AMERICA:The woman who made a fortune divulging her own secrets is is now the subject of Kitty Kelley 's unauthorised biography, writes LARA MARLOWE
OPRAH WINFREY is often called the most powerful woman in America. The 56-year- old talk show host and media mogul combines incredible self-confidence and drive with a Rabelaisian appetite for food, money and recognition.
The illegitimate daughter of an impoverished black teenager in rural Mississippi, Winfrey became a millionaire by the age of 32 and is now ranked by Forbesmagazine as the only African-American billionaire, with a fortune estimated at $2.7 billion. By switching her allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, she may have swung the 2008 presidential race.
Next year, after 25 years on the air, Winfrey has promised to end her daily chat show. This week, she signed a $100 million advertising pact with Procter Gamble for her new Oprah Winfrey Network, which will broadcast an evening programme entitled Oprah's Next Chapter.
That viewers preferred the earlier, more raunchy Oprah is proved by statistics. She claimed up to 14 million daily viewers in the early 1990s, when shows concentrated on what critics called “Nuts ’n’ Sluts” and “Freak of the Week”. Although Winfrey remains phenomenally popular, that figure has fallen to seven million since she began focusing on celebrity interviews and self-help.
Winfrey’s unique blend of prurience and uplift is adored by her audience of mostly white housewives. Her company Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards) has copyrighted her slogan: “Live your best life.”
Since adolescence, she says, she lived by the words of the Rev Jesse Jackson: “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism. Therefore be excellent,” and “If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.”
Winfrey is credited with changing American attitudes towards race and homosexuality, and with creating the strong confessional streak in contemporary American culture. When politicians tear-up or convey emotion with a quivering lip, they are taking a cue from her.
Winfrey has made her fortune by emoting, empathising and divulging her own secrets – often when forced to by circumstances.
In 1985, during a programme about the sexual abuse of children, Oprah burst into tears and told viewers across American that she had been repeatedly raped by male relatives between the ages of nine and 14.
Five years later, Winfrey's half-sister Patricia Lee sold her story to the National Enquirerfor $19,000, after Winfrey cut her stipend because Patricia used it to buy drugs. Lee told the tabloid that Oprah gave birth to a baby boy, who soon died, when she was only 15. Lee also said Winfrey stole from their mother and engaged in casual prostitution as a teenager.
Winfrey was so devastated by her sister’s betrayal that she spent three days in bed.
In 1995 Oprah staged a show about drug addiction because a former boyfriend was about to reveal they had frequently used cocaine together. While interviewing a mother who used crack cocaine, Winfrey broke down in tears and confessed: “I did your drug. It’s my life’s great big secret that has always been held over my head.”
Oprah’s iconic status has taken a dent with Kitty Kelley’s new biography, which the New Yorker billed as a “King Kong vs Godzilla event in celebrity culture”.
Based on an interview with Winfrey’s cousin, Katharine Carr Esters, Kelley reveals that Vernon Winfrey, the Tennessee barber whose name Oprah bears, is not her real father.
Esters swore Kelley to secrecy until Oprah’s mother Vernita was ready to tell her daughter. “And you’ll know when that happens because Oprah will probably have a show on Finding Your Real Father,” Esters said.
Winfrey became a star in the 1980s, when African-Americans such as Jesse Jackson, Eddie Murphy and Whitney Houston broke through in US politics and culture. As a child, she told Barbara Walters, she "wanted to be white". That changed when she saw Diana Ross and the Supremes on the Ed Sullivan Showwhen she was 10.
“It was the first time I had ever seen a coloured person wearing diamonds that I knew were real,” Winfrey said. “I wanted to be Diana Ross.”
Kelley suggests that Winfrey is obsessed with skin colour. “There are fudgies, gingerbreads and vanilla creams,” Winfrey once said. “Gingerbreads are the ones who, even though you know they’re black, have all the features of whites . . . Vanilla creams are those who could pass if they wanted to, and then there’s folks like me and the [former] mayor [of Chicago, Harold Washington]. No mistakin’ us for anything but fudgies.”
Yet Winfrey has been courageous in addressing racial issues. In the late 1980s she took a camera crew to Forsyth County, Georgia, to ask its inhabitants “why this community hasn’t allowed black people to live here since 1912”.
The head of the local Committee to Keep Forsyth White told Winfrey that many of the civil rights marchers who had been attacked with shouts of “N****r go home” were “outright communists and homosexuals”.
“You’re not just anti-black,” Winfrey calmly replied. “You’re also anti-gay too.”