“Vanity Fair ain’t gonna get me crying in here, I can tell you that right now,” Oprah Winfrey says, snapping herself out of an emotional memory as pa
“Vanity Fair ain’t gonna get me crying in here, I can tell you that right now,” Oprah Winfrey says, snapping herself out of an emotional memory as part of Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection. Her steely vow aside, the talk show host turned media mogul digs deep while reacting to standout clips from her 40-plus years in the spotlight.
One such pop cultural keystone? Winfrey’s groundbreaking car giveaway, which happened on September 13, 2004, during the season 19 premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey wore a red Celine suit to match the gigantic, glowing bow that topped each vehicle—one for every member of her studio audience. “You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” Winfrey shouted as a way to avoid “pandemonium,” her voice rising above the screeches of the overjoyed crowd. At the time, she had no idea she had coined a catchphrase.
But Winfrey did have a hunch about the staying power of one Barack Obama, a then senator from Illinois, where her show was filmed, whose profile got a gigantic boost from his early appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “Look at how sweetie pie young he is,” Winfrey tells VF while watching footage of an Obama appearance on her show. “I knew then he was gonna be president of the United States. Not only did I know it, I was saying it out loud,” she says, recalling how, at a dinner party, she introduced Obama to high-profile guests including Coretta Scott King, Sidney Poitier, and Maya Angelou. The future president went on to appear on Winfrey’s show multiple times, but that first interview, conducted in October 2006, had high stakes: “I was nervous, and I wanted this to be a good platform for him. I wanted people to see what I had seen.”
Elsewhere in the video, Winfrey sounds off on filming The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg and asking Meghan Markle if she had been “silent” or “silenced” during her time as working royal before her and Prince Harry’s UK exit. “My favorite moment in any interview is when either a person says it out loud—‘I never thought of it that way before,’” says Winfrey, “or you can see in their eyes, something just happened, and they never thought of it this way before.”
That idea is evident in a landmark 2010 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show that saw the host invite 200 male sexual abuse survivors to share their stories while holding photos of themselves at the age of their abuse. “They had carried the shame. They had blamed themselves,” Winfrey recalls. “They had never known that there was anybody else who felt the way they did—not to mention 200 men sitting in a room holding pictures of themselves at the age that they were abused. I just thought that was phenomenal.”
