Oprah: Tom Cruise’s Couch Jumping Was Wilder Than It Seemed

Oprah Winfrey Is Celebrating Two Decades With an Anniversary DVD
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/print?id=1303070
Nov. 11, 2005 - The public, and certainly the comedians, were amazed when Tom Cruise bounced on Oprah Winfrey’s couch proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes, but the talk show queen told “Good Morning America” she had no idea what was going on at the time.

“It was wilder than it was appearing to me,” Winfrey said. “I was just trying to maintain the truth for myself because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And what I was prepared for was the dance that happens when you’re doing celebrities — when you know they’re not going to tell you, but you’re going to ask anyway, and then you try asking another way.”

Instead of the “dance,” Winfrey was confronted with an Irish jig on top of her furniture.

“I was not buying — not buying or not buying,” Winfrey said of Cruise’s declarations of love. “That’s why I kept saying to ‘you’re gone, you’re really gone.’”

Cruise’s infamous appearance on “Oprah” is just one of many celebrity moments on the anniversary DVD celebrating Winfrey’s 20 years on air.

Winfrey has accumulated great wealth over the years — Forbes estimates her fortune to be $1 billion — but said she does not worry about the money changing her.

“You know why? Because you realize this as you get older — you’re still the same person, but you’re older,” Winfrey said. “And that is the same thing with money. I am the same person. I have just grown to be more of myself with better shoes.”

Winfrey said she has learned many things about herself through the years, and that includes big lessons about her weight.

“Now I look at the weight and I understand that the weight is not about anything other than stress and disconnection and that at the time I was in such denial about it,” Winfrey said. “It really was the degree to which I was engaged in the work and disconnected from the rest of my life. And that happens to me all the time. Now I understand it and can get my life back, can pull back to center and find some clarity and understand that when I start eating and repressing feelings that it’s really because I’m out of control and everything else is out of control.”

There are still some things yet to learn and do for Winfrey. If the world were to end in six months, Winfrey said she would go to China because she’s never been to the East, and then she would come home and sit under her trees.

“If the world was ending, I would want to be in the place that I love and nothing better than sitting under my trees with all of my dogs and that’s what I would do,” Winfrey said.

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