TRUTH TO POWER
Oprah dives deep into the harrowing tale of Henrietta Lacks’ exploitation
IN her lengthy career in the public eye, Oprah Winfrey has brought several passion projects to television (“The Women of Brewster Place,” “Before Women Had Wings”), but “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is in a class by itself. Based on the Rebecca Skloot nonfiction book, it tells the story of an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who suffered from cervical cancer. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore harvested cells from Lacks’ tumor, which were taken without her or her family’s knowledge. Known as HeLa, Lacks’ “immortal” cells would reproduce indefinitely — long after her death at age 31 in 1951. They would be used to help find treatments for a number of diseases and make money for medical labs.
“I lived in Baltimore for eight years. I was a reporter,” Winfrey tells The Post. “I did the rounds and never heard her name. The only people who had heard of HeLa were doctors. It was my intention to offer this story to the world so that the history and power of her life could be known.”
The book tells Henrietta’s story as well as those of her five children and extended family. At first, Winfrey, 63, thought of casting another actress (she won’t say whom) to play Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, whose struggle to understand what happened to her mother nearly drove her to a stroke. But Len Amato, president of HBO Films, encouraged her to step inside Deborah’s suspicious skin.
“I really didn’t want to do this,” Winfrey says. “I didn’t want to live in the space of manic depression and anxiety. I didn’t want to take all of that on.”
Winfrey was also egged on by the film’s director, George C. Wolfe. “Prior to George’s
script, the story was more about the cells and the science,” Winfrey says. “George said, ‘It’s [Deborah’s] search for her own identity.’”
Wolfe reveals that when Winfrey saw the set depicting Deborah’s house and saw the clutter, she said, “This would drive me insane.”
Winfrey laughs. “Her desk is pushed up against the bed. It feels kind of cray. Like, what’s going on in there? George would say, ‘But she was on 21 different kinds of medication.’”
Seeing the set did not satisfy her curiosity, though, and like a good journalist, Winfrey visited the East Baltimore house where Deborah (who died in 2009) lived, and knocked on the door.
“I wanted to get an idea [of how] she lived in that space,” Winfrey says. “The man [who answered] said, ‘Are you Oprah?’ I said, ‘I would like to come in.’ He’s in his undershorts. There’s a woman in the room who’s holding a baby. He says, ‘Oprah’s at the door.’ I said, ‘Are you aware of who lived in this house?’ He said, ‘I don’t know nothin’ about no famous person.’ There were 10 peo- ple living in that house.”
She also met with Henrietta’s surviving children and grandchildren.
“I stood up in front of the family and said, ‘Let me share this story. I’m not going to be able to satisfy everything your mother should be onscreen. I’m going to try to get it right as much as possible,’” Winfrey says. “I understand the family’s still agitated that they never got any compensation for those cells. I would probably be upset, too.”
What was particularly upsetting was filming the scene where Deborah and Skloot go to the Crownsville Hospital Center, formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane, where Henrietta’s eldest daughter, Elsie, died in 1955 at age 16.
In Skloot’s book, Deborah talks about her sister: “She did have them seizures. And she couldn’t never learn how to use the toilet. But I think she was just deaf. Me and all my brothers got a touch of nerve deafness on account of our mother and father being cousins and having the syphilis.” (Henrietta was diagnosed but not treated for asymptomatic neurosyphilis.)
In the film, Deborah and Skloot (portrayed by Rose Byrne) see a copy of Elsie’s autopsy report, with a gruesome picture of Elsie attached. “Her head is twisted unnaturally to the left, chin raised and held in place by a large pair of white hands,” Skloot writes.
“I didn’t want to see that photograph until the night I did the take,” Winfrey says. “I could tear up right now. At first Deborah’s so excited to find it. And then as she starts to look more closely, she sees the hand around the neck.”
On a visit to Maryland before filming began, Winfrey happened upon the Crownsville Hospital Center, which closed in 2004. She asked her taxi driver to stop.
“The thing that struck me immediately were the bars on the windows,” Winfrey says.
She decided to trespass. “I was crawling up the stairs, smelling the stench. Opening doors,” Winfrey says. “If someone had come in at that moment, I would have had some ’splaining to do.”
In 1954, medical lab Microbiological Associates started selling HeLa cells. Lacks’ family has received no financial compensation, though the cells led to breakthroughs in the treatment of diseases. Does Winfrey think Henrietta’s contribution to medicine is consolation for the family?
“I don’t think it’s enough,” Winfrey says firmly. “Listen, I have nothing but praise for Rebecca Skloot. None of us would have known about this story if it hadn’t been for [her] . . . But I think people are going to say, ‘I can’t believe that family doesn’t have any money.’ They should have gotten money from the drug companies. The cells are everywhere and they’re still multiplying.”
In an already depressing story, there’s one fact that seems the most sad for Winfrey. “That Deborah did not live to read the book,” she says. “She was not interested in the money. She was interested in knowing for herself and then having the world know who her mother was.”