Oprah Winfrey Remembers When Joan Rivers Told Her to Lose Weight on ‘The Tonight Show’
Celebrities are used to late-night talk show hosts taking shots during their opening monologues. But most of the comics don’t dish out the insults right to their guests’ faces. One exception? Joan Rivers, doing one of her regular fill-in spots on The Tonight Show back in 1985, talking to first-time guest Oprah Winfrey.
Rivers, who made plenty of jokes about her own appearance, started by asking Oprah about her beauty pageant experience. Oprah laughed, recalling the time she was crowned Miss Fire Prevention. Rivers couldn’t believe any beauty queen could allow herself to look like Winfrey.
“How did you gain the weight?” asked an incredulous Rivers.
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“I ate a lot,” joked Oprah, clearly trying to move on. But Rivers wouldn’t allow her to change the subject.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Fifty pounds — you shouldn’t let that happen to you. You’re very pretty,” Rivers said.
When Oprah tried to defend herself, Rivers cut her off: “I don't want to hear it. Let me tell you this: You’re a pretty girl, and you're single. You must lose the weight.”
These days, Winfrey understandably has uncomfortable memories of the appearance. She believed she’d just lost a role in The Color Purple due to her weight, and now Rivers was calling her out. “On national television,” Winfrey emphasized this week on The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast. “And I don’t know what to do with that.”
Oprah had no idea how to respond to Rivers’ questions of “Why are you so fat?” other than to joke them away: “I just did, like, ’Oh, I just love potato chips, Joan.’”
But that wasn’t good enough for Rivers, who Winfrey remembers responding with, “Shame on you.”
Rivers also offered Winfrey an odd bargain, claiming that she was trying to lose five pounds herself. “Will you come back with me in March when I’m back? You lose 15 pounds, and I’ll lose five. I’ll do it if you do it.”
“And I accept it. I accept that I should be shamed, because how dare me be sitting up here on The Tonight Show?” Winfrey recalls. “And of course, I didn’t lose the 15 pounds. I went and ate my way to another 10 pounds.”
Winfrey eventually checked herself into a facility to lose weight. “At the time,” she explained, “they called them ‘fat farms.’” She was hoping to drop some pounds after the disappointment of losing the Color Purple role when she received an ironic phone call.
It was Steven Spielberg. “I hear you’re at a fat farm,“ he told Winfrey. “You lose a pound, you could lose this part.”
It was a lesson about appearances for Winfrey, but one Rivers wasn’t ready to learn. Even during Winfrey’s interview, she was obsessed with the weight of other celebrities. When Oprah brought up the previous night’s guest, Nell Carter? “She's still very chubby,” responded Rivers. “She needs to lose more.”
