OPRAH OPENS UP:
new direction for media superstar
Oprah’s remarkable career is built on her uncanny ability to get others to open up, but her own inner life has been something of a mystery, says William Langley. Now a marathon US tour and a new mental health documentary series with Prince Harry promise to reveal more about what makes the superstar tick.
Another city, another sold-out show, another salute to the imperishable power of Oprah. The world changes, but its queen of the airwaves only makes adjustments, and after a lifetime on the road, Oprah Winfrey, at 66, believes she can finally see a destination.
“I’ve reached the point where I’m okay with where I am,” Oprah said at the start of her epic new 18,000km Vision 2020 tour of America’s biggest cities. “It’s taken a long time and it’s been really hard… but I think I’m there.” The talk show days are done, and having followed up with success as an actress, entrepreneur, philanthropist, political power-broker, and de facto global godmother, Oprah now intends to take herself directly to the masses.
For all her fame, amassed during one of the most astonishing careers in entertainment history, Oprah remains, in many ways, a mystery. Her core skill has been reaching into the souls and psyches of others, rather than revealing her own. Fame and money, she says, have had the paradoxical effect of adding to her insecurity. “I’m essentially an introvert,” she recently admitted to actress Amy Schumer. “People don’t believe it, but I find it hard to open up. I go to parties where I can’t think of anything to say and have to run to the bathroom.”
Her inner life and closest relationships,
particularly with her companion of 34 years, Stedman Graham, and best friend Gayle King, have long been a subject of intrigue and speculation. Biographers who have attempted to penetrate the mystique have gone away defeated.
So, in a current mood of what looks suspiciously like mellowness, Oprah has been using her tour to explain a little more about herself. Deploying her matchless power to draw star names, she has recruited the likes of Lady Gaga, Michelle Obama, Kate Hudson and Jennifer Lopez to join her in arenas from New York to Texas to California, for the events, which are presented by WW (formerly Weight Watchers), in which Oprah is a major shareholder and adviser.
The Oprah appearing before the ecstatic crowds emerges as a very different creature from the one who once hauled a toy cart loaded with 30kg of lard across her studio floor to illustrate how much weight she had lost. Today’s Oprah says she can no longer watch that famous TV clip, which she attributes to the pressure she was under in an industry fixated on image and appearance.
“I’m proud that I no longer live in a world of comparisons,” she said on the eve of the tour. “It’s taken me a lifetime to figure that out; that you can be OK as you are, but it’s so hard because we live in a world of Insta-comparisons. So the real best spiritual practice is to live from within, and not let the world define who you are.”
Behind this confident assertion lie decades of up-and-down dieting, which Oprah says she has now abandoned. “I’m over the scales,” she hoots. “I don’t even use them any more! I’ve been on every diet in the world, and it’s taken me a long time to understand this. Now it’s just – do I feel well and does it fit? I feel better than I ever have in my life. Healthy is the new skinny.”
But in our complex, modern world of “wellness”, different notions and nuances of health are emerging all the time. One of Oprah’s current preoccupations is highlighting the extent of mental illness, and its barely understood effects on society. Later this year, she will join Prince Harry, in a new TV documentary series addressing what the 35-year-old prince calls: “Global stories of unparalleled human spirit fighting back from the darkest places, and the opportunity for us to understand ourselves and those around us better.”
Oprah, who has grown close to both Harry and his wife Meghan in recent years (she was a guest at their 2018 Windsor Castle wedding), has publicly backed the couple’s decision to step down from royal duties. Declaring that she was “1000 per cent behind them both”, Oprah added: “Who doesn’t feel what it takes to make that decision, to give up everything you’ve known in your whole life to say ‘I’m going to choose this new life and what I believe to be the truest vision for myself.’ Who are any of us to stand in judgement of that? That’s what I think about it!”
While the woman born poor on a Deep South dirt road, and the young man raised in palaces may outwardly appear to have little in common, both spent their formative years fighting demons, and are still burdened with the fall-out. Harry has been open about the mental turmoil he attributes to losing his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales at an early age, while Oprah, the product of an abusive, dislocated childhood, has spent a lifetime questioning her own success.
In a revealing recent interview, Oprah explained that while she had never undergone psychotherapy, she had used her long-running TV
“Live from within… don’t let the world define who you are.”
show, with its heavy emphasis on self-disclosure, as a substitute. “I had so many therapists sitting in the chair across from me that I just sort of took it in,” she said. “The Oprah Winfrey Show was my greatest therapy.”
“It was the greatest teaching. It was the greatest classroom. I came out of it a better human being having listened to everybody’s stories, and I was able to say: ‘I don’t want to go down that road. I saw what happened to that lady. I heard what that man said.’”
Oprah pursued the theme in her opening tour event featuring a one-hour sit-down with Lady Gaga in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In an extraordinarily candid exchange, the 33-year-old singer/actress told of her own struggles with depression, self-harming, and fibromyalgia, a rare, neuropathic condition sometimes brought on by trauma, that leaves her in constant pain. Gaga, born Stefani Germanotta, explained how she created her outrageous alter ego as a “super-heroine” to save her from isolation and hopelessness.
“I think it happened because God was saying to me, ‘I’m going to show you pain, and then you’re going to help other people who are in pain, because you’re going to understand it… I take an oath as a commitment today with you: It’s 2020, and over the next decade and maybe longer, I’m going to get the smartest scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, mathematicians, researchers and professors in the same room together. And we are going to go through each problem one by one, and we are going to solve this mental health crisis.”
Powerful impact
With Oprah at your side, all things are possible. The US writer Fran Lebowitz calls her “The greatest single media influence ever experienced by the American public… almost a religion.” Her life story is taught in schools, where pupils discuss not so much her merits as her meaning. Academics credit her with what has been called the “Oprahisation” of society, whereby powerful public figures – politicians, celebrities, tycoons – now feel free to bare their souls and weep. Even the hint of an Oprah product endorsement is more powerful than any advertising campaign.
Yet as Oprah knows, all this power has explosive potential. Polls suggest she would be a serious contender for this year’s US presidential election, but while she weaves and feints around the possibility, it is more likely that she will push her agenda from the sidelines. “I don’t think she would ever actually do it,” says Gerri Fenton, a Washington political scientist and consultant. “In a sense it would be beneath her.”
Oprah appears to have reached the same conclusion. “We were going to call the tour Oprah 2020,” she joked at the launch in Florida, “but I figured people might get the wrong idea.”
Conveniently, one of her star guests, former First Lady Michelle Obama, was on hand to offer some cautionary advice: “It was the biggest privilege of my life to serve as this nation’s First Lady,” said Michelle, “and I will continue the work to be a person of service, to try to work to make sure my life means something to somebody else. But those eight years were hard. It’s a hard job. It takes a toll.”
Yet the big question of how a girl who grew up wearing potato sacks to school, rose to become the most famous woman in America remains essentially unanswered. Even Oprah says she doesn’t know. “Nobody had ever seen anybody like me,” she mused last week. “They just couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t slim. I couldn’t sing. I had no qualities that anyone could understand.”
Oprah was born to unmarried teenage parents in the tiny town of
“The Oprah Winfrey Show was my greatest therapy.”
Kosciusko, Mississippi, and given the biblical name “Orpha”, which later became corrupted to “Oprah”. With no settled family home, she was shuttled around between relatives, one of whom, she claims, sexually abused her from the age of nine. From these unpromising beginnings emerged a remarkable ability to talk effectively, and gain the trust of listeners. After winning her high school speaking prize, she landed a place at university to study communications.
The idea at the time was to become
an actress – an ambition which, like most of her others, would eventually be fulfilled but, desperate for money, the young Oprah was forced to take a part-time job as a local television announcer, and was talent-spotted by a Chicago station to front its struggling morning show. Three years later, in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show was launched. It was an immediate and massive hit, which changed the face of television, and was eventually shown in 145 countries.
Her difficult childhood, she says, has given her insight into other people’s lives and struggles, and in 2002 it led her to open the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, providing educational and leadership opportunities for girls who grew up like her, “economically disadvantaged but not poor in mind or spirit”.
Oprah has never married and has no children, and her inner life is shared almost exclusively by her two closest confidants, TV journalist
Gayle and 68-year-old entrepreneur, Stedman. “The simple truth of our relationship with each other,” says Oprah, “the one nobody seems to want to believe, is that it works.”
The magic continues
And so it rolls on, in city after city, before the adoring thousands who want to believe that what works for Oprah might somehow work for them. She tells them that her own talents are modest, her truths simple, and likes to quote a speech she made at the 2018 Golden Globes:
“In my career, what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave; to say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere, and how we overcome. And I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who’ve withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights.”