Bill Becker, lawyer who helped Oprah build her media empire, dead at 78
BY MAUREEN O’DONNELL,
Bill Becker’s career as a labor lawyer began with representing coal mines and grocery stores and culminated in helping Oprah Winfrey create a media empire.
He rose to become Winfrey’s trusted general counsel, heading a legal team of 25 employees. He handled employment matters ranging from hiring to severance as well as negotiating union contracts for Winfrey’s Harpo Studios.
“Bill Becker began working with me in the early days of Harpo and was a critical member of the team,” Winfrey said, “serving as general counsel and adviser regarding all things legal.”
Mr. Becker, 78, died Feb. 11 in Chicago. He had Parkinson’s disease and suffered a stroke in October, according to his daughter.
In addition to labor and real estate issues, he oversaw a variety of entertainment matters. With an eye toward Federal Communications Commission regulations, for instance, he’d warn producers away if he thought the show was at risk of dubious claims or deceptive guests. It also was his department that made sure Winfrey had clearance for all of the music heard on her show and that dressing rooms were furnished with the food and drinks specified in some entertainers’ contracts.
He helped with the mobilization of a legal team to investigate allegations of sex abuse at the girls’ school Winfrey founded in South Africa.
Organized and meticulous, Mr. Becker also helped Winfrey choose her private plane, according to his daughter Cathy. And as “The Oprah Winfrey Show” wound down in 2009, he helped plan an all-expenses-paid Mediterranean farewell cruise for 1,800 of her employees, their families and friends.
He made a memorable appearance on her show 20 years ago when Winfrey was taking orders at the Rock N Roll McDonald’s. Coincidentally, he rolled up in the drive-thru just then and could be heard complaining unwittingly to his boss, “Yes, ma’am, I gotta tell you this is the slowest service I’ve ever had here.”
Winfrey calls that moment “one of my alltime favorite memories of Bill.”
“I had agreed to do a story on working at McDonald’s,” she said. “And while I was there, fumbling my way through takeout orders, Bill pulls up and is blowing his horn and complaining about the slow service.
“‘Sorry, sir, it’s my first day,’ I said. I recognized his voice through the order speaker. When he pulled up to get his order, he was shocked to see ME in the takeout window handing him his Big Mac. He sent me an email apologizing right after and asked if there was anything he could do to make it up to me. We ended up putting him behind the McDonald’s counter taking orders, and he was a good sport about it.”
Working for Winfrey was “exciting in a new way every day,” Mr. Becker once told law. com. “Because she’s a creative butterfly, we never know where she’s going to land.”
He was born in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. His mother, Catherine, was a New Yorker from an Italian American family. His father, William Ludwig Becker, was from the town of Hochst, now part of Frankfurt, Germany. When Mr. Becker was a toddler, his family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where his father — who served with the Army Corps of Engineers — worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project.
Later, the family moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Becker was class valedictorian at Notre Dame High School. He