Behind the BastardsOprah continues to have the most sympathetic backstory of any BTB subject, and Robert walks Bridget and Andrew through how she turned it all around.
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, Part two of the Oprah Winfrey series, being filmed once again from Sudny, Las Vegas, Nevada, where I am exhausted and deeply hungover, unlike my guests today, who are both health nuts and extremely responsible people, the wonderful Bridget Todd and the also wonderful Andrew t Sorry for giving me the also there, Andrew, but one of you had to get it. I can't remember another nice word, just one.
Oh yeah, today I was I thought you were gonna apologize for the health nut business. I'm barely hanging on, dog, I'm kidding. How are you doing? Everybody? I mean, I'm alive and try to try to help folks out on Still in your home, Still in my home, trying to, yeah, trying to, trying to. We're at the where the fires are still raging as record in Los Angeles. But I am lucky enough to be able to try to fucking help some folks concentrating on the schied Row right now. But I will just.
Say, for all, for all, you right wing lunatics are scared of the Antifa super soldiers and the upcoming war against socialism.
It's going to be really hard for us to make sure all our super soldiers are showing up on time to the battle.
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's never been our strong side, being a manner, but the scheduling.
Scheduling has been a real thing these last couple of days.
Bridget, Are you feeling better about your decision to stay on the East Coast now? I?
Well, sort of.
I mean I'm in d C where they just put up all of the like safety scaffolding for the inauguration.
I guess there's no safe place.
I went for a walk and I was like, damn, this happened.
We're the city is like getting ready, so like there's plywood over windows being put up, so you know, there's no wildfires, which I'm grateful for, but I wouldn't say I'm feeling pumped.
Not the chilliest here on the East coast.
God, well, are we all ready? Are we ready to get back into the story of Oprah Winfrey?
Tell us things?
Okay, okay, let's uh, let's let's let's do it back back to the story. Yeah, I think this is probably the most time we've ever spent on the early childhood and adolescence of one of our people. It's it's just Oprah and Joseph Stalin who have gotten two episodes devoted to their childhood.
Yeah, and a prize to the listeners for figuring out the third in that series. Stalin Oprah, question Mark. Yeah.
Yeah, it's still being decided. But when we left off Oprah, she'd just been taken to Milwaukee by her mother, who lived downtown off of North ninth Street. So Oprah and Venita lived in a single room in a boarding house owned by Vernita's boyfriend, Vernita's boyfriend's godmother, which is not an ideal living situation at best. Oprah later said, I don't know why my mother ever decided she wanted me. She wasn't equipped to take care of me. I was just an extra burden on her. And yeah, I think it's just this is probably what she was aware of as a kid, because her mom was there the first four and a half years, but she probably just doesn't really remember that. So it's got to be this uncomfortable situation where from her mom's perspective, I was just gone eighteen months trying to like set up a life for you. From Oprah's perspective, it's like you were gone from as long as I can remember, and then you moved me into this terrible situation in a city. Right, it's so it's a bummer.
So weird should be able to perceive. I don't think I would have realized that was a bad situation when I was five. Maybe I was just an oblivious kid.
Yeah, I don't know. I have some pretty like my dad was gone right around the same time, when I was like five to seven. My dad was gone because he had to move to like New York and you know, earn money for us, because Oklahoma is not a great place to earn a living. Rural Oklahoma not always a great place to earn a living. And I remember being pissed about it for a while and not really getting as a kid that like, oh yeah, it's really hard actually to be an adult and take care of kids and sometimes you have to do shit that sucks.
Yeah, And it.
Reminds me of what Andrew was talking about in our last episode of how much do you really truly remember as a kid versus you're remembering how it felt?
Right, like, what do you?
I mean?
I think like and also like the idea that we are talking a lot about these very very early years in her life in this way of like, well, is she a liar or not based on what she remembered slash felt when she was four.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I went through this process when writing it and read it when doing particularly the research, where I was like, ah, okay, all of her family say that she's lying about this. This is just Oprah being a bad person, trying to myth make and make herself sound like she suffered more than she did. And then I went through this process of like, well, wait, what if her family's lying and they're just angry about the money. And then I think I've come back around to like, nobody has to be lying here. It's just a completely different experience for her and them, and neither of them really understand each other. And maybe communication isn't the family strong suit, which is ironic given Oprah's living But like, I think that's where I've probably landed. I don't know, there's some weird similarities. So I've been thinking a lot about like my own situation kind of some of the stuff I was angry for years with my parents over in terms of like why did you put us in this situation that was so clearly shitty? And you know, now as an adult, I better understand that, like, well, shit just happens, you know, And when you've got a kid, you have to figure out how to like make your life work. It's it's actually quite difficult to exist.
Yeah, this is why we call you. This isn't why we call you the White Oprah, but this is yeah, you know help.
Yeah, it's again because of all the geo metros I give out, Right, you get.
Kind of a car, you get kind of a car.
Sort of a car, kind of a car.
So upon moving in with her mom, this is one of the things where I do understand why Oprah is not thrilled. So she she comes into this situation, it's not they've got like one room, you know, it's very cramped. She's not used to the city. And she also learns upon arriving that she has a half sister named Patricia and a half brother on the way who's going to be named Jeffrey. And that is probably that is a lot to spring on a little kid, Right, your mom goes away and the first time you remember seeing her again, she's like, you're gonna about to have two new siblings. By the way, she and Patricia are never close, and yeah, that's that's a difficult situation. In Oprah's telling of things, she and her half sister are were immediately harsh competitors. Oprah's interpretation is that she is the smart sister, whereas Patricia is the hot sister, although again, they're both like seven at this point. So I don't know if this is Oprah later kind of thinking back on more shit that cropped up when they were like teenagers and young adults, or if she was thinking that way from the beginning. My guess is that this is a little like colored from later experience, right, oh one, God, one would hope. Yeah. Now, most of her insecurity here seems to have come down to the fact, and this is something that she talks about quite openly. She's she as a little kid was kind of obsessed with the fact that Patricia was lighter skinned than Oprah. Quote, I felt really ugly. The lighter your complexion, the prettier you were. And she complained that even though she was the smartest in the family, no one praised me for being smart.
Oh well, that is so that is like tail as old as time.
I mean, yeah, even when you're really young, you definitely get the sense when there's somebody in your family who has a lighter complexion, you definitely are aware of that. And in a lot of families and a lot of dynamics, there's like a very clear difference in how someone is treated and the things that you might think of as your gifts that should be very obvious, like I'm smart, I'm well spoken, i have the gift of gab, whatever.
You might not feel like.
Those things are being praised comparatively to someone who's being praised for their complexion, a thing they can't even really control about themselves.
I definitely that really rings true to me.
Yeah, And one of the things I do because I think that's a tough thing to talk about. And one of the things I do appreciate about Oprah's conception and how she talks about her childhood as she is, does not at all like hide that aspect of things, like she has strong opinions on it. This clearly had a massive impact on her psyche growing up.
And again I could see how her family would be invested in that, like, oh, we were never colorist against our own in this family.
How dare she say that that's a.
Lot of r Yeah, Yeah, and they probably I'm sure it wasn't conscious, right, like or at least not usually, you know, that's the way these kind of things tend to work, I would guess, but you know, like again it's it's I don't think Oprah's I'm certain Oprah's not making this up. It's just far too consistent in her story, and like you said, it makes total sense. Like this is definitely a massive has a massive impact on the way she perceives herself and the way she perceives her family. She told one story to Life from when she was about nine years old, where she was reading in a back hallway and her mother ran up through the door open, grabbed the book in her hand and shouted, you're nothing but a bookworm. Get your butt outside. You think you're better than the other kids. Oprah later remarked, of all this, I was treated as though something was wrong with me because I wanted to read all the time. And again you get some denials from the family on this point. Whoever's kind of more accurate there. Oprah isn't stopped from reading in like a major way, Like she remains an excellent student and a voracious reader into adulthood, like I mean, we could talk about the book club stuff, but yeah, this is one of like the big discrepancies between her and her mom. But she's like, yeah, I got punished for being smart and for reading.
Yeah. Yeah, God, Because it also is like that's exactly what you remember as a like Turnentine, is these conflicts that like don't probably resonate as much with the adult.
Yeah, like maybe for the adult it's this. Well, one time I was frustrated at her because she was spending all her time indoors, and I told her she was a book work to get outside, and you know, the rest of the time she was fine reading. I got her books. But you know, as a kid, you remember the one traumatizing mom your time your mom yelled at you for reading.
Yeah. Well, or it's like, you know, I was always trying to help, you know, make this kid in my image or whatever image I thought, and that you know, you hang on to different.
Things, yeah, child memories. So, given some of the other context clues of the way that people who were near the situation talk, I think that Oprah's recollection of events obviously like there's a lot that's true there, but there are some inconsistencies because one of the things that Oprah's doing in this time she continues from when she was living with her grandma, is she keeps traveling around to all of these churches in Milwaukee, all these like black churches and social clubs where she'll read poems and stories from the Bible and stories from literature. And so she's you know, if her mom was like so ardently against her reading, her mom wouldn't have been driving her around to do all this stuff, like taking her to all of them different events. So there clearly is like a good deal of support and like people in her like her momb recognizes, Okay, my daughter has this kind of gift for like public speaking and talking, and I need to do something to nurture that, right, And that's definitely a part of the story too. In People Profiles book Oprah, Merril Noden wrote, quote, Oprah gave recitations at black churches and social clubs. A particular favorite was Invictus, a stirring declaration of courage by the nineteenth century English poet William ernst Hinley, which closes with the couplet I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, and this is a great poems, the first poem I ever memorized. Oprah loves it. And the third famous person who loves this poem is friend of the pod Timothy McVey, who recited it has his last words before being executed by the state. So this is yet another thing that Oprah and cousin Timmy have in common. There's so many of them now, I mean, you don't even need to go back and listen.
Could you say that Oprah is the black Timothy mcvayh.
Just absolutely absolutely. I mean I think Regis was the first guy to say that, to point that out. But anyway, still a good poem. It's not the poem's fault that Timothy McVeigh liked it anyway. Describing the reception of her first performances, Nodan writes, although the audiences were impressed with her skill as a speaker, it seemed to annoy her mother and her peers teased her mercilessly, calling her the preacher, which I also believe that's exactly how shitty little kids are.
Yeah, lies going around and being like, I want to recite this poem.
When how old was she with She's she's like eight. Yeah, if you're the poem kid, you're getting a nickname.
Yeah, Phil's honestly not in the grand scheme of things, as bad as it could have been.
I mean, I don't. I mean that kind of stuff's pretty traumatic as a kid, like I got Yeah, you remember stuff like that, like little kids give you a shitty nickname, and yeah, that's sticks with you.
Robert.
I feel like you're about to say something about a nickname that you've had as a youth, and.
Then you yourself. We're not bringing any of that up, but it is like it's it's very it's very sympathetic, right, She's this, she's this bookworm kid who likes to like read poems to audiences of adults, and she that is I can't imagine much that's going to isolate you more than that, especially in like this period of time, right, Like it's even even harder back then and like harder to find kids. There's no internet. Oprah would have thanked God gotten on like four chan or something today and then she'd be fine. But yeah, you're just a lonely, poem loving little girl at this period of time. That's got to be difficult. The preacher. Yeah, so as an adult in interviews, Oprah would claim that their landlady, who is Againna she described her as a lighter skinned black woman, didn't like Oprah for being darker than everyone else in the house, and so Oprah was forced to sleep on a porch in the back of the house while her sister was allowed to sleep with their mom. As she claimed, white people never made me feel less. Black people made me feel less. I felt less in that house with missus Miller. I felt less because I was too dark and my hair was too kinky. I felt like an outcast. And this is I mean like that that's a tough thing. But this is also an area where there's like a pretty major discrepancy between Oprah's recollections and recollections of the other people in that house. And so I'll quote this passage of Oprah a biography by Kitty Kelly next Catherine Esters, and remember that's Oprah's aunt. And like the family historian responded sternly to Oprah's poignant memory, this bothers me more than her corn cob doll lies in her cockroach lies, because it plays into the damaging discrimination practice by our own people. I'm a dark skinned woman Oprah's grandfather, Earlis, was black enough to be painted by a brush, and Oprah is as dark as a preacher's prayer book. But when she says things like that, she reminds me of my cousin Frank, who did not wish to be what he was and discriminated among his kin, preferring the lighter skin to the darker skinned folks. Oprah slept on a porch in the back of the room of the house, but only because Vernita had to take care of her baby and there was just one bedroom.
That's it.
Period. If Oprah was discriminated against because of her skin color, i'd tell you, says Miss Ester's a civil rights activist who worked for the Urban League in Milwaukee. And I can't really like cast that aside either, So I mean, I don't really know what to do there other than kind of read both of those very much conflicting stories. Systeings to you.
I will say the tone of that passage, see, I was initially going to indicate that she was going to say that the sleeping on the porch was not factual, so to land on, well, she definitely was on the porch. Is still a little like good.
That's not in dispute.
That's not in dispute. She was, in fact sleeping on the porch. Yes, just like, oh boy, it's just wasn't you know, racism or just we have no space because we're very poor.
Yeah, I will say there's something about this conversation. I don't know if it totally fits, but you know, I think that a lot of black folks and folks of color when you get older and you think about the way that you showed up amongst your own people growing up, like I definitely went through a.
Thing where, you know, I don't even know how to put it.
Like, you definitely can internalize like they don't my own people are rejecting me because I like anime or because I'm nerdy and too smart. And then you get a little older and it's like, wait, am I a pain in the ass.
And that's why they're rejecting me? And like it's very easy to like.
Internalize some very self serving reasons for why you feel the way you feel. And then you get a little more mature and you're like, well, was that really what was going on?
Yeah? And there's also like like a I feel like with this type of thing too, it's like whatever the real story is, it's like the kernel of truth, even if just to like the phenomenon makes it really hard to push back where you're like she was.
Still sleeping on the porch.
Yeah, and I'm just like but but maybe but you know, and I'm like, even the it's in the middle of it is just like probably just let this go.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I fe only I had to present both of these things. But yeah, I don't actually know where the truth lies here now. For her sake, Catherine Esters thinks that the explanation for why Oprah felt the way she did is more benign, which is that once she moved to Milwaukee, she was for the first time and very suddenly not an only child and the center of attention in her household. She was suddenly the oldest of three kids, and her two baby siblings got more attention than her, and this made her very unhappy. And I'm sure that's not a non factor, right, Like that's such a thing, Like I don't have any trouble believing that that's that had a massive impact on her as a kid right now. As I've noted, Kitty's book is quite aggressive, and she is a woman who has built a career off of puncturing the reputations of beloved famous people. Her work is caddie as hell, but she does make a decent point here. Quote, the only photo I have of my grandmother, she's holding a white child, Oprah said at the age of fifty one. Yet a published picture of Oprah's desk shows a photo of her grandmother with her arm draped lovingly around Oprah as a little girl, with no white child in sight. And it's stuff like that where it's like, well, okay, that's that's not a there's a discrepancy, but maybe no, that's like, that's just obvious myth making. You've got a photo of your grandmother on your desk, all right, you just said that because you know, it made a case to an interviewer or something like, you've got pictures of your grandmother with her with you. That was just like not a not a not a true statement. So there's some there's some myth making going on here as well, like that we can kind of clearly lay out there. So again it's a complicated most of this. I'm still on the whole as a childhood. This is a very it's hard not to be on Oprah's side at this point. And I believe Oprah when she says of her grandmother, every time she would ever talk about those white children, there would be this sort of glow insider. No one ever glowed when they saw me. And you know, that also sounds true, like that sounds like the kind of thing that that would stick with you as a kid into adulthood.
But it also is like the exact thing that kids say all the time, you know, like.
I believe it.
Yeah, well, but but as in like every kid feels that way, that like there's a light in someone's eyes until they're talking about me. It's like, yeah, I know, but everyone feels that way?
Does everyone feel that way?
Or did we just get fucked up too?
Well?
Many people someone listening is like, what are you talking about, Andrew parents eye they.
Walk out the door to live their emotionally healthy life, have their good relationships once.
I'm just saying, there's certainly where we're right in the phase of like adolescence where it's just like everybody hates me, Like that's such a common idea among kids, sure, like of all, and that's that's also one of the like.
The key facts about becoming incredibly rich and famous. Is that all of these like weird little idiosyncrasies and like anger at you know, petty injustices or even some serious injustices that most people just have to get over. You have the ability to make other people care about it, and the ability to also like sometimes make it other people's problems, as we're seeing with a much worse billionaire who's in the public eye right now. Because at least Oprah, what I'll say for her is like how much of this is accurate or not? And how much of this is myth making? She has spent a lot of her like time as a philanthropist putting money towards like child abuse causes, so you know, you can't really I guess that's that's like in terms of billionaire coping strategies, she's definitely in like the upper ten percent. Oh my god, Yeah, it's that.
That is the thing that ultimately this entire series is going to hinge on is like, however much you might want to you know, or you one would categorize Oprah as some kind of bastard, there is a grating on the curve element of it, which might just put her at not a bastard given.
Her, Yes, I kind of think again, as we'll talk about like the actual harmful, toxic stuff she was involved with once her media career got going. It's still more than anything, a case of well, like, we probably shouldn't make any individual person that famous because like your own flaws and blind sites are going to cause you to do things that because of your platform and the level of your fame, will be harmful. But yeah, I really do think overall my opinion of her is like, yeah, this is about the best case scenario for someone who gets this Richard famous, right right right. That is kind of what I have been coming back to because I definitely started my reading more hostile towards her because I had been thinking of Oprah purely in terms of like, well, now I got to think about doctor Oz because you put this fuck around TV, Oprah, Why did you do that? But yeah, I have a lot more sympathy with her now, which doesn't happen often when we're doing these Usually you're like, oh, this person sucked ass from the jump.
I feel like it's got to be more interesting when the bastards are a little bit complex, No, like where it's like ooh, I kind of have sympathy or empathy for them in some ways.
But they did that like gotta be a little meteor.
Yeah, this is meaty. And I also there's also like a sick joy in reading a book like Kitty Kelly's, where it's like, well, I would never write something that's this mean about a traumatized child, but you can't.
Oh man.
So Vernita obviously needed a lot of help watching the kids, which meant family came over to visit and babysit a lot. And this is where the story gets very dark because one of the family members who helped watch Oprah was a nineteen year old cousin. I think they initially go over to the house where the cousin is, but then he starts coming over there, and at some point in this process, Oprah is made to sleep with him. I think initially just because there's not enough beds, right, Like they're literally just sharing beds because there's only so many. And then he starts molesting her. After the first night that he rapes her, he takes her to the zoo afterwards and in her words, buys her silence with ice cream. Yeah, that's not great. No one else in the family obviously was aware at the time. Aunt Catherine, the family historian, was aware that something is off. And which interesting is that the family pretty much always denies Oprah's what Oprah says about the sexual abuse that she suffered. I think because they don't want to admit that they were missing some very problematic stuff. But one of the things that's interesting here is that Aunt Catherine clearly knows something is wrong because around this time she writes to Vernon Winfrey, who's the guy everyone thinks is Oprah's father, and begs him to take his daughter in right, So she don't. She's never I don't think she still has accepted that this happened to Oprah, but she's aware enough at the time that something is unhealthy about this living situation that she's like, hey, Vernon, you should maybe think about taking your daughter. And she's not doing well here. And that's interesting to me too. So Vernon lived in Nashville. He and his wife Zelma were both sterile, I guess, and they had no kids, right, and I think they had tried to have kids, so one or both of them was like not biologically able to have kids. Vernon clearly had at one point, although actually that's not a guarantee, because it's come out since that he might not have been the day biologically. In any case, he agrees to take He and Zelma agree to take Oprah in and this is a vastly different environment for her. For one thing, he is a small business owner. He runs at this point a barber shop. He was a military man, and the Winfreees ran their home like a military operation, which was pretty much entirely geared towards producing the best possible educational outcome for Oprah. So she goes right away from the situation where she's in a very chaotic environment with not much resources, to the situation where again two adults are entirely focused on making her do as well in school as possible. Oprah continued to be an outgoing child. She's a natural performer. Adults who around her will say that she would kind of automatically make herself the boss of any group of kids that she was in. Her favorite game to play with the neighbor kids was school like she would play teacher and she would make them all play students. And I'm going to read a quote from her dad Vernon here, because this is pretty funny From what I observed. Then, Lily and Betty Jean didn't enjoy playing school as much as Oprah did. I think that's because she was always the teacher, always scolding her little playmates as she scrawled invisible lessons on a make believe chalkboard. Lily and Betty Jean would sit attentively at imaginary desks, hoping against hope that Oprah didn't call their names during spelling bees. Can't say I much blame them, because if they misspelled a word, there was trouble. Oprah would get her little switch, which was not at all imaginary, and spank the palms of their hands. That's a little unhinged, right.
I mean, where do you think she learned that behavior?
Absolutely? Absolutely, But it's still pretty funny.
It's such a fine line between how is that even playing school for the other two? Really it is.
It does give you some insight in Vernon where it's like, can you just let her do that?
I have to say, though, I used to play school, and it's only now hearing this am I like, Oh, was it like not fun for the others that I was a teacher to have?
It was not fun for all parties? Oh yeah?
The other kids might not have liked that at all. Maybe I just scared them in line. He did claim that. Eventually, after a while, he confronted Opraen was like, hey, you should let the other kids place teachers sometime. They don't seem to be enjoying this quote. She looked at me with the sweetest expression, all cute and bewildered about how I could ask such a silly thing. Why Daddy, she informed me. Lily and Betty Jean can't teach till they learn how to read. Yeah, speaking of learning how to read, the sponsors of our podcast never did. That's why they can focus entirely on delivering the best value and the best products to you. They don't know how to read. There's nothing else at all in their heads but a desire to please you with the absolute best consumer experience imaginable. And we're back. Ah, we're talking Oprah talking, pra talking pra We probably won't use that anywhere. That's not very good. I don't like it, Okay. So Oprah thrives. She spends a year with Vernon and his wife and very stable. You know, she has a lot of attention devoted to her education. She's doing very very well. She's also away from this nineteen year old cousin who was molesting her, So that's a huge plus is two plus two. Unfortunately, the situation does not last, because Vernita still harbors dreams of raising all of her children together as quote, a real family for whatever reason, not that she needs one. Oprah always saw Vernon as her father, but doesn't seem to have felt the same way, at least initially about his wife. She was dead desperate for a normal home with two parents, and claims other kids teased her over this, which I'm certain is true. That summer, at age ten, she went to visit and her mom was like, Hey, I'm about to marry this guy I've been seeing for a while. You are finally going to get your dream. You know, why don't you move back to Milwaukee? And this marriage never happens. This guy eventually dies, and so like this is just this situation just collapses as badly as it possibly can. But Oprah still makes the choice to leave the stable home with her dad because of how taunted she is by this possibility of like being part of a full and stable family. And this is one of those things where like, again I'm not there. It's very hard to at least read Oprah's recollection of events and not think, wow, Vernita not doing a great job here. Because when Oprah decides to stay with her mom, Vernita breaks the news to Vernon in the most devastating way imaginable. She doesn't like call him and like tell him, hey, you know there's been a change. She waits for him to drive to Milwaukee to like show up to take Oprah back home and says, oh, actually, no, I'm keeping her. You should leave, which is rough move. And this is more or less how Vernon recalls things. He remembers weeping as he left the house because he could tell that he was leaving Oprah in an environment where she would not receive adequate care. He told Kitty Kelly, I never saw that sweet little girl again. And he actually is going to raise Oprah again. He's saying that she was a different kid when he returned. Yeah, when Oprah returned to her mother's home, nothing had changed for the better. The same cousin continued to come over to babysit, and he picked right up where he had left off. She's molested off and on from ages ten to fourteen. The times being what they were, and her educational career being somewhat erratic and interrupted. Young Oprah did not initially have a great grasp on the physical consequences of sex and how they worked. And I'm going to quote from Oprah Winfrey by Meryl Noden here. Winfrey understood so little about sex that she went through the fifth grade convinced she was pregnant every time I had a stomach ache, She has said, I thought I was pregnant and asked to go to the bathroom. So if I had it, nobody could see.
That For me?
Was the terror? Was I going to have it? How could I hide it? All the people would be mad at me? How could I keep it in my room without my mother knowing? And boy, we really really need better sex ed It's kind of depressing how many kids today probably are not benefiting from better knowledge than Oprah had access to at that point.
Like real, bleak, yeah, it's only gonna go worse.
Just yeah, so yeah, I mean that really brought it home to me, Like what a lot of these people want to change the system back to is like kids being in exactly the situation Oprah was, like hiding in the bathroom because you don't know, like you just want to be in a safe place in case you have a kid, because you don't understand any of this stuff.
Well, it's worried about getting in trouble after being.
Even though the sex was forced on you. Yeah, like it's it's it's it's fucked up. Oprah grows into a teenager who is very bright, very sexually confused, and who is not at all being watched by her guardian. She starts seeing lots of older boys and some men, some of whom are eighteen nineteen years old. In both of the books I've read and in the recollections of Oprah and the people who knew her, the people around her tended to see it as she is incredibly promiscuous in this period of time. Right, Obviously, what is happening here is that this is a reaction to the sexual violence that she experienced from a young age. But that is how she is treated by the adults in her life as a result of what's going on. Right, One line from her that stuck with me was that she saw her behavior as revenge to the adults around her. They didn't care about what was being done to her, so she was going to behave in a way that forced them to pay attention to her, even if that meant like really yeah, yeah, So.
I mean not to continue to like make Oprah's story worry about the traumas and historical baggage of like some black communities. But like again, this idea that I think is really foisted upon black girls and young women about being quote fast, where when you are clearly having a response to like a sexual trauma or something that has happened, you know, it's it's used to sort of marginalize you and other you and like say something is wrong with you, as opposed to like, oh are the are the adults around you somehow failing you? The fact that like her nineteen year old, you know, adult cousin was it seems like not reprimanded and still welcome back into the home.
Meanwhile, Oprah, young.
Oprah, her response to this sexual trauma is for her to be criticized by her own family, is really telling like who gets demonized and who gets like welcomed back with no accountability?
Right, right, right. I think that's a really really good point, and it's probably not sp that Kittie writes so much better about this very messy chapter of Oprah's life than Meryll, who is a male journalist. But you know, it's there's some there's some bad lines in Meryll's book about this, this book that was written in nineteen ninety nine, probably the worst of which is quote when Oprah was thirteen, her figure was thirty six, twenty three, thirty six, certain to attract male attention. And I don't know, man, I feel like there's a better way to write about a thirteen year old girl than that. Jesus every time, it's just like.
That's yeh, man, Like I mean, like my own mother, who bought most of my clothes at thirteen, didn't know my figure sizes to the number. That's so disturbing.
I didn't know my figure size the number.
The reason Meryl does is that when Oprah talks about this, she will give the numbers for her figure. But also like, that's her, that's right. I don't know, Manyl, like quote her if you're gonna do that, Like though just writing it out that may mix. It makes me very distrustful of you.
Yeah, and the conclusion drawn is that the conclusion alone should put you on a watch list. Yeah.
Yeah, He basically is like, can you blame him, though, like, yeah.
I don't know if it's certain, because like I don't think most men look at thirteen year old girls that way, But yeah, yeah, I would hope. So, following what her abuser had done to her, she started using ice cream to get her younger sister to leave the house she could have boys over, one of whom was her cousin's boyfriend, who she claimed treated her as a pet. She expressed a feeling of frustration that none of the adults seemed to catch on about what she was doing and what was being done to her, and to an extent, again, she's like putting herself out there, doing this in part to provoke a reaction from an adult in her life, and no one reacts, nobody draws a line, nobody intervened. Now, throughout all of this, Oprah's grades remain excellent. She is still a pretty good student while she's dealing with all of this. In the seventh grade, she's transferred to a better school via Upward Bound. This is a federal affirmative action program to help poor kids who wanted to be first generation college students by providing them with more support and better educational opportunities. In Oprah's case, this meant being bussed with a handful of other black kids to a very white school that had just been desegregated. And one interesting thing to me is Oprah talks a lot about affirmative action and getting into schools and getting jobs only because of affirmative action, and very consistently. When you talk to the people who like hired here, they're like, no, she was like, actually the best candidate. Obviously she's Oprah. She was a very good candidate to work for a TV station or whatever. Right, But you can kind of see some of that, Like, it's interesting to me that that's the attitude that she has towards it, even though like everyone around her is like, no, that really was not the situation.
We'll say a little bit that I can't imagine getting the counterfactual even if it were the case of the time in a direct interview, Yeah, someone, hey did you hire Oprah despite her.
Noting the best the other part of it too, Yeah, And they were gonna say, well, yes, I find that hard to believe either way. It's like, I mean, what you can say is all these programs did exactly what they were supposed to, because she wound up creating a media empire worth many billions of dollars as a result of getting these opportunities. So they were known on campus as the bus kids. Oprah and these other kids were being bussed to this more affluent white school. The whole situation, it's a very weird one where she once she starts going here, she starts being taken like invited into homes largely so that these kind of like up affluent, liberal white families can have a black kid over for dinner and like showcase how cool they are. Like that's one of her early and it's like a pretty I think, a good experience as she takes it just because like some adults are giving me positive attention, right, Like that's a thing for her. She continues to engage in extreme behavior in a desperate attempt to make her mom or somebody parent her, and this eventually includes a fake robbery and an assault. So here's the situation. Oprah had started wearing glasses bifocals, and the first pair that she got were ugly and made her look, in her words, like a librarian. It became clear that she was only going to get a new pair if the old ones broke, so she threw them away, and then she like messed up her room and like cut herself in the cheek and called the police claiming that there had been a smash and grab. Now, because she's a kid at this point, she like is pretended to be concussed. But when the police look around, they're like, so what else did they take? And she's like, just my glasses. So not the smoothest crime anyone's ever faced. You gotta take something, you gotta take like high fire something out of there, you know, classic classic glasses criminals. Now, events like this probably contributed to her family not believing her when she finally worked up the courage to tell them that she'd been molested, which happens around this period of time. So you know, from her family's perspective, she's this kid who you know, lied about getting robbed. They've seen her out with a bunch of guys. They think she's just promiscuous. And that's how her aunt Catherine feels decades later. I don't believe a bit of it. Oprah was a wild child, running the streets of Milwaukee in those days and not accepting discipline from her mother. And when you get to like that aspect of it, it's like, Oh, I get why Oprah does not have a good relationship with a lot of feast people like that is not at all surprising to me.
Now, yeah, and this is the woman who still denies Oprah's sexual abuse.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
I wouldn't want this person in my life yet.
No, not hard to see why she doesn't. Obviously we can't know precisely what happened, but it's going to be interesting. Some of part of I think why Aunt Catherine has this attitude and why some of the family members that are maybe jealous of Oprah have this attitude, is that later on in her career, Oprah is going to make the sexual violence she experienced a very central that's actually central to why she got so famous is the way in which she reveals this to her audience, that the context in which she does that has a massive impact on her career and on It's like one of the things that gets people to pay attention to her because women in prominent places in the media really didn't talk about stuff like this the way that she did. And so there's this attitude from some in her family that she's again just doing it all for attention. I'm not saying that because I think that's accurate. I'm saying like that, you have to understand if you want to know, Like, why is her family saying all of this? This is part of the story, right.
Like she has an incentive so they can point to that, right.
Oh god, yeah, yeah, it's it's when you really dig into the family drama, it's very unpleasant. In the summer of nineteen sixty eight, Oprah goes back to Nashville to visit her father in Zelma, his brother, her uncle, Trenton, drove her.
No.
Up to this point, Oprah considered Trenton her favorite uncle. Then, while they're driving, he asks her if she'd started dating yet, Thinking that she was having a safe conversation with her uncle, she said yes, but that it was hard because all the boys that her age wanted to do was French kiss. According to Oprah, her uncle immediately pulled over to the side of the road and molested her. She does not tell anyone immediately, but after visiting with her dad, she returns to Milwaukee furious, and she runs away from home. This time she's gone for a full week. Her mother is panicking. Oprah claims that during this time, she was hustling for money on the street, and she meets Aretha Franklin literally running up to Aretha Franklin's limo and crying, saying that she'd been abandoned and she needed one hundred dollars to get back to her family in Ohio. She says Aretha gave her the money, which she then took to a hotel and spent several days drunk on wine, eating room service food. I don't know if this happened Aretha. I don't think anyone ever asked Aretha when they were both, like when she was still alive. I haven't found any evidence of that, And I'm kind of surprised because we've had this info for a while and it's like, well, I would kind of want to know if Aretha remembers this, right, But yeah, so I don't know. You you'll have to take Oprah's word on that one. It would be kind of a weird thing to lie about. But I don't know.
It's just like you would assume potentially that like this would not register on Aretha Franklin's radar.
Yeah, I mean, she had a lot going on. I guess Yeah, I don't know. I'm just kind of surprised no one ever asked her about it, as far as I can find out, because like Oprah, like there, there was plenty of time after which Oprah was very famous and Aretha was still alive. I'm just kind of nobody know what he thought to do that, huh.
And Aretha was giving interviews and stuff like for even in right before she died, right she took Yeah, yeah.
I kind of think this is a kind of thing that's just on someone's comms team is like, we're not talking about this.
We're not talking about this. We don't want to talk about Aretha giving wine money to young Oprah Winfrey.
Yeah, I could see that being now.
After this incident, Vernita tried to drop her daughter when Oprah finally comes home. Vernita tried to put her daughter in a school for delinquent girls. She was told the processing time would take two weeks, which was too long, and in a move that really tells you a lot about Vernita, Vernita's like, well fuck that. Then she calls Vernon and she says, hey, actually you should take her back.
Now.
This is kind of a cheeky move because by this point, Vernon had sat down and done the math, and he had counted back from Oprah's birth date in January of nineteen fifty four, and he'd realized that he was away with the army during the period of time in which she was most likely conceived. So he's got pretty good evidence that he is not, in fact the buyol logical father of this kid. But instead of being like, you know, you're on your own, Vernita, or she's on your own, this is a kid he's still bonded with that, he's he's thought of most of her life as his daughter. He says he'll take her back if Fernita gives up all claim to the girl. And that's what happens. Oprah moves back to Nashville, and, unbeknownst to everyone at this point, the fourteen year old girl was now pregnant with a baby she believed was the result of her uncle Trenton molesting her. So that's a lot to deal with, yeah, put lightly, but you know, big ups for Vernon there. That's like a pretty and this is like he's it's very interesting. He's like gotten basically nothing from Oprah, like asked for basically nothing from her. Like he takes a lot of pride in the fact that, like his barber shop, put her through school and supported her, which is, you know, he's right to do so, obviously, But this is probably the luckiest single break of her life. I think Oprah would say this was the luckiest single break of her life that Vernon, even when he got this kind of excuse to not be a father, decided to continue being her father. Yeah. How does she talk about him now? Very positively? Yeah, I think you get the feeling there's some stuff they don't quite agree on, but like, she's very open about the fact that she owes a lot to him, obviously, and Vernon's clearly clearly very proud of her success, even though again you get the feeling like, oh, he doesn't really understand like what she's been doing most of her career in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
So, once she started high school in Nashville, Vernon again became a strict disciplinarian, imposing a dress code on her and demanding excellent academic performance. Oprah was always a great student, but she stopped. She had stopped by this point enjoying school, and part of why it was that in the winter of nineteen sixty eight, she was now heavily pregnant, hiding it under layers of jackets. Eventually she could not hide it from her father any longer, and she told him what happened and that his brother had been the life rapist. The short of it is, Vernon didn't believe her about his brother, and I still don't think he does. He doesn't say she's lying, it's he kind of like deflects the question. Like the most recent interview I've read was him saying something like, well, it's very hard to accept something like that, you know, with somebody that you're close to. I'm not privy to the full details there, but you get the Obviously, it's a significant pain point in the relationship. The way Oprah describes it, her earlier promiscuity was used as an excuse by the most stable adults in her life to be like, no, my beloved brother didn't do this, right, this is you know, there's some other explanation here, you know, And yeah, that's even the most supportive family member in her life is doing this to her. So that's not great. Oprah Grave birth too much prematurely in the later winter of nineteen sixty eight, for whatever it's worth. Vernon and his wife had pulled together in the eleventh hour in that point and agreed to raise the child so that she could start her life like that was their plan. We'll raise her. This child is like another of our kids, and you can go off and go to college and stuff. But none of them ever get that chance. The baby is very ill, it never leaves the hospital, and it dies after less than a month. Oprah describes this as the most emotional, confusing, and traumatic experience of her life, which yep, that it would be from what I can glean via reading. This is the kind of moment that basically ended her childhood, and it seems like everyone is aware of that. At the time. Everyone decides to lock down and bury what had happened as a family secret. They never talk about this again, right, and so Oprah has to process everything that's happened without being able to talk about it to her family. All Vernon would say to her was that he thought that God had given her a second chance, which is maybe not the best thing to say about you baby dying. I don't know, I don't know.
I mean, without like wholly extrapolating a lot, or like putting my I mean, you know, my parents are not of that generation, but that is the type of shit they would do. Like, yeah, there are types of parents that would think this is you know, and would think not talking about it is the best way because we mostly just have negative things to say.
So let's just pretend it didn't happen.
Yeah, I mean it's it's yeah, fucking dark.
But yes, yeah, not a lot of light levity in this part of the Oprah story, Guys.
I gotta tell you that's sort of the nature of this show.
Yeah, it'll get more fun when we're playing some clips of TV from the nineteen eighties. But first, here's a so Oprah returns to school the following year with a terrible secret, but also like, this is kind of she changes, right, she kind of takes this is like a new lease on life, almost is how it's described. She gets heavily into speech and debate. She starts doing competitive like drama contests. She starts winning championships. She starts telling her teachers that she's going to be a movie star. According to her drama teacher, Andrea Haynes, Oprah insisted she wanted to change her name from Oprah to Gail because she thought it would help her in Hollywood, and Haines advised her to keep going as Oprah because it was a unique name and Oprah had a unique voice, so probably good advice given what happens later, the new Oprah gets invited to speak as part of a church event in Los Angeles in nineteen sixty nine. She gets to see Hollywood for the first time, and she came back telling her dad about the stars in front of Man's Chinese Theater and promising to earn one of her own. One day as a junior, when filling out yearbook questionnaires that asked where will I be in twenty years, she checked famous, So she has made a pretty clear decision about where she wants to go at this point. In nineteen seventy, she wins a contest sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville and she gets invited to deliver a speech in Philadelphia. This was her first big crowd. There's like a ten thousand person audience, and she recalled later only that she felt totally comfortable addressing this massive group of strangers. The remainder of her high school career is basically an endless parade of tournament victories and a surprising amount of jet setting for a high school girl. She's flown to Palo Alto for in nineteen seventy one for a contest at Stanford. She's the only black student at the national forensics competition. That year. She gets into student government, winning election as vice president with a campaign slogan, put a little Color.
In your life.
Vote for the grand Ole Oprah. She's at like a majority white school, you know, like, yeah, I appreciate the humor. Yeah, yeah, the grand All Oprah too. Now, one thing that's interesting because I haven't read as many as I should have of like stories of the first kind of generation of black kids to get integrated into like majority white schools. But Oprah is in that demographic and at her high school, the black students, as a minority decided that they had to work together as a block if they were going to win any school elections. So they all agreed, decided to agree ahead of time as to which candidates to put forward, and so they'd only nominate a single black student for each category and then they would all vote for them. Since the white kids, white students all inevitably had like several white students for each role, and there's one black student for each role, and all of the black students are voting as a block, you actually have a chance of doing pretty well. So that's part of how Oprah wins election as school vice president that year. But she has to get a lot of white vote since she's very good at this. She's been hanging out at the homes of a lot of white classmates as a way for them to like make their parents look good. And yeah, Oprah, you know, is able to like meet a lot of people and get a lot of votes this way. She shows this like very clear talent for politicking and talent for like charming people by this point. This is not lost on some of her black peers who claimed that she they who she claimed had taken to calling her an oreo. The first time this happened, she crossed. The first time this happened, she claims she crossed the invisible lines in the cafeteria to sit with the white kids. Quote. In high school, I was the teacher's pet, which created other problems. I never spoke in dialect. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was ashamed and I was attacked for talking proper like white folks for selling out. And yeah, it's interesting because like I don't have any reason to doubt that, but it's also evident, like she gets these nominations that everyone has to agree on beforehand, so she clearly like it's not like she doesn't have, you know, any of that support from her peers either, because she's able to, like, you know, convince them she's the best person to be the school vice president too.
Well, unless it's a calculated bid for electability when we all know how that comes.
Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say, I see some echoes of some of our you know, we're talking about a school election, but I see some echoes of our current situation.
Yeah's hard not.
To read some parallels.
I mean, no, No, the thing about her, so I mean, like, first of all, if you are a black person listening, every black person has been called an oreo at one point in their life.
That is not a unique experience at all, take it from me.
But it goes back to what I was saying of, Like, is it possible that it wasn't that the other black kids didn't like her or like, because they clearly liked her because she was the person that they picked. Is it possible that it wasn't about the way that she spoke. Maybe she was being an asshole at times and didn't notice it, and like that's why.
They were picking on her in this way.
Like it's very easy to internalized this as, Oh, they were picking on me because I was smart and ambitious and I was I smoke proper and got good grades.
And it's like, well, is that really what was going on?
Yeah, there's some of it that, like you wanted to be a star, you would talk constantly about being famous, and you're you're probably like I mean, anyone who goes into TV, there's a little bit of that narcissism cooking in the background that may have been some of what people were recognizing. Yes, yeah, I say that with love for all of my friends in TV.
You know, but like talking about how you're going to go to Hollywood and be famous is annoying if your.
Right, exactly, Like, no one likes hearing that, you know, like speaking as somebody who went to Hollywood to get into the entertainment industry, right, nobody wants to hear about that journey. There's also just why we only have four to six Oscar winning movies every year about doing that.
There's also like, like I mean obviously not okay to call someone in oreo or attack their blackness for quote acting white, but also every kid was called something. I'm just like there's a little bit of like, you know, history is written by the winners, and the winner is definitely Oprah as far as narrative goes.
So like, yeah, like I'm not saying it's a good high school.
But everyone, it's just it is also high school.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she is selected to be delegate at the nineteen seventy one White House Conference on Children in Youth. The organizer of this delegation was committed to making sure that it was not just a bunch of middle class white kids, and so the resultant group that he sends to DC is like extremely diverse, and they wind up voting on a series of recommendations to the Nixon government, which include legalized marijuana, denounce the invasion of Cambodia, launch a guaranteed income program for all Americans. Didn't work if you haven't been keeping track of US politics, But hey, we appreciate the kids who are now in their seventies. Yeah, we don't really know how Oprah felt about any of these super progressive goals. She was not very political, As one classmate noted, she's not an activist, and the only march she ever took part in was the March of Dimes, which is like a way of fundraising for I think cancer research that she primarily uses as a way to get her leg in the door for a show business career. She walks several miles on foot to the studios of WVOL, a black radio station in the Nashville area, and she basically tells the DJ, Hey, you're going to sponsor me for this march. The DJ is so surprised by this that he's like, well, all right, I'll do it. And when she comes by to get the donation from him, he tells her, hey, you've got a good voice. We should see what it sounds like on tape. And this guy, this DJ, is John Heidelberg. He would later declare himself the man who discovered Oprah. And it's one of those I.
Really hate that shit.
I really hate that shit.
I really like that is like every.
Fucking like famous or powerful woman ever. It's the man who discovered her. Just that's all I need to know.
He sucks, right, I thought there'd be a little more producer solidarity here. So here's the thing.
I hadn't thought about that at all, Sophie. And I'm not saying you're wrong to be annoyed by that. I was so in this guy's corner because when I hear, oh, young seventeen year old girl meets a DJ who says that maybe she has a future in an entertainment I was ready for this to be a hideous story. She's never claimed it was. All she says about it, and all we know about it is that like John actually gets her her first job, and that is like where the whole rest of her career comes from.
So it's entirely possible hate that narrative she got herself.
I'm not saying you're wrong I hate.
I'm just saying when I started reading this story, I was like white knuckling it, waiting for like the Crimes, you know, having just done the p ditty episodes, I was like, oh, God, this camp possibly and.
Well I'm the woman behind Robert Evans see it's discuss Yeah, definitely are like this.
Did not enjoy that. Everyone was.
I mean, the reality of the situation is that like physically need to give myself a hug.
It felt so uncomfortable.
It's every successful person in media has a whole shitload of people who were like big parts of why they got successful. And you know, John Heidelberg is the only guy John John Heidelberg certainly knows how to market that said, I'm just so happy this didn't turn into another story about like horrible, horrible crimes.
Yeah.
Yeah, gave him a.
Bat DJ seventeen year old, you know, not literally a good narrative.
This is the most surprised I've been since we found out that l Ron Hubbard was never a sex criminal, where I was like, really, huh, okay, why did he do all that stuff? Weirder reasons, very weird reasons. He wanted young people to dig for gold in the ocean.
Yeah, that's not a sexual like metaphor.
Nope, he's like a StarCraft guy basically, yes.
By which you mean a hero right, Yes, anyway, that's part two of the Oprah story with surprise, not a villain John Heidelberg, as far as I know, if horrible stories come out about John Heidelberg after this, look, I'm not defending the bad I was just shocked that this didn't go into a dark place.
Yeah, what a weird twist.
Yeah, one, DJ, who is not a creep that we can prove right now?
Yea.
Honestly, you are in the top one scent of morality of moral DJs if you don't commit a sex crime. Like that's so rare for the DJ community.
And I would like to formally apologize to our editor, DJ Danel for that comment.
Yeah, joic to John Heidelberg too, who I think is dead. I'm not going to okay, but ouch, poor John.
I don't need to apologize to men.
I'm good.
I'm good. Uh.
Anyway, that's our episode. Everybody. How are we feeling about Oprah so far? Don't worry next week? Next week is set. Yeah, I didn't feel good like I.
Should.
I have like summarized all of the bad things as bullet points. I felt like the whole story needed to be told.
Yeah. I remain curious to see how they connect because this this, if, if the bad stuff is kind of what I imagine it is, this would be the least the least like connective tissue between at X one and two and act you know, the late the B side, basically.
The connective tissue, and this is to an extent. Stuff that Oprah will even admit is that she grows up desperate to please, and that that is partly responsible for like her number one set of the stuff, like some of her contributions to toxic diet culture, but also maybe part of why she does not vet some of these you know, doctors types the way that she ought to have write like, I think you can draw some lines there between like some of the aspects of her career that are are not ideal. But yeah, uh, I gotta say reading through this this she it is definitely the most sympathetic person whose childhood we've talked about here.
Yeah, when you were talking about her like heyday and she was going to Hollywood and win speeches and elections, it was hard for me to not feel I was kind of like beaming thinking about in life. I was like, yeah, like good, Like I'm imagining like a montage of her really leaving up, and I guess I'm waiting to see how.
I mean, I guess from that point of view, the good news is things don't ever go bad for Oprah, Like, yeah, it's something tril Oprah go bad for the rest of us.
Yeah, I wonder.
But yeah, anyway, you get some pluggables.
I could go. I think I went first last time.
Oh all right, Well you could check out my podcast on iHeartRadio called There Are No Girls on the Internet, or my other podcast with the Mozilla Foundation makers of Firefox, all about power and people and ethics in a I called I r L New season coming soon.
Follow me on Instagram at bridget Marie and DC.
Yeah, excellent, that's the week. Everybody go home. And I'm sorry, Andrew, I haven't slept in three days.
Yeah, don't worry about it, Andrew edred fucking new Gares. Yos this racist? That's fine?
Check out yo? Is this racist? And remember everybody, don't don't hang out with DJs. It usually doesn't go.
This well except accept DJ Daniel do your jo is the best.
And shout out to Joe. I love your DJ screw shirt.
Oh thank you. This is a bootleg by probably don't hang out with Djscrew either.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to our
Channel YouTube dot com slash At Behind the Bastards
