Oprah Winfrey made actors cry, authors grovel and audiences whoop. As the talkshow host ends her 25-year run, her unique, soul-baring style should be applauded
'Oh, you just missed her." Earlier this year, I wangled my way into the Vanity Fair Oscars party in Los Angeles along with two other journalists. Immediately, one of them spotted Tom Hanks and was off. The other pursued Aaron Sorkin. I, on the other hand, saw a familiar female face, staggered in shock, and promptly pushed Claire Danes out of my path to reach my quarry.
It was Gayle King, known to Oprahphiles simply as Gayle, Oprah Winfrey's best friend and a frequent presence on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Theirs is a friendship so strong that not only have they been the subject of the inevitable and firmly denied rumours that they are more than friends, but, despite those potentially damaging whispers, Winfrey never wavered from featuring King on her programme. Last year, in one of the few interviews Winfrey has ever given, she wept when talking about King: "She is the mother I never had. She is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend everybody deserves." If Winfrey represents, as the New York Times put it this week, "the embodiment of success, especially for African Americans and especially for women", then her and King's friendship is the embodiment of ideal female friendship.
"Gayle, I love you!" I gasped, professional to my marrow.
"Thank you," she said, with the unruffled tone of someone accustomed to professions of love from hysterical strangers.
Are you here with, um, er, Oprah?
"Oh, you just missed her."
It's hard to say if the airily casual "oh" was worse than the almost cruel "just." But it was, in retrospect, just as well because if my behaviour with King was lacking a little something (Dignity? Maturity? Sanity?), then that is nothing compared to what would have happened if I'd spotted Oprah by the hors d'oeuvres.
In my defence, this is not unique to me: one of the best Saturday Night Live sketches ever satirised Winfrey's notoriously hysterical studio audiences. In the SNL sketch, the women ? with a gurning Tina Fey in the front row ? become ever more excited with each proclamation from Winfrey until they reach such a pitch that their heads explode. Fey later featured Winfrey herself in her show 30 Rock, this time with Winfrey embodying, not female histrionics, but calm wisdom, a source of wise life guidance and insider tips about "high-heeled flip-flops that lift up your butt". The real joke of that episode, though, was that Winfrey wasn't there at all ? she was a drunken fantasy of Fey's character, Liz Lemon. Like me, Liz got the stand-in: neither of us could have handled the real thing.
I was eight years old when the first nationally screened episode of her eponymous talkshow aired in 1986, meaning I am, to quote actress Dakota Fanning (and yes, it pained me to write that phrase), part of the Oprah generation. It was one of the first grown-up shows I was allowed to watch, and one of the earliest episodes I saw was her special about the Rodney King scandal (I'm guessing my mother would have preferred for it to be about high-heeled flip-flops). I loved Winfrey because it felt like she was neither talking above me nor down to me, and this is still the case, which says either something worrying about me or brilliant about her.
At this late stage, with The Oprah Winfrey Show coming to an end this week after 25 years, there is, surely, no need to rehash in full the Oprah Winfrey story ? one even more extraordinary than that of President Obama ? in which she emerged from a childhood riddled with abuse set against a background of poverty to become arguably the most famous woman in the world and a billionaire, repeat, a billionaire. She proved that a talkshow hosted by a little-known young black woman could trounce, within months of its debut, one hosted by Phil Donahue, an established old white man, an achievement that was seen back in 1984 as unique and, sadly, still looks that way today.
I wish I could say that these are the reasons I love Winfrey. But I'm afraid I'm not that deep. I love Winfrey for a reason that she, I like to think, would prefer: I love her for herself.
Her onscreen celebrity triumphs are many: she made Denzel Washington cry (when she brought on the teacher who taught him to read); she made Jonathan Franzen grovel ("I learned to have more respect for television," the novelist muttered when he finally appeared on her show last year after having snubbed it a decade earlier); she, of course, got Tom Cruise to reveal, finally, his ? shall we say ? eccentricity in what shall forever be known as "the sofa jumping episode".
Personally, though, I preferred her personal shows, such as when a disturbingly thin Winfrey pulled a wagon of 67 pounds of lard on stage, representing the weight she'd lost. That episode taught me a valuable lesson, one that Winfrey didn't intend at the time but would applaud now: being thin should not be the automatic goal, because Winfrey did not look good at that weight ? she looked unnatural, and she has since admitted she was nearly starving herself at the time.
Her skill at combining intelligence with emotion is harder than it looks, as proven, I'm sorry to say, by her new and not wholly successful network, OWN. Here we have the basic Oprah ingredients: life lessons, experts, celebrities. But Winfrey herself has hardly been on it and without her solid anchor, the fluff drifts away.
Not everyone likes Winfrey, of course, and God knows she has made some mistakes. Her risky move in the 90s from traditional tabloid TV ("I shot my ex-husband and his lover") to the more touchy-feely fringes of discourse had its benefits, but also its downsides. I never minded her Hallmark-card philosophising ("Live your best life!") but her promotion of dubious new age nonsense was, at best, tiresome and, at worst, dangerous. It was like watching a trusted friend start going to a psychic.
She changed ? for better or worse but certainly forever ? the way politicians and celebrities feel expected to comport themselves in public, aka the "Oprahfication" effect, in which public tears are synonymous in some quarters with private depth.
At an event last year at the New York Public Library, Jay-Z and academic Cornel West, in an interview with the rapper, spoke of their issues with Winfrey, although their complaints came from opposite ends of the spectrum. Jay-Z described his and Winfrey's ongoing debate about whether his use of the n-word in his lyrics is an act of reclamation or self-abuse. West ? the only scholar in the world, it is safe to assume, to have appeared in two of the Matrix films, been interviewed by Playboy and recorded with Prince ? replied that Winfrey, in his opinion, never featured enough non-Caucasian guests on her show and plays too much to the white mainstream, the "vanilla suburbs", to use a phrase he previously employed against her.
On the face of it, Jay Z and West's complaints come from a similar source ? that Winfrey is timid, bland ? but they actually reflect how difficult it is to be a high-profile African American, caught in the crossfire of those who, on the one hand, complain that she is too conservatively black and, on the other, not black enough.
Similarly, some complain that on her show she presents a cupcake image of women: too middle class, too cosy, with too much Eat Pray Love and not enough Think Work Live. Now, I am no fan of Elizabeth Gilbert's self-indulgent memoir, but what Winfrey is has always been at least as important to me as what she says and she is an unapologetically unmarried woman, who does not look like a stick insect in a platinum wig, and who calls the shots on her own career.
I haven't been watching The Oprah Winfrey Show as regularly as I did a decade ago, mainly because it is on at an inconvenient time for anyone with a job (it is a quirk of US TV scheduling that the highest profile talkshow hosts are on either in the middle of the afternoon, or the middle of the night.) But also because Winfrey herself increasingly seemed, well, bored. A quarter of a century is a long time to be sitting on a sofa, and that's true for both her and me.
I won't watch her network for the same reason most of her fans haven't tuned in yet (she has already said that she wishes "more people were watching") and won't ever ? it's too hard to find, too banal (even I don't want to see a reality TV show about Shania Twain) and there's not enough Winfrey.
So goodbye, Oprah. To paraphrase her description of Gayle King, she was the TV presenter we'd never had, the celebrity we'll never have again, and the woman I will never be cool enough to meet. I'll miss her, but, then again, I already missed her.
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