On Labor Day weekend 1983, a 29-year-old television host working in Baltimore flew to Chicago to audition for a better job.
She taped a trial show that Saturday, and by the time it was over, the WLS-Ch. 7 executives watching in their offices believed they had struck gold.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Holy smoke, this woman is awesome,’ ” recalls Dennis Swanson, the general manager of WLS at the time who now runs all of the Viacom conglomerate’s 39 stations. “I thought she was the most awesome talent I had ever seen.”
Oprah Winfrey took over as host of “AM Chicago” in January 1984 and before the next month had ended, the Mississippi native was more popular here than Phil Donahue, who not only taped in Chicago but was the leading national talk-show host.
For this city, it was love at first sight, passionate and enduring, and as Chicago went, so would go the nation. Winfrey, too, would repeatedly acknowledge her debt to and affection for Chicago. This, after all, was the place that turned her from a morning-show co-host and junior partner into a full-fledged star, the first step on the road to her current, one-name superstardom.
But as she prepares to celebrate her 50th birthday with a special live show Thursday and private parties through the weekend, it’s worth looking at that relationship a little more closely. What has it really meant to Chicago to have Winfrey — oh, all right, Oprah — here, with her empire that now includes not just her TV show and studios, but movies, a magazine and other TV she produces, charitable efforts, motivational speaking and more?
Is the relationship still meaningful for both parties or are we –when she could produce a hit show from the pine barrens of New Jersey or back in rural Mississippi — just a convenient big city? Would she consider leaving? What does it bring to have her here?
Answers are elusive. Raise the subject at a dinner party of media-savvy people, and the consensus is that Oprah is barely of the city anymore, her studios on the NearWest Side operating almost in a hermetically sealed, parallel universe. Big-name guests jet in, tape the show and jet out. The show doesn’t hide its Chicago setting, but it doesn’t flaunt it, either.
Her eponymous magazine, the biggest startup success in magazine history, is published and edited out of New York. She does few interviews with local media, turning down, for instance, a request to talk for this article. The local restaurant, The Eccentric, that she partnered in with Rich Melman’s Lettuce Entertain You chain is no more. The circles Oprah seems to travel in stretch to both coasts more than the third coast. She was on “Larry King Live” in December and, in 21 pages transcribed, never uttered the city’s name.
“When I think of Oprah, I don’t necessarily think of Chicago,” says the author Alex Kotlowitz, whose 1992 book “There Are No Children Here” Winfrey made, in the city, as a TV movie. “In some ways she’s bigger than Chicago. When I have visitors here and we’re driving around the West Side, I point out her studios but each time I’m always a little taken aback. It’s not necessarily something you associate with the city.”
But ask people more specifically about Oprah’s impact on Chicago, and they tend to get very effusive about how wonderful the daytime talk leader has been and continues to be for the city.
“She’s a huge icon, a great, great asset to the city,” says Lois Weisberg, Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. “She may be the single most — how can I put it? — attraction that we have. Mayor Daley’s an attraction, too, but in a different way.”
Joe Ahern helped hire Oprah when he was a Ch. 7 executive and now competes with her from his position running WBBM-Ch. 2. “Having one of the greatest talents that has ever been known in television here in Chicago is certainly a great coup for this city,” he says.
It may be just plain truth when people talk like that, but it may also contain some combination of Midwestern politeness and the common sense that tells you one cannot overpraise a billionaire.
Television
The clearest impact Oprah has had here is on the television scene. When she signed on at WLS to replace Rob Weller, who left for New York City, the ABC-owned station was well behind in the ratings. Within 18 months of her debut, it was No. 1 in total-day viewing, and it has held that title ever since, one of the lengthiest runs at the top of any local TV station in the nation.
It wasn’t all Winfrey. The station also debuted a new show called “Wheel of Fortune” and brought popular news anchor Floyd Kalber out of retirement at the same time and has cannily played to an audience perception of being very local and very stable.
But “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — the title it took even before it moved into national syndication in September 1986 — has had an impact on the station way out of proportion to what 9 a.m. programs usually do.
TV stations are “like battleships,” taking years to change course, says Tim Bennett, who was promotion manager at WLS when Winfrey started and now is president of her Harpo Productions.
“She turned this thing around in 18 months,” he says. “It was Oprah, I believe, that was the greatest catalyst.”
In conventional TV theory, such a popular morning show is thought to be most effective at pulling viewers to other shows that air in the morning and early afternoon. But Winfrey transcends time periods: With her, there is a halo effect that spreads over the entire efforts of the station, helped in the last decade or so by WLS rebroadcasting the show in late night, where the 11 p.m. repeat more than holds its own against the network comedy programs.
“She helped foster an image of this television station being very committed to the community, very local,” says Emily Barr, the current WLS-TV general manager and president. “And I would say that’s because Chicago is her hometown. She has a unique position in people’s minds here.”
One clue to the puzzle of whether Winfrey would ever leave can be found by looking at TV listings here. In almost every other city in the country, certainly in every major city, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” runs in the afternoon, the better to draw from a 30 percent larger viewership pool and the better to boost ratings for stations’ primary profit centers, local news broadcasts.
That she hasn’t moved to the afternoon here is not for lack of trying on the station’s part. But when the topic was broached during his tenure atop WLS, Ahern says, she did not want to abandon the time period-and-city combination that had sent her toward the top.
“I don’t want to say it’s a superstition,” Ahern says. “It’s just a gut feeling that that’s where she started and she didn’t want to move it. It was really Oprah more than anybody, just her gut told her not to move. Her gut’s pretty good.”
That same gut instinct is why those close to her believe moving the show is not and won’t be an option, despite her home in Southern California, despite rumors about the show leaving that have swirled in Chicago for years, probably based more on provincial paranoia than anything concrete.
“As far as I’m concerned, no, there’s never been a `What if … Could we maybe … Is California weather…?’ No,” says Bennett. “Could she have moved out there and done the show in Los Angeles? Sure. It may have been something so many others would have sat down with a team and debated and discussed, but it never even entered her mind. Even though she wasn’t born here, this is the show’s birthplace.”
It is also, many observers believe, invaluable to the show’s appeal to middle-American womanhood that she draws her audiences from here, instead of New York or Los Angeles. With Oprah pretty much the only game in town, the people attending are perhaps less jaded about the idea of attending a television show and therefore more enthusiastic, more able to project the kind of energy Winfrey likes — and has earned, especially this past season, as she seems to have rededicated herself to the show, according to those who follow it closely, resulting in 14 percent ratings gains and coinciding with her decision to extend her contract two more years, through the 2007-08 season.
And Bennett urges Chicagoans not to take offense at the SoCal home or the neighborhood she wrote glowingly of in a recent issue of her magazine O. He calls that “a place to occasionally rebound from when it is 22-below wind chill,” but says “this is her base. This is her terra firma. … This is where she walks the dogs.”
Through a publicist, Winfrey provided this statement: “The people of Chicago have embraced me from the moment I arrived and I’ll always be grateful for that support. I’ve chosen to stay here all these years because keeping my staff and myself in this city keeps us grounded.”
Although her Indiana property is up for sale, she still lives in a Water Tower Place condominium and, according to a spokeswoman, claims Illinois residency for income tax purposes.
Trying to estimate how much that, Harpo and her other businesses bring to Illinois coffers each year is a fool’s game, but Fortune magazine estimated in 2002 that the show and the magazine alone were bringing in more than $440 million in annual revenues and that her personal fortune then was about $980 million. Whatever annual income her accountants come up with, it certainly helps the state.
Neighborhood
Oprah’s effect on the Near West Side neighborhood where she turned an old Armory-turned-film production facility into Harpo Studios, at 110 N. Carpenter St. along Washington Boulevard, gets mostly positive reviews.
“It has had an excellent impact on the neighborhood,” says Robert Wiggs, executive director of the West Central Association. “It brings in thousands of people every year who wouldn’t really come to our community. They get a sense and feeling of what the West Loop is really like. That’s really positive.”
Not only does Harpo employ some 250 people in Chicago and pay more than $260,000 a year in property taxes on the Harpo Studios building, according to county records, but the 145 shows she tapes a year there, usually at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, bring some 300 audience members per show into the neighborhood.
Winfrey’s publicists says they have no handle on how many of the audience members fly in from out of town, but certainly a good portion of her audience is at least suburbanites and certainly a good portion of them make a Chicago day of it, hitting restaurants and stores afterward.
Many apparently spill into the nearby restaurants. The nearby Le Peep franchise says the restaurants sells a lot of coffee and muffins in mornings to “Oprah” attendees. “It gets pretty busy, especially when they need to use the bathrooms to do their primping,” says counter worker Danielle Knight.
At Wishbone, a well-regarded Southern cooking restaurant, “Oprah” staffers and audience members are regular customers and celebrity guests come in, too, Bernie Mac, Chris Rock and Sharon Stone in recent months, according to Wishbone employees.
And while a Wishbone manager says she could better serve the Winfrey crowd if the restaurant had a better idea of Oprah’s taping schedule, the restaurant has been mentioned on the show several times through the years and was even the location for a 1993 show. Wiggs, of the neighborhood association, says the Harpo investment in the neighborhood back in the late 1980s had a huge influence on many businesses.
“She and her partners saw the potential in the area,” he says. More commercial redevelopment followed, then some restaurants, then a first wave of residential redevelopment, then more restaurants and more residential. He doesn’t believe the residential boom there, with old factories being turned into pricey loft condominiums and new condo buildings being erected, is “directly linked” to Harpo, but it “did raise the profile,” he says. “When you say, `My residence is just two blocks away from Harpo Studios, the home of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,”‘ it’s just great to say.”
Charity
Winfrey’s philanthropy is considerable and widely recognized, but she is not usually included among the nation’s supergivers. She hasn’t made the list of most generous Americans compiled in recent years by Business Week or the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
But within the narrower classification of African-American givers, she has superstar status, up there with Bill and Camille Cosby, attorney Willie Gary of Florida and Baltimore money manager Eddie Brown and his wife, Sylvia.
Rodney Jackson, president of the National Center for Black Philanthropy, says of Winfrey, “clearly, she is in the top three [in terms of total giving]. If she’s not No. 1 then she’s close to it.”
And it’s not just direct giving by the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, Jackson points out, but her ability to draw donations to Oprah’s Angel Network.
“She is probably as close to being the Bill Gates of the black community as we are going to get for a while,” he says.
Jackson says there is a tendency to expect high-profile, wealthy people to give even more than they do, and this may be particularly true in the black community, considering the vast needs there. That puts an Oprah Winfrey under enormous pressure.
Jackson does not know Oprah and she is not a member of his organization, but he is often approached about her at conferences. “Everyone wants to know how to get to Oprah,” he says.
The author Kotlowitz, who lives in Oak Park, says he noticed something similar during the filming of “There Are No Children Here.”
“I realized very quickly that everybody who ran into her wanted something from her,” even then, some dozen years ago, he says. “So I kept a respectful distance.”
But he came to admire not only her commitment to filming in Chicago and specifically the low-income neighborhood where the book is set, but also her compassion for the people there. During filming, “she became very close to a kid there, and in a very meaningful way,” he says.
The Winfrey Foundation, established in 1987 and targeting education, women, children and families, had assets of $47.7 million at the end of 2002, according to its most recent Internal Revenue Service filings, and disbursed $7.5 million in grants and contributions.
Through the Angel Network, established a decade later, she has raised more than $12 million, her Web site says, largely for scholarships homes and schools.
In Chicago she contributed $1 million toward the development of Millennium Park. Her next largest local gifts over the years have been to the Chicago Academy of the Arts ($600,000) and the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School ($400,000), and her foundation has helped out dozens of other groups, usually with grants in the tens of thousands of dollars.
In 2002, they included the Marwen visual arts training program for youth in Chicago; the Ounce of Prevention Fund in Chicago; the Wonder Works Children’s Museum of Oak Park; the YWCA Evanston/Northshore; Sarah’s Inn of Oak Park; Literature for Us All in Evanston; La Rabida Children’s Hospital in Chicago; St. Sabina Church in Chicago; and the Inspiration Cafe in Chicago.
Antonia Contro, executive director of Marwen, says Winfrey’s first, $100,000 gift to the program came at a pivotal time, just after a new facility had opened.
“It was a tremendous boon to morale. It resonated throughout the organization,” on down to other potential donors, she says. “Because so many people know her, it was such a feel-good gift.”
Books and culture
Winfrey’s on-air Book Club, which she stopped after the blow-up with “The Corrections” author Jonathan Franzen then re-started with dead authors, was a direct influence on the city’s One Book One Chicago civic book club, library commissioner Mary Dempsey says.
“We never had any questions about whether something like this would work,” she says.
Oprah’s Book Club, besides boosting sales into the publishing-world stratosphere for many happily stunned novelists, also made it easier for the Chicago library system to establish some 50 book clubs in seven languages at library branches, in part by teaching people what a book club is and does.
“She just brings daily goodwill to the City of Chicago,” says Lois Weisberg.
And Swanson, Winfrey’s first Chicago boss, suggests another intangible benefit Winfrey may have brought to the city. The year 1984, he reminds us, was a time of extreme racial polarization in the city, with Harold Washington having just been elected mayor and white members of the City Council in open rebellion.
“I suppose that made hiring her a little risky,” Swanson says. “To me, she transcended that kind of stuff.” And her instant, virtually unprecedented ratings success seconded the opinion that Chicagoans could find a way to get along.
Perhaps as amazing is that Oprah has been able to retain that ability to transcend race and class and continue to appeal to every woman through her rise to superstardom, through her accumulation of fabulous wealth, through periods where she seemed to be quite openly struggling with whether she wanted to continue doing the show or was even interested in the show she was taping that day.
To watch her now, though, is to see talent reborn. The show cruises along with just impeccable production values, and Winfrey seems firmly in control and fully engaged again, mixing up lighter, more serious and self-help topics and giving her undeniable talent room to play.
The thing that makes her most special, Ch. 7’s Ahern says, is her gift for empathy. You could poll 1,000 women to find the 10 questions they’d most like asked on a topic or of a person, “and those 10 questions naturally pop into Oprah’s mind,” he says.
No less a figure than the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. Finds in her significance extending well beyond television and beyond Chicago.
“She’s one of the most important historic figures in the African-American tradition,” Gates says.
“She’s not a fly-by-night phenomenon. She is an historical force. I’m not privy to what she does in Chicago. I have no idea. But she’s done a tremendous amount of good and she’s made money.”
Gates credits her tremendous empathy and her “capacity to spot trends, to tap into the unconscious of Americans across the color line across the class line, across the geography line, which is why it’s hard to think of her as a Chicago person. I think of her as a 4 in the afternoon person.”
