From Orpah to Oprah—Making Television and Being Remade by It
From Orpah to Oprah—Making Television and Being Remade by It
“The reason I wanted to be a white kid is that I never saw little white kids get whippings.”1
With these words, Oprah summarizes some of her early struggles as a child. Born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, and named Oprah because her mother misspelled Orpah from the Bible, this child was destined to become a cultic figure and a household name. In these days when the names of “stars” are given to children, her mother had no idea she was naming a star. Who knows, maybe “Orpah” would just not have made it: Cary Grant’s birth name was Archibald Alexander Leach… it doesn’t have the same iconic ring to it as Cary Grant. That aside, not only was Oprah to become a household name, she was in effect to become the point of reference for terms and phrases such as “the Oprah effect,” “Oprahfication,” and “She Oprah’ed it out of me”… new words in cultural jargon. One writer says, “She’s not just working with the languages out there; she’s helping to create those languages.”
In a remarkable way, Oprah has embodied her own storied life. She interviewed the famous people who made her famous. She then went on to interview people who became famous because of her. We really don’t know them except through the sound bites of their interviews with her, which can be all of about forty minutes of give-and-take. But we think we know them. Oprah, interestingly, is also only known to us from the sound bites in which she handles her guests and periodically reveals her own inner hurts. “She’s like the one friend you trust,” said a fan, waiting in line to see her show. “You stick with a girlfriend like that, you know.”2
Being regularly seen by many on a television screen insidiously imparts a sense of trust. That is why advertisers use familiar screen personalities. The Earl of Shaftesbury once remarked that if the pope were married, he would know that he is not infallible. If we lived close to these television personalities, we would see them very differently from the cosmetic way in which we see them as “stars.”
While we were in the makeup room being dabbed and readied for a television program, a friend quipped, “This is what you call preparing the body for viewing.” That’s about it… making the dead seem alive, the old look young, decay look fresh. Can real bonds be forged through such a medium or is it part of the charade? One critic rightly calls this “intimacy at a distance.” The orchestrated informal, interactive style of the talk show encourages the audience to have a sense of intimacy with the host. The host’s conversational style of speech, direct gaze at the camera, and the sense of intimacy between the host and the audience give the viewers the feeling that they are part of the conversation they are watching take place before them. One viewer is reported to have said, “Oprah is me. We’re both black, we’re both the same age, we treat people the same way. That could be me.” Even Oprah’s choice of “I’m Every Woman” by Whitney Houston as her show’s theme song is no accident.3
It’s hard to know someone when there is no “authorized” biography. One wonders how well someone can be known even through an authorized version. But there are glimpses we get of Oprah that convey the shaping strands of her life. More to the point, her fans find her appealing because she reflects their inner hungers to escape the hard knocks of life and find someone who “cares.” Oprah credits her grandmother Hattie Mae for giving her a start that made it possible for her to pursue her values. But one gets a mixed story here. “My grandmother whipped me with switches. You go and pull a little limb off a tree and you bring it in. It’s what Richard Pryor described as the loneliest walk of your life—to get your own switch. Amazing, isn’t it?”4 She goes on to say that our prisons are full of men who as young men “had the living hell beat out of them.”5 The beatings that today would be considered child abuse, she says, form her memories for the early years.
I can relate. Speaking personally, in the culture and times in which I was raised, beatings and thrashings were common fare. And I mean thrashings. It was and still is a system of values that thrived on imparting fear and shame. If fear could not be leveraged, shame would be. If neither worked, suicide became the option.
Beyond these beatings and the poverty (they had outhouses… something you never forget, she has said), Oprah’s life seems to have been fraught with twists and turns to find some solid footing somewhere. Her early years were immersed in instability. At the age of six, she left her grandmother’s home and moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother, Vernita Lee, who worked as a cleaning woman and supplemented her income with welfare. After first grade, she went to live with her father and stepmother, but that was short-lived, and before long she was returned to her mother. Gleaning through her comments, you discover several shaping influences.
The principal feature of her early life was fragmentation… where nothing is the way it is supposed to be and a child is forced to grow up all too soon. She describes her own birth as the result of a “one-night stand.” No one would label herself that way without struggling to justify her existence as either an accident or design: If life becomes a protracted misery, then the accident takes primary place; if it turns out to be a Cinderella story, then design surfaces, in spite of the pain. But this is where spiritual depth determines whether she would see the details of her life as luck or providence, the result of personal perseverance or grace. I think, for Oprah, there are shades of all these, at least in the early years. Though sometimes others can see us better than we are able to see ourselves, it is the hazard of life that others can also mistakenly see us as greater than we really are… or less than we really are.
Oprah’s own admission is that she remembers her home being smaller than it actually is. Funny, in my memories my home and neighborhood are much bigger than they actually are. When I returned to India for the first time after years of being gone, I wondered why I remembered those small rooms as being quite large. Was it because I didn’t know any better? When Charles Dickens returned to his hometown and remarked that his city had changed, someone responded that it had not changed nearly as much as he had.
Oprah has the distinct trait of remaking herself many times over. From the glamour of fitting into a smaller pair of jeans to forcing an interest in particular themes so as to keep the show going, the power of a lens is incredible. This, audiences seldom ponder. As I read snippets of her own assessment of her life and career there are several unmistakable conclusions that can be rightly drawn.
Oprah was and is almost unstoppable—determined, hardworking, driven, a keen exponent of her medium (television), knowing precisely where her audience is. In fact, she knows them better than they will ever know her. With determination and skill she has combined her grit, gained in spite of the fragmentation of her life, with an intuitive strength of knowing what to serve up to her worshipping audiences. She has pursued every opportunity toward her goal, and when opportunities seemed to disappear, she created them. She understood the medium and wrested it to her advantage.
The fragmentation was a drawback, but she has used her wounds and hurts to her advantage. These, I have no doubt, have conditioned her thinking, and she has drawn from them at the precise moment of maximum impact. There are two ways to use a wound: either as a stepping-stone by looking beyond it, or as an exploitative thing to be leveraged for gain. I shall leave the individual to decide which is what. A little child in the arms of a beggar can elicit pity. But if the child is exploited for the purpose of material gain, there is a thin line between pity and seduction, or even deception. Any confession that paints the subject as a victim, and at the same time as a survivor, will draw a large following. Her personal stories of repeated molestation at the hands of relatives and friends opened the door of this harsh memory for large numbers of women.
Some of these experiences she has revealed in her shows; others have been dragged into the public eye without her desire to see them made public. Her first experience at being molested happened, she says, when at nine years of age she was left alone for the day with her nineteen-year-old cousin. When she was fourteen, she was molested by an uncle. Her pain has been shared by many women who have found an echo for their own pain in her voice. When the subject comes up, tears flow and those who have never experienced that trauma can still feel the weight that is being borne by those who have. The emotional scars make for desolation and rejection by the self, of the self. This is the self no little girl would choose. In this, Oprah has to be seen as a trailblazer, instrumental in unifying the public revulsion for such actions.
But then came a bombshell from a completely different source. In March 1990 Oprah’s half sister betrayed a deep family secret to the National Enquirer, saying that when Oprah was fourteen years old she gave birth to an illegitimate child. In Oprah’s words, “That experience was the most emotional, confusing, and traumatic of my young life.” One can only imagine the double-edged pain felt by a public figure who is betrayed in this way, when deep hurts that never leave you are turned into public wounds to be exploited.
Oprah talks about this subject quite extensively… the resulting fears, the promiscuity, the silence that was bought by the perpetrators. The most distressing thing about this story to me is not even addressed; that it is possible for no one in the family to know that a nine-year-old has been molested when it is a family member who is responsible; that no one asks, “Who?” “When?” “Where?” Is it the unwritten law in a family that has experienced this to ask no questions, lest one hears what they don’t want to hear, or risks being exposed for their own crimes? Such victimizers have learned to run from reality themselves and do not consider that they are criminals and could stop the crime.
There were other forces at work in shaping her life. Moving from home to home, repeatedly packing her bags and living sometimes with her grandmother, sometimes with her mother, sometimes with her father… the transitory feeling of being constantly uprooted was always present. Life has a way of compelling the “homeless mind” to either surrender or persevere. Oprah chose the latter, and she credits her father with pointing her in the right direction. “His love of learning showed me the way. Reading gave me hope. For me it was just the open door.”6
One writer offers several reasons for “why Oprah is a compelling and successful spiritual teacher.”7 These speak clearly to her success and take nothing away from her; in order to be the success she is, she has had to exhibit extraordinary and sustained skill. I believe they are an accurate assessment of Oprah and of her story and explain why she is so admired and loved. Below is my take on the reasons offered:
As one makes their way down this list, one begins to see that these were not values cradled in a vacuum. I am not sure that I necessarily agree with this blanket assessment, because it all needs explanation. Many seriously take issue with whether all that has happened in Oprah’s life has been as stated and without exploitation. Nonetheless, that is how she is portrayed. That is the persona that is believed to be the real thing. But what we must pay heed to is that even if this is not who she really is, this is what people are looking for… a person who cares, who listens, a person in whom people see reflected their deeply cherished hopes and longings. We are guilty of living contradictory lives, but we can still recognize what really matters deep within. It almost sounds like something you would hear at church: As Paul said in Romans 7:16 and 18, “I do what I do not want to do… For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out” (NIV).
Oprah had a church upbringing. Her spiritual heritage included music, drama, Sunday school, and, most of all, storytelling. She is a master storyteller. She embodies what she does. She talks to people about people. She feels what she wants people to feel. She wants authenticity to be normal and common. That’s what comes through. At least, that is what her admirers say about her. Any famous person will always have their detractors. Even as I write this, an unauthorized biography by Kitty Kelley has just been released. The unfolding story is quite remarkable.
In the content of her programs, she sometimes comes extremely close to the truths of her upbringing and then suddenly drowns them in a sea of postmodern reality. Even though her life was fragmented, I strongly suspect there were those in her family background who prayed for her, those who asked Jesus to take care of her and who, as church members, withstood their own pain because the gospel gave the possibility of hope to them. Fatalism would have been easy. But dependence upon God is that sixth sense that somehow holds on to the last sprig of support. I shall return to this. For now, I simply wish to underscore a backdrop of pain and disappointment. Yet I strongly suspect there existed lines of the gospel that kept in check those in whose charge she was raised.
That is one side of the story. To be a victim and rise above it is to one’s extraordinary credit. Until the program changes you. That is the fearsome side of god-makers.