Investigation of a person (Oprah's profile)

The following passage is a profile of a person — a biographical sketch intended to give a sense of the person's appearance, behavior, character, and accomplishments. These paragraphs are part of a profile of Oprah Winfrey written by journalist Joan Barthel that appeared in Ms. magazine.

Here Comes Oprah!

A profile of Oprah Winfrey is not just the story of a survivor, though she obviously is one: besides that bottom-line day five years ago [when she wrote a suicide note], she's survived early adolescent years so troubled that she became a runaway and was nearly placed in a juvenile detention home.

Nor is it just a success story of a black woman who's made it in the white man's world of network television, though she's done that, too. At 19, she was anchoring the news in Nashville — the first woman, the first black. She worked for seven years in Baltimore, first paying her dues as a TV street reporter, "hating every minute of it," especially when she was required to ask a woman who'd just lost her children and her house in a fire how she felt. (When she didn't have the heart to do that piece, her boss told her to get it or lose her job. She came back to the studio with the story and, on the air live, apologized for it.) She did everything she was told, including trying to remake herself. "They told me my nose was too wide, my hair too thick and long, and they sent me to a place in New York to get my first perm. I felt the lotion burning my skull, and I kept saying, 'Excuse me, this is beginning to burn a little.' They kept saying, 'Oh, just a few more minutes.'" Within a week all her hair had fallen out. "You learn a lot about yourself when you're bald," she says now.

Nor is it even a rags-to-riches tale, though her dazzling condominium apartment (marble floors, four baths, including one with a gold swan as the tub faucet and another with adjoining sauna) is a glamorous world apart from the Milwaukee housing project where she spent part of her childhood. "I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good," she declares. "I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good."

Knowing did not always mean doing, though. Which is why a profile of Oprah Winfrey is, mostly, a look at a woman in process.