10 things you might not know about Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is all over the news. She’s got a deal with HBO, she has revealed that her weight has ballooned to 200 pounds, and she plans to broadcast from the Opera House at the Kennedy Center before Barack Obama’s inauguration. So what things could we possibly not know about her? Try these 10:

1. Winfrey’s mother intended to name her Orpah, after the sister-in-law of Ruth in the Bible. But the “P” and the “R” got switched. Biographers have described it as a paperwork error, but Winfrey has said that the people around her in Kosciusko, Miss., simply pronounced it wrong.

2. As a teen, Winfrey was Miss Fire Prevention of Nashville.

3. Winfrey, hired as a news anchor in Baltimore at age 22, was a disaster. She cried while reporting on a fatal house fire. She annoyed the news writers by ad-libbing. She mispronounced “Canada” three times in the same newscast. Her hair fell out after a bad perm. The station yanked her off the nightly news and assigned her to co-host a morning show, “People Are Talking.” It was not a disaster.

4. Movie critics Gene Siskel of the Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Sun-Times appeared on Winfrey’s Baltimore show. The guest ahead of them was a chef demonstrating how to make zucchini bread. He knocked over a blender, spraying pureed zucchini on the interview couch. During a commercial break, Winfrey turned over the couch cushions and wiped off the back of the couch with a copy of the Baltimore Sun. Then she told Siskel and Ebert: “OK, boys, sit down and don’t mention the zucchini.”

5. Winfrey once dated Ebert.

6. For a 1984 episode on blindness during her first year as host of “A.M. Chicago,” Winfrey wore a blindfold for most of a day. That included dinner at Yvette’s. The Tribune’s Inc. column noted that “she didn’t try soup.”

7. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of a Southern California restaurant on Jan. 28, 1985, when Winfrey dined with Maria Shriver and her boyfriend, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Winfrey, a growing force in Chicago, was in California to make her first appearance on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” hosted by Joan Rivers. Her friend Shriver was on the “ CBS Morning News” at the time. Schwarzenegger’s first “Terminator” movie had recently debuted. As they sat in a booth, Schwarzenegger pretended he was Rivers and interviewed Winfrey. She recalled: “He kept pumping me. ‘Why are you successful?’ ‘Why did you gain weight?’”

8. The idea of casting Winfrey in “The Color Purple” came from a TV set in a Chicago hotel room in 1984. Quincy Jones, co-producer of the film, was in Chicago to testify for Michael Jackson in a lawsuit over his song “The Girl Is Mine.” While eating a room-service breakfast, Jones saw the talk show hosted by Winfrey, whom he already knew. He realized immediately that she should be Sofia.

9. In the audience of Winfrey’s TV show, women outnumber men 19 to 1.

10. Oprah.com may be the only Web site that gives advice on tax deductions while also featuring a detailed map of female private parts and recommending three William Faulkner novels.

Source: oprah.com, Chicago magazine, Tribune news services, International Directory of Business Biographies, “Oprah: The Real Story,” by George Mair, “Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook,” by Roger Ebert

mjacob@tribune.com