Gayle King Has the Spotlight All to Herself

Slightly Rich and Slightly Famous

In 1992, when Ms. King’s son Will was 6 and she was an “Eyewitness News” anchor in Connecticut, he told his mom, “You know, I wouldn’t want you to be Auntie O famous. I like you how you are now, slightly rich and slightly famous.’” And that is how Ms. King still sees herself, slightly rich and slightly famous.

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ms. King spent much of her childhood attending an American school in Turkey, where her father worked as an engineer for the United States government. She had a swimming pool and a housekeeper, luxuries that were unheard-of in Ms. Winfrey’s childhood in rural Mississippi, where her teenage mother worked as a maid. “She was the first black person I’d ever met who wasn’t hit by her parents,” Ms. Winfrey said.

The two met in their early 20s at a Baltimore TV station, where Ms. Winfrey was an anchor and Ms. King a production assistant. A snowstorm hit the area and Ms. Winfrey let Ms. King, who couldn’t get home, crash at her house and borrow her clothes. They stayed up all night talking. The next day they went to a Casual Corner at the mall. Ms. King was blown away that Ms. Winfrey could afford two $19.99 sweaters.

“We were two black girls who loved being black, who loved the experience of growing up black girls in America, and we felt our value system was very much the same — our dreams were the same,” Ms. Winfrey told me. They had grown up in different types of homes, but they both experienced racism and were taunted for talking and acting ‘‘white.” (It didn’t help matters that they both loved Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond.) “Both of us,” Ms. Winfrey said, “grew up as black girls striving to do better in our lives.”

As Ms. Winfrey rose to supernova stardom, “my friend Gayle” became a known entity to “Oprah” viewers, along with the intimate details of her life: her children’s births, her husband’s infidelity. Ms. King served as a special correspondent on the program and had her own show on Ms. Winfrey’s Sirius XM station, Oprah Radio. In 1999, Ms. King joined O, The Oprah Magazine as an editor-at-large and monthly columnist of “The World According to Gayle.” Ms. Winfrey even asked Ms. King to take over “Oprah” when she wanted to focus on movies, but at the time, Ms. King didn’t want to leave Connecticut, where her children were close to their father, her ex-husband.

She had her own short-lived “Gayle King Show” on Ms. Winfrey’s cable channel, OWN. “It was essentially Gayle sitting in a chair talking to viewers, and she was in her moment of glory,” Ms. Winfrey said, noting that Ms. King is often late to meet her because she’s been chatting with her cabdriver. Ms. Winfrey blamed herself for the show not catching on. “Nobody told me that nobody programs cable in the mornings,” she said.

By 2012, when Chris Licht, then the executive producer of “CBS This Morning,” asked Ms. King to audition for the show, the low-rated OWN was getting skewered in the press. “I said to Oprah, ‘Can you imagine the headlines if I leave OWN?’ They’d say, ‘It’s so bad, even her best friend is jumping ship,’” Ms. King told me. Ms. Winfrey insisted she do it. “For heaven’s sake, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for,” Ms. Winfrey recalled telling her friend.

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