Oprah Winfrey says her brand is about love. This I heard in her interview with Piers Morgan (left) in his debut appearance on the CNN talk show, Piers Morgan Tonight.
Morgan said her brand was more about therapy, but she insisted it was love. “Money doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t buy you the opportunity to open your heart to love,” she said.
She was then asked how many times she had properly been in love at which point she turned rather coy but said that when people stood in and stood up for you, that’s what love is.
She sees her role in life as “evolving people to the point when they can love.”
As for sex, well, as a teenage girl, Oprah got into trouble and got pregnant at 14. She knew she couldn’t tell her parents because her father had said he’d rather his daughters die than bring shame to the family.
“When the baby died, I knew it was my second chance. Nobody knew. If they did, the entire trajectory of my life would not have happened.”
She then said she wasn’t the marrying kind and if she had married, she certainly wouldn’t be by now. As for kids, and despite Morgan gushing, “You’d make a fantastic mother”, Oprah is also clear – “Mother? No. I am a good godmother.”
Morgan also gushed – he did a lot of gushing, I recall – that she’d make an excellent politician and she should run for office. On that, she was also clear. You have to know your lane and stick to it, she said.
“I know my lane. My compassion is for anyone who is struggling – whether job, love and life.”
Saying she had earned every single salary, she said, “When I am gone, everything goes to charity. I don’t have children.” Oprah is valued by Forbes at US$2.7 billion.
To Oprah, money can pave the way to happiness. That, and the media platform she has created of course. She believes her “supreme moment of destiny is bigger than myself, more than me owning shoes and houses – but how I can be used for something bigger than myself.
“I know how to use it.”
I got a distinct feeling that Oprah seems to have come into her own with her OWN network but found myself hoping that she wasn’t starting to take herself too seriously. I have great admiration for her as a media person and believe hers is a uniquely American story.
Morgan was definitely a happy puppy though at the end of the interview. I use the canine analogy because the former Fleet Street journalist who gained game in America as a judge in America’s Got Talent behaved mostly like an adoring pup eager to please the mistress of talk shows.
Reviewers in the US used adjectives like “enthusiastic and effusive”, “charming, vain, well informed, and fawning – but mostly just fawning”. Hank Stuever from The Washington Post said it “turned out to be a fawning and completely unnecessary interview”.
Morgan’s last question reminded me of my dog who’s worked for his treat and sits waiting for his reward. He asked, almost coquettishly, “How did I do?”
When she said, “Surprising”, he giggled, “Surprisingly bad?”
And she replied gamely, “You have been surprising and that’s a good thing because who doesn’t want to be surprised?”
You could almost see Morgan wagging his tail.
