Oprah (66 page)

“Everyone wanted that interview,” Oprah said of her exclusive booking. “But I played the friendship card.” She also bathed Schwarzenegger in the warm glow of her acceptance: “Arnold is a mentor to a lot of men, but the thing that they’re mentoring is the macho, the muscles. But what makes Arnold Arnold is the balance. He knows and practices sensitivity.” She extolled him as a father and lauded the Schwarzeneggers’ four children as a tribute to both parents. Such praise from Oprah enabled him to overcome the resistance of women who remembered the boasts of “Arnold the Barbarian” to
Oui
magazine in 1977 about his drug exploits, gymnasium gang-bang orgies, and demands for oral sex during bodybuilding tournaments.

Weeks before he announced his candidacy he had given an interview to
Esquire
comparing himself to a beautiful woman whose looks cause people to underestimate her intelligence:

His crude and galloping arrogance sparked Molly Ivins to write, “Is it just me, or doesn’t he look like a condom filled with walnuts?”

Oprah promoted her new season’s premiere, on September 15, 2003, as “my exclusive with Arnold and Maria—the campaign, the rumors, their first interview together,
ever
!” She opened with Maria Shriver, who was familiar to Oprah’s viewers from her past appearances, from the many references Oprah made to their friendship, and from the pages she devoted to Maria on her website. They began with girlfriend memories of working together in Baltimore, and Oprah showed pictures of herself at Maria’s wedding at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport. Then she asked about her husband’s reputation as a womanizer.

“I know the man I’m married to,” said Maria. “I’ve been with him for twenty-six years. I make up my mind on him based on him. Not based on what people say.”

“Do you think Kennedy women are bred to look the other way when it comes to marital infidelity?”

“That ticks me off. I have not been quote ‘bred’ to look the other way. I accept him with all his strengths and all his weaknesses. I’m not perfect either.”

Oprah brought up the stories depicting Arnold as a misogynist, and Maria said he was “the exact opposite” of a woman-hater. “He makes me coffee every morning, tells me I’m wonderful, and has been supportive of my career.”

Arnold joined his wife in the next segment. Sitting down, he reached over and grabbed Maria’s hand. “This woman here has been the most incredible friend, the most incredible wife and mother,” he said. Oprah beamed happily, and her studio audience clapped. “They love celebrities,” she said later, knowing her show was Celebrity Central for her viewers.

She asked Schwarzenegger about his infamous
Oui
interview, but
he said he didn’t remember it. “The idea [then] was to say things that were so over the top you could get headlines.”

“But did you remember the parties, Arnold?”

“I really don’t. These were the times I was saying things like ‘a pump is better than coming.’ ”

Maria’s hand shot to his face, clamping his mouth shut. “My mother is watching this show. My God!”

The New York Times
later chided Oprah for doing such “a big favor” for Schwarzenegger by having him on her show. Citing the federal equal-time rule, the newspaper said, “Now she needs to do the voters a favor, and extend an invitation to the other top candidates in the California governor’s race….[E]ven if Ms. Winfrey has the right to invite only one candidate, it is a poor use of her franchise.”

Oprah ignored the editorial advice because the Kennedy franchise was far more important to her. She also dismissed the
Nation
article titled “Governor Groper,” which accused her of caring more about “celebrity…than sisterhood,” saying that the people who really needed her platform were “women who think humiliating, insulting and harassing women is something worth talking about.” Schwarzenegger won the recall election in 2003 and was reelected in 2006. Oprah contributed $5,000 to his campaign that year, the only political contribution she made.

Having flexed her muscle, she now became a political celebrity herself, and members of the Reform Party set up a website to entice her to run for president, while the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore started an online petition:

Others took up the call, including the author Robert Fulghum, (
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
), who also endorsed Oprah for president on his website. This prompted David Letterman to read as one of his “Top Ten Things Overheard at the Republican Weekend”: “We’ve all had it—Oprah just announced her candidacy!” Aaron McGruder’s TV series
The Boondocks
ran an episode titled “Return of the King,” about Martin Luther King, Jr., that ended with a newspaper headline: “Oprah Elected President.” The biggest effort to make Oprah commander in chief came in 2003, when Patrick Crowe, a former schoolteacher and owner of Wonderful Waldo Car Wash in Kansas City, Missouri, set up a website selling “Oprah for President” mugs, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. He reaped tons of publicity after publishing the book
Oprah for President: Run, Oprah, Run!
Immediately, the sixty-nine-year-old fan got slapped with a three-page cease-and-desist letter from Oprah’s lawyers, citing nineteen copyright violations, plus the unauthorized use of her name, image, and likeness. They gave him five days to respond.

“They should not have sent that letter,” Oprah told Larry King. “I didn’t appreciate that my attorneys did that.”

Mr. Crowe was not intimidated. When Oprah called him to suggest he put his time and energy into supporting Barack Obama, who was not a presidential candidate at the time, Crowe suggested that Oprah give the new Illinois senator a seat in her cabinet. He then explained to reporters why she would make a great president: “The business genius. The heart of gold. Her ability to get folks to work together…her fierce determination—she’s just not a girl you’d wanna mess with.”

Although Oprah never ran for public office and said she never would, she possessed immense charisma and represented credibility to millions. In addition, she took stands on issues that alternated between pleasing both Democrats and Republicans. She was for a woman’s right to choose. She was against the death penalty, and she opposed guns, legalized drugs, and welfare. She supported the war in Iraq (and then she opposed it). On crime, she recommended hanging drunk drivers, but keeping them alive so they would be continuously tortured “in their privates.” A little squishy on religion, she quoted the Bible but did not
attend church. She preached self-improvement (makeovers and cleansing fasts) and self-empowerment (believe it and achieve it) sprinkled with the New Agey piffle of
The Secret.
On family values she covered all the bases: she applauded motherhood but for herself she had chosen a career over children; she lived with a man outside of marriage but traveled constantly with her best female friend.

Contradictions aside, Oprah became a towering presence in America, a one-woman cathedral collecting alms for the poor, hearing confessions, and issuing edicts: “Don’t chew gum in my presence.” “Always bring a hostess gift.” “Soak in your tub fifteen minutes a day.” “Shop, shop, shop.” Dispensing judgments from on high, she chastised Lionel Richie for being an absentee father, thumped Olympic track-and-field star Marion Jones for lying about taking performance-enhancing drugs, and upbraided Toni Braxton for going bankrupt after spending $1,000 for Gucci silverware.

Occasionally Oprah bestowed forgiveness ex cathedra. In a satellite interview with twenty-two-year-old Jessica Coleman, serving a six-year sentence in the Ohio Reformatory for Women for killing her newborn baby when she was fifteen, Oprah was as tough as a hanging judge throughout most of the show. She directed Coleman to tell the story of hiding her pregnancy; having the baby, which appeared to be stillborn; stabbing the infant; and then stuffing its body into a duffel bag, which her boyfriend ended up tossing into a quarry. When the baby was found, the community of Columbia Station, Ohio, named him Baby Boy Hope and gave him a proper funeral. For six years police searched for the infant’s killer and found her only after Coleman was overheard in a bar sobbing out her sad story.

“Did you know that at the age of fourteen, I hid a pregnancy?” Oprah asked her. “I was raped at nine and sexually abused from the time I was ten to fourteen. At fourteen years old I became pregnant….The stress of [having to confess my pregnancy to my father] caused me to go into labor, and the baby died [thirty-six days later]….There are a lot of teenagers out there right now who are hiding their secret, just as I hid mine, because…like you, I didn’t feel there was anybody I could tell. Your speaking out today is going to give a lot of girls the
courage to do that….You are not your past. You are what is possible for you. Own this truth and move forward in your life. Forgive yourself, and others will be able to forgive you.”

Oprah’s show had become the place where miscreants begged for mercy or, as in the case of NBC’s anchorman Brian Williams and news president Steve Capus, defended controversial actions. After airing photos and parts of videos sent by the maniacal killer who shot thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, NBC was severely criticized for broadcasting the shooter’s final hate-filled words before he killed himself. Many felt the network had been exploitive in giving the mass murderer national attention without considering the feelings of the bereaved. So a week after the broadcast, Williams and Capus appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show.

“We were…very careful as to how many pictures we were showing,” Brian Williams told Oprah, “and I think…now, it has all but disappeared.”

Oprah set him straight. “It disappeared, Brian, because the people said, because the public said, ‘We don’t want to see it.’ ”

Williams looked so chastened that one old-fashioned Catholic watching the show wondered half-humorously if Oprah was going to give him absolution: “For your penance say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Now make a good Act of Contrition and go in peace.”

Like the village vicar, she tended her flock, helping them atone for past sins. She mediated the public apology of heavyweight champion Mike Tyson when he said he wanted to make amends to Evander Holyfield for biting off a piece of his ear during their 1997 title bout. Twelve years later the two men came together on her show and shook hands, hoping their reconciliation might set an example to warring gangs of young men. Although many viewers criticized Oprah for having Tyson, a convicted rapist, on her show, others saluted her. The two Tyson shows, not incidentally, garnered huge ratings at a time when her ratings were slipping.

Oprah continued to be unbending in her condemnation of child abusers, knowing all too well the trauma to victims. Interviewing a man in prison for sexual molestation, she referred to him as “slime.” Still, her contradictions could be confounding. While she gave her friend
Arnold Schwarzenegger a pass on sexual harassment, she condemned rappers because their lyrics debased women. She was unforgiving of racism but pardoned the president of Hermès after his Paris store barred her entry because of alleged “problems with North Africans.” Yet she was barely civil to Hazel Bryan Massery, who as a young white student had yelled at Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, who integrated Central High School in 1957 after President Eisenhower sent federal troops into Arkansas. In the intervening years, Massery had apologized to Eckford for her hateful rants, and the two became close. Oprah invited both women on her show but was highly skeptical of their friendship and would not accept that Hazel’s remorse had led to reconciliation. “They are friends,” Oprah told her audience in disbelief. “They…are…friends,” she repeated with obvious distaste. She then showed a massive blowup of the photograph taken that historic day, showing Elizabeth, silent and dignified, carrying her books into school as a crowd of screaming white students taunted her, the most menacing being Hazel. Oprah was icy as she asked Eckford why that photo still upset her so many years later.

“She [Oprah] was as cold as she could be,” Eckford told David Margolick of
Vanity Fair.
“She went out of her way to be hateful.”

Margolick, who spent time with Eckford and Massery to write their story, added, “Characteristically, though, Elizabeth felt sorrier for Hazel. She was treated even more brusquely [by Oprah].”

Still, people flocked to the Church of Oprah. Online there were twenty-eight thousand websites devoted to getting on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
and late-night television’s David Letterman, who had been excommunicated for years, began an “Oprah Log,” begging to be invited. Oprah ignored him, but he persisted. “It ain’t Oprah til it’s Oprah,” he told his audiences night after night. Soon his fans began holding up signs in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater, in airports, and at football games: “Oprah, Please Call Dave.”

After eighty-two nights, Phil Rosenthal advised Oprah in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
“This is a call you have to make….Every night…he is making you look like a humorless, self-important diva who spouts all kinds of New Age platitudes about forgiveness and positive thought but stubbornly clings to grudges. He’s not the one who looks bad in this.
It’s a funny bit, and so long as you refuse to play, you’re the butt of it….You’re simply digging in your heels, being stubborn, petty and stupid.”