Posts Tagged ‘gayle king’
"Oprah Fired Me for Talking About Jesus"
by Kitty Kelley
Shortly after Oprah Winfrey became a national sensation she hired her first cousin Jo Baldwin to be her speech writer. Later she promoted Baldwin to V. P. of her company Harpo Inc.
“When I received my PhD in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Oprah asked me where I was going to work,” said Jo Baldwin in the summer of 2010. “I said I would be applying for a position at Ebony magazine as a copy editor. Oprah said she did not like Linda Johnson Rice [owner of Ebony] and I should come to work for her instead. So I did.
“I was to work for her for three years, but she fired me without notice after two years… I heard from someone later that she got rid of me because she got tired of me talking about Jesus all the time…Oprah preferred the teachings of Shirley MacLaine’s books, such as Dancing in the Light and Out on a Limb, which Oprah made me read but I didn’t think much of.”
Jo Baldwin, a tenured professor at Mississippi Valley State, is also an ordained minister and pastor. Deeply religious, the Reverend Jo, as her parishioners call her, feels her famous cousin has lost her way and is mired in godless New Age mumbo jumbo.
Baldwin’s feelings, like many in Oprah’s family, stem from resentment over the way she has been treated. The power of Oprah’s vast wealth makes most of her relatives quake. They want to be part of the luxurious life that she offers on occasion (her lavish Christmas presents, her birthday checks, even her hand-me-downs) but they chafe at the way she has dismissed them since becoming famous and they know that she does not cherish them as family. She prefers instead her celebrity friends. Oprah holds Maya Angelou as the mother she should’ve had; she sees Sidney Portier as her father, Quincy Jones as her uncle, and Gayle King as her beloved sister.
Jo Baldwin became estranged from her famous relative who continues to put distance between herself and her blood relations. Oprah will not give her mother, Vernita Lee, her personal phone number. If her mother needs to call Oprah, she must call the studio and talk to Oprah’s producers.
“The family is tangled with so many secrets and so much fear,” said Baldwin. “I admit I was afraid of Oprah for 20 years. Absolutely terrified. She’s powerful and dangerous. She told me if I ever opened my mouth [about what I know] she’d sue my pants off.”
Baldwin, who spoke to me for the paperback publication of Oprah: A Biography, feels the main reason she is not close to Oprah is because of the differences in their religious convictions.
“Mainly, Oprah wanted to shame me for being a follower of Jesus as if to say, ‘What is He doing for you that’s so great?’ Oprah inflicts emotional wounds that could lead to physical illness, if they aren’t healed. My faith has kept me from getting sick [over her].”
(Photos: Jo Baldwin courtesy of Jo Baldwin; Oprah in 1987, Kevin Winter/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Cross-posted from Gawker
Another Oprah Lover Heard From
by Kitty Kelley
It always happens. The day after your book is published you meet someone who says, “Oh, I wish I’d known you were writing that biography. I could’ve told you about ….” Fill in the blanks here with some hair-raising incident you did not have in your book, despite years of research and hundreds of interviews. Never fails.
Shortly after the paperback publication of Oprah: A Biography, I received an email from a man, gently chiding me for my vaunted investigative skills. “How come you didn’t find me?” he teased. “I was Oprah’s lover back in the 1980’s and lived with her for four months before Stedman came on the scene.”
Ordinarily, such an email would be tossed into the crank bin filled with letters from felons, proclaiming their innocence. But this particular email had too many specifics to ignore. So I responded with pertinent questions to see if this Haitian film maker, Reginald Chevalier, was the real deal. Turns out he was. I called Oprah’s publicist to double-check his information but my call was not returned.
Not that I needed to add any more lovers to Oprah: A Biography. She had had several over the years, including the muzak musician John Tesh, when they worked together in Nashville, and retired radio disc jockey Tim Watts, the married man who was the love of her life for years in Baltimore. There was also a brief fling with Randy Cook, who lived with Oprah for a few months and described himself as her drug procurer.
Reginald Chevalier said he met Oprah when he appeared on her show in 1985. “She was doing a segment on look-alikes and at the time I looked like Billy Dee Williams. She later confided that she instructed her producers to keep me backstage after the show. She threatened to fire them, if I got away. She took me to lunch at the Water Tower restaurant and ordered stuffed mashed potatoes for both of us.”
Their affair began that day.
I remember how she loved taking candle-lit baths before going to bed. We took lots of them together. We spent many nights together in her new condo which she loved so much. I would be watching TV and she would be working on her next day’s show…. Besides going to restaurants for lunches and dinners, to stores to buy gifts for employees and friends—Oprah is generous with stuff—we would go to the Bears games because I was friends with one of the players. We occasionally had dinner with Michael Jordan and his wife, Juanita, or with Danny Glover, [Oprah’s co-star in The Color Purple.]
I noticed a few times she would bring up the subject of marriage and ask me if this was something I believed in. I think at that time Oprah was ready to take the plunge, and I was the chosen one…but I wasn’t interested in getting serious…. Oprah took me to her mother’s house for dinner in Milwaukee and that’s where I met Jeffrey, her gay brother [who died of AIDS in 1989]. Oprah said to him, “You stay away from this guy. He’s mine.”
Chevalier was 25 years old then and Oprah was 32, but he said the age difference didn’t matter to either of them. He accompanied Oprah to the Chicago premiere of The Color Purple. “Oprah bought a purple mink coat for the occasion and wanted me to wear purple mink as well but I just couldn’t do it.” Their photo appeared in the Chicago newspapers. “If you look carefully, you can see part of Gayle King’s face in the lower left of the picture,” he said. “Gayle was always around. Everywhere we went she was there. She was Oprah’s shadow.”
Chevalier has fond recollections of his time with Oprah, although he admits that she’s a much more reserved, calculating person off-camera than the warm, embracing person she presents on her show. “Things came crashing to a halt in April 1986,” he recalled. “I had been out of town on a modeling assignment and when I returned to the Water Tower condo, my key wouldn’t work. The concierge informed me that the locks had been changed. Oprah had left a box for me filled with all my belongings. On a yellow envelope she had written: ‘Sorry, things aren’t working between us. Oprah Winfrey.’ That was it. No phone call. No good-bye. Nothing. She was as cold as ice…. A few weeks later Stedman was on the scene— full time.”
Reginald Chevalier then.
Reginald Chevalier now.
(Photos courtesy of Reginald Chevalier.)