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Oprah Winfrey is now admitting that she was once afraid her OWN network would never live up to the success of her daytime TV show.
“All the bells went off. This is why I lived in fear about this network. I kept thinking I have to repeat the 25-year phenomenon of the ‘Oprah’ show. I don’t want to be Michael Jackson,” she tells Fortune magazine, referring to the pop singer once saying he’d never be able to top 1983?s “Thriller.”
But now?
“My fear about, ‘Will the people really follow me?’– I’m past that,” Winfrey says.
Still, getting the network, which is due to launch early next year, off the ground was a challenge.
Winfrey admits she was indecisive about the show lineup, causing backer Discovery Communications to invest an extra $89 million on top of its $100 million launch money, as previously reported. OWN CEO Christina Norman, who joined the network after leaving MTV as chief, was unable to greenlight any series without Winfrey’s input.
“This is part of the reason OWN was stagnant,” Winfrey says. “I was the holdup.”
Also nagging Winfrey: Rosie O’Donnell having her own show after polarizing viewers on “The View.” She brought Tom Freston, Norman and OWN chief creative officer Lisa Erspamer to O’Donnell’s suburban New York home to vet O’Donnell this past June.
Recalls Winfrey, “Rosie said, ‘I know you’re here to assess how crazy I am.’ I said, ‘Basically, yes. I’m doing a crazy check.”
After seeing her kids running around in the back yard, Winfrey says of O’Donnell, “What I found is that she is so generous as a mother.”
But Winfrey banned O’Donnell from airing any grievances on her blog or radio show, as she did with Barbara Walters: “If you have an issue that’s causing a problem, speak to me, woman to woman, so that it doesn’t become a worldwide issue.”
Winfrey downplays that she’s concerned about O’Donnell’s potentially abrasive effect on viewers. “No, it doesn’t worry me,” she insists to Fortune. When asked if she thinks about it, she replies crisply, “Of course.”
She’s also not too worried if the network is not an immediate success. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think it will be.
“No — technically, I don’t think in terms of being in the top 10. But do I think we will be? Yes,” Winfrey says.
According to analysts Fortune cites, OWN could be worth $3 billion or more within a few years — and she owns half of it. Winfrey is worth $3 billion currently.
The Emmy-winning actress who brought the sexually liberated Southern belle Blanche Devereaux to life on the hit TV series “The Golden Girls,” has died. She was 76.
Her manager Barbara Lawrence said McClanahan died Thursday at 1 a.m. of a stroke.
She had undergone treatment for breast cancer in 1997 and later lectured to cancer support groups on “aging gracefully.” In 2009, she had heart bypass surgery.
McClanahan had an active career in off-Broadway and regional stages in the 1960s before she was tapped for TV in the 1970s for the key best-friend character on the hit series “Maude,” starring Beatrice Arthur. After that series ended in 1978, McClanahan landed the role as Aunt Fran on “Mama’s Family” in 1983.
But her most loved role came in 1985 when she co-starred with Arthur, Betty White and Estelle Getty in “The Golden Girls,” a runaway hit that broke the sitcom mold by focusing on the foibles of four aging – and frequently eccentric – women living together in Miami.
“Golden Girls” aimed to show “that when people mature, they add layers,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “They don’t turn into other creatures. The truth is we all still have our child, our adolescent, and your young woman living in us.”
Blanche, who called her father “Big Daddy,” was a frequent target of roommates Dorothy, Rose and the outspoken Sophia (Getty), who would fire off zingers at Blanche such as, “Your life’s an open blouse.”
McClanahan snagged an Emmy for her work on the show in 1987. In an Associated Press interview that year, McClanahan said Blanche was unlike any other role she had ever played.
“Probably the closest I’ve ever done was Blanche DuBois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ at the Pasadena Playhouse,” she said. “I think, too, that’s where the name came from, although my character is not a drinker and not crazy.”
Her Blanche Devereaux, she said, “is in love with life and she loves men. I think she has an attitude toward women that’s competitive. She is friends with Dorothy and Rose, but if she has enough provocation she becomes competitive with them. I think basically she’s insecure. It’s the other side of the Don Juan syndrome.”
Here are some things you are not supposed to love. Practice loving them:
Sex
Money
Yourself
Power
Glory
Fame
Success
Winning
The Adulation of Others
Being Better
Having More
Knowing How
Knowing Why
Knowing God
“THE THINGS YOU WANT MOST”
Yet I tell you this: love, love, love the things you desire – for your love of them draws them to you.
These things are the stuff of life. When you love them, you love life! When you declare that you desire them, you announce that you choose all the good that life has to offer!
So choose sex – all the sex you can get! And choose power – all the power you can muster! And choose fame – all the fame you can attain! And choose success – all the success you can achieve! And choose winning – all the winning you can experience!
Yet do not choose sex instead of love, but as a celebration of it. And do not choose power over, but power with. And do not choose fame as end in itself, but as a means to a larger end. And do not choose success as the expense of others, but as a tool with which to assist others. And do not choose winning at any cost, but winning that costs others nothing, and even brings them gain as well.
Go ahead and choose the adulation of others – but see all others as being upon which you can shower adulation, and do it!
Go ahead and choose being better – but not better than others; rather, better than you were before..
Go ahead and choose having more, but only so that you have more to give.
And yes, choose “knowing how” and “knowing why” – so that you can share all knowledge with others.
And by all means choose to KNOW GOD, in fact, CHOOSE THIS FIRST, and all else will follow.
All of your life you have been taught that it is better to give than to receive. Yet you cannot give what you do not have.