(
)
Gayle King is starving.
“I’m so damned hungry, I could chomp your leg off,” the newly anointed face of “CBS This Morning” declares, as she bursts into her sparsely decorated temporary blue office — save for a few pieces of art and a birthday flower arrangement in the corner (she turned 57 last week). She sits down on a cream couch to speak with The Post about her new job — and the controversy surrounding it.
But right now, she’s busy directing everyone around her, including one team member who is carrying her Hale & Hearty vegetable soup. (“I’m always on a diet,” she says, noting she left her Jenny Craig meal at home.)
Yes, for the first time in her life, it is Oprah Winfrey’s best friend — not Oprah — who is calling the shots. And CBS, whose morning show is perpetually in third place behind “Today” and “Good Morning America,” is betting on her success. (King debuts Monday in the 7-to-9 a.m. time slot, when she will co-anchor with Charlie Rose and Erica Hill.)
King left Winfrey’s struggling cable network OWN to take this post, and industry critics say she finally managed to escape the domineering shadow of her famous friend. “This is obviously a moment for her to break away,” BigGovernment.com publisher Andrew Breitbart tells The Post. “I’m sure she wants her identity back, even though it’s probably been a good run. As many successes as Oprah Winfrey has had, the OWN network is clearly not working out. [King] sought sanctuary elsewhere, in higher elevation. She’s moving away from a sinking ship.”
Stunning, imposing and towering in her 4-inch snakeskin Sergio Rossi heels, purple Michael Kors dress and mounds of silver necklaces (she has loved the jewelry trend since she read about it in O Magazine, where she is editor-at-large; “I hope you’re a subscriber,” she says), King leans forward and lists the traits she says are part of her brand: authenticity, empathy and curiosity, enunciating each word with the same hypnotizing, melodic singsong for which Oprah became famous.
If CBS’s gamble pays off, it won’t just be Oprah’s mellifluous style of speech, but her pre-cable ratings success that rubbed off on King. It’s been three decades since CBS had a winner in the morning slot, and the network’s reinvention of the show is a wild move.
King has sought advice on how to deal with the pressure of her new role. “I was just talking to my favorite mayor in the whole wide world, Cory Booker, because today is my birthday. He was calling me from the beach in Israel,” she chirps about the mayor of Newark. “He’s there for the holidays, and he and I are very tight, and he’s asking me how’s rehearsal going. He said, ‘I hope you don’t think that you have to go to CBS and become something that you’re not.’ And I went, ‘Well, Cory, this isn’t my first rodeo.’ ”
Indeed, King could almost be the rodeo queen, after years of apprenticing for Oprah and working as a reporter and weekend TV news anchor in Kansas City, and later as the anchor in Hartford, Conn., where she toiled for 18 years. Not to mention her work as a special correspondent for “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Good Morning America” and, most recently, “The Gayle King Show,” which ran on OWN from Jan. 10 to Nov. 17 last year.
“This is a woman who had prior award-winning experience,” says Mark Ebner of hollywoodinterrupted.com. “I understand the dollars-and-cents motive [to go to CBS]. If she’s got a network gig, she’s making several times what she would have been making at OWN — her friendship with Oprah notwithstanding.”
King was raised in Bethesda, Md., in a far more privileged household than her best friend. Growing up, she spent many years in Turkey, largely around white people. She says, jokingly, “I have a lot of whitebread and WASP-y friends,” and when she goes to a Barry Manilow concert, “I will go and count the black people.”
She and Oprah famously bonded back in 1976, when Oprah, then a new anchor on Baltimore’s WJZ-TV station, wouldn’t let King, then a production assistant, drive home alone through a snowstorm. The two of them spent the night at Oprah’s pad, talking and gossiping, realizing they liked the same people in the office — and disliked the same ones, too. As Oprah rose to talk-show dominance and became one of Forbes’ wealthiest women, audiences around the country learned that there was one constant in the talk-show queen’s life: her “best friend, Gayle.”
Over the years, King, a psychology and sociology double-major from the University of Maryland, has been Oprah’s only form of talk therapy. “When you look at her life, the fact that she hasn’t had therapy and is still so friggin’ normal is astounding. We talk all the time.” King, on the other hand, isn’t averse to counseling. She says that before she ended a 10-year marriage to her lawyer husband, Bill Bumpus, in 1993, “I had extensive marital counseling. I’ve been to five different marital therapists. Five different ones. And I’m still divorced.”
So is there a possibility of future romance between King and her new co-anchor, Charlie Rose? King laughs. “Wouldn’t that be hilarious? At the press conference [announcing the show], I said, ‘We’re lovers.’ Now, see, I can say that because we’re not. If we were, I wouldn’t say it at the press conference.” She grins. She adds that Rose is an icon who loves to “play,” and the two, so far, have demonstrated great synergy.
King and Rose were Plan B for the job after ex-congressman Joe Scarborough and veteran correspondent Mika Brzezinski decided to stay put on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. King credits the CBS show’s executive producer, Chris Licht, for giving her the chance. “I’m thinking Chris Licht suggested me and hired me for a reason. He really is . . . my new best friend.”
King’s eyes gleam. She realizes, of course, the mere utterance of the phrase “best friend” is enough to send the tabloids into a frenzy. In November, Wendy Williams — who wondered on-air if Oprah and Gayle’s famous friendship might be on the rocks — claimed Oprah sent her a letter dismissing the notion. King says she called Oprah as soon as she heard the gossip.
“I said [to Oprah], ‘Did you write a letter?’ And she goes, ‘What are you talking about?’ I go, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen it, but I hear [Williams is] reading a letter that you wrote her.’ And she goes, ‘I never wrote a letter.’ I think somebody in p.r. released a statement.”
Williams was among several gossip hounds spreading the idea that Oprah and King had fallen out after she left OWN. But King says her decision to move on came from the career opportunity of a lifetime, and nothing else.
“I love the TV show at OWN, and it’s not like I was unhappy. That’s the thing. There was just something about this. And, of course, I talked to my daughter, Kirby [25], and my son, Will [24], and Oprah — that’s my counsel, those are my consiglieri — to ask them, ‘What do you guys think?’ And Oprah, without hesitation, said, ‘Oh my God. If that works out, there’s no way you should not do that.’ She said your whole life has led you to this. Because she knows what a news junkie I am.”
King says she knew the gossip columns would turn to questions about their relationship being on the outs, but that Oprah reads none of the tabloids, so it doesn’t bother her. King, on the other hand, reads them all. “Sure enough,” King says, “in the tabloids the next day, it says, ‘Oprah begs Gayle to stay,’ and ‘Gayle slams the door,’ and ‘They’re fighting.’ It was just so ridiculous.”
Does she laugh about it with her best friend? Hardly. Oprah shuts her down.
“No. 1, she doesn’t pay any attention to it. I do. I’m buying it. And she’ll say, ‘Don’t even read it to me; I don’t care.’ And, ‘You shouldn’t even take it in.’ She goes, ‘Don’t even read it to me.’ I’ll go, ‘Let me read you this part.’ She goes, ‘Gayle, don’t even read it to me because I don’t care.’ But if I’m standing at the counter, and I see my face on the front page . . . I’m buying it! I see my name and my picture? I’m buying it. Yes I am. Just because I want to know: Now what are they saying? So, no, there was never any kind of issue or problem, ever. Not even kind of.”
Oprah has widely praised King, saying that her friend has now reached the “sweet spot” of her career in taking on this new job. This leads to the question: Is King finally glad to be known simply as “Gayle King” and not “Gayle King, Oprah’s Best Friend”?
“I never run away from that. Never,” King says firmly. “You know, I know people must think, ‘Oh, God, doesn’t that ever get old to you?’ And this is what I say: When you have a true best friend, you know what that is. No. 1 and No. 2. The truth of the matter is, unless you lived in Connecticut, where I anchored the news for 18 years and won three Emmys, or unless you’ve lived in Kansas City, the main reason you would know me is through Oprah. Because Oprah, for years, has talked about her best friend, Gayle. That’s how you would know me.”
Still, doesn’t King, who will continue on in her editor-at-large position at O magazine, have any desire to perhaps one day start a G magazine for “Gayle”?
“Stop talking, crazy lady,” she says. “Stop talking. My name is Gayle, not Oprah. No, I have no desire. This,” she says, looking around her new office — a room of her own — “is a dream. This is a dream.”
mstadtmiller@nypost.com