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Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
Oprah Winfrey spent 20 years becoming the most powerful woman in broadcasting. Then she told her viewers to turn off their televisions and pick up a book.
May 4, 1999 | There's an old joke that goes: "I dreamed last night that I met God. And she was black." In terms of power and sphere of influence, Oprah Winfrey still may not be the supreme being, but she's running pretty close. She's a one-woman industry: talk show host, producer, actress, lobbyist and philanthropist. In a field traditionally dominated by middle-aged white men and slim young blond females, she's added diversity with heft and color. And she brought a serious dose of warm -- and often overheated -- emotion to a medium once famously described as cool. If she's not God, her success story is at least undeniably miraculous.
Oprah Gail Winfrey, the biblically misnamed misfit (her mother meant to call her Orpah, after a figure from the book of Ruth) who became the first woman to top the Forbes list of America's highest-paid entertainers, lived a childhood of extremes. Her parents never married; her mom worked as a maid and collected welfare. As her family splintered, she spent years shuttling between her grandmother in Kosciusko, Miss., her mother and half-siblings in Milwaukee and her father and stepmother back in the South. Her youth was marked by the kind of wildly divergent experiences that would later enable her to relate to individuals from an impossibly broad spectrum -- she was a churchgoing girl in a small town, a poor urban kid crammed into a tiny apartment, a sexually abused child, an achiever who earned a scholarship to a posh all-white suburban high school, a promiscuous rebel who ran away, got pregnant and lost the baby.
Eventually she found her way to Tennessee State University, but dropped out when she snagged an anchor spot on a Nashville news station. She was its first African-American anchor and its first female. She was 19 years old. Later she moved to a station in Baltimore -- but Oprah didn't just want to report the news, she wanted to discuss it. She got worked up over the stories she covered. She ad-libbed. It was only when she moved over to co-hosting a morning show that she found her voice -- concerned, soothing and highly subjective.
After several years in the trenches, Oprah came to Chicago in the early '80s with what was to be a breezy mid-morning chat show. Up against daytime titan and |bermensch Phil Donahue, plunked down in the middle of a racially volatile metropolis, Oprah conquered both the color line and the ratings as if neither existed; within the first week she was already trouncing her silver-haired competition. While Donahue had pioneered the daytime talk format -- controversial subject matter, wandering host with a microphone -- it was Oprah who perfected it. Oprah, unlike Phil, was the first broadcaster who looked like she could be a member of her own audience. She was, for her predominantly female audience, an instantly recognizable best girlfriend -- the woman whose shoulder you could cry on Monday and the one who'd be spilling her guts to you about her own problems on Tuesday.
Later, in the first flush of her national success, she declared that all she really wanted in life was to fit into a size 10 pair of Calvin Kleins. She was a woman at the top of the world who maintained a very down-to-earth relationship with her butt. It gave viewers something that Barbara or Jane or Diane never had or could -- the shock of recognition.
The traumas and triumphs of her early years are remarkable and eventful enough, but what makes Winfrey unique is her unblinking frankness about them. Near the beginning of her television career, she first publicly revealed the molestation she suffered as an adolescent at the hands of a cousin and uncle. Today, in a climate of rampant celebrity oversharing, Oprah's initial revelations may not seem particularly unusual or gutsy. At the time, they were electrifying. Here was a broadcaster who didn't reassure with bland calm, as rock-solid Walter Cronkite and his ilk had. Instead, she comforted viewers through the force of the two-way empathy she generated. Audiences, whatever their colors or sizes, looked at Oprah and saw, for the first time in nonfiction television, themselves. And incredibly, Oprah has held onto her talent for looking at her audience and seeing herself right back.
Just recently, the day after the mass shooting in Littleton, Colo., Oprah interviewed a teacher at Columbine High School who had lost two of her students. When the teacher mentioned that she'd coached the kids on the forensics team, Oprah quietly remarked, "I was on the forensics team," before breaking down in sobs. It was, depending on your point of view, a moment of deep self-absorption or supreme compassion -- a middle-aged black woman in Chicago had, without even seeming to try, found something in common with two white suburban teenagers.
It's that trademark brand of "I know, because I've been there" empathy that's her
stock in trade. Each episode of her dozen-
