Oprah Winfrey: The remarkable reign of the queen of television

Why on earth, many will wonder, are their formerly royal highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Sussex going on a talk show? Even – or indeed especially – on a talk show hosted by the friendly Oprah Winfrey, the Queen Empress of chat, and responsible over her long and glittering reign for shows with themes such as “when families break open”; “suburban teen prostitutes”; “my husband is not my child’s father”; and, of course, the classic “diet dreams come true”, the one in 1988 when she came out on stage hauling a little red trolley with 67lbs (30kg) of animal fat loaded on it, representing her recent victorious weight loss, in all fairness a classic daytime TV moment. Come to think of it, the first one, at any rate, might be quite appropriate for members of the House of Windsor to reflect on, sad to say.

The answer is easy, says Oprah: “validation”. That, Winfrey herself has shrewdly pointed out, is the one thing that the 35,000 or so people who’ve appeared on her programmes all have in common. Adulterers, child molesters, members of the Ku Klux Klan, presidents, soap stars, the cast of Seinfeld, the lot. She’s hosted everyone from Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga to Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela, from Tina Turner to Liberace, and she and they all know what they’re there for. When Lance Armstrong wanted to confess his cheating, he chose Oprah as his priest.

For Harry and Meghan too, it will be about their version of the story, about winning the public to their side, getting their messages across unmediated by the Palace or the British press (up to a point), and ensuring that their public appeal remains strong enough for them to continue to become financially independent and to pursue the obligations of “service” they have set themselves. The Sussexes, indeed, may have in mind the example of the “service” that Oprah has made part of her life – the $400m (£285m) she has decided to good causes across the world, and the patronage and influence she uses to support causes including education of the poor in South Africa. Oprah has made a lot of power and money, and she makes no secret of her enjoyment of it, but the finance and the fame are also used for other ends, and she didn’t have to be born into it or marry it.

The Queen (that’s Elizabeth II rather than Oprah, to be clear), has let it be known that she doesn’t expect them to embarrass her, but we’ll see what the “wide-ranging” and “intimate” interview will uncover. You’d doubt they’d spend much time on the future of the Commonwealth. Over the course of 90 minutes on Sunday 7 March, a global audience will be have a chance to make their minds up, with Meghan first speaking candidly woman-to-woman with Oprah (there will be tears), and then as a couple. The audience will probably be not quite as huge as the one for Jacko back in 1993, broadcast live from his funfair at the Neverland Ranch, the most watched TV interview in world history (90 million viewers), but the best clips will surely go viral. “My role is to open people’s hearts”, Oprah says, and the Sussexes are certainly up for that, even if it ends up looking like open-heart surgery on the British monarchy.

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Winfrey’s interviewing style isn’t particularly aggressive. Apart from one time when she tore into and humiliated someone who’d used to her show to plug a plagiarised book, that’s really not her style (and even then she later apologised to the guy). It could be because she is usually a bigger, wealthier, more successful celeb than anyone she meets, there is thus a sense that she is doing them a favour, and it is they who have to deliver the goods. Perhaps that is why so many megastars so often ask her off-camera “was that OK?” after their performance. It is as if they have to justify their place and time on the sofa with her, rather than the other way around. It could also be that she asks questions and asserts things with a certain authority, part of what makes her such an extraordinarily natural broadcaster. She is quite able, for example, to declare stuff like: “My life is fuelled by my being” and for people to take that at face value. Yet, impressive and deep as that sounds, a moment’s scrutiny reveals it to be meaningless. Imagine Boris Johnson or Nicola Sturgeon saying those phrases without sounding ridiculous; yet from the lips of Winfrey it is beatific. The “Oprah Effect”, they call it.

All being well, then, (or not for the palace), and with the huge global audience taking their cue from Oprah’s reaction shots, she will make Harry and Meghan even bigger stars. The Sussexes will be be the latest beneficiaries of that Oprah Effect, a well known phenomenon that makes her the planet’s leading influencer. No? Well here are just a few examples of how it works.

Case one: when she launched a book club section on her show it had an immediate and dramatic effect in the sales of the volumes she features. Some 16 of her early picks made it into the top of the New York Times best sellers list, and Penguin grossed an extra $60m in sales from just three favoured titles.

Case two: during the mad cow disease scares in 1997, Oprah abruptly declared she was off burgers. Beef sales slumped. In Texas they sued her for the $11m in lost sales the farmers suffered, under an unusual law that allows for to be slandered. Needless to say she took the Oprah Winfrey Show down to Amarillo down for the duration of the trial and she triumphed.

Case three: Barack Obama. No doubt from the perspective of today the charismatic ex-president looks like he needs nobody’s help, but back in 2007, when he was seeking the Democratic nomination, he was well behind Hillary Clinton. When Oprah backed him in the January of 2008, it meant 23 per cent of voters were more likely to vote for him. Even though some 13 per cent said the Oprah seal of approval made them less likely to vote for Senator Obama, it still left him with a net benefit, and he needed it. The leading Republican conservative Newt Gingrich assessed the Oprah effect like this: “I think Oprah Winfrey is a remarkable figure. I think she brings not just a celebrity status, but there are millions of people who trust her judgement. I think that’s a significant asset to Barack Obama”. No wonder he and Michelle are regular guests... and no wonder Meghan, more attuned than her husband to Oprah’s impact in America, wants to get on the show.

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The politics of Oprah have become more prominent too in recent years, as progressives thrashed around looking for someone wildly popular to beat the (apparently) indomitable Donald Trump. Could the Oprah Effect save the Democrats?

The president himself seemed half-inclined to want to take her on, if only for the ratings. Sooner or later, Oprah was going to be hit by a Trump tweet, and it arrived in February 2018: “Just watched a very insecure Oprah Winfrey who at one point I knew very well, interview a panel of people on 60 Minutes. The questions were biased and slanted, the facts incorrect. Hope Oprah runs so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others”. Trump must be the only person to reckon Oprah is “insecure”, so maybe he was just teasing, but she was being talked up for a run on the White House, and, in a back-handed way, the president paid her a complement. As usual with Trump, though there is a back story. As early as 1999, Trump was actually publicly wooing Oprah to be his running mate in a presidential bid under the auspices of the small, libertarian Reform Party: “Oprah would always be my first choice ... she’s a terrific woman”. Well, they’re both populists...

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Usually, Oprah interviews are more like therapy sessions, which is why Trump has never turned up for one. In recent years Winfrey has been majoring in her work in TV and the motivational speaking tours, on the spirituality that has become a greater obsession of hers in recent years, going on about trusting “instinct” and “your internal GPS”. It is something that she has expounded on at length, in mystical, almost messianic terms. This is what she told a receptive audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2014: “What really, really, really resonates deeply with me is that I have a fantastic life. My inner life is really intact. I live from the inside out, and so that everything that I have I have because I let it be fuelled by who I am, and what I realise my contribution to the planet could be, and what my real contribution is. It looks like I was a talk show host. It looks like I’m in the movies. It looks like I have a network, but my real contribution, the reason why I’m here is to help raise consciousness so my television platform was to raise consciousness.” All clear?

Despite the raw emotions and gross sentimentality that can easily overcome proceedings, Winfrey and her producers were always careful to avoid the excesses of the likes of The Jerry Springer Show – no brawls, no lie detectors and, if it can be avoided, no one using Oprah for their own nefarious ends. Instead it is all about self-helping, self-aware, feel good, new age televisual nutrition for the “wine moms” tuning in at 4pm of a weekday. It went to 100 countries.

So the other key to her success, apart from her relationship with her subjects, and what should shortly make for fascinating television with Harry and Meghan, is that she instinctively understands what it is that the audience wants to get out of it. That is why her flagship talk show came from nowhere to being the number one rated of its kind from 1986 to 2011, and sweeped so many awards that she eventually had to ban it being nominated just so others could get a chance to win something. It is also why so much else that she has expanded into has been, usually, phenomenally successful - her “own” production company, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), the O, The Oprah Magazine, book clubs, Oprah.com, the Oprah YouTube Channel, an Apple TV+ collaboration, the public speaking, a Twitter account with 45.3 million followers (32nd in the whole world) and so on. It is why, as her friendly rival Larry Sanders once introduced her, she is “a girl who doesn’t need a last name”. She explains it succinctly: “I try to tell stories that allow people to see themselves in the lives of other people.”

This is true, and it amounts to a re-dedication of the Americans dream every time she features someone’s story of strength and renewal, or triumph over adversity, of accepting failure as merely nature’s way of moving you on to your next success. You can, sort of, see how Meghan and Harry fall into that narrative, but much more so how well Oprah herself is the embodiment of that sort of tale of redemption and growth. It is one that every viewer cannot but be intrigued by, and to measure their own life by: “People all over the world could see themselves in me”. It’s no accident her show’s theme tune was an arrangement of “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan.

Because of her show’s overt shows of distress and joy, she was blamed by the Wall Street Journal of the Oprahfication of society (coincidentally something of the same thing was observed about Britain in the outpourings of grief after the death of Diana in 1997). Winfrey’s critics mock her faddish promotion of diets and “pseudoscience”, and her “weird combination of sappy new age snake-oil and shameless hucksterism”.

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This life story of this most famous “everywoman” is sometimes disputed and usually complicated, but what is undeniable is that she was born poor on 29 January 1954. Poor, that is, materially and to a degree emotionally, and with absolutely no advantages in life beyond what she created for herself. Her mum was a maid, aged 18, and unmarried, and they lived in the small town of Kosciusko, in rural Mississippi. As Winfrey has said, the year she was born was significant, the same year as the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brown vs Board of Education, which began the long process of desegregation and the struggles for civil rights, still unfinished business. Thus, she never had to set foot in a formally, legally segregated classroom, and later on, when she was starting to get jobs in broadcasting, a modest push for equality from the Federal Communications Commission helped her to get a few breaks (by Winfrey’s own witness). Had she been born in 1944 she would not have made it. Clearly, in those days, she did have to be fuelled by herself because there wasn’t much else to power her, and the casual accepted racism of the time, such as discrimination and use of the N-word, is difficult for a modern world to comprehend.

Oprah was christened, in fact, Orpah, a biblical name, but, either through subsequent clerical errors or difficulties in pronunciation she ended up as Oprah. That said, she anyway preferred her family and friends to call her by her middle name, Gail. Her mother’s name was Vernita Lee, but Oprah took the name of her father, Vernon Winfrey. Or rather, as it is sometimes put, “the man she calls father”, as other family members have suggested he is not Oprah’s biological father, and claim his military service record means he cannot have conceived a child born at that time, and he knows it. There have been no tests either way, despite the appearance of another paternal claimant. Kitty Kelly, who wrote an unauthorised biography of Winfrey, says she knows who Oprah’s father is, but isn’t saying. Vernon, 88 this year, ran a barber shop and small store for years, and Oprah used to sell penny chews in there. She was, amusingly, forbidden from chatting to the customers. She hated it.

Like many African Americans of the time, during the “great migration”, Vernita moved north to the booming industrial midwest in search of work. This was soon after Oprah was born. The little girl was left behind with her grandparents to be raised, a mixed blessing. Hattie Mae Lee, her gran, had a habit of beating – whipping – her until she wept, and then beating her some more until she stopped crying, and then again until she put on a smile. The Lee smallholding generated a meagre income and the story goes that they were so poor Oprah had to make a dolly out of a corncob, had a dress made out of an old potato sack (giving rise to the school nickname Sack Girl), and had two cockroaches in a jar for pets. According to Kelly’s 2010 biography, though, Winfrey exaggerated the hardships and once admitted as much to a cousin, adding that it was OK because the public liked to hear such tales. Even if her upbringing was a little more comfortable than she made out, it was still in poverty or close to it. The family made have had some better and worse times, depending on how keeping one pig and one cow translated into a subsistence income. No way was she middle class, say.

Her home life was never settled, either, as she was shuttled between gran in Mississippi, dad, who settled in Nashville, Tennessee and mum up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Oprah had a half sister, Patricia, born in 1959 (she died of drug abuse in 2003), a half brother, Jeffrey, born in 1960 (he died in 1989 of Aids) and, unknown to her, another half sister also named Patricia born in 1963, who was sent for adoption and whom Oprah only found out about in 2010. Vernita and Oprah didn’t spend enough time together to get to know each other, with the result that they became near strangers. In Oprah’s account, Vernita only showed any interest in her eldest child “when the famous Oprah Winfrey arrived”. Still, true to her doctrine that forgiveness is a way of lifting a personal burden for oneself, Oprah was reconciled with her and Vernita received the usual Oprah treatment of lavish hospitality, large house and financial security for life, extended to many of her family, and so much so she sometimes says that she discovers new relations every time one of them needs a new roof. Relations with various more remote branches of the family, including her stepmother, can be strained.

Oprah’s teens and adolescence also provided enough miserable material to be mined in successive decades. Basically, almost any appalling experience a guest dragged into the studio was one that Oprah could identify with because she’d lived through it or something like it herself. At around the age of 9 she was molested, and at 14 by a man she trusted, a favoured uncle. It is possible that he was the father of the “secret” son Oprah gave birth to later, though she had a number of boyfriends at the time. The boy, named Canaan, was born premature and died.

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Winfrey’s mother and, more effectively, her father attempted to control her with curfews and discipline, but without success, and Oprah spent a good deal of time out late with boys, running away or stealing money from her parents. (She has been prone to problematic behaviour all through her life: Even in her twenties, when she was starting to make a good career in the media she was using crack cocaine, and her troubles with food, body image and her weight are well documented).

After the death of her baby, though, she began to calm down and get on with her schoolwork, and she was a gifted pupil at oratory and dramatics. The one thing her granny did do for her was to encourage little Oprah to read, and she was well advanced by the age of three. A nicer nickname for her at school was the Preacher or Preacher Girl, because she could recite and project passages from the Bible her grandmother taught her. When short of an audience she’d lecture the pig. The skill developed strongly into a flair for stirring oratory and dramatics, helped her win various beauty/dramatic contests, and eventually brought her to the attention of the local black radio station. Her impressive voice and delivery made her a rare asset, and she was reading news headlines on a local black Nashville station by 16. By the time she was at Tennessee State University she’d already started on the local television station. From there came bigger roles in Baltimore and, finally in Chicago. Rummage around on YouTube and you can find Oprah’s TV audition tape from 1983, an extremely impressive performance – she had the X factor in abundance. Her progression to greatness was partly stalled when she and her employers found out that she wasn’t much of a news reporter or even a news anchor – shortcomings she freely admits to. When she went out to report on fires, she spent too much time trying to help the victims rather than filing her video, and she wasn’t much good at writing news scripts. Despite her earlier claims that she was about to be “the black Barbara Walters”, she plainly wasn’t. Trying to get shot of her, one station came up with the bright idea of sending her to daytime shows and the sort of fluffy “people” features that were disdained by “serious” journalists. She soon felt gloriously at home in this new world, and before long she had turned disaster into spectacular opportunity. Even when big name interviews turned her down, she had the imagination to recruit “ordinary” people that might have equally interesting life stories to tell. The staples were sexuality, drugs and relationships, a template for daytime TV that sustains to this day. In between reinventing television, Oprah also managed to land a few roles in the movies, notably in The Color Purple (1985) for which she received an Oscar nomination.

Slavery, segregation and racial justice are obviously constant themes in her work, unsurprisingly, given where she was brought up and the times she has lived through. Her gran’s grandparents were slaves, and within living memory there were white folks in Mississippi and Tennessee whose recent ancestors had legally owned other human beings who happened to be black. She had a few mixed-race relationships, but they failed partly through societal pressures, when interracial relationships were taboo. Happiness, long term, came with her perpetual fiance, Stedman Graham, an educationalist she has been with since 1986. Additional emotional support comes from BFF Gayle King, and great inspiration from her late friend Maya Angelou.

Winfrey throughout her life has found herself discriminated against because of her skin colour – including by other people of colour (Oprah calls herself a “fudgie”, as supposed to a “vanilla cream”, jokingly but with an edge). Every time she sits in her boardroom or walks into another she says she is conscious of gender and race. A few years ago, in a hurtful and telling incident, a shop assistant in Zurich refused to fetch down a $22,000 handbag for Winfrey to take a look at, explaining that she wouldn’t be able to afford it. (Other reports say she was actually reluctant because the shop had been robbed by thieves who were black a couple of weeks before, which is hardly better). Winfrey considered buying the entire stock to make a point, Pretty Woman-style, but thought better of it “because she might have been on commission”. Winfrey made her displeasure public, and refused the offer of having the bag for free. That gesture did miss the point, the point being that no matter how rich or famous Winfrey becomes, or how successful in attracting white fans, she, like every other black person, is subjected to all manner of subtle and not so subtle hurts every day, whether intended or not. If it cannot happen to her, it can happen to all. Saying it’s better than the days of segregation and Jim Crow, as some do, is hardly enough. On her first application for the Miss Black Nashville contest in 1971, she wrote why she was entering the pageant: “I would like to try to instil a sense of individual (black) pride within our people. Self-dignity”. This is a mission not yet accomplished.

And so the Sussexes interview has to be put into that context, of Oprah’s life experiences too, and how they mirror what happened to Meghan Markle. The facts are that Meghan is mixed heritage; has suffered grievously in parts of the British media and in sections of public in opinion as a result; and her brief time in the royal family came at a time of renewed racial tensions and the Black Lives Matter movement. These are the foundational facts of the forthcoming interview. The starting point is the book written by friends of the Sussexes, Finding Freedom, a title that could quite easily have been devised by Oprah.

A curiosity of history, by the way, is that Oprah met Diana in the mid 1990s, and an interview was discussed, but it instead went to the BBC and Martin Bashir. Kitty Kelly’s book is informed by Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell who told her that Diana wanted control and a big British impact, which disadvantaged Oprah. When Oprah went through Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York’s sad tale, her producers first insisted that Ferguson wear a tiara during the interview because it would be “more royal”. One doubts that will be an issue with Meghan.

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It is too easily forgotten now that the marriage of the first person of colour into the British royal family in modern times was a moment of great symbolism and hope. Many believed it was a turning point, if not a catalyst for wider social change. One of those who will have been disappointed about what happened next is Oprah Winfrey, who said a the time of the wedding in 2018: "It was more than a wedding, I thought. It was a cultural moment. And you could not be there or watching on television ... and not feel that there was a shift that just happened in the middle of it. I think it's bigger than them, and I think it bodes well for hope for all of us." In the end, it didn’t. Oprah, like everyone, wants to know why.

The one thing that can be said about Winfrey is that her financial independence confers a certain amount of journalistic independence. She isn’t interviewing the Sussexes for the money. She hardly needs it, for one thing, being worth around $3bn and the richest black American woman in history. Her $100m 67-acre estate in California, plus a sizeable chunk of Hawaii, speaks for itself. Meghan and Harry subsist, for now, in a smaller joint down the road. She is proud that she has never paid for an interview, including the occasion when she passed on a scoop to talk with Monica Lewinsky about her relationship with Bill Clinton at the height of that scandal in the 1990s. That said, Oprah did happily advertise – there’s no better word for it – a range of lifestyle latte drinks last Christmas. The “Clevr” [sic] range of powdered lattes, featuring probiotics and adapt ovens, whatever they are, come at about $28 for 14 servings, so an affordable luxury for many, and they found their way into Oprah’s Instagram account (19.3 million followers) complete with jokes about crown emojis. All routine lifestyle b*******, except that Meghan has invested in this start-up, and the Oprah endorsement seemed a bit contrived, even if they are friendly neighbours. Others have suggested that the “friendship” between the two women is barely closer than an acquaintanceship, and the invite to the wedding in 2018 came after one meeting, hinting at a slightly mercenary approach. But then again, that’s showbiz, and royalty is just another branch of showbiz these days. Oprah, Meghan and Harry are all simply actors in the latest edition of a long-running soap opera, and the world is looking forward to it.