To earn your few moments in the Presence, you must first sit the test. Read the (famously difficult) book; sit through the (three-hour) movie; submit samples of your journalism for perusal (including one of a specifically "literary" bent); agree to interview all the "talent" in the movie; acquiesce to a publishing embargo that suits the marketing schedule.
Then you wait. And someone, somewhere, decides whether you are a worthy candidate to breathe the same air as the star and - oh, yes, nearly forgot - plug her movie.
Meanwhile, the candidate is pinching herself at hourly intervals to stay abreast of reality. Hell, this is a talk show host we're being offered a few words with, hardly the Oracle of Delphi or the leader of the Free World.
Silly candidate. Celebrities rule; we allow it. Get over it.
Inside the opulent halls of London's Dorchester hotel, five dozen print journalists from as far away as Taiwan are meekly interviewing all the "talent" as instructed, although that fierce clicking sound that accompanies the star's arrival is of tape-recorders being finally switched on. We weren't the first, of course. The day before, dozens of film crews had duly observed the pre-conditions for their seven minutes apiece of "exclusive" chat.
So what's going on ? Well, something fairly remarkable actually. A black woman perceived to be the only begetter of victim television, has produced and starred (powerfully and credibly) in a grim but extraordinary movie, based faithfully on a Nobel laureate's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, on a theme that Americans really, really want to ignore. "What I wanted to do was let people know what slavery felt like and not just what it looked like. Did I want it to be brutal? Yes. Did I want people to come out feeling a sense of devastation? Yes. You can't speak after seeing it."
That's Oprah Winfrey, Mark II. Purely, independently, contemptuously anti-Hollywood - and mighty proud of it too. Just 14 years ago, this was a woman on less than $50,000 a year, so obscure that Steven Spielberg refused to put her name on the poster for The Colour Purple (for which she later won an Oscar nomination). Last year, she pushed Spielberg down to second place as the most powerful person in show business, topped the Forbes list of the top-40 wealthiest entertainers with personal wealth of half a billion pounds, and was adjudged by Time to be one of the century's 100 most influential people. By any standard, Oprah Winfrey is a formidable creature.
Today, her 45th birthday, she sips tea from an outsize mug and is dressed entirely in black in a style sympathetic females recognise as camouflage. Despite the triumphant cover shoot for Vogue in couture corsets, those same ole' 20lbs that she worked off for Beloved have crept on again. "But at least it's not the same ole' 80lbs, like it used to be," she says wryly.
She gets our names and actually remembers some of them, then conscientiously answers the queries thrown up about her weight, her entourage (hairdresser, make-up artist, the best friend, the boyfriend, sometimes the cook and the personal trainer), her private plane (a Gulfstream G4), the farm in Indiana (11 dogs, 12 horses), the penthouse in Chicago, the houses in Miami and Telluride, Colorado (where the tub was sculpted to fit her body), the "100 most influential" tag, the therapy she never had ("talking to so many people and so many therapists on TV, ah figured it out for mah self"). But one gets the sense that honestly, she wishes that we'd all evaporate.
And why not? For one thing, Lord knows, she has heard it all before. For another, she's here in drizzly London to discuss a movie, a deadly serious project that has occupied her every waking moment for 11 years, for whose sake she has had her appearance, intellect, instincts and acting ability dissected and dismissed at every turn. For another, there's a sharp sense that Oprah Winfrey has genuinely undergone some kind of radical life-change, that a major re-assessment has taken place. And that life is too short for this kinda garbage.
So. Under the new dispensation, perpetual victims are out; vulgar, exploitative talk-show hosts are out; moronic Americans who expect to have everything served up on a plate are out; ill-prepared, time-wasting cretins of all kinds are out (which doubtless explains the filtering process we came in with).
What makes Winfrey an arresting and worthwhile interviewee is that she actually says what she thinks. This woman holds back for no "exclusive". She took her time to get around to it, but now that she's at this point, and has grasped the breadth of her power and reach, she will be nobody's creature.
A catalyst was the offer of an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. Although this was hardly an Earth-shattering surprise (she'd already won 32 Emmys), she baulked - because what she needed to do in television was "just beginning". But she went off to review some of her own tapes anyway and as a result decided to use the Emmys as a transition point. ". . . Because it's the end of an era for that kind of television." What kind? "Well . . . exposing the way people feel."
A new sense of mission also emerged from her insights into the slave experience during the making of Beloved. "I've had some bad things happen to me, but I can't even compare that to no free will, the loss of self it comes from . . . that you are owned. What is that? That is the kind of thing that would make you kill yourself and your children, that kind of living death. So you realise - that is where I come from, from a history of people who survived that, to build lives, educate themselves and their children, tried to rebuild themselves . . . What is a self when you've never owned yourself? If they did that, then there's no reason I can't do anything. No reason whatsoever. So then the question became - what will I do? What will I do myself with this life that I've created for myself? That's the place it put me in. I said I will no longer be used by television . . ."
Whoa there. Used? Oprah? Used by television? When?
"Well from the beginning actually. All of us who are programmers in television, to a great extent, you programme what you think will work. You say this will get the number, this is a ratings period, so let's do this because this will work. So in the beginning I would do shows that I felt would get numbers. I'm just more conscious and cautious about it now. I say to all my producers `when you come in here with an idea, along with that idea, you say what is the ultimate intention'. Our intention is that in some way we have a mission statement, that we want in some way to use this show to enlighten, to encourage, to uplift as well as entertain. `Entertaining' isn't good enough."
This sounds a lot like remorse, an attempt to atone. Does she have regrets about shows she has done? "I don't regret because my friend Maya Angelou says `when you know better, you do better' . . ."
It was good for its time, she insists; got all the taboo issues out in the open such as child abuse, sexual abuse, divorce and the reality of the destruction that alcoholism wreaks on families; reminded Americans - whose dysfunction, she reckons, stems partly from the notion that "everyone else's life is happier than ours" - that they are more alike than different. Uh-huh, you interject, but . . . But she's there before you "And then I got tired of it . . .", she booms, rather unexpectedly.
"For many years we spent talking to women who were abused. Battered women: that used to be one of my things. You know" - and the voice drops to a deep, passionate quiver - " `Save the Battered Women'. And then I got tired of it and got tired of women with battered women syndrome. I said - on air - `I'm tired of this, we have talked about it on air, we now know it's an issue, we now know what battered woman syndrome is. What are you now willing to do to change it? I don't want to sit and talk to you about it anymore if you're not willing to do something to change it'. We went through a whole period of `We Have Been Victimised'. We did about two years of that" - and she chants, whingily, hilariously - " `Victims, we're victims, our mothers weren't good enough, we were abused as children, our husbands aren't treating us right . . .' " - then, the stern, control freak voice returns - " `Now, what are you going to do about it?' And that's where I am now".