Oprah (42 page)

J
UST WHEN
Oprah decided to yank her show out of the trough of trash television, she lost one million viewers. But so did all the other talk show hosts. None of them—not Donahue, Geraldo, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer—could compete with O. J. Simpson and the most notorious murder in American history. On June 17, 1994, they were all run over by a white Bronco leading police on a sixty-mile chase across the freeways of Los Angeles with cameras whirring overhead as helicopters followed the sport utility vehicle until it finally stopped at Simpson’s Tudor mansion in Brentwood. There he was immediately arrested, charged, and jailed for the slashing murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

For the next sixteen months every lurid detail of the vicious crime was disseminated and debated on television as the country became fixated on all things O. J. Court TV shows were created to analyze the crime, the suspect, the victims and their families, the prosecutors, the defense team, and the judge, who welcomed cameras to his courtroom, where the trial was televised live. Reporters such as ABC’s Terry Moran, MSNBC’s Dan Abrams, and Greta Van Susteren of Fox News became celebrities simply for covering the O. J. Simpson trial, and
twentieth-century Americans sat in front of their television sets like Romans once gathered in the Colosseum to watch lions devour Christians and gladiators battle for their lives.

People who did not know their next-door neighbors came to know everyone associated with Orenthal James Simpson: his bumptious houseguest, Kato Kaelin; the 911 operator who took the call from Nicole in 1989 as O. J. was beating her; the criminal defense attorney Johnnie (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”) Cochran; the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden; the celebrity-loving judge, Lance Ito; and the disgraced LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, whose racial epithet and Fifth Amendment evasions greatly swayed the jury. As Eric Zorn wrote in the
Chicago Tribune:
“The O. J. Simpson trial became the most tabloid friendly story since Elvis died on the toilet.”

Until that night in June 1994, Simpson had reigned as the golden boy of American sports, who, upon retirement from football, never stopped hearing the cheers. The former Heisman Trophy winner, who for most of his career played for the Buffalo Bills, extended his fame as the high-flying star who galloped through airports in a series of television commercials for Hertz rent-a-car. He appeared in films such as
The Towering Inferno
and
The Naked Gun,
and worked with stars such as Paul Newman, Fred Astaire, Faye Dunaway, and Sophia Loren. He played golf at the most exclusive country clubs and received hefty honorariums just for showing up at Hollywood benefits to smile and shake hands. A black man embraced by white America, O. J. Simpson had it all—money, position, national recognition, and universal respect—until the night his ex-wife was found butchered alongside the waiter who had stopped by her house to return the sunglasses she had left at the Mezzaluna Trattoria earlier in the evening.

When the trial began in January 1995, Oprah saw her ratings tank. “I can look at the numbers and say, ‘Was Kato on the stand? Who was on the stand?’ Like yesterday, our numbers shot up a point and a half from what they’ve averaged for the past couple weeks because there was no court.” Tim Bennett, the new president of Harpo Productions, defended her dip in the ratings. “While these are not the most outstanding numbers we’ve ever had, they’re leading our nearest competitor by close to 100 percent. What other genre in all of television—comedies
in prime time, network newscasts, late-night talk shows—can claim that?” He conceded the impact of the trial coverage “to the tune of 15 percent almost on a daily basis.”

During the court’s first day off in April 1995, Oprah leaped to recoup some of that lost percentage by booking four network trial commentators, plus the writer Dominick Dunne, who had been given a prize seat in the judge’s courtroom because he was covering the trial for
Vanity Fair.
As soon as Oprah’s audience had a chance to speak, they quickly established themselves as passionately in support of O. J. Simpson, and for the next six months they and the rest of the country wrangled about whether he could or would or should be found guilty. The debate went on behind the scenes at Harpo as well, and Oprah decided to do a show on October 3, 1995, following the verdict. When it was announced that O. J. was found not guilty, she appeared visibly shocked. Most of the black members of her audience shrieked and clapped and danced around, while some of the white members sat in stunned, disbelieving silence. The trial had splintered the country on race. Polls showed that 72 percent of white Americans believed O. J. was guilty, while 71 percent of black Americans believed he was innocent. Although privately Oprah had predicted the outcome, publicly she stood with white America. Ten years later polls recorded a shift, with only 40 percent of black Americans believing O. J. innocent, which brought black opinions closer to those of whites.

“For a long time after that, people wrote in asking what I was really thinking when they read the Not Guilty verdict,” Oprah said. “So here it is: I was completely shocked. I couldn’t believe that verdict. As a journalist, I was trying to keep some sense of balance in the midst of my own very strong opinions, but it was difficult to do that day.” It was surprising to hear Oprah identify herself as a journalist, trying to keep “strong opinions” at bay. Rather, she was a shrewd talk show host not wanting to alienate members of her audience who believed O. J. should have been found not guilty.

A former Harpo employee remembers that before the verdict, those in the control room predicted O. J. would be convicted, but Oprah disagreed. “You don’t know my people,” she said of the predominantly black jury, understanding that Mark Fuhrman’s racist comments would
deny him any credibility among African American jurors. Publicly she said there was a perception among black people that almost all white people feel the way Fuhrman did. In a column for the
Nashville Banner,
Oprah’s friend and former coworker at WTVF-TV, Ruth Ann Leach, focused on Oprah’s belief that “most white people harbor deep hatred of black people.” Pointing out that “Oprah’s entire career has been nurtured, supported and made possible mainly by white people,” Leach wrote, “This woman knows full well that she is worshipped by millions of white Americans. If she still feels that most whites hate most blacks, what must the less privileged people of color feel? Whites claim to be baffled by the polls that show African Americans believe O. J. Simpson did not do the crimes. How could anyone dismiss every drop of blood, every strand of fiber? Easily. Black people—not limited to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury—simply did not believe anything the racist cops and their racist support teams produced as evidence.”

For two days after the verdict, Oprah dedicated her shows to “O. J. Simpson: The Aftermath.” The tabloids reported that she had been promised his first broadcast interview, which she rushed to deny. “I will never interview O. J. Simpson,” she declared. Days later she welcomed the TV star Loni Anderson, ex-wife of Burt Reynolds, who Anderson said had thrown her into furniture and smashed her head against the wall of their Hollywood home. Oprah looked shocked.

“I’ve had it with men who beat up women,” she said. Turning to her audience, she announced she was banning all wife-beaters from her show. She again recited the humiliation of her married lover walking out on her in Baltimore and slamming the door on her hand. “I remember falling to the floor and crying. I remember being down on that floor and saying, ‘Who am I really?’ From that time on I made the decision that I was going to take charge of myself.”

From the beginning of her career Oprah had established herself as America’s girlfriend. She was the beloved sister-woman who knew the sorority secrets, some of which she divined from how-to books such as Sarah Ban Breathnach’s
Simple Abundance,
an advice book for women. To her viewers, Oprah was the neighbor lady down the street who poured coffee for the wives after their husbands lunch-pailed to work. She was the misery madam who soothed and comforted and
occasionally scolded. She was the town crier warning against pedophiles, wife-beaters, and all manner of abusers, and as such, she became a champion for women, especially downtrodden women who had been done wrong by men.

“If I could just get Black women connected to this whole abuse issue,” she told Laura Randolph of
Ebony.
“I hear it all the time from Black women who say, ‘Well, he slapped me around a few times, but he doesn’t really beat me.’ We are so accustomed to being treated badly that we don’t even know that love is supposed to really feel good.” She used her own life as an example of how her female viewers could shake free from the loser men in their lives and reclaim their self-esteem. “If I can do it,” preached America’s first black female billionaire, “you can do it.”

While Oprah refused to interview O. J. Simpson, she did interview those around him, including Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who had been hired as O. J.’s appeals lawyer. He had written a novel,
The Advocate’s Devil,
focused on a Harvard lawyer who thinks his client, a professional athlete, might be guilty of a felony, and the dilemma the lawyer faces in representing him. When Warner Books could not book Dershowitz on Oprah, he called the producers himself and insisted they do a show titled “How to Defend a Criminal.”

“He actually bulldozed his way onto the show,” said a former Warner Books publicist, “but then he got blindsided because they also booked Ron Goldman’s family. Dershowitz was annoyed and kept mentioning his book over and over again. So much so that Oprah turned to her audience and made fun of him, saying, ‘What’s the name of the book again?’ They all chorused the title. He was definitely overdoing it….And if you and your book don’t get the love treatment on her show, you lose.” Dershowitz’s book sank without a trace.

The most controversial O. J. shows Oprah did were her February 20 and 24, 1997, interviews with Mark Fuhrman, who swore in court that he had never used the word
nigger.
Tape recordings and witnesses proved he had lied, and Oprah pressed him on it.

“What do you mean there are no right or wrong answers? What about the truth?” she said. “Do you think you are a racist?”

Fuhrman said no.

“Why not? If you could use those words, why not? Do you believe you can use the
N
word and not be a racist?”

Even as she made clear her disgust with the detective, she was criticized in black newspapers for having had him on the show in the first place, especially during Black
History Month.
The Chicago Defender
quoted former Illinois appellate court judge Eugene Pincham as saying it was “a slap in the face” to the country’s African American community. Oprah admitted that her interview with Fuhrman provoked more viewer response than any other topic in the history of her show. She later interviewed the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, when they published their books about losing the case, and she especially empathized with Darden. “He felt that that trial—133 days—was a total waste of his life and time,” Oprah said.