; office suites; conference rooms; control rooms; production and editing rooms; a screening room with a popcorn machine; a private dining room with an in-house chef; a gymnasium stocked with Nautilus bicycles, treadmills, and ellipticals; a beauty salon with hairdressers, makeup artists, and manicurists; plus a staff cafeteria. Oprah said she wanted "to create an environment so stimulating and comfortable that people will love coming to work." However, as one woman noted, Oprah did not build a day-care center for the children of her employees "because at Harpo it's full steam ahead for Oprah and only for Oprah, and of course, for her dogs."

She said she considered her c.o.c.ker spaniels Sophie and Solomon to be her children, and allowed them to roam freely through the hallways of Harpo. "They are allowed to prowl through the offices," said a former employee. "Solomon wears a cone around his neck. Poor thing was walking into walls, always banging himself." Oprah occasionally included her dogs on her show. Once she teased an upcoming segment (May 2005) by announcing, "Stedman and I have a daughter. She has issues and I think it's my fault." The "daughter" was their dog Sophie.

Reflecting Oprah's fear of a.s.sa.s.sination, her studio is a fortress. In addition to the phalanx of security guards who pa.s.s a wand over the studio audiences at the entrance, checking all purses and packages, there is a private code that Harpo employees must punch into a computer at each steel door to be admitted. All guests must be scheduled and present identification. There is no access for visitors.

Harpo contains three different green rooms, two for ordinary guests--"We need two because sometimes we have to keep guests separated before they go on the air," said one employee. Ordinary guests get served fruit, m.u.f.fins, and water. The VIP green room-for celebrity guests such as John Travolta, Tom Cruise, and Julia Roberts--has its own private side door leading into a lush area of soft leather chairs, a large television, fabulous foods, and a private bathroom filled with Molton Brown products. "The difference between the ordinary green rooms and the VIP green room is the difference between the Marriott and the Ritz," said a woman who has spent time in both.

In addition, Harpo also contains warehouse s.p.a.ce the length of five football fields packed with Oprah's fan art, done and sent by viewers: crochet doilies of Oprah, oil paintings of Oprah as an angel or a Madonna, ceramic figurines of Oprah, rhinestone replicas of Oprah as queen of the world, watercolors of Oprah eating mashed potatoes (her favorite food), oil paintings of Stedman and Oprah on a wedding cake. "It was funny, interesting, quirky," said an art director who toured the s.p.a.ce with Oprah. "I told her, 'This is really very touching.' She said, 'Well, yes and no. Most of them came with invoices.' "

Eventually Harpo would consist of six buildings, and her real estate corporation would purchase an additional building nearby for the Oprah Store, a 5,500-square-foot emporium that opened in 2008 to sell Oprah merchandise to Oprah fans, with all proceeds going to Oprah's Angel Network and the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation. Almost everything in the store is marked, st.i.tched, embossed, or imprinted with an O. O. During the Christmas holidays the store sells a snow globe of During the Christmas holidays the store sells a snow globe of The Oprah The Oprah Winfrey Show that contains eighty-eight that contains eighty-eight O O s, including snowmen made of s, including snowmen made of O O s. Year-round s. Year-round there are O O pajamas, pajamas, O O candles, candles, O O metallic purses, metallic purses, O O canvas bags, canvas bags, O O caps, caps, O O mugs, mugs, O O place mats, even grocery bags marked "gr O O ceries." In one corner of the store is "Oprah's ceries." In one corner of the store is "Oprah's Closet," which contains Oprah's hand-me-downs, ranging in size from ten to eighteen.

Each item, including her used Prada skirt ($400) and Ferre boots ($300), contains a tag: "Harpo Inc. hereby certifies that the item to which this tag is attached is a genuine garment from the closet of Oprah Winfrey." The Oprah Store also sells chartreuse boxes of little Oprah note cards containing Oprah's inspirational sayings: The work of your life is to discover your purpose and get on with the business of living it.

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes and step out and dance.

What you do today creates every tomorrow.

Everything you do and say shows the world who you really are. Live your truth.

Live your own dreams.

The joy of living well is the greatest reward.

The only courage you need is the courage to follow your pa.s.sion.

The love you give = the love you get.

After Harpo was built, the Near West Side of Chicago became gentrified.

Developers moved into the area to build apartments and condominiums, thanks in large part to the substantial investment of Oprah in her production studio.

During the time she was building Harpo, Oprah flew to Los Angeles to film The The Women of Brewster Place, based on the novel by Gloria Naylor about seven black based on the novel by Gloria Naylor about seven black women who bond to overcome the ghetto setbacks life has dealt them. "This will be the best miniseries any television network has done to date," Oprah told reporters. "Do you hear me? The best. You can quote me on that."

This was her first starring role and her first movie as executive producer. "After The Color Purple I wanted to prove my acting wasn't a fluke," she said. She chose I wanted to prove my acting wasn't a fluke," she said. She chose Naylor's book of broken dreams, betrayal, and bitterness because she felt it made a statement about surviving with dignity in a world that tries to strip you of it. But all three networks turned the project down. "They said it was too womanish," said Oprah, who finally exercised her clout with ABC by flying to Los Angeles to meet directly with Brandon Stoddard, president of network entertainment. "Basically I got it on the air," she said later. "My partic.i.p.ation convinced ABC to do it."

She then helped a.s.semble the cast, including Cicely Tyson, Robin Givens, Jackee Harry, Lynn Whitfield, Lonette McKee, Olivia Cole, and Paula Kelly. "This is the first time [in my memory] that television has ever presented a drama dealing with the lives of black women," said the casting director, Reuben Cannon, a close friend of Oprah's.

The Gloria Naylor novel, like The Color Purple The Color Purple by Alice Walker, had been by Alice Walker, had been criticized for its treatment of black men, so Oprah softened some of the male characters to make them less menacing, but she refused a request from the NAACP to review the script. "I just don't think you can allow yourself to be controlled," she said. "[Besides] I'm insulted. I am more conscious of my legacy as a black person than anybody. I realize I didn't get here by myself, that I've crossed over on the backs of black people whose names made the history books, and a whole lot of them who did not. I have a responsibility not only as a black woman but as a human being to do good work. I am just as concerned about the images of black men as anybody, but there are black men who abuse their families, and there are white men who do it too, and brown men. It's just a fact of life; I deal with it every day. So I refuse to be controlled by other people's ideas and ideals of what I should do."

While changing some of the male characters in the book, she left intact the lesbian relationship, honoring the novelist's intent to represent the diversity of black women, from their skin color to their religious, political, and s.e.xual preferences.

Oprah worked eighteen-hour days for six weeks to complete the film. As executive producer, she was the first one on the set every morning. "I made sure I knew everybody's name, so there was no one thinking I was Miss Mightier-Than-Thou."

The Women of Brewster Place was scheduled to air on Sunday and Monday was scheduled to air on Sunday and Monday evenings, March 19 and 20, 1989, and Oprah agreed to do national promotion for ABC beforehand, including a press conference for television critics. Jeff Jacobs stressed to reporters the importance of Oprah doing good work, whether or not it was commercially viable. " The Women of Brewster Place The Women of Brewster Place hasn't aired yet," he said. "When it does, we'll hasn't aired yet," he said. "When it does, we'll find out if people respond to it and give it a good number. But whether they do or they don't, it was an important book, an important film. It needed to get made. If we make money, great. And if we don't, well, there are other reasons to do projects besides making money."

Oprah turned to the reporters. "You want to know where I'll be Sunday night?

You'll find me on my knees in front of the TV--praying for the Nielsens." While Jacobs indicated a commitment to the worth of the project, Oprah's commitment was to the ratings, and she was not disappointed. The Women of Brewster Place The Women of Brewster Place was the most was the most watched two-part movie since NBC's Fatal Vision Fatal Vision in 1984. Oprah's triumph averaged a in 1984. Oprah's triumph averaged a 24.0 rating and a 37 share, according to A. C. Nielsen Co. figures, with one ratings point representing 904,000 households. On Sunday her miniseries beat both The Wizard of Oz The Wizard of Oz on CBS and NBC's airing of Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi.

The reviews were mixed, but none surprised Oprah more than the one in the Chicago Sun-Times by Daniel Ruth, who had criticized her in the past but now praised by Daniel Ruth, who had criticized her in the past but now praised her as "a woman of considerable talent--especially as a dramatic actress. Throughout...she exerts an energy that carries this production from beginning to end. It's a first-rate characterization."

Oprah wrote him a note, saying that she never thought she'd get a positive review out of him. He replied that he never thought she'd do anything to deserve one. "So," he said many years later, "we were even."

Now with her star power greatly enhanced, Oprah persuaded ABC to give her a weekly series in prime time based on the film. Her only caveat was that the show could not air on Thursday nights. "I will not be put in a situation where I'm up against Cosby,"

she said, referring to The Cosby Show, The Cosby Show, one of the most popular shows on television then. one of the most popular shows on television then.

To appease critics who felt The Women of Brewster Place The Women of Brewster Place bashed black men, Oprah bashed black men, Oprah agreed to add some sympathetic male characters and simply call the series Brewster Brewster Place. The network threw its full support behind her and her new show. "We are The network threw its full support behind her and her new show. "We are delighted to have Oprah Winfrey join our prime-time schedule in this series," said Robert Iger, the new president of ABC entertainment. "The success of the mini-series last season and the ongoing popularity of her daily program are testament to Oprah's universal appeal."

Brewster Place began airing in May 1990, but drew such poor ratings that ABC began airing in May 1990, but drew such poor ratings that ABC canceled it after eleven episodes. The failed venture cost Oprah $10 million and left Harpo's facilities largely unused and unprofitable. Having once again lost a shot at primetime television, she retreated to her farm in Indiana. She later told Essence Essence magazine that magazine that she had failed because the noise of her ambition had drowned out "the voice of G.o.d."

"I thought I could make [the series] all right because I wanted it to be all right....But I wasn't ready for it. My mistake was that I didn't listen to the voice. Me! The one who always preaches 'Listen to the voice,' 'Be guided by the voice,' 'Take direction from the voice,' by which I mean the voice of G.o.d within me....The voice was speaking loud and clear and I didn't take heed."

Oprah could not comprehend that the failure of Brewster Place Brewster Place might have been might have been in its conception, or the script, or maybe even the acting. She had said over and over again, "G.o.d is with me. That's why I always succeed....I am G.o.d-centered."

She did not believe that bad things could happen to good people. Nor did she accept the anarchy of fate or wicked chaos, even bad luck. She totally dismissed good luck as having any part in her success. "Luck is a matter of preparation," she said. "I am highly attuned to my divine self." She believed that everything was dictated by holy design, including the 157 miracles she told viewers she had experienced. She told n.o.bel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel that his surviving the Holocaust was a miracle, but he disagreed. "If a miracle of G.o.d to spare me, why? There were people much better than me....No, it was an accident," he said. Oprah looked at him incredulously.

Having credited her "triumphal" life to G.o.d's plan for her success, she now accepted her Brewster Place Brewster Place setback as another message from on high. "I truly setback as another message from on high. "I truly understand that there is a lesson in everything that happens to us," she said. "So I tried not to spend my time asking, 'Why did this happen to me?' but trying to figure out why I had chosen [to do the series]. That's the answer you need. It's always a question of accepting responsibility for your choices. Anytime you look outside yourself for answers, you're looking in the wrong place."

In a.n.a.lyzing Oprah's beliefs for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Barbara Grizzuti Barbara Grizzuti Harrison had written that her "knotty contradictions" and simplistic truths often collided with each other but were perfect for sound-bite television: "They make up in pith what they lack in profundity." The writer later admitted she could not bear to watch Oprah's show. "You'll forgive me, but it's white trailer trash. It debases language, it debases emotion. It provides everyone with glib psychological formulas. [These people] go around talking like a fortune cookie. And I think she is in very large part responsible for that." The writer Gretchen Reynolds agreed, if not quite so harshly. "[S]he is a true adherent...of the squishiest sort of self-help dogma. She believes you can 'get to know yourself by facing your fears.' "

Yet Oprah's little homilies touched her audiences and reflected their own spiritual quest. As she evolved from a child of Old Testament preachers into a New Age theorist who loosely defined G.o.d as a vague force of the universe, she gave her viewers what she called "a spiritual reawakening," so that they could all, in her words, "live your best life."

That phrase became such an Oprah mantra that she had the four words trademarked by Harpo, Inc., as her own. She led Live Your Best Life seminars across the country, charging as much as $185 per person, and attracted thousands of women. She pa.s.sed out Live Your Best Life journals and encouraged everyone to write their aspirations in order to realize them. She distributed Live Your Best Life gift bags filled with scented candles and tea bags. She preached like an old-fashioned Baptist minister, but her Live Your Best Life sermons did not contain fire and brimstone. Instead, she offered huggy, feel-good messages about "living in the present moment" and "following your dream" and "listening to the voice," which, she promised, would lead you to "live your best life." And to the hordes of paying partic.i.p.ants who wrote down every word she said in their Live Your Best Life notebooks, there was no better proof of this than Oprah herself.

Thirteen.

DURING THE summer of 1988, Oprah heard a voice that led to the biggest change in her life and gave her the highest ratings of her career. It was the voice of Stedman Graham, whom Oprah said had been sent to her by G.o.d after she had formally prayed on her knees.

Over dinner one night she asked if her size ever bothered him. He paused--a little too long. Then he said: "It has been something of an adjustment." Oprah looked at him in disbelief.

"At first I figured, 'Oh, great. I get to be somebody's personal growth experience.'

But then I started to realize that, my G.o.d, he's been feeling that all this time [two years]

and it took him this long to ever tell me about it."

On July 7, 1988, shortly after that conversation, Oprah started a protein-sparing fast, drinking a medical concoction of powder and water five times a day, plus sixty-four ounces of noncaloric liquids, and taking vitamin pills, but eating absolutely no solid food.

Six weeks into the strenuous diet, she and Stedman were on vacation in Hawaii and Oprah started eating. "I felt terrible because I'd been so controlled up to that point. So Stedman said, 'Why don't you just decide you're going to eat on vacation and not make yourself crazy? When you go home, you can start the diet again.'

" 'How about if I had just one cheeseburger and got it out of my system?'

" 'Are you crazy?' "

Oprah became maniacal about that one cheeseburger. She waited for Stedman to go to his golf lesson and opened all the windows in the hotel room. Then she called room service and ordered the cheeseburger--with bacon and avocado. Minutes later she raced to the phone and called Gayle King to tell her what she had done. Gayle understood the binge because her husband, William b.u.mpus, had been on the same fasting diet and lost seventy-five pounds in twelve weeks. Oprah went back on her fast and jogged every day with Stedman. By the time she returned to Chicago in the fall she had dropped forty pounds.

The transformation of her five-six frame was startling. Her audiences could not believe their eyes. She promised she would reveal her secret as soon as she lost more weight. Viewers tuned in every day just to see what she looked like. By October she had dropped another fifteen pounds. Still, she would not say how she was shrinking every week. Finally she announced that she would share her secret during November sweeps, on a show t.i.tled "Diet Dreams Come True."

The buildup to this show seemed to galvanize the country. Everyone wanted to know how Oprah, who once said she didn't keep a handgun because she would shoot off her thighs, had finally managed to lose weight without joining the NRA. The a.s.sociated Press dispatched a photographer to Chicago, and newspaper editors around the country sent reporters to cover the "Diet Dreams" show. While acknowledging that Oprah's amazing weight loss had grabbed the nation's attention, the Knight Ridder correspondent groused that it was only "the most important social development since Michael Jackson's last nose job." Embarra.s.sed to be covering Oprah's diet revelation, he added, "Did she find the cure for cancer? Did she eliminate the specter of AIDS? Did she reduce the national deficit?"

The day of the much-ballyhooed show, November 15, 1988, Oprah sashayed onto her soundstage in a big bright red coat. "This is a very, very personal show," she said.

Then, like an exuberant stripper, she ripped off the red coat to reveal half of her former self. "As of this morning I have lost sixty-seven pounds," she said, justifiably proud of her new figure, which was tucked into a pair of size-ten Calvin Klein jeans that had been hanging in her closet since 1981. She twirled around the stage to show off her new body in a cinched belt with a silver buckle, a tight black turtleneck, and spike-heeled boots.

The audience cheered her wildly, waving the little yellow pom-poms they had been given for just that purpose.

Oprah held up a package of Optifast powder, which she said she mixed with water in an Optifast cup and drank five times a day. This gave her four hundred calories of nutrition without solid food on a fast that supposedly spared the body's loss of protein.

Before she had ended her first segment, Optifast operators were bombarded. A company spokesman reported one million attempts to get through to the toll-free number after Oprah mentioned the brand name seven times. "I'm sure a lot of people think I own stock in Optifast," she said. "I don't."

After a commercial break, she returned pulling a little red wagon loaded with sixty-seven pounds of greasy white animal fat. Bending down, she tried to lift the bag of blubber. "Is this gross or what? It's amazing to me I can't lift it, but I used to carry it around every day."

Then she became very serious. "This has been the most difficult thing I've done in my life....It is my greatest accomplishment." She then made her personal diary public, reading entries she had made after talking with an Optifast counselor about why she wanted to lose weight. "What is the bigger issue here? Self-esteem. For me, it is getting control of my life. I realize this fat is just a blocker. It is like having mud on my wings. It keeps me from flying. It is a barrier to better things. It has been a way of staying comfortable with other people. My fat puts them at ease. Makes them feel less threatened.

Makes me insecure. So I dream of walking into a room one day where this fat is not the issue. And that will happen this year because the bigger issue for me is making myself the best that I can be."

The next segment of the show featured a congratulatory call from Stedman in High Point, North Carolina, to say how proud he was of her. At that time he was working for his mentor, Bob Brown, and seeing Oprah only on weekends. "I hate it," she told reporters then. "It's going to last another year. Then he says he's going to move back to Chicago." Her regular viewers knew who Stedman was, although they had yet to see him.

She was saving that introduction for a February sweeps show t.i.tled "How Fame Affects a Relationship." Stedman's phone call of congratulations was followed by a video clip from Shirley MacLaine, whom the audience knew to be Oprah's movie-star guide to all things paranormal.

The "fat wagon" show became the most watched show of Oprah's career, with her highest overnight rating ever in sixteen of Nielsen's major markets, meaning that 44 percent of the daytime television audience watched. "These are unbelievable numbers,"

said Stephen W. Palley, COO of King World. "Those people who didn't see the show certainly heard about it." Oprah's eye-popping weight loss riveted the nation's media for days after the show, as nutritionists and doctors and commentators debated the merits of protein-sparing fasts, with everyone wagering on how long Oprah would keep the weight off.

Lost in the hullabaloo of headlines from coast to coast was the ill-timed salute of Ms. magazine (November 1988) to Oprah as one of six women to receive its 1988 magazine (November 1988) to Oprah as one of six women to receive its 1988 Woman of the Year Award: "In a society where fat is taboo, she made it in a medium that worships thin and celebrates a bland, white-bread prettiness of body and personality....But Winfrey made fat s.e.xy, elegant--d.a.m.ned near gorgeous--with her drop dead wardrobe, easy body language, and cheerful sensuality."

Oprah wanted no part of the tribute to her weight. "I never was happy when I was fat," she said. "And I'll never be fat again. Never." She became irritated with people who asked if she would maintain her new size. "Asking me if I'll keep the weight off is like asking, 'Will you ever be in a relationship again where you allow yourself to be emotionally battered?' " she said. "I've been there--and I don't intend to go back." She said her romance with Stedman would keep her highly motivated. "I feel so much s.e.xier....We're just s.e.xy, s.e.xy, s.e.xy now. My weight loss has just absolutely changed our relationship."

In a stand-up routine, Rosie O'Donnell said she was sick of hearing about Stedman. "Now that Oprah's thin, she talks about Stedman all the time. Every five minutes it's Stedman this and Stedman that. If she mentions Stedman one more time, I'm gonna fly to Chicago and force-feed her Twinkies through an IV tube."

Oprah vowed never to blimp up again because she was afraid of the grocery store press. "I have fear of tabloids because of the stories they would print." But the pressure became intense, and the press began piling on. For the next year she was subjected to a national Amber Alert on her food intake, not simply from the tabloids but from the mainstream media, which also hounded her. Within weeks of unveiling her new starvation size, she was caught in a gluttonous feast by the syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, who wrote in the New York Daily News: Daily News: Is our darling Oprah Winfrey becoming "The Phantom of the Oprah" we used to know--that is, just a sh.e.l.l of her former self?...Well, not to worry...Last Sat.u.r.day she dined at Le Cirque in New York, consuming not only fettuccini with wild mushrooms, but a braised snapper. Then, on Sunday, she was with a party of six at New York's Sign of the Dove and ordered poached eggs on a brioche with Hollandaise sauce. After that, Oprah decided the lunches of her companions were inadequate and ordered a chicken for the table, consuming almost half of it herself. Then Oprah moved on to Serendipity for a 20-ounce frozen hot chocolate with whipped cream.

The next week, People People reported Oprah was eating goat-cheese pizza at Spago in reported Oprah was eating goat-cheese pizza at Spago in Hollywood. Then Vanity Fair Vanity Fair weighed in: "Oprah Winfrey seems to be fleshing out a weighed in: "Oprah Winfrey seems to be fleshing out a pair of larger than size 8 jeans," adding, "Forget the Optifast--we prefer the grand old Oprah." In its "Conventional Wisdom Watch" column, Newsweek Newsweek said, "Oprah Winfrey-built terrific studio but working overtime at the dinner table again." The unkindest cut said, "Oprah Winfrey-built terrific studio but working overtime at the dinner table again." The unkindest cut came in August 1989, when TV Guide TV Guide decided that Oprah's body was not good enough to decided that Oprah's body was not good enough to ill.u.s.trate its cover story on her: "Oprah! The Richest Woman on TV? How She Ama.s.sed Her $250 Million Fortune." So the magazine put her face on Ann-Margret's dazzling figure, sitting atop a pile of money. The editor said it was not TV Guide TV Guide's policy to misrepresent, but he couldn't see why anyone should complain. "After all, Oprah looks great, Bob Mackie got his gown on the front of the nation's largest-circulation magazine, and Ann-Margret made the cover--most of her, anyway."

Oprah did not need the media to keep a death watch on her diet. She knew she was in trouble just days after she dragged her little red wagon across the stage. In her journal she wrote: November 29, 1988: I've been eating out of control. I've got to bring it to an end. I can't get used to being thin.

December 13, 1988: I came home and ate as much cereal as I could hold. I eat junk all day.

December 26, 1988: There's a party in Aspen, I don't want to go. I've gained five more pounds.

January 7, 1989: I'm out of control. Start out my day trying to fast. By noon I was frustrated and hungry just thinking about the agony of it all. I ate three bowls of raisin bran. Left the house and bought some caramel and cheese corn, came back at 3:00 staring at food in the cabinets. And now I want some fries with lots of salt. I'm out of control.

For a few weeks after her "Diet Dreams" show, she savored the delicious sensation of buying beautiful clothes in designer boutiques, no longer having to shop at The Forgotten Woman or buy the two largest sizes of a dress at Marshall Field and have them sewn together to fit her. She indulged in shopping from the couture collections of Christian Dior, Chanel, and Yves Saint Laurent. She posed for Richard Avedon in a black silk bodysuit for a national ad as one of Revlon's most unforgettable women. "I loved doing the Revlon shoot," she said. "It changed the way I felt about me. I never imagined myself as beautiful. But that ad made me feel beautiful. So for that reason alone it was worth shooting just to feel that." She felt so good about her new thin self that she gave away all her fat clothes, donating them to the homeless. "It didn't solve their problem,"

she said, "but they're sure lookin' good." She felt that after four months of starvation she had finally conquered her weight problem. So she stopped the Optifast group counseling and discontinued the supervised maintenance program.

Within a year she gained back seventeen of the sixty-seven pounds she had lost.

"It's a battle I'm still fighting every waking minute of my life," she told her audience, most of whom nodded in sympathetic agreement. At that point, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, 27 percent of American women and 24 percent of American men were considered to be overweight, bordering on obese. Oprah showed a video of herself chugging up a mountain at a high-priced spa, struggling to burn off calories. She looked defeated as she pleaded with viewers to please leave her alone if they saw her shoveling down mashed potatoes. "I've decided I'm not going to go through life depriving myself of things that make me feel good."

A year later she wrote one of her saddest journal entries: I cried in my office with Debra [DiMaio]....I cried for my poor miserable self having gotten to this state. Scale said 203 this morning. Controlled--just controlled by it...By the end of the day...feeling diminished, less of a person, guilty, ugly...I really am fat again.

During the November sweeps of 1990, Oprah acknowledged the nightmare of her "Diet Dreams" with a show t.i.tled "The Pain of Regain": she had gained back all of the sixty-seven pounds, plus more. She would not say how much she weighed, but she later confided it was more than Mike Tyson, boxing's heavyweight champion. "I will never diet again," she said. "I certainly will never fast again."

From her fan mail, Oprah knew her audiences adored her, so she was surprised when most said they preferred the original fat Oprah to the new "lite" version. They said when she was heavy she was more approachable; she laughed easily and hugged everyone. The thin Oprah seemed pinched and strained, as if the effort to diet had sapped her of her cheerfulness. Viewers let her know that they were much more comfortable with hefty Oprah than sylph Oprah, who, they felt, acted a little smug and a trifle selfsatisfied. Her bulk had rea.s.sured people that looks were superficial, only skin-deep. Now they realized that she never really believed that. Years later she admitted as much. "I do know what it's like to live inside of a body that's twice your size....I know that anybody who's there would want it to be different. Even people who say they've made peace with it. You reach a point where you fight it, fight it, fight it, and then you say you don't want to fight it anymore....

"I can tell you this, even being a famous person, that people treat you so differently when you're fat than when you're thin. It is discrimination that n.o.body ever talks about."

As much as Oprah disliked her heavy self, she, too, seemed more at ease with her corpulence than she did without it. "I always felt safer and more protected when I was heavy," she said, "although I didn't really know what I was trying to protect, any more than I knew what I was afraid of." It seemed that the same limitless ambition that had rocketed her to the top of her career had set her appestat: while gaining weight worked to her professional advantage, making her what Essence Essence described as "the quintessential described as "the quintessential mammy figure," her huge size made her absolutely miserable as a person. Ebony Ebony suggested that her "touchy-feely" manner toward her predominantly white audiences "is reminiscent of the stereotypical Southern Mammy." People People described her as "the described her as "the powerful mommy figure," which she did not accept. "A woman told me recently, 'I used to think you were more compa.s.sionate when you were fat because you were like a mother to me. And now you're this s.e.x thing,' " recalled Oprah. "I said, 'Is it something I said, something I did? Because I never felt like I was your mother.' "

Some black comedians were mean-spirited, particularly Keenan and Damon Wayans on In Living Color, In Living Color, the comedy show they developed for the Fox Network. In the comedy show they developed for the Fox Network. In one spoof t.i.tled "Oprah on Eating," the comedians' sister Kim Wayans imitated Oprah doing an interview: she began eating ferociously until she blew up like a balloon and exploded potato chips all over her audience. Abiola Sinclair p.r.o.nounced the skit "vicious" in the New York Amsterdam News: New York Amsterdam News: "Sensible and genuine Black people never "Sensible and genuine Black people never were overly concerned about Oprah's weight. What was of more concern to many of us was her feeling the need to wear funny colored [green] contact lenses, seemingly indicative of some sort of racial dissatisfaction. At her heaviest Oprah never was a slob, and always looked good. In our opinion...a little weight on her looks better than that unnatural skin and bones body, with that big round head sitting on it. She could be a size 14 and still be fit. The key word is fit."

Oprah probably felt more discrimination for being fat than she ever did for being black. The African American community was far more accepting of large-scale women than the white stick world, which prized anorexics as straight as a fork tine.

As a black woman who broke the tape in her sprint to success, Oprah was universally applauded and rewarded for her professional triumph, but as a fat woman, she felt excluded from the fork-tine world, and the exclusion was painful. "People take you more seriously [when you're thin]," Oprah said. "You're more validated as a human being...." "I hate myself fat....It's made me terribly uncomfortable with men." "I don't believe fat people who say they're happy. They're not. I don't care what they say."

Over her career she would win seven Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show Host, nine Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show, seven NAACP Image awards, Broadcaster of the Year from the International Radio and Television Society, the George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America. Yet, sadly, she felt her greatest accomplishment in life was losing sixty-seven pounds, and her biggest failure was regaining it.

"I remember [before she went on that fast] being at Oprah's show in Washington, D.C., when I was the research director for WUSA-TV," said Candy Miles-Crocker, a beautiful black woman. "Oprah wore a bright yellow knit suit and she must've weighed close to 275 pounds then. She was huge, and that knit skirt clung to her like the wrapper on a sausage. It was also slit up the front so that when she sat down the slit spread, as did her fat...and...oh, dear...it was horrible. I felt awful for her. She knew what was happening, so during the break she went off to the side and turned the skirt so the split wouldn't be in the front. Watching her try to maneuver that skirt over her thunderously fat thighs was like watching a ship try to dock in a slip for a rowboat."

Oprah's weight hung like a harness around her neck, but as beleaguered as she felt, she did not completely give up. She continued going to health spas, where she eventually met Rosie Daley, who became her chef, and later, Bob Greene, who became her trainer. Together, they managed to alter her lifestyle and her size in time for her fortieth birthday, but even then it was not easy.

"Before Rosie arrived, Mrs. Eddins [Oprah's honorary G.o.dmother from Nashville]

did all the cooking, and every lunch was fried chicken, potato salad, heaping bowls of macaroni and cheese with freshly baked pies for dessert--and Oprah ate it all," recalled her landscape architect James van Sweden. "Rosie introduced her to fresh fruits and vegetables, but it took Oprah a while to make friends with food that wasn't fried or sauced." Oprah said herself that Rosie worked with her for two years before she ever lost a pound.

During the time she was regaining her weight in 1990, she was sledgehammered by her sister, who told the tabloids the long-held family secret of Oprah's pregnancy at the age of fourteen and of the baby boy she had given birth to. This tell-all came after Oprah had discontinued her sister's $1,200-a-month allowance because she was using it to buy drugs, so Patricia Lee Lloyd went to the National Enquirer, National Enquirer, which paid her which paid her $19,000 to reveal details about Oprah's so-called "wild and promiscuous early years,"

when she sneaked older men into the house and did "The Horse" while her mother was at work.

"She said that's what she used to do," Patricia Lee Lloyd told the tabloid, "and I realized that all those afternoons she was making out with her men."

Oprah was so humiliated by her sister's revelations that she took to her bed for three days. "I thought my whole life was over," she said later. "The world's going to hate me. They're all going to say, 'What a shameful, wicked woman. What a little wh.o.r.e.' But Stedman...got me through it. He helped me to be brave about it....I cried and cried. I remember him coming into the bedroom that Sunday afternoon, the room darkened from the closed curtains. Standing before me, looking like he, too, had shed tears, he handed me the tabloid and said, 'I'm so sorry. You don't deserve this.' " Stedman helped her see that what had happened to her happens to many, but he said that as one of G.o.d's special children, she would survive and thrive and be able to help others do the same. "Stedman thinks I'm one of those chosen people," Oprah said. "You know, hand-picked by the universe to do great things."

A week later she got slammed with the second installment of her "shameful secret past," in which her sister popped all the bubbles Oprah had blown about her povertystricken childhood. Patricia also revealed the "lies Oprah told that made Mom cry," and the stories Oprah had never told, about how she "p.a.w.ned Mom's ring, stole her money and ran away from home."

Suddenly the mythology Oprah had created for herself started to unravel. "She told a hundred reporters about her pet c.o.c.kroach, Sandy," recalled the novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, then a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. Milwaukee Journal. "She told me the Sandy story, "She told me the Sandy story, too...back when she was only an upstart young television host giving Phil Donahue a headache....Even back then, there was a drivenness about her that seemed not fully explained even by her towering ambition. She was an enigma, a high-flying solo pilot full of rehea.r.s.ed one-liners but uncomfortable with too much introspection. And as any therapist can tell you, the people who run hardest usually are trying to outrun something, almost always something that was not their fault, almost always something in the past."

In a sympathetic column t.i.tled "Maybe We Know Now What Makes Oprah Run,"

Mitchard wrote that if Oprah could embrace the truth of her life she would be able "to caution young girls in tough places to avoid early pregnancy." Interestingly, Mitchard's novel The Deep End of the Ocean The Deep End of the Ocean became the first choice for the book club Oprah started became the first choice for the book club Oprah started six years later, but Oprah "fortunately" did not make the connection between the columnist and the novelist.