The O factor

Oprah Winfrey’s first interview with a women’s magazine since starting her own

The crowd outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia is streaming into the stadium-size arena with the expectant zeal of true believers. Black and White, they have come from up and down the Eastern Seaboard, shelling out $185 a head to spend a day with an idol, a woman whose very name has become synonymous with power. At 49, Oprah Winfrey is not only the country’s No. 1 rated TV talk-show host, but she has also held that spot for the entire 17 years since her show went nation. She is the founder and editorial director of a three-year-old magazine that is considered to have had the most successful launch in publishing history. And she is an Oscar-nominated actress, the winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a producer of movies and made-for-television films, a philanthropist, a book lover and a businesswoman whose personal net worth now exceeds a million dollars, making her the richest black woman on the planet.

On this hot June morning, though, Oprah Winfrey is just Oprah, regular and resplendent, in town to run her Live Your Best Life Tour, the last of the four she ahs hosted around the country this year. It is something of a personal read show, starring Oprah herself, te ultimate communicator, appearing g live and colorufl to show the adoring masses how to find their life’s purpose. Shortly after 10:00 A.M., Oprah, stunning in a custom-designed three-piece salmon-colored silk-shantung pantsuit, bounds onto the stage as the theme music from her television show crescendos. “Looking good, Philadelphia!” she whoops to the thunderous applause of ht e2,800 faithful who are now standing, rocking to the music, pumping the air and screaming for their girl, the mighty O. For the next several hours, as Oprah preaches and prances, jokes, quotes her favourite self-help sages, gives shout-outs to her main girl, Gayle King, and recounts parts of her remarkable life story, her power is palpable and transforming. It’s easy to be a true believer.
ON the morning before her Philadelphia seminar, Oprah sits barefoot in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Manhattan, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and white slacks, talking about what it’s like to be the most powerful woman in the world. Smaller in person than her larger-than-life TV image, she has just finished a cover photo shoot and has already put in what for most people would be a full day’s work. Obviously tired, she is nevertheless gracious and thoughtful. “How’s the family Nevis?” she says to the young waiter who has just brought breakfast. “Fine,” he answers, beaming. She often stays in this hotel when she’s in town, taking over three or four suites, so she has gotten to know the hotel staff. And she remembers the little things, like the young man’s family back home on a tiny Caribbean island.

It is almost 17 years ago to the day that I interviewed Oprah Winfrey in another New York hotel suite, just as her local A.M. Chicago television talk show was about to go nation. She was 32 then, had only one room in the hotel and was nervous about taking on Phil Donahue, the mega talk show host based in Chicago who’d been number one in national ratings for as longs as anybody could remember. “Gayle and I used to joke about what people must have thought when they turned on TV and saw me,” Oprah says now. “They thought nothing, because I was Black and fat with Jheri curl. The general manager at my station said to me, ‘You know you can’t beat Donahue, so just go on the air and be yourself.’”
Oprah went on the air host A.M. Chicago in January 1984. By February her little local show was beating Donahue in the Chicago ratings. In September 1986 the show’s name was changed to The Oprah Winfrey Show, and it went into national syndication. The rest is historic. “I just came across something I wrote in a journal the night before I started,” Oprah says. “It was dated September 8, 1986, exactly eight hours before I launched the nation show. ‘I wonder how it will change my life?’ I wrote. ‘And what does all of this really mean? Maybe it means I have more to say.’”

The key to Oprah’s success is that whatever she’s had to say has always resonated with American women, whether she was talking about her own sexual abuse as a child, her battles with weight, her man, Stedman Graham; her best girlfriend, Gayle King; her hair, makeup, clothes, family. She long ago crossed that supposedly sacrosanct line of objectivity as a journalist to discuss any and everything on her shows. Nothing is off-limits, and this, surprisingly enough, has given her enormous power as well as an enormous following. By just being herself, with all he vulnerabilities, fears and contradictions that she exposes, she has inspired millions of other women to follow her lead, learning to first confront their worst demons and then find their best selves.

But even Oprah ahs been hard-pressed to explain her unprecedented success and power as a Black woman in twenty-first century America. “I understand why I would be a puzzlement,” she says. “I don’t play sports, I don’t sing, I don’t look like your typical movie star. I think for a culture of people who have been for so many years denied and deprived and lacking in self-esteem, it’s very hard to see the possibility of what awaits in your future. It’s really hard, because the world has given you ideas about who you can be. It takes a lot of courage to be who your really are and not let the rest of the world tell you what that is.”
Yet only in America, where racial stereotypes still resonate, could Oprah’s appeal be based partly on the fact that she exudes the comforting, nurturing energy of the mother figure who will make everything right. Add to this a shard, articulate with and a personality that naturally lights up the cool, up-close-and-personal medium of television, and you have powerhouse who has stayed at the top of her game for nearly 20 years.
At age 3, Oprah was already reading and reciting Bible verses in her grandmother’s church in Mississippi. “Hattie Mae,” the elder sisters of the church would say to Oprah’s grandmother, “we do believe this child is gifted.” And so she was recognizing even then a future beyond her stereotypes. “My grandmother used to wash clothes for White people, and I remember seeing her on the back porch one day hanging clothes on the line,” Oprah says. “She had all these clothes-pins in her moth and a string of them around her apron. ‘Watch me, now, Oprah Gail,’ she said, ‘ ‘cause you’ll be doing this one day.’ And I thought to myself, No, I won’t. O won’t be doing that. I don’t know where that came from, but I know that was going to be my life.”
The instinctive “knowing” that one’s future will not be limited by race or gender or class is what ultimately fuels human power, especially the power of people who have been denied it. Blacks in particular. Women in particular. Oprah has always had the power. And these days she has become quite comfortable with it. “I wouldn’t say I take it in stride, though,” she admits, “because sometimes I’m in awe of it myself. I’ll see myself on my own magazine cover, and I go ‘That’s me.’”

O, The Oprah Magazine is the latest vehicle to cement Oprah’s power as a force in American media. Every cover since the first has been a glamorous photo of Oprah conveying some lush, romantic ambience - Oprah sailing or horseback riding, rocking on a veranda, gardening, modelling an Easter hat, shimmering in summer finery. Every month for three years she has knocked down the myth of White magazine publishing – that Blacks on covers don’t sell. “When I first started the magazine, people were always saying, ‘Well, who else are you gong to put on the cover?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, who’s going to sell better than I am? You got any ideas?” Indeed, before O, The Oprah Magazine became part of the competition, Oprah, The Star was a best-selling subject for most magazine covers, Black and White alike. One of her first covers was for this magazine’s October issue 17 years ago. She has cow come full circle, returning to the sisterhood, choosing to grant another interview, another cover, comply because she wants to.
Oprah, of course, has never left the sisterhood, despite the sniping of player haters who say things like “She’s not really Black” or “She treats White people better than Black people.” This has always been one of the burdens of Black success: Black resentment. “That was the hardest thing for me in the beginning,” Oprah admits. “I used to get criticism all the time. People saying you’re not doing enough for other Blacks. I remember go into to Sidney Poitier early on and saying, ‘God, I just can’t handle this.’ It was Maya Angelou who told me, ‘You alone are enough. You don’t have to be anything else. You don’t have to explain anything else.’ I finally got it. Just because you’re part of my culture doesn’t mean you can decide for me. White people don’t decide for me. Nobody decides for me. I get to decide for myself. Once I got that, I was free.”

Still, Oprah has spent years trying to answer the huge cosmic question: Why me? Why all the fame and the money and the power that defies history, logic and expectations of where Black women should be in his time and place? She had to go to the ancestral source to find an answer: Mother Africa.

Always a generous philanthropist, Oprah decided two Christmases ago to bring joy and toys to a million children in South Africa. The idea was to re-create for these children the moment of Oprah’s own best Christmas, when she was 12 and her mother had told her there would be no Santa Claus that year because there was no money. “Miraculously, thee nuns showed up at our door on Christmas Eve with toys and food,” Oprah recalls. “I felt such relief that somebody remembered me and my half brother and sister. I never forgot that.”

The idea of giving out a million toys quickly proved overwhelming, but a scaled-down vision soon took shape. During December 2002, Oprah and nearly 100 workers distributed food, toys, books, clothes and school supplies to 50,000 children throughout South Africa. At the first gift-giving, most of the 184 children present had lost their parents to AIDS. “One girl’s mother had died just the day before,” Oprah remembers, “and the child had to be pried from her body.”

Oprah’s team had gotten the names, clothes and shoe size of every child. And Oprah herself was there to give out the gifts. “As I called each child’s name and handed them their gifts, they’d go back and wait patiently for everyone else to get a gift. When all the presents were given out, I said on the count of three, everybody open their gifts. It was pandemonium. These kids had never had anybody give them anything. They had already been through so much. But when they opened their gifts there was wonder and joy and happiness. ‘Do we get to keep the shoes?’ one little girl asked. It was the single greatest moment of my life.” Oprah suddenly stops, choking back tears. “It was the single greatest moment of my life,” she repeats, wiping her eyes.

It was the moment the universe revealed all the answers to all the questions she had been asking. “That moment changed my life,” Oprah says now. “I realized this is why I was born. These children are my children. This is why I don’t have children. This is why I was never married. This is why I have thae fame and the money and all the attention – to become a voice for these children. Because in this world nobody pays attention to you unless you have some bucks to back it up. These children will become my life’s mission. I felt this as strongly as I felt that day standing on my grandmother’s porch when I know I was not going to be a washerwoman.

Oprah is now using her fame and power and money to help troubled Africa, for she knows as Africa goes, so goes the fate of Black people. She also knows that it will take Black energy and Black wealth to rescue the ravaged homeland of our ancestors. She’s planning to build a dozen schools on the continent, and the first one, being constructed outside Johannesburg, will be a leadership academy for girls. Scheduled to open by January 2005, it will be a boarding school for 450 students. “Women are going to save Africa,” Oprah says unequivocally. “And this will be my legacy. All around Africa you will have these women coming out of these schools with a future so bright, it burns their eyes – that’s what Quincy Jones once said about my future.” Since her trip, Oprah has also assumed financial responsibility for the care of five South African children whom she is thinking of adopting. “What’s amazing about African children is that you see yourself in every one of them,” she says. “You see your own beauty. You see the depth of your richness.”

And what Oprah finally sees is the meaning of true power. “Gary Zukav, author of The Seat of The Soul, says that when your personality comes to fully serve your soul, that is ultimate power,” she explains. “I feel tremendously powerful because I do believe I have reached a point in my life where my personally is aligned with what my soul came to do. I believe you have to use your ego for a higher good.”

This is the basic message of Oprah’s Live Your Best Life Tour. You are responsible fro your own life, she says. You become what you believe. The premise is simple enough, but the power is profound when carried out. Yet despite the sold-out success of her personal seminars, Oprah’s talk show continues to be the best vehicle for delivering her message. This is the reason she keeps putting off retiring form the show. “Stedman has said from the beginning, ‘Don’t give up the five hours,’” Oprah says. “Every year when I’m wondering whether to renew my contract, he just walks into the kitchen and says, ‘Don’t give up the show. That’s your power base.’”

Stedman, too, is part of Oprah’s power base, though they haven’t talked about marriage in years. “The truth of the matter is, had we gotten married we wouldn’t be together now,” Oprah believes, “because in no way is this a traditional relationship. Stedman’s a traditional Black man, but I’m in no way a traditional woman, so to take on that role just doesn’t fit. I would say we’re probably happier than ever because he has built his own life as a motivational speaker and teacher. We actually speak and mirror the same things in the world. Only I have the television show from which to do it.”

Oprah has taken Stedman’s advice, extending the contract for her show for another five years. She also recently brought back her phenomenally successful Oprah’s Book Club, a feature that got America reading and practically guaranteed that any selection she made ended up on best-seller lists. In the end, this is what power looks like at this time and place in our history: Black and female, smart and shrewd, wise and true. It looks like a woman called Oprah.

Audrey Edwards was the executive editor of ESSENCE when she first interviewed Oprah in 1986. She’s now a contributing writer to the magazine.