Oprah (50 page)

The judge, Mary Lou Robinson, issued a gag order, prohibiting both sides from discussing the case. “Can you imagine how hard it was for me NOT to talk about the trial?” Oprah said. “Can you imagine a gag order on a talk-show host? It was horrible.” She came close, though, as she cleverly presented herself as pro-beef in Amarillo, where the feedlot/slaughterhouse is the single biggest employer. In her first taped show, she had steaks sizzling in the background as she said, “Of course, you’re in Amarillo so there’s beef, beef, and more beef.” Interviewing Patrick Swayze, she said, “You had beef, did you? That’s just fine by me.” He presented her with a cowboy hat and a pair of black Lucchese boots. Then he taught her the Texas two-step. She adopted a countrified Texas accent, and at some point in every show (she taped twenty-nine) she mentioned the nice people of Amarillo. Within days she had the town wrapped around her little finger. The line for tickets to watch tapings of her show began forming at
4:00
A.M.
every day and new bumper stickers sprouted up reading, “Amarillo Loves Oprah.”

The female judge refused to allow women to wear pants in her courtroom, so Oprah wore a skirt every day. “I loved the fact no cameras were allowed in the courtroom,” she said. “Those artist renderings made me look skinny.” Even with her trainer and her chef in tow, she still battled her weight—at least for the first few days. Then she said she gave herself over to “Jesus and the comfort of pie.” She gained twenty-two pounds during the six-week trial. “My trainer, Bob Greene, was very upset with me. He said, ‘It’s like you gained it, and you’re very proud of it.’ I’d say, ‘Yes! I ate pie! I ate pie! And we had macaroni and cheese with seven different cheeses!’ ” Her codefendant, Howard Lyman, a cattle rancher turned vegetarian, was not allowed to mention weight or food to her. “Her attorneys told me I couldn’t talk to her about her diet during the trial….They felt she was under enough pressure.” As director of the Humane Society’s Eating with Conscience campaign, Lyman was covered by legal insurance, which also paid for half the fees of Phil McGraw.

After he was hired, McGraw flew to Chicago to meet with Oprah, but he was told by one of her assistants that she could give him only an hour of her time. “Excuse me,” he said, “it isn’t
my
ass getting sued. If that’s all the time she’s got, then I don’t want to be part of this.” Before he stomped out, Oprah agreed to give him as much time as he needed to help her drop her defensiveness. “She came across poorly,” he said later, “in a state of disbelief that she was being sued.” Midway into the trial he told her to “snap out of it” or she was going to lose. She had come to his door at 2:30 in the morning, sobbing hysterically and unable to cope with the frustration of being “unfairly” accused. “My advice to her was that ‘right or wrong, Oprah, this is happening. They are well financed, dead serious, and deeply committed.’…I was a wake-up call that said deal with the fairness later, but right now you are in a firefight, and you’d better get in the game and get focused….At that point she became a very different litigant.”

Tall, balding, and broad-shouldered, McGraw walked behind her going in and out of the courthouse every day and never said a word to
the news media. He did not even nod hello. Tim Jones of the
Chicago Tribune
said, “I thought he was one of her bodyguards.”

“Phil met with us and all the lawyers after every day in court,” said Lyman, “and he was worth every nickel he charged. His fee was $250,000—I know because I had to pay half of it—but I do not believe we would have won the lawsuit without the advice we got from him….Phil said we could defend the case on the facts and march in all of our scientists to swear up and down that everything we said was true, and the other side would do the same thing. But the jury sitting there needed to know if they voted to take away our right of free speech, someone could come along and vote to take away theirs. That was what Phil came up with and that’s why we won.”

Midway through the third week of the trial, Oprah took the stand to testify. She ascended the steps of the courthouse clutching the hand of Maya Angelou, who whispered in her ear as she stood to walk to the witness stand. Stedman arrived a few days later to take over from Maya, who returned home and sent a group of preachers to church to pray around the clock for Oprah.

For three days Oprah was examined about her negligence in not double-checking Lyman’s claims and not doing something about her producer’s careless editing. At one point she lost her patience, sighed loudly, and tossed her hair over her shoulder. When asked about her huge viewership, she said, “My show has been built around people who are just regular people with a story to tell.” Then she added, “I have talked to everybody I have ever wanted to, except for the pope.” After repetitive questioning, she leaned in to the microphone and in a commanding voice said, “I provide a forum for people to express their opinions….This is the United States of America. We are allowed to do this in the United States of America….I come from a people who have struggled and died in order to have a voice in this country, and I refuse to be muzzled.” She said if the guests on her show believe what they say is true and sign a statement to that effect, then truth is established for her, and accountability rests largely with the guests. “This is not the evening news,” she said. “I’m a talk show where free expression is encouraged….This is the United States and we are allowed to do
that in the United States.” When she was asked about her integrity, she said, “I am a black woman in America, having gotten here believing in a power greater than myself. I cannot be bought. I answer to the spirit of God that lives in us all.” She said her influence was not enough to drive Americans away from beef. “If I had that kind of power, I’d go on the air and heal people.”

Her attorney pleaded with the jury in his final argument. “You have an opportunity to silence one of the powerful voices of good in this country. She is here to validate our right to free speech.” Describing Oprah as “a shining light” for millions of Americans, he said, “Her show reflects the right of the people in this country to have free speech…and robust debate.”

After five and a half hours’ deliberation over two days, the all-white jury of eight women and four men cleared Oprah, her production company, and Howard Lyman of knowingly making false and disparaging statements about beef. “We didn’t like what we had to do,” said the jury forewoman, “but we had to decide for the First Amendment.” Hearing the verdict, Oprah lowered her head and wept. Moments later she appeared on the courthouse steps in sunglasses and flung her fists to the sky. “Free speech not only lives,” she yelled, “it rocks.”

O
PRAH NEVER
gave up her dream of becoming a marquee movie star, and by 1997 she felt she finally had the vehicle to put her name in lights. For nine years she had been trying to develop
Beloved,
Toni Morrison’s novel about the effects of slavery. But even with a finished script, her own financing, and Disney as the distributor, she had been rejected by ten directors, including Jodie Foster (
Little Man Tate
), who said the book was too difficult to be filmed; Jane Campion (
The Piano
), who said she did not know enough about the black experience, and Peter Weir (
Witness, Dead Poets Society
), who said he did not want Oprah to play the lead of Sethe, the mother who kills her daughter rather than send her into enslavement.

“[He] couldn’t quite see me in it,” Oprah sarcastically told the writer Jonathan Van Meter. Mocking Weir’s Australian accent, she said, “And would I please just trust him and if he felt that I could be in it he would certainly make every effort.”

Although she had appeared in only two feature films and three made-for-television movies, Oprah insisted she was born to play the role of Sethe. So she dismissed Peter Weir without further consideration. “You want
me
to give you
my
script and
you
decide if
I
can be in it? Okay. Bye-bye.”

In 1997 she found the Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme (
The Silence of the Lambs
), who said he couldn’t wait to see her play Sethe. Demme was hired on the spot, and Oprah became the producer and star.

“This is my
Schindler’s List,
” she said, referencing Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece. She felt that she could do for descendants of slavery what Spielberg had done for Holocaust survivors—bring to the screen a story of heroism surrounded by heinous evil. This was to be her first feature film production, although she had been producing made-for-television films on ABC under the banner of “Oprah Winfrey Presents,” and most had won their time slots with high ratings, if not rave reviews.

“Do you suppose anyone has ever had the nerve to tell Oprah Winfrey to go soak her head?” wrote
The Washington Post
’s TV critic, Tom Shales, about her production of
David and Lisa,
which was directed by Oprah’s first Baltimore boyfriend, Lloyd Kramer. “[H]er evangelistic tendencies are beginning to spin way out of control….She’ll improve and nurture and inspire us even if it kills us.” Shales objected to Oprah’s on-camera introduction: “She tells us what the film is about, what the moral message is and how we should react to it….She also spells out some of the plot, perhaps for people who move their lips when they watch TV….Winfrey playing national nanny is getting to be a drag. ‘It’s a story I wanted to tell to a whole new generation,’ she says grandly into the camera. Oh, Oprah. Give it a rest already.”

She brought the same high moral fervor to the making of
Beloved.
“It’s my history. It is my legacy. It is the capital WHO of who I am,” she said of the three-hour film that cost $53 million to produce, plus another $30 million to promote. “It’s wonderful to be in the position to finance the movie yourself,” she said. “I don’t care if two people come to see it or two million. This movie will be done and it will be incredible, one of the great statements in my life.”

To prepare for her role she began collecting slave memorabilia, buying at auction ownership papers from various plantations, which listed the names and purchase prices of humans alongside those of mules and pigs under the designation of “property.” She framed the wrenching documents and hung them in her home and in her trailer
during filming. Five generations removed from slavery, she lit candles to “the spirits of the ancestors,” said she heard the voices of slaves and prayed aloud to them every day. She bought as her “first very serious art purchase from Sotheby’s” a painting by Harry Roseland titled
To the Highest Bidder,
which she hung over the fireplace in her Indiana farm. The canvas shows a black slave and her young daughter trembling with fear on the auction block.

Oprah also enrolled in “The Underground Railroad Immersion Experience,” to reenact the emotions of a runaway slave who has been denied free will and independent thinking. For two days she lived as a fugitive, blindfolded, chased by bloodhounds, and spat upon by whiskeyed slave masters on horseback. “I knew I was still Oprah Winfrey, and I could take off the blindfold anytime I wanted, but the reaction to being called a nigger was just visceral for me. I wanted to quit. But I didn’t. I wanted to feel it all. I touched a dark, hollow place of hopelessness that I’ll never forget. It was a transforming experience for me. I came out fearless because I truly learned where I came from.”

Oprah was determined to present a story that exposed how slaves absorbed the abuse of their masters, turning it on their own—physically, sexually, emotionally. The taboo theme of sexual abuse, so frequently left out of slave narratives, drew her because of her own personal experience, and she resolved to show the horror of sexual molestation on-screen. She wanted audiences to experience slavery in a way they never had before: to see a woman lynched, bound with tight leather cords, a metal shiv jammed in her mouth; to hear the rope crack her neck; and to smell her corpse as it is left to rot in the gallows. Oprah wanted people to feel the lash of whips cutting across a bloody black back, leaving a tree of scarred welts. She intended to produce something more memorable than the miniseries
Roots,
Alex Haley’s sweeping slave epic that transfixed 130 million television viewers in 1977. “While
Roots
was magnificent and necessary for its time, it showed what slavery looked like, rather than what it felt like,” Oprah said. “You don’t know what the whippings really did to us.”

With
Beloved,
she planned to recast the story of slavery in America in all its hell and heroism. “We got it all wrong,” she said of the history books. “For years we’ve talked about the physicality of slavery—who
did what and who invented that. But the real legacy lies in the strength and courage to survive.”

She wanted nothing less than to change America’s consciousness with her film, and to heal racial wounds. “I understand a lot of what that conflict is about,” she said. “It’s about people truly not understanding one another. Once you understand, come to know people and have a knowledge of their hearts, the color of their skin means nothing to you.”

During his second term in office, President Bill Clinton had called for a “national conversation on race,” and Oprah felt the president would have done well to have chosen her to lead that conversation. “He should’ve,” she told
USA Weekend.
“I know how to talk to people….Everything is about imagery. We’re people who respond to imagery. You need to see something different so you can feel something different.”

She felt that her production of
Beloved
would provide the needed differential. “I just want this movie to be received in the way that I truly think it should be,” she said. “I want people to be moved and disturbed by the power of Sethe. If that can happen, I’ll be satisfied for a very long time.”

When the film came out, the critics were moved but, disturbingly to Oprah, in the wrong direction. Most found her film too long, too confusing, and overwrought, and her acting less than star-making.
The New York Times
’s Janet Maslin said she was not “an intuitive actress”;
The New Republic
’s Stanley Kauffmann said she was merely “competent”; and
Commonweal
’s Richard Alleva dismissed her as “surprisingly dim.” But her good friend Roger Ebert, the film critic, said she gave “a brave deep performance,” and
Time
’s Richard Corliss agreed. “This isn’t a gimmick performance; it is genuine acting.” Even Toni Morrison, who worried about Oprah’s ability to contain her oozing emotions, was impressed. “As soon as I saw her I smiled to myself, because I did not think of the brand name,” said Morrison. “She looked like Sethe. She inhabited the role.” But the public did not want to see Oprah as Sethe and watch her water breaking, or see her breast milk stolen by “mossy-toothed” white men, or her slitting the throat of her baby girl. In a perceptive column for the
Chicago Sun-Times
Mary A. Mitchell, herself an African American, summed up why:

Beloved
was released on October 16, 1998, with one of the most expensive ($30 million), media-saturating publicity campaigns ever accorded a film—and perhaps that was part of the problem. To some people Oprah appeared to be promoting herself more than her movie, or the important message behind the movie, especially when she appeared on the cover of
Vogue,
the bible of fashion elites. The editor, Anna Wintour, who weighed barely one hundred pounds, had flown to Chicago to tell Oprah she had to lose weight before she could be considered for the cover. “It was a very gentle suggestion,” recalled Wintour, who filled her pages with runway whippets. “She knew she had to lose weight….I suggested that it might be an idea….I said simply, ‘You might feel more comfortable.’ ” Then she added, “She promised she would lose twenty pounds by our deadline.”

Later, André Leon Talley,
Vogue
’s editor at large, and quite sizeable himself, told Oprah, “Most of the
Vogue
girls are so thin, tremendously thin, because Miss Anna don’t like fat people.”

Like a fashion slave hearing her master’s voice, Oprah rushed off to a weight-loss boot camp and began sipping broth, climbing mountains, and running eight miles a day to get down to 150 pounds. Only then did Ms. Wintour allow her to pose for noted photographer Steven Meisel, a favorite of Diana, Princess of Wales. Oprah’s
Vogue
cover, in October 1998, sold 900,000 copies and became the top seller in the magazine’s 110-year history. Oprah later told Sheila McLennan from BBC Radio 4’s
Woman’s Hour
that the idea of being on the cover of
Vogue
wasn’t even a fantasy for a little girl who claimed to have been
called “colored,” “ugly,” and “Buckwheat.” Oprah devoted one of her shows to her
Vogue
makeover and flew to New York when Wintour hosted a cocktail party at Balthazar Restaurant during Fashion Week to unveil the cover.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Stedman Graham when he first saw the photo of Oprah lounging seductively in a black strapless Ralph Lauren gown. “It’s like the culmination of all that she’s worked for….From being overweight to this point is one of the greatest victories a person can have.”

It may have been this kind of thinking—putting the glamour of a weight-loss makeover on an equal footing with overcoming slavery—that caused the publicity and promotion surrounding
Beloved
to backfire.

In addition to
Vogue,
Oprah promoted her film by posing for the covers of
TV Guide, USA Weekend, InStyle, Good Housekeeping,
and
Time,
which heralded her with four articles and eleven pages as “The Beloved Oprah.” Days after the film’s release, she arranged a special showing for New Age guru Marianne Williamson’s Church of Today in Detroit and told the congregation, which included Rosa Parks, sitting in the front row, “
Beloved
is my gift to you.” On the day the film opened,
The Oprah Winfrey Show
presented the cast of
Beloved
and the making of the movie. “I’m having my baby,” she told her audience. That same day launched publication of
Journey to Beloved,
by Oprah Winfrey, with photographs by Ken Regan—a forty-dollar coffee-table book of the daily diary Oprah kept during the three months of filming, in which she also recorded her shock over the murder of the designer Gianni Versace in Miami and the startling death of the Princess of Wales in a Paris tunnel. But most of her entries concerned filming
Beloved,
which Oprah said was the only time in her life, other than filming
The Color Purple,
when she was truly happy. A few excerpts:

Oprah promoted her movie as medicine that is good for you whether or not you like it, and she sat for hours giving newspaper and television interviews. “The thing about this movie is…you really have to pay attention,” she told one reporter. “And that’s why this is probably my 135th interview….Because I want people to know that there has not been a movie like this before, and you need to be prepared….People need to know that this is a movie that requires your full attention, just as all art does. That it stimulates, is deep, goes down, down, down and comes back up again.”