Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture

more damaging to my health: shooting a piece with the crusty newsman who’d screamed at me. I almost had my own meltdown, and I cursed and screamed the whole way back to meet Mr. Mean. By the time I got to the truck, the guy had fled—I think he was as excited to shoot with me as I with him—and I got a message from New York that instead, I was to meet the very kind CBS News reporter John Blackstone back in town. John and I spent the day driving around neighborhoods formerly made up of brand-new gorgeous mini-palazzos. Now the homes were gutted. We met home owners who had lost everything but inspired us with their gratitude and calm. These victims were different from the people I’d met covering the Great Flood. They were fortunate, and had the resources to rebuild, and though I didn’t know it at the time, in just a few years, and through a series of then unimaginable circumstances, I’d come to know those even newer mansions like my own while making the maiden show in the Real Housewives franchise. That day, we shot until three in the afternoon, and though I was again without sleep, I nearly levitated when I found out that Blackstone had arranged for us to beat the traffic back to CBS Television City (at least a two- or three-hour drive) by taking a helicopter. Landing on the roof of that historic building, once the home of Carol Burnett and Sonny and Cher, made up for the fact that I was wheezing from smoke and smelled like a blast furnace. When I got out, tapes in hand, I skipped across the roof, loudly singing, “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.”

But the truth was, the job was really starting to get to me. Or I was starting to get to me. My emotional disconnect from the stories I was covering was nothing new, but the realization that I was getting better at the disconnect was disturbing. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel anything, it was that I was growing more and more able to put aside the human faces of my stories for the stories themselves. Flying in, helicoptering out as fast as I could—I didn’t know how long I could sustain it.

AHA MOMENTS WITH OPRAH

This is a perfect time in our little story to pause and pay devotion to Miss Oprah Winfrey. Over the course of 4,561 episodes, I logged at least 3,192.7 hours of my life watching Oprah. That’s equivalent to the course hours necessary to earn ten master’s degrees, but Oprah was my academia. And in the course of my studies, I noticed the show’s progression over the years: how she used to hug and touch everybody and run around among them, and then how they just put the mic in the audience and people stepped up to it and Oprah stayed on the stage, at a distance. Finally, the audience members stopped being allowed to talk at all and just fainted and cheered like people who’d been healed by the Reverend Ernest Angley. Despite these shifts, and through all the theme songs (especially the one Oprah recorded herself, and the one with Miss Patti LaBelle), the different set decor and hairdos and weights, Oprah remained one of the best-produced shows on television.

As a TV producer, I was fascinated to see how Oprah’s show evolved from fairly exploitative standard talk show fare to celebrity-driven and public-service programming with the book club and courses in miracles and the Angel Network and a school in Africa. For all of the crap that folks throw around about the idol worship of Oprah and her deified persona, she’s done so much good that the haters should consider just shutting their faces. Oprah’s genius was such that she could make important, newsy topics entertaining and set an agenda no matter what the subject.

I sat glued to every episode of her final season and thought she went out on top. No matter what the issue, no matter whether the audience was expected to be quiet, no matter if she was standing by a Radio Flyer wagon full of fat, Oprah’s personality kept me watching. She is someone whom everybody wants as her or his best friend, myself more than included. But I’m here to tell you, I’ve struck out three times with Lady O. My professional karma with Oprah stinks. And that is something I have to live with every day. And no matter how hard I’ve tried to live The Secret, I’ve had to keep this terrible secret. Until now.

Since the day I started working at CBS This Morning in 1990 I tried to get an “in” with Oprah and somehow get her on our air. I badgered her publicist, Colleen, for years and finally booked a date for O.W. to come into the studio for a taped interview with Paula Zahn, whom Oprah had known for quite some time. She was coming in advance of the Daytime Emmys, for a regular ol’ interview. (Some would say it was a “profile-raising” interview, but since we had none and she didn’t need that, I’d call it a “sympathy interview.”) Simultaneously, I was producing a weeklong series featuring the big talk show hosts of the day—Geraldo, Joan Rivers, Sally Jessy Raphael—in which I had requested that Oprah take part, in addition to her interview with Paula, but which Oprah, via her publicist Colleen, had declined. Looking back, I don’t blame her. Oprah was already in a different league, and she didn’t need to be a part of our series. But I was feeling spunky and decided not to take no for an answer. Oprah’s interview was to be taped after we’d gone off the air for the morning, and we’d timed her arrival so the studio was fired up with Paula in her chair ready to go as soon as Team Winfrey swept in. She arrived wearing a tenty bright green outfit that was, from