In Oprah We Trust

The magazine’s lead features are lively and unusual life stories, describing the trials of women who eventually find their happy endings. In the first issue, a journalist born to a black father and a white mother related her conflicted fondness for her racist white grandmother; Camille Cosby (Bill’s wife) talked about her “womanness” and the death of her son; the singer Jewel rattled on about losing her job and living in a van when she was a teenager. The second issue’s testimonials are not as strong. A young novelist recounts how she learned to say no to people; Sunny von Bulow’s daughter is interviewed by her sister-in-law but reveals nothing significant about the famous trial; Jane Fonda confides her intimacy issues and her failure as a mother to “show up” in the lives of her children.

Oprah has rounded up columnists as well, “life strategist” Dr. Phil McGraw, New Age thinker Gary Zukav, and the ubiquitous pro-frugality Suze Orman — professionally sunny types who flesh out Oprah’s gospel. And there are incidental pick-me-ups, items teaching you to fill up your dull moments, increase your joy, sharpen your Internet skills, relieve your PMS, soothe your aching joints, look better, and recover from divorce.

No aspect of life that could possibly be improved is outside the magazine’s boundaries. There is a calendar of exercises to help you “tap your personal courage,” instructions on how to beautify your home and get in touch with your senses, tips for your social life, and enough inspirational sayings to choke a cynic. One gets the impression that there isn’t a hair on your body, a word to be said, a sight, a smell, a moment that couldn’t be further enriched if approached with an Oprah-like determination. Amid all this economic, physical, sensory, and spiritual uplift, mere muddling through would offend the god of personal progress.

Some critics have noticed that the magazine is mostly about Oprah Winfrey. Her picture appears often, her wise sayings and favorite quotations, movies, and novels pop up everywhere. But this is not a cult of personality, this is product, and Oprah is a brand, an “icon,” a cultural touchstone. She is the key to creating and living out your “grandest, highest vision.” Oprah is all over O magazine because Oprah is the reason to buy it.

People don’t just love Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, now in its fourteenth season; they love her. The Arts and Entertainment channel’s popular show Biography had its highest ratings ever when it aired the Horatio Alger story of her life. And not only are several biographies available, including some for young readers, but the tabloids still give saturation coverage to her weight, her relationship with longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham, the time she smoked cocaine, what her bathroom looks like, her sexual orientation, and whether she’s having an affair with an NBA player.

Oprah Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, heir to social pathologies that would transform America during her lifetime. Her mother, Vernita Lee, said her daughter was the result of “a one-day fling under an oak tree.” But Vernita also told a soldier, Vernon Winfrey, that he was the father, and he did not object. Before Oprah was one, her mother moved to Milwaukee, leaving the baby with her own mother, Hattie Mae. Five years passed before Vernita took her daughter in.

For most of the next eight years, Oprah lived with her mother, a half sister, and a half brother in Milwaukee. They moved in with a boyfriend of Vernita’s when Oprah was 12, and a chaotic period in Oprah’s life began. She shared a bed with a 14-year-old male cousin who she says raped her. A favorite uncle took advantage of her, too. And there were “boyfriends,” whom she invited over for unsupervised games. At school she showed promise, but with promiscuity came juvenile delinquency. Even her inattentive mother saw she needed a change.

At 14, Oprah was sent to Nashville to live with Vernon Winfrey, and in his strict, God-fearing household, it emerged that she was pregnant. “I did the exact same thing my mother had done,” she would say later. “I hid my pregnancy until the child was born. And I named all of the people who could have been responsible.” The child, however, lived only two weeks, and his death was a turning point. Vernon and his wife demanded Oprah obey the rules of the house, study hard, and act like a lady. So began the achievement-hungry years, punctuated by high grades, an innocent high-school romance, and beauty pageant victories.

Later she would bear witness to what her father did for her, but also to a coolness toward him. “He took responsibility because I could have been his,” she said. “To this day there has never been any official test. . . . He took responsibility for me when he didn’t have to. So my father saved my life when I needed to be saved. But we’re not, like, bonded.”

Then when Oprah was 17, she lucked into a part-time job reading the news on a Nashville radio station. At 19, while she was still a student at Tennessee State, she moved to the local CBS TV affiliate. Soon the ABC TV affiliate in Baltimore, scouring the country for a black woman to co-anchor a popular news program, hired Oprah.

But news wasn’t her vocation. In Baltimore, the casual journalistic skills she had picked up in Nashville got her in trouble, especially with colleagues jealous of her position, and the station moved her to its morning talk show. Before long, People are Talking was beating Donahue, the undisputed leader in daytime talk, and the Oprah we know was born. As she turned 30, Oprah Winfrey became host of the ailing A.M. Chicago, and within 12 weeks it was ahead of Donahue in Chicago. Three years later, in late 1986, the Oprah Winfrey Show was in national syndication, and Oprah was poised to become queen of talk.

The Oprah Winfrey Show, Number One in daytime TV, has won 32 Emmy awards. Its only real competition came from the Jerry Springer show, which dropped in the ratings after it abandoned its notorious on-air fisticuffs. In 1998, Oprah received a lifetime achievement Emmy and announced she and her show would no longer compete for the award. And why should she — what is mere industry praise to her? She is, as she often says, doing “God’s work” as a leading producer of “women’s culture”: not just TV, but also websites, cable channels, movies, and novels made “for women.” Oprah is one of the partners behind the new Internet and cable multimedia effort Oxygen Media, Inc. And these and other projects have put her in line to become America’s first black billionaire.

Preaching betterment isn’t a business for the stingy-hearted, and there is nothing cheap about Oprah. She uses her money and influence to build houses for the poor, send students to college, feed a township in South Africa, build shelters for battered women, and make quilts for newborns with AIDS. On “Money Mondays,” her show hosts people who do good works, and they walk away with grants of $ 50,000. Members of the studio audience often find gifts tucked under their seats. Recently, on a show about technology, every audience member was given close to a thousand dollars’ worth of high-tech gadgets and computer software to help them organize their lives, communicate with friends, and find driving directions. At such times, a spirit of beneficence washes over the show, leaving the lovely impression that possibly just anyone — even you — might be invited to the feast of goodness that is Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah is her “own best thing,” to use a phrase from her favorite novelist, Toni Morrison. With all the publicity about her weight, her many physical gifts get over-looked. Her speaking voice, for one thing, is exceptional. Its naturally trusting and soulful timber can turn girlish, heart-stoppingly serious, tough, or confidential. And her face, huge like her commanding eyes, has all the animation and flexibility of a great stage actor’s. Large, curvy, and soft, she moves with ease, hunching down to listen closely to a guest, turning to her audience to reel in its reaction, using her hands with just enough energy. Hers is an exceptionally wide repertoire of full-body expressions, always decisive, almost always apt. With the physique of a homebody and the informality of a warm and gossipy next-door neighbor, this woman might have just come from the kitchen with barely time to get dressed. She is not especially precise with words, but she is all the same enormously expressive.

Long ago, Oprah Winfrey identified the secret of her own success: “the ability to be myself in front of a camera, which is a gift.” More recently, she has credited not her talent, but her belief in herself in the face of what she insists were great obstacles. She is rich and powerful, she says, despite the fact that she is a woman, that she is black, and that she is overweight. Yet, the truth is that these problems have been grist for her show and for her image. Women of all races make up the adoring audience that sends her 25,000 fan letters a week and contributes to her favorite charities. As for her weight, it is perhaps the most enduring theme of her show; as one of her best stunts ever, in November 1988, she walked onstage pulling a wagon carrying 67 pounds of lard, representing the weight she had lost on a liquid diet.

But it seems that not even Oprah (the second-highest-earning celebrity in 1999 after George Lucas) is content to admit that she has talent to thank for her triumphs; greedily, she wants to have overcome even greater adversity.

“If I had believed what they said in Mississippi in 1954,” she commented on a recent show, “if I had believed what they said in Baltimore, I would not be where I am today.” In reality, by the early 1970s, when Oprah entered broadcasting, being black and female was advantageous for an aspiring journalist. Television was ready for Oprah’s rocketlike ascent.

The Oprah Winfrey Show first made its mark as a purveyor of sensationalist muck. “Courtship Violence,” “Ramifications of Sexual Abuse,” “Drunk Drivers Who Have Killed,” “Donald and Ivana Trump,” “Autoerotic Asphyxia,” and “Priestly Sins” were episodes from its first six years. Oprah entertained more than her share of racists, Satanists, cross-dressers, and other exhibitionist malcontents, and it made for exciting television. But in 1994, she announced a change: “The time has come for this genre of talk shows to move on from dysfunctional whining and complaining and blaming.” She led the way.

Since then, Oprah’s show, the palace of her multimedia kingdom, has taken on new, though not exactly edifying, dimensions. It trades in cheap spirituality and self help, indulges in casual misandry, and beatifies women almost regardless of their decency or goodness. Its popular once-a-month Oprah’s Book Club showcases literary mediocrity. Through it all, Oprah sails, confirming her audience’s self-serving notions, satisfying their voyeuristic urges, and blessing as received truths the misconceptions that befuddle our age. Yet — and it’s a big yet — there is something about Oprah. To watch her is to see a performer at the height of her powers, a mesmerizing talent, a certain kind of genius, even, doing what she was meant to do.

The Oprah Winfrey Show has become a chautauqua, dispensing wisdom on everything from keeping house to “excavating your true self.” And it has more than range, it has what the confused heart wants to hear. Some days, Oprah speaks as if there were no love superior to self-love. Other days, she sounds like a woman who asks only to serve God. On one show, she celebrates romantic bonds; on the next, the triumph of the unencumbered woman.

Embodying this philosophical potluck are the show’s two most regular guest experts, the self-fulfillment guru Gary Zukav and the marriage advocate Dr. Phillip McGraw. Zukav, author of the bestselling The Seat of the Soul, talks like Chauncey Gardiner with a college degree. The boisterous “Dr. Phil,” author of Relationship Rescue, also a best-seller, barks out his prescriptions with all the finesse of a football coach.

Zukav speaks with a Zen-like concentration, as if patiently unearthing some long-ago mislaid truth about the human condition. His concern is not your job or your family, but you, specifically your soul and your openness to following wherever it leads. As he told one of Oprah’s guests, “You are a soul first and a personality second, and your life is constantly offering you opportunities to move into your wholeness.” Of course, your obligations may occasionally get in the way — a point Zukav clears up in his 1989 book.

“All of the vows that a human being can take cannot prevent the spiritual path from exploding through and breaking those vows if the soul must move on,” he writes. But worry not, for “there is no such thing as a tragedy in this life; no such thing as unfairness.” Least of all are there other people to worry about. “There is no such thing as a victim,” said Zukav on one show, and Oprah gushed, “I love that!” Your soul comes first, and becoming happy is “your life’s work.”

By comparison, Dr. Phil is the show’s very own Dr. Laura. He’s full of tough advice. He tells an errant husband who is appearing with his wife, “You have to behave your way to happiness,” through “impulse control.” A mature person’s feelings follow his better instincts, Dr. Phil says. And when the adulterer admits that what he has done is eating him up inside, Oprah chimes in, asking, “Does it eat you up enough to stop seeing the other person?” She admonishes another cheatin’ heart, “Love is a verb. Love is a verb.”

But even without Zukav and McGraw, the show would have two minds about marriage. One day, in the regular “Remembering Your Spirit” segment, the singer Kenny Loggins extols “the love affair between the husband and the wife.” Another day, the never-married Oprah recommends videotaping the program for your friends: Her guest is a divorce counselor who encourages those recovering from wedlock to use self-esteem flash cards, write goodbye letters to their marriage, do breathing exercises, meditate. “Close your eyes and see yourself sitting on the lap of the Great Mother,” the divorce enthusiast tells her fellow divorcees, “and this big woman is holding you. You know that you can cry here . . . ”

Overall, an unsettling coyness governs the show’s treatment of female guests. For the montages that introduce segments, women guests are usually videotaped at home, sometimes with their children, but seldom with any mention of whether they are married, even when this would have bearing on the show’s subject. And they are treated with kid gloves.

On a recent episode, a mother who had left her newborn in a trash bin explained that the baby had interfered with her plans for finishing college. Oprah inquired what the guest was thinking when she abandoned her child, and was told: “I wanted the baby to be safe when I put her in a trash bin.” To which Oprah responded — acknowledging that others might feel otherwise — “I understand it. I understand it perfectly.” This forgiving attitude seems to arise from a belief, implicit in the Oprah Winfrey Show, that women exist in a holy state, no matter what. Married, divorced, working, looking for a job, they stand alone, sanctified, the masters of their destinies — except when they have men in their lives who treat them horribly.

Males are seldom the beneficiaries of the trademark Oprah Winfrey empathy. Far from it. She presents them as uncaring beasts who have sex “without their brains attached.” The disparagement of men, a thread that runs through all her products, is neatly on display in Oprah’s selections for her book club. “The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old,” reads the opening sentence of Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue. The heroine of Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone was 13 when she was raped, and vicious predatory men lurk throughout the book. The indictment isn’t always so direct. The title character in The Pilot’s Wife is a mother in her thirties when her husband’s death in a plane wreck reveals his secret life, with a second wife and child and a job working for Irish terrorists.

Many of the novels Oprah has chosen rely on the same emotional trigger. Like the shoot-out in a spaghetti western or the engagement in a Jane Austen novel, an Oprah’s Book Club selection has its violence-against-women scene. In Where the Heart Is, a sweet and likable character is looking for Mr. Right but always ends up with Mr. Wrongs. She dates them; she gets pregnant with their children; and they leave. When she finally seems to have met Mr. Right, who is kind to her and gentle with her children, she walks in on him sodomizing her son. A fight ensues that is so brutal her jaw has to be wired for a year, she loses her job because she cannot work, and her son may never recover from his trauma.

A more subtle female chauvinism shows in Oprah’s choice of writers. Even the best-known ones — Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison — belong to that school whose works would be less praised were they written by men. Allende’s Daughter of Fortune follows the adventures of a sensitive young lady who finds love in the arms of a socialist worker, then a Chinese medicine man. Beloved, which won Morrison a Pulitzer and which Oprah made into a movie, relies heavily on the violence-against-women device for its depiction of the horrors of slavery.

Alas, Oprah, the great lover of books, is no lover of great books. While her favorites, according to O magazine, include To Kill a Mockingbird and some lesser decent novels, she also lists Reflections on the Art of Living by Joseph Campbell of “follow your bliss” fame and A Return to Love by Hollywood New Age healer Marianne Williamson. One worthy novel did recently make her book club — The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink, a curious little love story from Germany — but it was the exception. What a pity that the influential Oprah’s Book Club is enamored almost exclusively of a literary world where the women are innocent, the men are brutal, and if you watch the river long enough, the body of your husband will float by.

Maybe Oprah’s audience is to blame. Her fans apparently want to be told that great truths can be found in shallow books; that it’s all right to hate men, or not; to ditch your marriage, or save it; to lose weight, or wear it proudly; to conceal your age, or accept it; to have a sex change, or change back; to abandon your child, or raise your child; to cherish your family, or relish your singleness. And Oprah is nothing if not a performer who delivers for her audience. Which is why she makes a wonderful entertainer, but a two-bit oracle.

Still, as Oprah’s favorite poet, Maya Angelou, might say: She’s a phenomenal woman. Watching her, one realizes that Oprah is doing what, by some compelling but ineffable logic, she should be doing. She has achieved a kind of perfection, slinging truths, half-truths, and out-right nonsense to flatter America with its own favorite fallacies. As she purveys Oprah-brand women’s culture through her ever-popular show, her magazine, her cable channel, and across the Internet, one might wish that there weren’t a talent for such things, but there is, and she has it.