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Few would have bet on Oprah Winfrey's swift rise to host of the most popular talk show on TV. In a field dominated by white males, she is a black woman of ample bulk (usually over 190 lbs., though she has lost 24 of them since starting a medically supervised all-liquid diet three weeks ago). As interviewers go, she is no match for, say, Phil Donahue, whose program was the obvious model for hers. What she lacks in journalistic toughness, however, she makes up in plainspoken curiosity, robust humor and, above all, empathy. Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah's eye or get a comforting arm around the shoulder. They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as group-therapy session.
And the talk-show host as budding entertainment mogul. Following her Oscar- nominated role in The Color Purple, Oprah formed a production company, Harpo Inc. (Oprah spelled backward), to develop TV and movie projects. Its first co- production, The Women of Brewster Place, a drama based on Gloria Naylor's novel in which Oprah plays one of seven ghetto women, is scheduled to air on ABC this season. The company has also bought the rights to Beloved, Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel about slavery (Oprah wants to play the lead role), and has even approached some of Oprah's talk-show guests about turning their stories into TV movies.
At 34, Oprah Winfrey is making a lot of money (close to $12 million annually from her syndicated show alone) and living it up. She resides in a sleekly decorated three-bedroom Chicago apartment with a panoramic view of Lake Michigan, spends lavishly and unapologetically on clothes, and jet-sets around the country to such events as the Tyson-Spinks fight.
Her growing celebrity, not to mention the high-style hairdos and drop-dead outfits, often seems gratingly at odds with her down-to-earth TV image. And , there are Chicagoans who say that Oprah has forgotten her roots, that success has gone to her head. But she seems pleasantly unaffected by fame. Her conversation is a mix of calm self-assurance (one rarely hears an "uh" in Oprah's speech), erupting high spirits and down-home sass. She talks amiably to the fans who constantly recognize her on the street, and personally says goodbye to each member of the studio audience filing out of her daily tapings. Despite her lavish life-style, Oprah notes, her plates still don't match, and she says she gave up a chauffeur because "it drove me crazy having someone at my beck and call." She now drives herself to work in a Jaguar convertible, often with her hair dripping wet from her morning shampoo.
She is rarely seen on the Chicago social circuit, and spends most of her nights at home reading. "I read in themes," she says. "One year it was black authors. Another year all the books I was supposed to read in college but didn't. This is my spiritual summer." Her current fave: A Course in Miracles, a spiritual text that offers positive-thinking lessons for life. Her boyfriend, Stedman Graham, a former basketball player, is now based in North Carolina as vice president of a public relations firm; they usually see each other every couple of weeks.