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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-
May 4, 1999 | By the time Oprah went national, in September 1986, she was already an Oscar-nominated actress for "The Color Purple" and relentlessly hyped as broadcasting's next big thing. As it turned out, she was. For the next several years she sailed comfortably along on a sun-kissed crest of success. She collected Emmys and broadcasting awards like they were seashells on the beach, dominated the ratings, branched out into television production with projects like "The Women of Brewster Place" and spawned a seemingly endless supply of talk-show clones. Then, while at the top of her game, she looked around and made an intriguing observation -- most daytime talk shows are crap. And she, Oprah, the talented self-made millionaire businesswoman who'd spent a lifetime idolizing black female leaders like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, was becoming a purveyor of sensationalism and exploitation. So she made a decision.
"I am not going to be able to spend from now until the year 2000 talking about dysfunction," she declared in 1994. Trash TV was out, empowerment was in. She began changing the tenor of her show from scandal to self-improvement, and started something she called Oprah's Book Club, a regular reading group to discuss works of merit she'd chosen and encouraged her audience to read. The reaction was enthusiastic, to say the least.
Oprah's detractors sniff at her viewers' lemming-like obedience -- a blessing from Winfrey can guarantee a bestseller -- but the merit of her choices and the impact on her audience is not so easily dismissed. The comfortably literary humanities majors of the world can yawn and declare that they don't need Oprah to tell them what to read, but the person who hasn't picked up a book since high school, who has never read for pure pleasure, knows, because of Oprah, the transforming power of books. And authors -- from Wally Lamb to Jane Hamilton to Edwidge Danticat, and even big names like Toni Morrison -- have reached a whole new readership.
If it's easy and valid to criticize Oprah's pop psychology format and her sanctimonious derision of the TV genre that unquestionably owes its success to her (let she who has never done a show on women who've had babies by their fathers throw the first stone), her tireless attention to issues like child and domestic abuse remain unimpeachable. In 1991, for example, she helped draft and lobby for the National Child Protection Act, to create a centralized national database of convicted child abusers. Call her self-involved, weight-obsessed, controlling, workaholic or simplistic -- not only won't she disagree, she'll probably do a show on it. (Recent episodes have covered, in true Oprah fashion, unequal relationships and the trials of perfectionism.) But no other celebrity so intuitively comprehends the power she holds over her audience, or takes that responsibility so seriously.
Of course, that influence hasn't escaped the attention of others either, notably Texas cattlemen. They were so spooked when Oprah announced in 1996 that fear of mad cow disease had permanently turned her off burgers that they blamed her for causing beef prices to plummet and sued her. Ever resilient, she moved her show to Amarillo for the trial, won the suit and came out smelling like a rose.
Other entertainers contentedly grab the ratings and wait for the trucks of money to roll up to their mansions. Oprah, while still visibly enjoying the fruits of her success, has gone one step further. With the spotlight glaring on her, the microphone in her face, the girl from Kosciusko smiles and says, "Now that I have your attention ..." As she publicly struggles with her own demons, with her scars and her weaknesses, she throws down the gauntlet for her audience to do the same. To get out of abusive relationships. To educate themselves. To even, amazingly, turn off the damn TV and read a book. And if she cries or throws her arms around a guest with a candor that can be at times unsettling, it also provides a leveling counterpoint to every cool, straight-faced news reader and every riot-inciting, histrionic ringmaster. Critics may deride her show as facile, middlebrow or ickily touchy-feely, but damn if she can't bring a lump to your throat with a single quiver of her lip.
After more than two decades on the air, she remains the one talking head most boldly unafraid to demonstrate she also has a heart -- and even a stomach. If God were one of us, the Almighty would probably keep that same human touch as well, while grabbing a prime slot on TV and a big-deal production company. In short, she'd probably look a lot like Oprah.