Yahoo Lifestyle “I Accept That I Should Be Shamed”: Oprah Winfrey Heartbreakingly Recalled Joan Rivers Telling Her She Was “Fat” On National TV
Oprah Winfrey recalled feeling “shamed” by Joan Rivers on national television in the early days of her career.
On this week’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast, Oprah looked back on her very first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1985. Joan Rivers hosted the talk show at the time, and Oprah recalled the late comedian making hurtful comments about her size.
“Joan Rivers turns to me, and she says, ‘Tell me why are you so fat?’” she said on the podcast this week. “On national television! And I didn’t know what to do with that.”
In response to the rude comments, Oprah recalled saying: “Oh, I just love potato chips, Joan,” to which the host — who died in 2014 — replied: “No, seriously, shame on you.”
Heartbreakingly, Oprah said she “agreed” with Joan, who apparently told her: “I’ll let you come back if you lose 15 lbs. You need to lose 15 lbs.”
“She says to me on national television. And I accept it. I accept that I should be shamed, because how dare me, be sitting up here on The Tonight Show,” the media mogul confessed, adding that she and Joan “agreed that [she] was gonna go away and lose 15 lbs.”
After this interaction, Oprah went to a “health retreat” to try to lose weight. “At the time, they called them fat farms,” she said.
Around this time, Oprah was grappling with the fact that her size may have lost her a role in The Color Purple. However, it wasn’t long before she received an important call from the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg, who told her that losing weight wasn’t what she needed to do.
“I hear you’re at a fat farm,” Oprah recalled Steven saying over the phone while she was at the health facility. “You lose a pound. You could lose this part.”
Notably, his call came just as Oprah was beginning to accept that she may not appear in the film.
“The fact that it happened in the instant I know I let it go was the greatest life lesson I have ever received, because I physically felt the release,” she said. “The second I did that it changed.”
As we now know, Oprah landed the part of Sofia, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Looking back, the 70-year-old said that whole experience became her “grounding teaching for the rest of [her] life and career.”
“Do everything you can, work as hard as you can, and then let it go,” she added.
You can find the full episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show here.
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