Word: chicago
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Oprah Winfrey is making a lot of money (close to $12 million annually from her syndicated show alone) and living it up. She resides in a sleekly decorated three-bedroom Chicago apartment with a panoramic view of Lake Michigan, spends lavishly and unapologetically on clothes, and jet-sets around the country to such events as the Tyson-Spinks fight...
...rarely seen on the Chicago social circuit, and spends most of her nights at home reading. "I read in themes," she says. "One year it was black authors. Another year all the books I was supposed to read in college but didn't. This is my spiritual summer." Her current fave: A Course in Miracles, a spiritual text that offers positive-thinking lessons for life. Her boyfriend, Stedman Graham, a former basketball player, is now based in North Carolina as vice president of a public relations firm; they usually see each other every couple of weeks...
Oprah breathed new life into the ratings and repeated the trick seven years later, when she became host of WLS's struggling AM Chicago show. The program, which went national in September 1986, has won a huge following by focusing -- unduly, say some critics -- on the often bizarre nooks and crannies of human misfortune. "There is a commonality in human experience," Oprah contends. "If it's happened to one person, it has happened to thousands of others. Our shows are hour-long life lessons...
...life lesson of its own. Oprah landed the part by a stroke of harmonic convergence. She read Alice Walker's novel, gave copies to friends and said she felt destined to appear in a movie version. When the film's co-producer, Quincy Jones, turned up in Chicago to testify in a lawsuit, he saw Oprah's show and arranged an audition. Oprah regarded the entire experience with near mystical awe. "It was a spiritual evolvement for me," she says. "I learned to love people doing that film...
...driven black woman. "She is one of the most directed people I know," says Dori Wilson, a Chicago publicist. "She wants to go straight to the top." Yet she is trying to relax a bit, cutting back on her travel and free- lance good deeds. "I used to take every phone call from a guy who said he would jump off a building if I didn't talk to him. But I no longer feel compelled to aid every crazy. For two years I have done everything everyone asked me to do. I am now officially exhausted." And unofficially still...