Queen Of All Media

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Supermodels and Nobel prizewinners tend to travel in separate circles, but at a recent party held in honor of Oprah Winfrey in downtown Manhattan, both Toni Morrison and Cindy Crawford were in attendance. The gathering, held at a restaurant where it's difficult to get a reservation unless you call long in advance or are a recent recipient of an MTV Video Music Award, was a starry one. Mariah Carey. Barbara Walters. Maya Angelou. They were all there. Oprah worked the room, shining attention on each guest briefly but brightly, a passing Lexus with her high beams on. The occasion was a celebration of Oprah's star turn in the new film Beloved and of her appearance on the cover of Vogue magazine. She posed next to a huge blowup of the cover, bathed in camera light. The woman who once dragged a cart of fat into a TV studio to dramatize her battles with obesity, the nappy-headed girl who grew up poor in Kosciusko, Miss., had become a full-fledged movie star.

Winfrey is still the Queen of Talk. Despite a strong performance by downscale upstart Jerry Springer, her show remained No. 1 overall last season among all syndicated talk shows. And she recently agreed to continue as the show's host through the 2001-02 season. Nonetheless, in recent years, Winfrey has increased her influence in areas beyond daytime chatter: in prime-time movies and specials, in books, in cinema. She is much more than just talk.

When the Oprah Winfrey Show went into national syndication in 1986, it helped democratize the world of talk shows; it wasn't quite the fall of the Berlin Wall, but an important barrier was breached. Here, finally, was a woman--a black woman, a plus-size woman, a woman with an attitude--holding the mike and holding forth. Says Geraldo Rivera, host of CNBC's Rivera Live and Upfront Tonight: "Oprah was the first host of any daytime talk show who looked and sounded like her audience."

Winfrey, in the wake of Phil Donahue, helped usher in an age of confessional, ultrapersonal TV. Hers was television that cared, that wanted to know, that wanted you to spill your feelings and your guts and just forget about the 15 million people or so watching. Today, of course, all of television wears the Stained Blue Dress of Confessional Excess. Winfrey used confessional TV to explore, to empathize, to try to figure out where people were coming from. Today people watch Jerry Springer to see a good fight, to see a lesbian throw a punch.

In 1994 Winfrey announced her intention to make her show more meaningful. In 1996 she started an on-air book club. In 1997 she launched the Angel Network, an ongoing campaign to spur her viewers into doing good works, like building houses for needy families, volunteering at local schools and saving spare change to fund college scholarships. She recently added a regular segment to her show titled "Remembering Your Spirit," which focuses on the rather lofty goal of soothing viewers' souls. "Oprah set the standard in daytime television," says fellow daytime host Rosie O'Donnell. "She consistently maintains a decency and morality on her show that gives talk shows a positive name."

Winfrey's work has avoided the voyeuristic label partly because her primary subject has always been her own life. She has talked about her relationship with longtime boyfriend Stedman Graham; she has admitted using cocaine when she was in her 20s; she has revealed being raped at age 9. Springer avoids personal questions and won't even tell reporters his marital status. He stands in the audience, amused, as his guests slug it out. Winfrey demands as much honesty from herself as she does from her guests and viewers.

A signature feature of Winfrey's show, her enormously influential on-air book club, has, with each pick, revealed itself to be a literary manifestation of Winfrey's own desires, fears and ghosts. Certain themes and topics are explored again and again, in book after book. Secrets. Child abuse. Physical abnormalities. The first club selection, The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, was about a lost child. Other selections struck similar chords: Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone centers on an obese victim of sexual molestation; Anna Quindlen's Black and Blue focuses on an abusive marriage; on page 1 of the book-club pick Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, the narrator says, "When I was little, I would think of ways to kill my daddy."

Novelist Edwidge Danticat, whose novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was an Oprah book-club choice (it's the fictional tale of a sexually abused Haitian girl reunited with her mother), says literature offers readers a way of healing psychic wounds. "There are a lot of us who feel some part of us, an important part, was salvaged by reading. Oprah says that when she reads about people who are going through similar experiences to her own, she feels less alone. A lot of us share that feeling."

Almost all the film and TV projects Winfrey has become involved in have been based on books that have made a personal impact on her. Winfrey's production company, Harpo Films, has a deal with ABC to produce six TV movies under the heading "Oprah Winfrey Presents," and all three of the movies so far have been based on such books, notably the highly rated Before Women Had Wings, which centers on a young girl who is physically abused by her alcoholic mother. Among Harpo's upcoming TV projects: a remake of the 1962 movie David and Lisa, which portrays two teens in a mental home, and an adaptation of the novel Rich Deceiver, about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who wins the lottery. Harpo also plans to produce a film or video version of another Toni Morrison novel, Paradise.

"I wouldn't call the movies we make 'uplifting'; that's too limiting a word," says Kate Forte, Harpo's executive vice president. "We look for projects that show individuals being responsible for themselves. It's all about seeing human beings as active creators of their lives rather than as passive victims."

That is, of course, what Winfrey tries to do on her talk show. In real life, such efforts can sometimes seem silly or superficial or narcissistic. "Forgiveness is something you do for yourself so you can move on," one guest told Winfrey's audience on a recent show. As the theme of a short story, perhaps that line would work. On the show it came off as self-centered and graceless. On another show last month, guest John Gray taught the audience to meditate by saying the following words "O glorious future, my heart is open to you. Come into my life." Perhaps the exercise was useful. But it sure sounded goofy.

The subjects Winfrey has explored on film and in her book-club picks have generally been important and meaningful. But Winfrey is a woman reported to be worth more than $550 million. She is confident, powerful, charismatic, well read, glamorous, modern. It would make quite a statement if she made more movies and championed more books featuring heroes and heroines who shared some of her more inspiring character traits. Moreover, most of Winfrey's movies are set in the past. The future beckons.

This is not to say that there isn't plenty of inspiration to be found in Winfrey's work. There is a moment near the end of Beloved where Winfrey, playing the ex-slave Sethe, bemoans the loss of one of her children. Her child, she believes, is her "best thing." Danny Glover, playing her lover Paul D, tells her, "You your best thing." A look of revelation comes across her face. "Me?" Sethe says. "Me?"

It's an Oprah-show moment; she is constantly searching for ways to inspire her audience, to lift them up, to give them a sense of self-worth. In Beloved, however, this moment arrives not as part of an unstructured monologue by a rambling guest, but as the climax of a nuanced, thoughtful story line. Daytime talk shows are often content simply to show us life. In her movies and her book-club picks, Winfrey seeks to do something more--she wants to show us how to live.