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Oprah's closest friends are the people she works with: a tight-knit group of half a dozen or so producers and assistants, most of them young women in their late 20s (the majority white) who revere her as a combination sorority sister and guru. "I feel very destined to have met her," says Debra DeMaio, executive producer of the Oprah Winfrey Show. "I have pretty much unconditional love for her." Says Producer Mary Kay Clinton, who credits Oprah with helping her conquer her shyness: "I get a lot from her spiritually." Oprah will be maid of honor at Clinton's wedding in August, and is financing the entire affair. That is not unusual. Oprah has regaled all her producers with expensive gifts, from Christmas bonuses to fur coats and trips.
She also gives generously to a number of charities. Last year, for example, she laid out $750,000 to fund ten scholarships at Tennessee State University in Nashville, her alma mater, then followed up with letters to each recipient, challenging a couple of them to get better grades. "My mission is to use this position, power and money to create opportunities for other people," she says.
Oprah's spiritual side appears to be genuine and deeply felt. She reads a Bible verse every morning and contends that her life is directed by a kind of supernaturally inspired instinct. "I am guided by a higher calling," she says. "It's not so much a voice as it is a feeling. If it doesn't feel right to me, I don't do it." If this sounds like a new-age version of Norman Vincent Peale, it is also the sign of someone profoundly comfortable with herself. "It is easier to go with the river than to try to swim upstream. Anything negative that happens to me is because I've been fighting against the stream."
The stream has not always been smooth. Born in Mississippi, Oprah (her name is an accidental misspelling of the Biblical character Orpah) shuttled for much of her childhood between her grandmother in Mississippi, her mother in Milwaukee and her father in Nashville. The time with her mother was the most traumatic: she suffered several instances of sexual abuse, the first at age nine by a 19-year-old cousin. Oprah revealed the incident in a now legendary segment of her talk show; today she says the abuse was "not a horrible thing in my life. There was a lesson in it. It teaches you not to let people abuse you."
It did, however, help turn her into a rebellious and promiscuous teen. She was straightened out by her father, a strict disciplinarian who forced her to read books and memorize 20 new vocabulary words a week. The two are still "close in spirit," Oprah says, though they talk only once every couple of months. "We weren't a family with lots of hugs and touching," Oprah recalls. "Nobody ever said, 'I love you.' " Her father, still a barber and city councilman in Nashville, has turned down Oprah's offers to "retire him" (though she does support her mother financially). "The only thing he's ever asked me for was a ticket to the Tyson-Spinks fight." Oprah came through with one.