The Oprah Seal of Approval

CHICAGO —  The ladies had come all dressed up for a few hours out with their best friend. They lined up patiently on the sidewalk of a Chicago warehouse district, bundled in their nicest shopping coats and smartest outfits, eagerly awaiting a sublime afternoon of gossip and enlightenment.

There were 200 of them (along with a sprinkling of men), 196 too many for an intimate table. When you are sitting down to watch Oprah Winfrey dish, you squeeze in where you can.

The 200 who clutched tickets to the recent afternoon taping of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” inside Winfrey’s Harpo Studios complex were the lucky few among the estimated 15 million to 20 million viewers who treat their regular dalliance with Winfrey as a treasured moment in their day.

On this uncommonly warm Chicago winter day, many of the women in line carried more than their tickets. Dozens of them held copies of “She’s Come Undone,” a well-received 1992 novel that Winfrey had asked them to read. These days, the queen of talk is doing more than talking. She is advising her audience on what to read, what to listen to, how to live. And by the hundreds of thousands, Winfrey’s devotees are taking her advice.

Talk show pretenders have chipped away at her ratings in recent years, but Winfrey remains at the head of the sofa chatter pack, thriving on her uncanny ability to fuse mundane reality and angst with the remote gloss of celebrity status. To her fans, Winfrey is the understanding girlfriend who knows their hidden emotional scars, their dietary yo-yoing, their love for unabashed romance, seemingly one of them even though she is what they are not--a talk show host-film star-studio executive who oversees an entertainment powerhouse worth $415 million.

“She’s like the friend you always connect with, the one who catches you up on her life; you know, the one you confide in,” says Maryann Koehl, an airline worker from Palatine, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago, who sometimes tapes the Winfrey show when she is on the job, even on the day she joined the 200 other “Oprah” addicts in line to see the talk show host in person. “She’s down to earth, a real natural. When she talks, you just don’t listen. You want to listen.”

As concerned friends will sometimes do, the nation’s girlfriend has lately gone on a reclamation project. Not content with improving viewers’ waistlines and taste in bedsheets, Winfrey has asked her audience to join her in “Oprah’s Book Club,” reading serious literary fiction and discussing it once a month on her show.

The results have been nothing short of seismic since the book club was announced last September. At Winfrey’s suggestion, legions of viewers have trooped out to bookstores and bought hundreds of thousands of copies of four recommended novels, catapulting authors Jane Hamilton, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Wally Lamb (the author of “She’s Come Undone”) and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison onto bestseller lists.

Insisting she is only a “conduit,” Winfrey says she is stunned by the results of her reading campaign, despite a documented ability to pump up the sales of self-help, exercise and cooking books.

“It’s the most exciting thing in my television experience,” she says, “the ability to get people to experience words. Not only do I bring them into bookstores, but I’m hopefully introducing them to new ways of thinking. You have to be grateful to have that kind of impact.”

Her overnight success at winning new converts to pedigreed reading--accomplishing what the publishing industry, the public school system and the organs of the nation’s literary establishment have failed at in recent decades--has been scorned by some as a new low in the pop culture zeitgeist.

“Doonesbury” cartoonist Gary Trudeau zinged Winfrey for the obvious paradox of a television figure urging her viewers to read more, a practice that, Trudeau needled, might eventually put her out of business.

There has been sterner criticism. “The carpet bombing of the American mind,” scoffs New York literary critic Alfred Kazin, dismissing Winfrey’s--and television’s--effect on the nation’s dwindling reading culture. And a recent article in the New York Times Book Review suggested that Winfrey had become one more “gatekeeper” in an increasingly segmented publishing industry.

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Despite the carping, Winfrey has found altruism. A two-year ratings slide prodded her to reinvent her show, and the changes have both stabilized her core audience and freed her to experiment with new formats that appear to have magnified her influence. She is no longer merely the nation’s most popular talk show host. She is fast becoming a cultural tastemaker, as much a force to be reckoned with in her medium and her time as Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan and Walter Cronkite were in theirs.

“I think the reaction against Oprah is sheer intellectual snobbery,” says culture critic Camille Paglia, who has occasionally been a guest on the Winfrey show. “The idea that a black woman with a devoted audience could have this kind of impact jeopardizes [her critics’] role as tastemakers.”

Every day, publishing houses besiege Winfrey’s producers with copies of everything from novels to cookbooks, hoping a lucky manuscript will wend its way to Winfrey’s night table. And Winfrey’s ability to work similar wonders on record sales--artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Yanni and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince have seen sales figures tick up after Winfrey appearances--have led record company bookers to plead regularly with anyone at Harpo (for the uninitiated, Oprah spelled backward) to approve their acts for interviews.

Competitors within the television industry, too, are taking notice. Rival syndicators are already touting design queen Martha Stewart and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell as budding tastemakers in their own rights. Veteran programmers have begun to refer to Winfrey as the personification of “branding”--this year’s media buzzword, a reference to a talk show host’s credibility factor.

“The rest of the talk shows are just tissue,” says one television industry analyst. “ ‘Oprah’ is Kleenex.”

Inside Fortress Oprah, amazed staffers arrive each morning to face yet another round of letters, pitches and come-ons. Alice McGee, the show’s senior supervising producer, is deluged with 50 new books each week, all sent by publishers desperate to win Winfrey’s recommendation.

“I tell them their chances are greater hitting the lottery or being struck by lightning,” says McGee, who showed up one recent morning to find 14 boxes of unopened mail.

McGee, a 12-year veteran of the show, is Winfrey’s self-proclaimed “book buddy.” For years, the two women have shared reading enthusiasms and showered each other with books as gifts (last year, McGee gave Winfrey first editions of every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel dating to 1918). As the book club took off late last year, it was McGee to whom Winfrey turned for help in developing its format and deciding which books would be knighted as book club candidates.

“We have been our own little book club for the last 12 1/2 years,” Winfrey says.

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The decision to try the book club came last August after another “Oprah” producer, Laura Grant, mentioned to Winfrey that her mother was in a reading club. Grant wondered aloud if the Winfrey show might mimic reading clubs--a growing phenomenon across the country--in a televised segment.

Winfrey had turned down previous proposals to feature authors and books on her show. But this time, she agreed to try. Her willingness to experiment with the book club came at a time when the show’s ratings and future were in doubt.

Winfrey’s talk show, which led the Nielsen Station Index with a 34% audience share in November 1991, had been slipping. By mid-1996, the show’s audience had dwindled to a 23 share. McGee blames much of the drop on Americans’ temporary obsession with coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. (The syndicated program runs on 205 domestic and 132 foreign stations and is shown in Los Angeles at 4 p.m. on KABC-TV Channel 7.)

But there were other factors, including the rise of youth-directed talk shows like Ricki Lake’s and, more recently, O’Donnell’s. And there was a sense of drift within Harpo. Several ranking producers and executives left the show last summer, reportedly during an internal rift over control issues. Most resigned quietly, but one former publicist claimed that the studio was torn by “dishonesty and chaos.”

Winfrey’s core audience was drifting off.

“She was getting too predictable,” says Christina Dziadula, a Des Plaines, Ill., homemaker who began channel-surfing to other talk shows for a spell last year before she returned to Winfrey this winter. “She was trying too hard to compete with Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer.”

Others saw her as becoming too much the aloof celebrity, no longer their special television girlfriend.

“She was getting high income, highbrow, highfalutin, and it obviously wasn’t working,” says Janeen Bjork, director of programming at Seltel, a prominent television rating analysis firm in New York.

At Winfrey’s prodding, the producers began an overhaul, jettisoning shows that spent entire hours on gossipy subjects, replacing them with faster-paced programs broken down into two and three segments. A celebrity interview might be followed by a segment on people who hide their best linens when guests arrive.

It seemed to work. The audience share held, then rose. Winfrey’s audience share is now up to 24, and though still far from its 1991 peak, it still leads that of all other talk shows.

And Winfrey’s show maintains a commanding lead among total households and women viewers. Although newcomer O’Donnell has shown overnight success, particular among younger women, Nielsen ratings from January showed Winfrey leading O’Donnell nearly 2 to 1 among women in the 25-to-54 age group and more than 2 to 1 among total households.

With tighter, shorter segments, Winfrey’s producers found room to experiment with their 10-minute “Oprah’s Book Club.” Still, fearing that any segment geared toward serious reading would bomb, Winfrey was careful to position the first book club toward the end of the broadcast.

The plan was for Winfrey to call on her viewers to read one novel a month. Winfrey and a selected group of four viewers would then join the author for a dinner discussion of the book, which would then be taped and played back for a larger audience.

The fact that it worked not only righted the course of her show but, according to Winfrey, reaffirmed her own sense of going by the gut. Her newfound ability to affect the buying choices of her viewing public on a regular basis has given her new clout as a telecaster and set the standard for O’Donnell, Stewart and her other talk show rivals.

“It’s a great lesson to me in moving on your heart and something you care about and having it work,” she says. “For years, I debated whether we could segment the show. But I was afraid to make the move because of how we’d be compared to other [talk show] people.” The changes, she says, have “opened up” the show, allowing her “to do what I want to do. If someone merits an hour, they get an hour. If not, I can fit two or three of them in, whatever fits in the pace of that show.”

Her renewed sense of relaxation seems to be penetrating to her audience. “Oprah right now is a god,” says Vicki Abt, a Penn State University sociologist and American studies professor who has written “Coming After Oprah,” a book analyzing Winfrey’s success. “She has probably the highest Q [popular identification] rating of anyone on television. There may be better interviewers and smarter people elsewhere on TV, but no one markets charisma like Oprah does.”

The first outsider to learn about Winfrey’s plans for the book club was Patti Kelly, director of publicity at Viking Penguin. Kelly was in the middle of a phone conversation with Mitchard, author of the critically well-received “The Deep End of the Ocean,” when Winfrey called.

“[Patti] got an interrupter beep,” Mitchard recalls, “and when she got back on with me, she said it was Oprah calling. [Oprah] told her, ‘We’re gonna create the biggest book club in the world and the first book we want to do is “The Deep End of the Ocean.” ’ I think she was flying by the seat of her pants at that point.”

Still, Winfrey was astute enough about her past successes at selling books to warn Kelly “that we should be prepared” to print thousands of extra copies of Mitchard’s book.

Viking had already printed 100,000 copies of Mitchard’s book in response to a favorable early buzz among critics and industry savants. The publishing firm printed 150,000 more hardback copies after Winfrey’s call. Between Sept. 24 and Oct. 4 of last year, Viking scrambled to keep up with the demand from Winfrey’s viewers, printing 400,000 more copies. In all, 800,000 copies of “The Deep End of the Ocean” have sold in hardback since Winfrey announced it as her first book club selection.

“This has made my faith in the American intellect and its capacity for heart and mind go ‘boom,’ ” Mitchard says. “Not because it’s made me gobs of money but because I figured people were afraid of serious books. What Oprah has done is take the fear out of reading.”

That success is even more dizzying considering that the Winfrey show was initially deluged with complaints from viewers that Mitchard’s hardback was priced too high at $23.95, prompting Winfrey’s subsequent decision to ask her readers to buy only novels already in paperback and to request that publishers donate 10,000 paperback copies of each new book club selection to local libraries.

Although several senior “Oprah” executives regularly join Winfrey and McGee in vetting each new book selection, the final selection, McGee says, often comes in chance meetings inside the studio. Last month, Winfrey made the decision to go with her most recent book club selection, Ursula Hegi’s dense “Stones From the River,” while she sat in her makeup room minutes before taping a show.

The selection of a new book club choice may be informal, but its announcement has become nerve-racking. Once notified, publishing firms race to print hundreds of thousands of new copies yet are obliged to keep the new selection secret until Winfrey announces it on a taped show.

That secretive process is complicated by the show’s need also to inform the typically stunned author. When Winfrey called Lamb, the Connecticut author recalls, he was convinced that a friend was playing a prank. Lamb kept his selection a secret, but word almost leaked out when a Winfrey film crew showed up to tape Lamb teaching English at the high school where he works.

“They’ve been at it four times now and they’re still working out the kinks,” Lamb says.

Musical guests appear on the Winfrey show in a more predictable manner, booked by record companies when an artist has a new album to sell. But unlike “Saturday Night Live” and the Letterman and Leno talk shows, which feature songs by musical guests as brief moments of counterpoint to their comedy skits and celebrity talk, Winfrey allows her guests to perform and then talk alone with her in segments that last up to 15 minutes without interruption. That kind of tailored attention persuaded media recluses Prince and Madonna to steer away from the nighttime variety formats and appear on “Oprah” when their new albums premiered in recent weeks.

“She’s able to focus completely on the guests,” says Warner Bros. publicity director Bob Merlis. “It’s a great way to get your acts on. It’s not like a typical talk show where the band goes on and then they roll the credits and you wonder, ‘Who did I just listen to?’ ”

Winfrey’s effect on record sales is not as drastic as it is on fiction, but it is still impressive. An appearance last June by Warner Bros. artist Quincy Jones led to an immediate bump in the sales of his album “Q’s Juke Joint.” After a spell of declining weekly sales in the 7,000 to 9,000 range, the album sold 22,239 copies the week after Jones’ appearance and 23,000 more during the next two weeks.

Music industry analysts have noticed the “Oprah effect” ever since Thanksgiving week of 1990, when an appearance by new age singer and keyboard stylist Yanni jolted his album, which had just fallen out of the Top 200, into the Top 80 rankings.

“Oprah doesn’t hide her emotions,” says Geoff Mayfield, chart director for Billboard magazine. “She lets her audience know who she likes, and she knows exactly what their likes are. That means you don’t get groundbreaking new acts on her show. But it also means that when she calls attention to an artist she likes, her audience will respond.”

The afternoon that Winfrey’s audience of 200 showed up with copies of “She’s Come Undone,” the host was having the kind of day, she gushed, “you just dream about.”

Her favorite female R&B; singer, Tina Turner, had flown in for an interview. Lamb, still stunned at Winfrey’s ability to prod Pocket Books into printing a “near-million” copies of his novel, was in town too, nervously preparing to meet Winfrey’s audience and hear their verdict on his book. Several cast members from the TV sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun” were backstage for an interview designed to goose their own weekly ratings.

And waiting outside were Oprah’s women, just as eager as Winfrey to take it all in--the stars, the discussion, the laughs, the emotion and, at the end, the chance to hobnob, if even for a brief moment, with their favorite TV girlfriend.

“She’s like the one friend you trust, the one you know has good taste,” says Maryann Koehl as she nears Harpo Studios’ audience entrance. “You stick with a girlfriend like that, you know?”