Investor's Business Daily, April 11th, 2007
Oprah Winfrey sure knows about building a brand.
The little girl born in Kosciusko, Miss., wasn't even supposed to be called Oprah. Allegedly, her parents intended to name her Orpah -- a name from the first chapter of Ruth in the Bible -- but the birth certificate had a misspelling.
She hated the name as a child, but also knew she should make the most of what had been given to her.
So when she was 22 years old and a co-anchor for TV station WJZ's 6 o'clock news, she stood up to the corporate suits and image-makers who asked her to change her name.
"They asked would I change my name to Suzy because nobody would ever remember or pronounce Oprah. That was another good decision I made, to keep my name," she told CNN's Larry King in 2003.
Her life has been full of tough decisions. From concluding at age 9 that it would be best for her to hide a rape committed on her by a cousin, to revealing that crime years later by sharing it with millions of viewers on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," to choosing to defend her name by acquiring ownership and production rights of her show from ABC, to pouring $10 million into building a school for girls in South Africa, Winfrey writes her own story.
"I think the real job of your life is figuring out what is the job of your life," Winfrey, now 53, told King.
Grade-A Education
"The one element, the prevailing element in my life that has allowed me to not be embittered or feel discriminated against is that I had education," she said in Henry Gates' book "Finding Oprah's Roots."
Born in 1954 -- the same year as the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, a year that Winfrey noted was remarkable for really giving people "a sense of hope ... to believe that life could be better" -- she spent her first six years in Mississippi with her maternal grandparents, Hattie Mae Presley and Earlist Lee.
The seeds of her broadcasting career were sown there. Presley taught her Bible verses and the shapes of letters, and at age 3 she was reciting verses to crowds at her grandmother's house and at church.
By the time she was in kindergarten, she was an avid reader and quick learner. On her first day, she was so bored she thought she was going to "lose my mind with these kids sitting there with their ABC blocks. So I wrote my kindergarten teacher a letter. I sat down and I wrote: 'Dear Miss New.' And I wrote down all the words that I knew. I said, 'I know words,'" she told Gates.
The teacher was aghast at her edge and sent her to the principal's office. Still, Winfrey made her point. The next day she was in first grade and soon got bumped to third grade.
She spent the next eight years shuffling between her parents' houses. It was while living with her mother, Vernita Lee, in Milwaukee that she was sexually abused and became a rebellious and promiscuous teenager.
At 14, she was pregnant and sent to live in Nashville, Tenn., with her father, Vernon. Winfrey's baby died weeks after he was born, and she turned to her father, who instilled in her a discipline she had not known.
Vernon Winfrey stressed to his daughter the importance of education and insisted she learn new vocabulary words each week or she would go without dinner. She got a radio job with WVOL while still in high school, and was granted a scholarship to study communications at Tennessee State University.
At 19, Winfrey became the youngest person and first black woman to anchor the news for WTVF in Nashville. Three years later she was co-hosting the evening news, and up came the request for a name change, which she famously denied.
By 1978, Winfrey was co-hosting a local TV talk show. When she moved to TV station WLS in Chicago to host the struggling talk show "AM Chicago," she took it to the No.1 slot within a month, beating out top dog Phil Donahue.
"The Oprah Winfrey Show" first aired on Sept. 8, 1986. Soon it entered national syndication.
For 20 years it has been the No. 1 daytime talk show, garnering Winfrey and the show 35 Emmy Awards.
She was the first woman to own and produce her own talk show, which today has a Nielsen-estimated 48 million U.S. viewers a week. The show is aired in 117 countries.
"There is a commonality in human experience," she told Time magazine's Richard Zoglin in 1988. "If it's happened to one person, it has happened to thousands of others. Our shows are hour-long life lessons."
"We look for projects that show individuals being responsible for themselves," Kate Forte, Harpo's executive vice president, told Time. "It's all about seeing human beings as active creators of their lives rather than as passive victims."
In 2003, Forbes magazine reported that she was the second black American to reach billionaire status and the first black woman to do so. Today the magazine estimates her fortune at $1.4 billion.
She has interviewed scores of celebrities and politicians -- she considers Nelson Mandela one of her closest friends -- plus makes everyday people a part of her show. She has been named several times to Time's list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
A fanatic reader, Winfrey launch- ed a national book club through her show in 1996. While ratings slip during these episodes, publishing industry execs figure her endorsement leads to 500,000 extra books sold, equal to $5 million in revenue for a book's publishing house. "What she lacks in journalistic toughness, she makes up in plain-spoken curiosity, robust humor and, above all, empathy," wrote Zoglin. "Her conversation is a mix of calm self-assurance ... and down-home sass."
In 1985, a year before her show aired, Winfrey drew critical acclaim for her appearance in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "The Color Purple." After being nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her role as Sofia, she formed Harpo Productions; the name is Oprah backward, coincidentally also the name of her character's husband in the film.
In her three decades in the entertainment industry, Winfrey has had only four real partnerships with: King World Productions for distribution of her show, ABC television for production of Harpo Entertainment Group's movies, the Oxygen network for syndication of her show, and Hearst Magazines for O, The Oprah Magazine.
"Oprah brings us the hard truths of life as well as the evidence for change," wrote activist Gloria Steinem in a 2005 piece for Time.
Going Global
Winfrey's effort to spread the message of active change has spilled beyond the TV screen and onto the political and international stages.
In 1993, President Clinton signed the "Oprah bill," so named because Winfrey drafted the law's first blueprint. It is known as the National Child Protection Act, which created a national database of child abusers.
And in January, she opened the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls-South Africa, located in Henley-on-Klip in Gauteng province, for girls in grades 7 to 12.
"By making herself and her struggles central to her message," Patricia Sellers wrote in a 2002 Fortune article, "she taps deeply into the American psyche and its desire for self-reliance."
"I am just saying every day you have to work at making it great," Winfrey told King. "There's not one day when you sort of lay back and say that was it. ... because you still have tomorrow."
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
