Oprah_ A Biography Part 6

Within weeks it became clear that the chemistry between Oprah and her silverhaired, silver-tongued coanchor was toxic. He saw himself as the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, and to him she looked like an imposter who had no right to serve the sacred host of television news to the community of Baltimore. He was astounded that she allowed others to write her copy and then went on the air without reading it ahead of time. This was incomprehensible to a man who revered writing and always came to the office early to compose his newscast. He was appalled by the arch manner she a.s.sumed on the air, which she later mocked herself as her condescending lady-to-the-manor-born tone of voice, saying she thought that was how an anchorwoman was supposed to sound.

Turner was flabbergasted when Oprah read the word Canada Canada from the teleprompter as from the teleprompter as "Ca-NAY-da" three times in one newscast. She later misp.r.o.nounced Barbados Barbados as "Barba-DOZE." She read a report about a vote in absentia in California as if "Inabsentia" were as "Barba-DOZE." She read a report about a vote in absentia in California as if "Inabsentia" were a town near San Francisco. A few nights later she characterized someone as having "a blaze att.i.tude," not knowing how to p.r.o.nounce blase. blase. Then she began editorializing on Then she began editorializing on the news, breaking in at one point to say, "Wow, that's terrible." Ratings tanked.

For Turner, though, the capper came when Oprah, twenty-four years his junior, turned to him on the air and quipped, "You're old enough to be my father." That ripped it, and unbeknownst to Oprah, her days were numbered.

"From the start I knew it wouldn't work out," said Bob Turk. "Oprah was just too inexperienced and limited in her knowledge of world affairs, especially geography, to be placed in [the] position...of anchoring with the dean of Baltimore news."

When the dean became displeased, Oprah got dumped, and all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put her back together again. On April Fool's Day 1977, eight months into her reign, Oprah lost her crown. Toppled from the most prestigious position at the station, anchoring the news, she was tossed into television's scut bucket, to do early-morning cut-ins. The consensus around the station was that while she may have been a power pitcher in Nashville, she couldn't get the ball over the plate in Baltimore. A minor leaguer who would never make the majors, Oprah became the baseball goat, shunned by fans and blamed by the team for failure.

Years later she and her best friend, Gayle King, a WJZ production a.s.sistant at the time, recalled what happened: OPRAH: [T]hey decided it wasn't working because the anchorman-- GAYLE: Didn't like you.

OPRAH: But I didn't know it. I was so naive. The day they decided that they were going to take me off the 6 o'clock news, I said to Gayle-- GAYLE: I'm just typing at my desk. She goes, "Get in the bathroom now."

OPRAH: We'd always meet in the bathroom. We were like, "Oh, my G.o.d. Do you think Jerry Turner knows?" Of course, Jerry Turner was the main anchor who was kicking my a.s.s out, but we didn't know that. Jerry was like, "Babe, I don't even know what happened, Babe." You know, "Sorry, Babe."

GAYLE: I was stunned.

OPRAH: It's like your life is over.

Al Sanders was immediately promoted to coanchor, and left no doubt that he had been sent in to clean up the mess. "I've been in this business seventeen years," he said, drawing a stark contrast to Oprah's lack of experience. "Whenever you replace anybody on a job and people think that things weren't quite right before, there is pressure. But I'm comfortable."

He and Jerry Turner swiftly resurrected the ratings and then dominated the landscape for the next decade. "They were the best local news team in America," said William F. Baker. Until their deaths--Turner died of esophageal cancer in 1987, Sanders of lung cancer in 1995--WJZ reigned as the number one station in Baltimore.

At the time of Oprah's severe demotion, the station tried to counter the obvious.

"We can't account for what people will think," said the general manager, Steve Kimatian.

"But we believe this is an opportunity for her to develop herself, to work more on her own. When people see how Oprah does in the a.s.signments she is given they will be convinced that the profile we have of Oprah is a high one."

Translation: Oprah was a goner.

For someone who had given herself three years to become television's black Barbara Walters and anchor the news in a top ten market at a network-owned station, or else to take Joan Lunden's place as the cohost of Good Morning America, Good Morning America, Oprah had Oprah had been brought low. The self-confidence that had hurtled her upward seeped away like a big hot-air balloon dropping from the sky. She was no longer a star. While her contract guaranteed twenty-five more months of pay, she had no standing at the station. Yet she couldn't quit, because she needed the money. Promotion to a news job in a larger market was out of the question, and to go to a smaller market would dash all of her exalted dreams. For the first time in her life she had no upward options to dodge the fireball of failure rolling her way. Her father and her friends advised her to stay put and hold on.

After all, they said, she was still in television in a large market, and getting paid. So Oprah picked up the only mop and pail available. In addition to doing the local cut-ins for Good Morning America, she became "weekend features reporter," which, as she said, was she became "weekend features reporter," which, as she said, was the lowest position on the newsroom food chain.

"I did mindless, inane, stupid stories and I hated every minute of it," she said, "but thought even while I was doing it, 'Well, it doesn't make any sense to quit because everyone else thinks this is such a great job.' "

No longer a show horse, she trudged into work at six every morning and stayed all day, taking every dreary a.s.signment thrown at her. She covered a c.o.c.katoo's birthday party at the zoo, did live shots of elephants when the circus came to town, and chased fire engines. She also took guff when she interviewed the organizer of the Mr. Black Baltimore contest.

"In the newsroom she was asked, 'Did you go for the Miss Black America t.i.tle?' "

recalled Michael Olesker. "If she boasted about it, she had no sense of nuance. If she joked, she understood she was in a business where everyone had an ego."

Oprah rose to the occasion. "Yeah, honey," she said, patting her rear end, "but I've got the black woman's behind. It's a disease G.o.d inflicted on the black women of America."

Open and cheerful, she was eager to please and desperate to be liked. "I'm the kind of person who can get along with anyone," she said. "I have a fear of being disliked, even by people I dislike." She made friends with everyone at the station and treated her camera crews well. "In those days when we used film, a film editor could make or break a reporter who was on a tight deadline," said Gary Elion. "They always busted their backs to help Oprah because she was so nice to them. Some people would try to get their way by being tough and nasty and aggressive. Oprah was just the opposite....She made it a point to get along."

Most important, she hid her resentment toward Jerry Turner and Al Sanders. That bitterness she confided only to her closest female friends, Gayle King and Maria Broom, who understood the difficulty of dealing with male divas. Oprah's animus surfaced only after both men had died. She was nowhere to be seen among the thousand mourners who thronged Jerry Turner's funeral in 1987, nor was she among those who came to Baltimore to say goodbye to Al Sanders eight years later.

Her demotion, while h.e.l.lish at the time, proved to be her crucible, forcing her to develop the formula she needed for future success. She learned that flaming ambition combined with grinding hard work and enduring stamina would reap rich rewards. "I've kept a diary since I was 15," she said, "and I remember writing in the diary...'I wonder if I'll ever be able to master this so-called success!' I was always frustrated with myself, thinking I wasn't doing enough. I just had to achieve."

In addition to working overtime on her job at WJZ, she also joined the a.s.sociation of Black Media Workers and gave speeches throughout the city about women in broadcasting. She became active in her church as a member of Bethel A.M.E., and began mentoring young girls, speaking at schools all over the city. She espoused the goals of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had impressed her the first time she heard him speak, in 1969. "He lit a fire in me that changed the way I saw life....He said, 'Excellence is the best deterrent to racism. Therefore be excellent,' and 'If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.' That was what I lived by." As a teenager she made a poster out of construction paper with Jackson's words and taped it to her mirror, where it stayed until she left Nashville. In Baltimore she helped organize a fund-raising rally for Jackson's Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) at the Civic Center.

She attended Sunday services every week, always sitting in the center of the second row of the sixteen-hundred-seat church, and became a beloved fixture in the black community through her speaking engagements as well as her political support of local politicians such as Kurt Schmoke and Kweisi Mfume.

"Oprah learned about the city's power structure, who was important and what made them powerful," recalled Gary Elion. "She learned the names and faces, where the bones were buried, everything about the power structure, and she learned to use that information to her benefit in gathering the news. She became a force in the city very quickly, because she knew how the city worked. She was very bright, and I knew she was going to go far. She wasn't terribly partisan--at least she never talked about it with me-but she was highly astute politically. She seemed to have a natural instinct for it and used it to her advantage."

Oprah increased her visibility in Baltimore through Bethel A.M.E. as much as through her job on television. "I met her...through her church," said Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. "I was contacted to work collaboratively with her on a project that they would then present. I interviewed Oprah and created a script from that interview, [plus] poetry and song by Sweet Honey. The centerpiece was an excerpt she performed from Jubilee Jubilee by Margaret by Margaret [Walker] Alexander....We premiered ["To Make a Poet Black and Beautiful and Bid Her Sing"] at Morgan State in Baltimore, and performed in Nashville and in New York City."

"Oprah wanted to be an actress more than anything else," said Jane McClary, a former producer at WJZ.

"She used to put on this one-woman show [with] which, through poetry and dramatic reading, she reenacted black history," recalled WJZ's Richard Sher. "And she was fabulous. She played to standing ovations."

Bill Baker also remembered Oprah's "little recitals...she always invited me and I always made a point of going....She became notable in the black community."

Years later Oprah's impact on black women in Baltimore became the subject of an academic book by Johns Hopkins University sociology professor Katrina Bell McDonald, t.i.tled Embracing Sisterhood. Embracing Sisterhood. "These women marvel at Oprah's staying power--her ability "These women marvel at Oprah's staying power--her ability to have survived some of the most difficult struggles black women face and to have won the envy of a world that typically finds little regard for black women."

Long after she left Baltimore, several women recalled her traumatic breakup with Lloyd Kramer, a Jewish reporter who worked for WBAL-TV. Even in the late 1970s, interracial relationships were rare in Baltimore. At the time Oprah was involved with Kramer, a local (white) radio personality viciously joked that "Omar Sharif is dating Aunt Jemima."

"But that didn't faze them," said Maria Broom. "She really loved him. They were so close. I thought they might get married and have children....[When] Oprah's confidence was wrecked, that's when Lloyd really helped her....It was a deep and caring relationship."

One of Kramer's closest friends at the time recalled first meeting Oprah. "Lloyd called me from Baltimore, said he was coming to New York with his new girlfriend and could they stay with me," said the editor and writer Peter Gethers. "I said, 'Sure,' and asked him about her. Lloyd, being Lloyd, hemmed and hawed a bit, then said that she was black and that his parents were really upset that he was dating a black woman. He told me her name was Oprah--which led to a few laughs, because it was not your normal white girlfriend name--and that she was an on-air reporter at a rival station in Baltimore.

So a week or two later, Lloyd and Oprah came to New York and stayed with me in my fifth-floor walk-up, West Village, somewhat c.o.c.kroach-infested apartment. I didn't have a spare bedroom, or even a spare bed, so they both slept on a pillow couch--which wasn't really a couch, just a bunch of pillows arranged to be in the shape of a couch--on the living room floor. They spent the weekend, and we had a lot of laughs, hanging out with a few other friends who Lloyd didn't get to see regularly, having moved to Baltimore."

The relationship floundered when Kramer left Baltimore for a job at WCBS in New York City and met actress Adrienne Meltzer, whom he married in 1982. "Oprah suffered quietly even though her heart was breaking," said Maria Broom. "She was hurting, but she moved on with her life." She also remained grateful and stayed friends with Kramer, later making him a TV director of note. She told Chicago journalist Judy Markey, "Lloyd was wonderful. He stuck with me through the whole demoralizing [Baltimore] experience. That man was the most fun romance I ever had."

When Oprah joined Bethel A.M.E. in 1976, she arrived with the biblical precepts of a young country girl who had been called "Preacher Woman" by her cla.s.smates. A deeply religious Christian who quoted Genesis and Leviticus, she believed that h.o.m.os.e.xuality was wrong. She was ashamed of her gay brother, Jeffrey, and a year before he died of AIDS she told him he would not go to Heaven because he was a h.o.m.os.e.xual. In the next seven years she would travel far from the doctrinaire concepts of her Baptist childhood. "I was raised to not question G.o.d. It's a sin," she said. "[But] I started to think for myself...and that's when I really started, in my mid-twenties, my own journey towards my spirituality, my spiritual self."

The journey began when her pastor, Rev. John Richard Bryant, gave a sermon about G.o.d being a jealous G.o.d. "I was just sitting there thinking for the first time after being raised Baptist...church, church, church, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday...I thought, 'Now why would G.o.d, who is omnipotent, who has everything, who was able to create me and raise the sun every morning, why would that G.o.d be jealous of anything that I have to say? Or be threatened by a question that I would have to ask?' "

Even bolstered by religion, she found her public humiliation taking its toll, physically and emotionally. "Reporters leaving the building would find her sitting in her car weeping, unable to summon energy to start the engine," said Michael Olesker.

"The stress was so bad that her hair started falling out," recalled Jane McClary.

"She said later that she had had a bad perm, but it was definitely stress."

Oprah consoled herself with food, eating around the clock. "I still have the check I wrote to my first diet doctor--Baltimore 1977," she said years later. "I was 23 years old, 148 pounds, a size 8, and I thought I was fat. The doctor put me on a 1,200 calorie regimen, and in less than two weeks I had lost ten pounds....Two months later, I'd regained 12. Thus began the cycle of discontent, the struggle with my body. With myself."

The stories that Oprah and others tell of her battle with food are sometimes comical, but more often sad. "I first met her at Overeaters Anonymous," said Hilda Ford, the former secretary of human resources for the state of Maryland. "We became close friends, despite our thirty-year age difference....We were both heavy black women who were outsiders to Baltimore at the time....We attended OA meetings, worked out at the gym together, and then went to Oprah's favorite deli in Cross Keys and--can you believe it?--we gorged on fried chicken."

People from WJZ recall a party thrown by Pat Wheeler, the station's director of community services. "At the end of the evening Pat was ushering everyone out, but she couldn't get Oprah to leave because there was a huge platter of salmon on the dining room table that hadn't been touched," said a reporter. "Oprah, an enormous eater, wouldn't go until she devoured the whole thing. It was quite an amazing display of gluttony." Oprah freely admitted to compulsive eating. She said her addiction to chocolate chip cookies frequently led her out of her apartment at night in boots and a coat on top of her pajamas for trips to the bakery. Most people understood that her eating was a subst.i.tute for something else. "I would hear stories about how she would have binges of eating when she was lonely," said Bill Carter.

"After her string of successes, Oprah was 'devastated' by [her] demotion," Gerri Kobren wrote in The Baltimore Sun. The Baltimore Sun. "She feared her career was grinding to a halt, and "She feared her career was grinding to a halt, and thought briefly about leaving town. Her hair fell out, leaving great bald patches; she had to keep her head wrapped in scarves while working."

Later, in the first flush of national success, Oprah would put an entirely different spin on losing her hair. Rather than admit to ravaged nerves, she blamed the a.s.sistant news director at WJZ, claiming he had sent her to New York City for a makeover after telling her, " 'Your hair is too thick, your eyes are too far apart, your nose is too wide, your chin is too long and you need to do something about it.' " She said they wanted to perform plastic surgery on her. In her confabulated tales, delivered with gusto to gullible feature writers and adoring audiences, she said the a.s.sistant news director came to her one day to announce, "We're having problems with the way you look. We're going to send you to New York. They have people there who can help you." She claimed she was sent to "a very chi chi poo poo lah dee dah salon. The kind that serves you wine, so that when you leave it does not matter what you look like. So...I said, 'Do you all know how to do black hair?' And the response was, 'Oui, madame, we do black hair, we do red hair, we do blonde hair and we do your hair.' So this French man put a French perm on my black hair. And I was the kind of woman at the time--this was 1977--that I sat there and let this French perm burn through my cerebral cortex rather than tell this man, 'It's hurting.'...He left this perm on my head to the point when I got up out of the chair, the only thing holding my hair follicles in were scabs."

More amusing than accurate, her exaggerated yarn about getting her head fried until she was "as bald as a billiard ball" was all part of a buoyant performance that took her audiences on a happy ride, but something her "aunt" Katharine Esters might have called another one of "Oprah's lies." Truth to tell, she had gone to a high-end beauty salon in Manhattan, but she had not been sent by the station. "We didn't have the budget for that sort of thing," said the news producer Larry Singer.

"I have no recollection of her being sent to New York City to have her hair redone by a French hairdresser," said the news director Gary Elion. "I don't know where that [story] came from."

Being h.e.l.l-bent on cosmetic self-improvement, Oprah had taken herself to New York City, but in her mythology of the makeover supposedly mandated by dunderheaded male management, she wailed, "They wanted to make me a Puerto Rican....They wanted me to bleach my skin, change my nose." At this point in her speeches she usually took a swipe at the news director who had hired and fired her. She claimed he had also wanted her to change her name. Sometimes she said he wanted her to call herself Suzie. Putting a hand on her hip, she would grin and ask her audience, "Do I look like a Suzie to you?"

Other times she said he wanted her to be called Cathy.

The only reporter who ever questioned Oprah on her fabulist tales was the television critic for The Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore Sun, Bill Carter, later with Bill Carter, later with The New York Times. The New York Times. After After interviewing her in 1986, when she insisted that Gary Elion had wanted her to change her name, Carter called the former news director, then a practicing lawyer.

"I'm flattered that Oprah even remembers me," Elion said ten years after leaving the station, "but I never asked anyone to change her name, except my wife when I asked her to marry me." Remaining gracious as Oprah pounded away at him in interviews and speeches, Elion simply resigned himself to Winston Churchill's observation that a lie flies halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on.

In the spring of 1977, William F. Baker arrived to become general manager of WJZ, and was soon promoted to president of Westinghouse Television and Group W Satellite Communications. "We all called him Dr. Baker because he had a PhD," said Jane McClary, who had been hired by Baker in Cleveland. "I got my job right out of college because my brother-in-law was press secretary to Senator John Glenn of Ohio.

Bill Baker was so smart that way. He hired Arleen Weiner, whose husband was a bigtime lawyer in Baltimore, and he also hired Maria Shriver. He saw the advantage of hiring people with those kind of connections....Maria wanted to be on the air, but she was too heavy and unattractive then, so Dr. Baker put her in as an a.s.sociate producer on the Evening Exchange. " "

Having created Morning Exchange in Cleveland, Ohio, the highest-rated local in Cleveland, Ohio, the highest-rated local morning program in the country and the template for ABC's Good Morning America, Good Morning America, Baker's mandate was to do the same in Baltimore.

"Daytime television was then an untapped audience of stay-at-home moms, who were completely underestimated," he said. "All they had were soap operas and game shows. I wanted to give them something more, and after my wife and I had gone to a few parties and gotten to know people at the station, she suggested I consider Oprah. 'You want to do another Morning Exchange Morning Exchange here, and you need a female cohost. I think you here, and you need a female cohost. I think you should look at Oprah. She wears her heart on her sleeve. Talks all the time, and relates well to people. I think she'd do well for you.' "

By then Oprah had worked herself back into news and was anchoring weekdays at noon. She wasn't permanent and she wasn't prime time, but she was back in the game.

The last thing she wanted to do was to start Dialing for Dollars on a daytime talk show.

"Oh, please, no," she begged Baker when told that he was buying the popular franchise, and that her new job as cohost of People Are Talking People Are Talking would include giving the would include giving the Dialing for Dollars pa.s.sword at the start of the program; at the end of the hour she would randomly select a phone number from a bowl of phone numbers previously submitted by viewers. If the selected viewer was watching the show and answered the phone with the correct pa.s.sword, he or she would win money. If the phone was not answered, the money would be added to the jackpot for the next day's call. It was a forty-five-second device producers used to keep viewers tuned in.

Suddenly c.o.c.katoos, circus elephants, and fire engines looked substantive. "The truth is that Oprah was on her way out," Baker said many years later. "She was simply serving out her contract until she could be let go....I knew she couldn't read a [news]

script very well, but that's not using the medium to its fullest potential, and it's not what I had in mind for a morning talk show. I needed someone good at ad-libbing, interested in people, who could handle viewer call-ins and all manner of guests. I thought Oprah would be good at fluff, too, so I suggested her to the program director, Alan Frank, and he recommended we pair her with Richard Sher, a solid news guy who had been at the station since 1975."

Frank said, "If we do this show right, it should have a white guy and a black woman. It crosses all lines then."

Baker agreed. "Then came the hard part," he said. "I had to talk Oprah into it."

Even at the end of her rope, she would have preferred being let go to doing daytime television. "She really wanted to be a news person," Baker said. "She knew that news was all that mattered in television at the time. She saw daytime as a real comedown, a failure. She started crying. 'Please don't do this to me,' she begged. 'It's the lowest of the low.' I told her, 'If you can become a success in daytime, Oprah, I promise that you can have a more profound effect on Baltimore than you can as a news anchor.' What I was offering her was a real job and, quite frankly, she had no other option."

Rather than play his take-it-or-leave-it card, Baker promised to help. "I told her I'd open my Rolodex. 'I'll do the booking, if need be,' I said. 'I'll make the calls. I'll oversee the producers. I'll be there every step of the way, because I've got my career riding on this morning talk show as much as you do. We'll make it a success together.' "

What Bill Baker told Oprah he also told reporters. "This show will be the ultimate refinement of every morning talk show that has ever been presented....Housewives are bright, intelligent people. They are deep-thinking people." He promised to give them shows of substance, which he defined at the time as dealing with Valium abuse, special diets, male s.e.xuality, fashion, and cooking. " People Are Talking People Are Talking will be the biggest will be the biggest studio morning show this city--or any city--has ever done." He also wanted to create a talk show to compete with The Phil Donahue Show, The Phil Donahue Show, which was getting astounding ratings which was getting astounding ratings all over the country, including in Baltimore.

Baker promised Oprah a big production budget, a raise in salary, an elaborate new set, a sophisticated telephone hookup, wardrobe consultants, and lighting and makeup specialists, plus the booking office of Westinghouse, which he said would ensure better guests because they would be offered the opportunity of appearing on all five Westinghouse stations around the country.

"Oprah finally agreed to do it," Baker recalled years later, "but she left my office with tears in her eyes."

Six.

RICHARD SHER cringed as he recalled the August 14, 1978, debut of People People Are Talking. "I still remember the headline in "I still remember the headline in The Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore Sun, " he said decades later: " he said decades later: " 'A Breath of Hot Stale Air.' "

Television critics shredded the new morning talk show. They blasted Bill Baker for promising intelligent fare for stay-at-home moms and then delivering a "mindless"

show about soap operas. They blasted Richard Sher for hogging air time with an ego that "swallow[ed] up the co-host, the guests and most of the furniture." They slammed the producers for a herky-jerky pace: " People Are Talking People Are Talking sputtered into life yesterday like sputtered into life yesterday like some sort of souped-up car with a rookie driver who had never used a clutch before."

Only Oprah escaped the d.a.m.ning reviews. She was commended for a "well polished" smile and handling the Dialing for Dollars segment "with unusual grace, giving this tacky little gimmick about as much cla.s.s as is possible." Still, Bill Carter issued a warning in The Baltimore Sun: The Baltimore Sun: "A long run at this and Oprah's image as a news reporter "A long run at this and Oprah's image as a news reporter is not going to be helped."

Oprah continued anchoring the news at noon, but she was no longer driven to become "the black Barbara Walters." She had been so nervous the day before her talk show debut that she ate three Payday candy bars and five chocolate chip cookies the size of pancakes. But after interviewing two actors from her favorite soap opera, All My All My Children, she said she felt like she had finally found her place in television. She loved the she said she felt like she had finally found her place in television. She loved the talk show format--"I used to watch Donahue Donahue to figure out how to do it"--and she could to figure out how to do it"--and she could hardly wait for the next show to interview men who had had plastic surgery to look like Elvis Presley. Obsessed with the concept of fame as a reflection of greatness, and having worshipped Diana Ross since she was ten years old, Oprah saw People Are Talking People Are Talking as a as a gateway to celebrities, even lunatic Elvis wannabes.

"She used to come into the makeup room like a little girl and sit down on a stool while I was being made up and ask questions about people she was interested in," said d.i.c.k Maurice, the entertainment editor of the Las Vegas Sun Las Vegas Sun and a frequent guest. "She and a frequent guest. "She had this quest for information about stars."

After the debut show, Oprah was the only one to walk off the set giddy with delight. "We live," she yelled as she grabbed a gla.s.s of champagne and hugged Richard Sher, who was reeling with misgivings. The producers were also a little shaky, but Oprah was soaring. "I came off the air, and I knew that was what I was supposed to do....This is it. This is what I was born to do....It just felt like breathing. It was the most natural process for me."

Within a week, The Baltimore Sun The Baltimore Sun agreed. "Oprah is rapidly proving that she was agreed. "Oprah is rapidly proving that she was an excellent selection for a morning talk show host," wrote Bill Carter. "She simply looks very good in the morning talk format. She is low key but bright and attractive, and that combination works well over a morning cup of coffee."

"It took us two or three years to jell," said Richard Sher, the dominant partner to Oprah's second banana. "My Afro was as big as hers." Quick and witty, Sher had been selected because he resembled Phil Donahue and might appeal to Donahue's female audience, which Sher never disputed, even given a chance. "He was the talent," joked Oprah. "Just ask him." As a Southern black woman who shrank from confrontation and described herself as a "people pleaser," she accommodated her c.o.c.ky cohost, and gave his ego a wide berth. She had learned from her bruising debacle with Jerry Turner and was determined to make this partnership work.

"We were very close," recalled Sher. "I'll never work with anyone again like that.

We knew what each other was thinking....I once took her to the hospital because she had chest pains and she put me down as next of kin. She had her own pretzel and potato chip drawer in our house. She'd jog up, we'd hear the door open, and the drawer open and we'd know Ope was there. She was real close to my wife, Annabelle, and the kids. She used to call me her best girlfriend."

"He taught me how to be Jewish," said Oprah. "He also taught me to swear."

"Oprah and Richard had a very close relationship," said Barbara Hamm, an a.s.sociate producer for People Are Talking. People Are Talking. "They were like brother and sister, although "They were like brother and sister, although they had creative disagreements about what guests should be on the show and the line of questioning." She preferred movie stars, rock stars, and soap opera stars; he wanted government officials and corporate moguls. She asked questions that made him squirm.

"Oprah liked to have fun," Hamm said, "get the audience into the show. Richard wasn't so sure. He didn't want to lose control. During one show she got the audience literally dancing in the aisles. It was wild and it worked."

Unlike her cohost, Oprah was not overly concerned about her professional image.

Nor was she afraid to ask naive questions and look silly, even undignified, on occasion.

She exercised with manic fitness guru Richard Simmons, danced with ethnic dancers, and interviewed a prost.i.tute who had killed a client. She also decorated cakes, basted turkeys, and bobbed for apples. When Richard Sher entered into a ponderous discussion about television journalism with Frank Reynolds, the network anchor for ABC-TV, Oprah sat on the couch listening quietly.

"Her cohost was asking all these serious, boring questions," recalled Kelly Craig, a nineteen-year-old college student who later became a reporter on WTVJ in Miami.

"When it was Oprah's turn, she asked, 'So what does Frank Reynolds eat for dinner?' "

The young woman was impressed by Oprah's off-the-wall query because she felt this was what the audience really wanted to know. Craig decided if she ever got the chance to interview celebrities, she'd ask questions like Oprah's.

"Oprah had to be taught how to ask those questions," recalled Jane McClary, "and you have to give the producer Sherry Burns credit for training Oprah to be Oprah....I can remember Sherry screaming and yelling and swearing at Oprah day after day. 'Oprah, what the h.e.l.l were you thinking? What was in your head? Why didn't you ask that obvious question? You should always ask the first thing that comes to mind. Just say it.

Say it. Say it. Put your gut out there, girl. Don't be afraid. Just do it.' "

One.