Oprah Read Free Page B

later, Dennis Swanson, former vice president and general manager of WLS-TV, would not discuss the matter. Long credited with hiring Oprah and bringing her to Chicago, he would not comment on his reactions to her first show about sexual abuse.
    At the time, Swanson and his promotion manager, Tim Bennett, were elated by Oprah’s spectacular ratings but stung by press criticism of her emphasis on sex shows, particularly the show she had done on pornography. The TV critic of the
Chicago Sun-Times,
P. J. Bednarski, had castigated them and the “corporate morality” of WLS for allowing Oprah to devote an hour-long show to hard-core sex. “Shame on them,”he wrote, and then blasted Oprah for inviting three female porn stars to talk about male organs, male endurance, and male ejaculations.
    In the saddest portion [of the show] there was a discussion of what they called on the air—the graphic lovemaking “money shot.” That got a lot of laughs….The Ask-the-Porn Stars program, amazingly, carried not a minute of discussion in which Winfrey stated, asked, or even worried that these X-rated stars were, in fact, cheap hucksters, talentless, sleazy skin traders. She barely wondered if these films demeaned women. Instead, she asked, “Don’t you get sore?”
    “For someone with the natural talent of Winfrey, it was telling evidence she’s got some growing up to do,” Bednarski wrote, before adding that Oprah’s porn show got a 30 percent share of the 9:00 A.M. Chicago audience, much larger than usual. “It also got mentioned all around town and got its own column right here.” The column’s headline: “When Nothing’s Off Limits: Oprah Winfrey Profits from Porn Stars’ Appeal.”
    Oprah understood the axiom of television: She who gets ratings rules. “My mandate is to win,” she told reporters. During crucial “sweeps” weeks she insisted on “bang-bang, shoot-’em-up” shows, for which her producer, Debra DiMaio, led the eureka hunt, with Oprah weighing in with her own ideas. “I’d love to get a priest to talk about sex,” she said. “I’d love to get one to say, ‘Yes, I have a lover. I worship Jesus and her. Yes, I love her and her name is Carolyn.’ ”
    In her race for ratings during Black History Month, Oprah booked members of the Ku Klux Klan in their white sheets and cone hoods. She also did a show featuring members of a nudist colony who sat onstage naked. Only their faces were shown on television, but the studio audience got a full frontal view, so management insisted the show be taped. “That will allow us to make sure nothing that’s not supposed to be seen on TV will get on,” said Debra DiMaio. Management also said that each member of the audience who arranged to attend had to be called and reminded that the guests would be nude. “No one was turned off,” said DiMaio. “On the contrary, they were excited. I mean, what fun.”
    Oprah admitted to being nervous during the nudist show. “I pride myself in being real honest, but on that show I was really faking it. I had to act like it was a perfectly normal thing to be interviewing a bunch of naked people and not look. I wanted to look into the camera and say, ‘My God! There are penises here!’ But I couldn’t. And that made me real nervous.”
    When she told her bosses she wanted to do “Women with Sexual Disorders” and interview a woman who had not had an orgasm once during her eighteen-year marriage, and then interview the male sex surrogate who gave her orgasm lessons, and then a young woman so sexually addicted that one night she had twenty-five men in her bed, the program director blanched.
    “Management doesn’t want problems, but they want ratings,” Oprah said. “I told them I’ll be decent and I was. They don’t understand what women feel, and I do. Men think, for instance, that if you do a show about mastectomy, you can’t show a breast. I say you have to show the breast.”
    The day after her sexual disorders