Dr. Feelgood

Hey Oprah, read any good books lately?: Oprah Winfrey with Star Jones, left, at Ebony Magazine's pre-Oscar party on Feb. 24, 2005. AP Photo/Matt Sayles.

If she weren’t already one of the most important cultural figures of our time, it would be fair to call this “an Oprah moment.” The billionaire media empress is celebrating the 20th year of her eponymous daytime show. She kicked last season off by giving everyone in her studio audience a car. Last month, she released a 17-hour anniversary DVD compilation (with proceeds going to Oprah’s charitable Angel Network foundation). Dec. 1, her first theatre venture, Oprah Winfrey Presents The Color Purple, opens on Broadway, the same night she makes an appearance The Late Show with David Letterman, ending a years-long feud between the two television hosts.

For 20 years, Winfrey has been cannily balancing her you-go-girl familiarity with a shrewd business sense. More than 49 million Americans tune in to her show — which is aired in 121 countries — each week. She graces every cover of her magazine O, which boasts a circulation of 2.6 million, and her book club has 700,000 members. She was only the third woman, after silent-film star Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball, to build her own studio. Harpo Productions produces Oprah, as well as Dr. Phil and TV movies like the Halle Berry vehicle Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her influence is unprecedented: a nod from Oprah can make a film a hit or a book an instant bestseller; inclusion on her annual holiday “favourite things” gift list ensures a similar spike in sales.

Americans may have gone to bed with Johnny Carson, but it’s Oprah Winfrey who’s told them what books to read and how to find the perfect bra, how to raise their kids and keep their marriages intact. She’s also taught them about the impact of the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the plight of children sold into prostitution and what the rest of the world thinks of the U.S. post 9/11.

Oprah is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream: she’s become extraordinarily rich, but kept a common touch. She may count Nelson Mandela, Patti LaBelle and Toni Morrison among her dearest friends, but she still hates her thighs. In fact, watching Oprah’s 20-year evolution on the DVD reveals one of the most interesting themes of her career: the symbiosis of her success and her self-loathing. Her ego is both outsized and yet underdeveloped. The irony in telling millions of adoring fans how difficult it is to love oneself is, apparently, lost on her.

The source of her appeal is no secret: she is undeniably likeable on camera, funny, easy and intimate with her guests and audience. Like her one-time theme song, I’m Every Woman, Oprah is relatable, from her very public struggles with weight and her many fashion infractions (in the DVD commentary, she admits that “good taste was a long time in coming”), to her frequent onscreen tears, her affection for her dogs and her soft-focus spirituality (she keeps a gratitude journal to list everything she is thankful for). She is your best pal, the girlfriend who will pour you a margarita, tell you honestly how your bum looks in your jeans, encourage you to have a breast exam and fill you in on the plight of women working in Chinese sweatshops. All without ever making you feel guilty about, say, fretting about how your bum looks in your jeans.

Her populism has made her somewhat of a joke among the intelligentsia, which tends to be a little incredulous that someone like Oprah — that is, a black woman who tackles mainly “women’s issues” — has so much cultural clout. But ultimately, even they can’t deny the power of Oprah. When The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen expressed concerns about participating in Winfrey’s book club for fear it would cheapen his novel, he looked liked the pettiest of snobs — someone who was happy to write about the travails of a middle-class, middlebrow Midwestern family, but who didn’t want actual middle-class, middlebrow Midwestern people reading it. Winfrey briefly retired her book club following Franzen’s very public hissy fit, only to return several months later with a list of classics that not only got America reading Leo Tolstoy and William Faulkner again, but sent them to the top of the bestseller lists. Take that, Franzen.

Full Nelson: Winfrey with former South African President Nelson Mandela at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Meyerton, South Africa on Dec 6, 2002. AP Photo/Themba Hadebe.

That Oprah has triumphed, and so spectacularly at that, is a testament to her drive and talent. “Everybody told me I wasn’t going to make it,” she says on the DVD commentary. “Let’s face it, nobody who ever looked like me — overweight, black, female — [ever did].” But Oprah did, by playing into the stereotype of the strong, plump, nurturing black woman and deftly using it to her advantage by disarming guests with her soulful, sister-friend persona. Watching her handle a roomful of racist whites in an early 1980s show about a county in Georgia that refused to integrate reveals the kind of fearless, poised, pull-no-punches reporter she might have been had she not opted to become a talk-show host.

Winfrey began her media career when she was still in high school, working at a radio station. At 19, she was anchoring the television news in Nashville. In archival footage, she is preternaturally smooth in front of the camera, kibitzing with her subjects and covering even the hokiest human-interest story with zeal. But it wasn’t until she got a job co-hosting a Chicago talk show that she says she truly felt at home. By the time she was 30, she had her own show in Chicago; on the advice of Roger Ebert, she quickly signed a deal to have it syndicated nationally. Within months, she had stolen the crown from the inventor of the talk-show genre, sensitive guy Phil Donahue. For 19 consecutive years, The Oprah Winfrey Show has been number one in daytime ratings.

To her credit, Winfrey has used her singular platform to highlight previously taboo issues like divorce, sexual abuse, domestic violence, addiction, abortion and depression. She’s also been extraordinarily generous with her wealth, most recently donating $10 million to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Without preaching, she has gently encouraged her audience to open their minds by befriending openly gay celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and by living a life that is, by Red State standards, unconventional. She is childless by choice and lives with her longtime boyfriend, public-relations executive and former basketball player Steadman Graham. Despite critics who suggest that her fame, wealth and crossover appeal have somehow made her less authentically black , Oprah has always championed civil rights. “I don’t come to any of this without an acknowledgement of where I’ve come from,” she says. “I know it’s not a small thing to be a former coloured girl — Negro, black, now African-American — in the United States of America with a media forum that is in the homes of millions. I didn’t take that lightly. And to this day, I don’t take that lightly.”

Her modus operandi may have tended more towards uplifting the race — in Oprah’s eternally optimistic worldview, education is all it takes to conquer the ignorance of prejudice — than fighting the power, but she is hardly a sellout. A show on the 35th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas brought together the Little Rock Nine with some of their former tormenters, who apologized for their racist intolerance. It may have been weepy and manipulative, but it also demonstrated the real possibility of social change. Winfrey is even willing, at times, to challenge the party line. During the racially divisive O.J. Simpson trial, Winfrey, despite her usual celebrity sycophancy, believed he was guilty. “I wanted to shake [Simpson supporters] and ask them, ‘Are you crazy?’” she says. She took some hits for her position, but as she explains in the DVD commentary, she believes in thinking for herself, not along race lines.

More than anything, Winfrey embraces the power of the makeover, physical, spiritual and material. There is no bosom too saggy, no house too messy, no psyche too damaged that it can’t be mended by one of Oprah’s aphorisms: “Make the connection;” “Nurture your spirit;” “Love yourself first.” It’s bunk, of course; one of life’s hard truths is that some things are simply unfixable. But that line of thinking is still enticing, especially coming from someone who has lived through so many transformations in the public eye.

Therein lies Oprah’s greatest strength. That for one hour each day, she makes viewers believe that anything is possible.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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