Winfrey, Oprah (1954—)

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Winfrey, Oprah (1954—)

Television talk-show host, actress, and producer, the first African-American woman to helm a national television program, who has become one of the most recognized and influential media personalities in America. Born out of wedlock on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi; daughter of Vernon Winfrey and Vernita Lee; entered Tennessee State University, 1972.

Raised in poverty on her grandparents' farm before moving to Milwaukee to live with her mother; the following troubled years led to threats to place her in an institution before she moved to Nashville to live with her father, who introduced strict discipline and a respect for education into her life; entered Tennessee State University (1972); went to work as a reporter at a Nashville radio station (1973); moved to television, becoming the first African-American anchorwoman in Nashville (1974); had moved to Baltimore and was hosting a television talk show (1978), the ratings for which became impressive enough to bring an offer to host Chicago's "A.M. Chicago" (1984); show was renamed "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and syndicated nationally (1986); made her film debut in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985), receiving an Oscar nomination for her performance (1986); now heads her own production company, which produces her television show along with television mini-series and feature films.

Oprah Winfrey once recalled that during much of her lonely, poverty-stricken childhood in rural Mississippi, the only audience a talkative child like herself could find was pigs and chickens. She is no less talkative today, but her audience is numbered in the millions of Americans who watch television's most popular chat show or flock to see the feature films in which she performs and which are often produced by her own company. Beginning in the mid-1980s, in fact, Oprah Winfrey has remained America's most influential woman and one of its wealthiest, reported to have earned as much as $95 million in one year; but she is the first to admit that she got that way simply because of her childhood enthusiasm for talking. "I basically am no different from what I was when I was six," she says.

Although what few neighbors there were in tiny Kosciusko, Mississippi, knew all too well about the precocious Winfrey girl, little else about her early years indicated the reputation would spread. She had been born as the result of, as Oprah once put it, a "one day fling under an oak tree." Her father Vernon Winfrey never even knew that Vernita Lee was pregnant until the day he received a birth announcement mailed to him 250 miles away, where he had found work, telling him of the birth of a daughter on January 29, 1954, and carrying Vernita's hastily scribbled message, "Send clothes!" Vernon and Vernita never married and would not see each other again until many years later. Vernita had given birth to the child at home using the services of a midwife, who filled out the birth certificate by misspelling the Old Testament name chosen for the girl, Orpah . With no husband and no chance of earning a living to support her daughter amid the farms of rural Mississippi, Vernita left the child in the care of her parents and moved to Milwaukee to find a job.

For the next seven years, Oprah grew up under the tutelage of her strict Baptist grandparents on an isolated farm in a rundown house with no plumbing. There were no other children within walking distance, the nearest neighbor being an old blind man who lived up the road. Although she came to love her grandmother Hattie Mae Lee , whom she called Mama, Oprah was terrified of her grandfather's temper tantrums and occasional beatings with a birch switch. She had become so talkative by the age of three that Hattie Mae was often obliged to tell her granddaughter to sit in a corner and keep her mouth shut when company came to call. When the two of them were alone, however, Hattie Mae took Oprah's education in hand by teaching her to read and write, and telling her not to be afraid of what lay beyond the confines of the farm. "God don't mess with His children," she would say, although Oprah had decided even at this early age that God's white children were the more favored ones. Shirley Temple (Black) was her girlhood idle, and a clothespin clamped on the nose her favorite method of making it turn up, just like Shirley's did.

What little social life there was in Kosciusko—some 70 miles north of Jackson, the state capital—revolved around the Faith United Mississippi Baptist Church, of which her grandparents were proud members; and it was at a church event that Oprah gave her first public performance at the age of three by reciting her own essay about Jesus during the church's Easter observances. By the time she was ready for kindergarten, her recitations and readings had become so popular that other children at church were taunting her with the names "Preacher" and "Miss Jesus." No doubt it was equally irritating to them when 4-year-old Oprah, arriving in kindergarten and looking over the picture books around the room, wrote a letter to her teacher pointing out she did not belong in kindergarten, but in first grade. After a reading test, Oprah was promoted—not once, but twice, reaching third grade by the time she was six. The next year, Hattie Mae and her husband decided the child had become too much for them and sent their granddaughter north to live with Vernita, who was working in Milwaukee as a maid for $50 a week and who had given birth to a second daughter out of wedlock by the time Oprah arrived from Mississippi.

The temptations of a northern city after the rural isolation of Mississippi, coupled with Vernita's prolonged absences at work during the day and socializing at night, soon found Oprah stealing money from her mother's purse to buy candy and magazines. "I wanted to have money just like the other kids," Winfrey recalled of her first year in Milwaukee. It only took 12 months before Vernita arrived at the same conclusion as her parents in Mississippi had, sending Oprah off to live with Vernon in Nashville, Tennessee, where the environment was decidedly different. Vernon had married and settled down to a good job as a maintenance engineer at Vanderbilt University, where he saw firsthand the advantages that an education could give a child. His wife Zelma Winfrey was of the same mind and drilled Oprah at home in mathematics and the sciences while Vernon set strict rules about his daughter's after-school hours. "It was like military school there," Oprah once said of her father's household, although she admitted the discipline was precisely what she needed. Schools were better in Nashville, too, and Winfrey became particularly fond of a fourth-grade teacher who, she said, instilled the sense of self-confidence that would stand her in such good stead in coming years.

But her peripatetic childhood found her back in Milwaukee after another year, when Vernita married a man with his own son and had decided she wanted her own daughter with her. Oprah was to have spent only that summer of 1963 with her mother, but when September came and Vernon arrived to take her back to Nashville, Vernita refused to let her go. Away from the routine and discipline of the Winfrey household, often left alone with her half-sister and stepbrother while Vernita spent her evenings out, Oprah passed the time reading or watching television, where favorite sitcoms like "Leave It to Beaver" and "I Love Lucy" reinforced the notion of her Shirley Temple days that white skin was the passport to a better life. Then, too, there were the wealthy white families she began to visit when a junior high school teacher recommended her for a scholarship to an exclusive, all-white girls' school in the suburbs. There were earnest, if sometimes clumsy, attempts to treat her as an equal, but the differences between these families and her own were so sharp that Oprah often made up stories about her own home life to compensate. "I wanted a family like everyone else, because I was going to school where kids had mothers and fathers," she once said of this period.

It was only a matter of time before her frustrations began to burst out. There were the casual thefts of money from Vernita's purse, boyfriends of whom her mother had no knowledge, the clandestine entries through her bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning. There was the week Oprah spent living in a hotel room using money given to her by, of all people, Aretha Franklin , who stepped out of a limousine one night to give $100 to the teenaged girl who claimed she was penniless and trying to get home; and there was the night Oprah ransacked Vernita's apartment over some trifling dispute, then called the police to report a burglary and an assault. These were only symptoms of something Winfrey kept hidden, a secret so terrible she would be unable to reveal it for nearly 20 years, and then in the most dramatic way possible.

It was when Vernita finally threatened to put her daughter in a juvenile detention home that Vernon Winfrey came to the rescue, Vernita being only too glad to let Oprah return to her father in Nashville. "When my father took me in," Winfrey has often said, "it changed the course of my life. He saved me." An indication of Vernon's belief in strict discipline could be found in the sign which hung in the combination barbershop and grocery store he now owned. ATTENTION TEENAGERS, it said: IF YOU ARE TIRED OF BEING HASSLED BY UNREASONABLE PARENTS, NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION! LEAVE HOME AND PAY YOUR OWN WAY WHILE YOU STILL KNOW EVERYTHING.

To do less than your best is a sin.
—Oprah Winfrey

Vernon and Zelma saw to it that Oprah's merely average grades in school improved to the point where she became an honor student at Nashville's East High School, where she was one of the first black students enrolled after desegregation, and that her television viewing was restricted mostly to watching the news, Oprah being particularly impressed by the well-dressed, well-spoken newscasters. The Today show's Barbara Walters became her early model. Zelma also set a reading list for Oprah that included the great authors of African-American literature—Margaret Walker and Zora Neale Hurston , among them. So effective were Vernon and Zelma's attentions that Oprah was elected student government president at East High and was chosen to represent her school at the Nixon administration's Conference on Youth in 1970. With natural poise and her gift for public speaking, Oprah was soon invited to enter the Nashville Fire Department's Miss Fire Prevention beauty pageant, sponsored by the city's most popular radio station, WVOL. She became the first African-American woman to win the event and, more important, entered the business that would bring her national fame when WVOL offered her a position as a part-time newscaster. "She was aggressive," an employee at the station recalled at the time, "not shy at all. She knew where she was going." Even Vernon had to approve when Oprah next won the Miss Black Nashville beauty contest and its first prize of a four-year scholarship to Tennessee State University, where she enrolled in 1972 as a speech and drama major. That same year, she won the Miss Black Tennessee pageant, and had a good chance at the Miss Black America title had she not grown disillusioned with the whole process, deliberately presenting herself on the Miss Black America stage in a drab outfit with little makeup. Although she predictably lost the title, Winfrey later said she felt a sense of victory by taking control of her own life with her decision.

She arrived on the Tennessee State campus in the midst of the Black Pride movement of the 1970s, although she felt no need to demonstrate for something she had long taken for granted in light of Zelma's choice of reading. "I believe those women [authors] are part of my legacy, and the bridges that I crossed to get where I am today," Winfrey once said. Besides, Oprah had taken to heart Vernon's dictum that the best way to advance one's position in life was to be the best at one's chosen role. For Winfrey, that role increasingly seemed to be in broadcasting. In 1973, she was offered a job as a weekend television news anchor on Nashville's CBS affiliate, WTVF, becoming the city's first black news anchor. "I was a token," she said, "but I was a happy, paid token." After three years, a third job offer came along, this time at Baltimore's WJZ as a co-anchor on the station's evening newscast. Even though she was 22 by now, it was the first time Winfrey had been away from her family. Almost as bad as the loneliness and her apprehensions about moving to such a large market was the station's initial dissatisfaction with her personality on the air. She was not authoritative enough, the station complained, packing her off to New York for lessons with a voice coach to lend her delivery a more business-like air. The attempt failed to squelch Winfrey's natural friendliness and conversational tone, and her future in Baltimore was looking decidedly questionable when a change in management at the station brought a fresh and, as it would prove, momentous idea. Why not, the new station manager proposed, give Oprah Winfrey a talk show?

Winfrey was teamed as a co-host with one of the station's best-known reporters on "People Are Talking," WJZ's half-hour morning chat show meant to be a challenge to the top-rated "Phil Donahue Show." Within weeks, it was obvious that the very affability the station had complained about earlier was Winfrey's greatest asset. "People Are Talking" overtook the Donahue show and was syndicated to 12 other markets after its first year on the air. It should have

been a triumphant vindication for Winfrey, but instead she found herself sinking into a deep depression, driven by several failed love affairs. The depression became so severe that Winfrey found herself one night writing out a suicide note before she forced herself to confront the fact that she had allowed herself to be emotionally abused by men. "You're not getting knocked around physically," she said, "but in terms of your ability to soar, your wings are clipped." Winfrey marks the beginning of her climb to the top of her career from this new-found commitment to determine the course of her own life.

While "People Are Talking" continued to gain in ratings, Oprah set as her goal a move to an even larger market; and when one of the producers of the show left to take on production duties for a morning chat show in Chicago, opportunity knocked. Like Baltimore's WJZ, Chicago's ABC-affiliate WLS needed to resuscitate its ailing "A.M. Chicago," also suffering at the hands of Phil Donahue. Winfrey was offered the show. She signed a four-year contract at $200,000 a year, even though friends warned her that Chicago, with its troubled racial history, would be a difficult challenge for a black woman thrust into such a public spotlight. The station's manager was more reassuring. "I don't care what color you are," he told Winfrey. "You can be green. All we want to do is win." Oprah made his wish come true, boosting the show's ratings after her first month on the air by abandoning the carefully scripted questions provided to her and using her instincts to interview her guests. Her first major interview on the show was with Paul McCartney, but Winfrey's obvious empathy with whomever she was talking to at the time and her ability to relate her personal experiences to the subject at hand convinced the show's producers that her guests and topics should be drawn from everyday life. "Talk show hosts didn't talk about themselves," fellow TV-host Maury Povitch said of television talk in those days. "Oprah opened up a lot of new windows." The show in which Winfrey interviewed three women from the Ku Klux Klan drew considerable attention, less for the crackpot theories the women espoused than for Winfrey's unruffled calm as her guests explained why blacks were inferior to whites and why their organization was committed to defending whites. Winfrey even managed to draw laughs from her audience when, after her invitation to lunch was refused by her guests, she innocently asked, "Not even if I pay?"

The decision to take the show national was hastened when Winfrey attracted major attention with her first film role in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, based on the Alice Walker novel and released in 1985. Winfrey had been recommended for the part of the abused wife Sofia by the film's co-producer, Quincy Jones, who was visiting Chicago when he saw her television show. The film starred two formidable Hollywood personalities, Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover, and Oprah found herself in the unusual position of being a subordinate. "I'm not accustomed to being intimidated by big stars or anybody," she said, "but this time I wasn't in control." Nevertheless, she held her own well enough to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the film. The next year, she accepted a role in a film adaptation of Richard Wright's germinal novel Native Son, playing the mother of the film's central character, Bigger Thomas, and basing her role, she later said, on her own mother. With her growing fame came the decision to rename her television show "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and to syndicate it nationally, making Winfrey the first black woman to have her own national television program. Within six months, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" was America's highest-rated talk show.

The confessional nature of many of the programs fascinated Winfrey's daytime audience, no more so than the show in 1985 on childhood sexual abuse. As one of her guests told of being sexually molested as a girl, Winfrey suddenly burst into tears, threw her arms around her guest, and then revealed to her millions of viewers the secret she had hidden from the world for so long. She told of being raped at the age of nine by a 19-year-old cousin during her years in Milwaukee, and of being sexually molested over a period of five years by a boyfriend of her mother's and by an uncle. "You lose your childhood when you've been abused," Winfrey later told a Congressional committee which was considering a bill she had promoted to make an FBI database on known sexual molesters available to local police. Later still, Winfrey's half-sister sold a story to the tabloids claiming Oprah had become pregnant at the age of 14 and that her baby, born prematurely, had died. Winfrey never denied the truth of the story but has so far refused to discuss it publicly. These revelations of the mid-1980s underscored the lines Winfrey's character speaks in The Color Purple: "All my life I had to fight," Sofia says. "I had to fight my daddy, I had to fight my uncles, I had to fight my brothers. A child ain't safe in a family of mens."

Releasing the burden of her past history seemed to energize her career even further. "Doing good film is one of the best ways to raise consciousness," she told an interviewer in 1986 after announcing that she was forming her own production company, Harpo Films (Harpo is Oprah spelled backwards), housed in a blocklong former warehouse in Chicago which she purchased for $20 million. Winfrey thus became the first black woman to own a studio, and only the third woman in American history, after Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball . Winfrey used her show to explore sometimes painful subjects, as when she broadcast live from Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1987 with an all-white audience deliberately containing several outspoken white supremacists. (In one pre-taped segment, Winfrey ventured into a grocery store and offered her hand to the owner. "We don't shake hands with niggers here," the man proclaimed. "Good thing for the niggers," Winfrey shot back before turning and walking out.) That same year, after winning three daytime Emmy Awards, Winfrey announced an agreement to buy the rights to her show from Capitol Cities/ABC, with which she also negotiated a deal to broadcast her company's first major television film, "The Women of Brewster Place," based on the Gloria Naylor novel. Winfrey played the matronly Mattie Michael in Naylor's story of the African-American women who inhabit an inner-city brown-stone. While the film received respectable ratings, the weekly series spun off from it failed to find a consistent audience and was soon canceled; but Oprah pressed on with a 1991 TV adaptation of Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, examining the experiences of black children growing up in a Chicago housing project.

Meanwhile, the national addiction to confessional chat shows continued to grow. Although Winfrey's show held its own against newcomers, competition for viewers forced the nature of the shows' content to go beyond exploring real-life problems to sensational, even lurid, depictions of bizarre relationships and sexual abnormalities. "Trash Talk" became the byword of daytime television by the mid-1990s. Winfrey's show featured its share of such material, but when a former guest on a rival show was murdered by the man whom he had identified on the air as the object of his unspoken love, Oprah vowed to lift her own show's material to a higher plane. Among her innovations was "Oprah's Book Club," a regular discussion of notable books of the day, and examinations of legitimate social issues like welfare reform and women's rights. Viewers could also draw inspiration from Winfrey's descriptions of her battle with a longtime weight problem, and share her confession during a show on drug abuse of her own use of cocaine in the 1970s. Her pervasive influence on the national dialogue came to the fore in 1996 when she was sued for defamation by the Texas Cattlemen's Association after a militant vegetarian on one of her shows claimed that eating beef could lead to so-called "mad cow disease," prompting Winfrey to exclaim that the information "just stopped me cold from eating another burger!" A Texas court decided in Winfrey's favor two years later, although it gently expressed the opinion that she may have "melodramatized" the dangers of beef-eating. The incident only strengthened her show's ratings even further and allowed Oprah to negotiate a renewal contract in 1995 containing an unprecedented clause giving her the right to cancel the show without penalty at any point during the contract's five-year term.

By the time of the renewal, Winfrey had nearly completed another round of complex negotiations for a project she had first undertaken a decade earlier. In 1986, she had optioned the film rights to Toni Morrison 's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel Beloved, a spiritually tinged narrative of redemption set just after the Civil War. The book's story of Sethe, a former slave who must come to terms with a horrifying secret from her past, touched Oprah deeply. Ignoring warnings that the novel's complex structure, psychological texture and underlying theme of infanticide made it impossible to film, Winfrey guided the screenplay through several versions with three different writers and finally managed to bring the film to the screen after a tortuous process she described in her book The Road to Beloved. Winfrey not only produced the film as part of a multi-picture deal with Disney Entertainment, but took the emotionally difficult role of Sethe, playing opposite Danny Glover, as the ex-slave Paul D, and Thandie Newton , as the daughter known as Beloved. Winfrey described her own self-doubts as the film began production in North Carolina under Jonathan Demme's direction, but felt at the end of ten weeks of shooting that the film would be her crowning achievement. Unfortunately, critics and audiences alike did not agree. "Some audience members … will find it confusing or too convoluted," said Roger Ebert, although his review of the film was generally favorable. "It does not provide the kind of easy lift at the end that they might expect. Sethe's tragic story is the kind where the only happy ending is that it is over." Janet Maslin , writing in The New York Times, advised her readers that familiarity with the book would help them understand the film's structure. "In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book," she wrote. But it was not only the structure of the picture that disturbed filmgoers. The picture's frank depiction of the brutalities of slavery and the horrifying murder at the center of the story proved too much for most audiences. Winfrey was devastated by the film's reception but discounted rumors that she was giving up the film business, preferring to look on the experience as a lesson in matching material to the market.

Meanwhile, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" continues as the nation's top-rated TV talk show and Oprah's remarkable influence on American thought and habit goes on unabated. But one thing is still missing—a long-awaited autobiography, which Winfrey completed and nearly published in 1993 but later withdrew. "I am in the heart of the learning curve," she says. "I feel there are important discoveries yet to be made."