Olesker: Oprah's Secret to Success—Be Yourself

The Oprah Winfrey Show wraps things up on Wednesday, and all of America can’t get over it.

She’s made billions of dollars. She’s got millions of adoring followers. As she leaves to breathe life into her very own network, everybody wonders: How did so much magic happen to one woman?

They should look to her years in Baltimore, where the secret came to her one glorious morning when she co-hosted People Are Talking with Richard Sher on WJZ-TV.

Oprah discovered honesty in front of the TV camera.

Who could have imagined such a thing? TV reporters are marketed as instant experts on everything they cover. It’s their public persona, even when it happens to be absurd. One day they’re covering a street shooting, the next struggling to dissect a state budget, and the next day faking insight into global warming – all under deadline pressure.

Oprah realized a simple truth: If you don’t understand something, admit it. You’re a surrogate for the folks watching at home. Ask the puzzling question, even if it makes you look silly. Chances are, viewers have the same question.

So there was Oprah, on People Are Talking, interviewing a chef from a Baltimore restaurant. This was not exactly typecasting, since Oprah used to joke that she knew nothing about cooking, and nothing about life in the kitchen.

As the chef attempted to prepare a turkey in the studio kitchen, Oprah picked something up from the counter and asked, “What’s this?”

The studio audience, mostly women, chuckled.

“You never saw one?” the chef asked. “It’s a meat thermometer.”

Behind the scenes, producers started losing their minds. They thought she looked idiotic. In the control room, an associate producer (and future reporter) Sandra Pinckney, said, “Lord, where has this child been?” A producer named Sherry Burns scribbled words on a pad and raced to the studio, trying to signal Oprah to move on. Burns had no chance.

“Isn’t this the best thing you ever heard of?” Oprah asked her audience. She couldn’t get over it. “Every kitchen should have one.”

Instead of laughing at her, the studio audience loved her for it. They found it endearing. She was trusting them. She wasn’t afraid to look naïve or silly. She wasn’t afraid to say what she didn’t know.

Oprah sensed the breakthrough, and that she’d found her medium. People Are Talking became a blockbuster. In a time when The Phil Donohue Show ruled the airwaves, Oprah Winfrey and Richard Sher crushed him in Baltimore’s ratings and, once their show was syndicated, in markets around the country.

It was an era of relentless triumph for WJZ-TV, and a time of redemption for Winfrey, who’d been brought here as co-anchor for the legendary Jerry Turner and was instead bumped out of the chair in a matter of months.

She was too young, too inexperienced – and she was deflated and humiliated when she lost the job.

But then came a station manager, Bill Baker, who paired her with Sher and created People Are Talking. The show lasted most of a decade with the two co-hosts, and Oprah never lost the openly honest – if you don’t know something, just ask approach– even when it made her look clumsy.

Once, they had Siamese twins as guests, 32-year old women who were attached at the top of their heads. They talked about going through life sharing everything.

Oprah blithely asked, “When one of you has to go to the bathroom at night, does the other one have to go with her?”

The question just popped into her head, and out it came.

Over the Baltimore years, Winfrey and Sher interviewed Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barry Levinson. They built one show around sexual orgasms on a day when their studio audience happened unfortunately to be comprised entirely of a Baptist church congregation. On another rough day, they had Alan Funt show some comic clips from his Candid Camera show. Unfortunately, the studio audience that day was students from the National Federation for the Blind.

But, good days and bad, the show dominated the ratings, and Winfrey was learning to do interviews with her smarts and her naiveté on open display.

When she left Baltimore for Chicago at the end of 1983, there was a farewell gathering at the Café des Artistes Restaurant here.

“I remember when I first came here,” Oprah said, glancing at newsroom colleagues gathered around the place. “I would drive around town just crying.”

She started to weep a little. She mentioned the city’s historic row houses.

“I didn’t understand why they were all stuck together,” she said. She was still the little country girl who had come to the big city.

Now she’s got a whole country to call her own. And it started here, with a simple truth: Be yourself. The folks at home will love you for it.

-

Michael Olesker broadcast nightly commentaries on WJZ-TV from 1983 through 2002. His book, "Tonight at 6: A Daily Show Masquerading as Local TV News," published by Apprentice House, is based on those years.