When it comes to “the gold standard” of friendships look no further than Gayle King and Oprah Winfrey.
The besties first met in 1976 and they’ve been inseparable ever since. Now, both women who are very much powerful figures in their own right share with The New York Time the secret to a friendship that’s endured for nearly five decades.
As most people know by now, Winfrey and King met when they worked at the same TV station in Baltimore, Maryland. And they have a snowstorm to thank for hyper charging that friendship. The story goes King couldn’t get home one night due to the inclement weather, and it was Winfrey who invited King to stay at her place that night.
They bonded like sisters, and the rest is history.
“We sort of became the gold standard for friendship,” Winfrey tells The New York Times. “I actually think that is deserved.”
It’s true.
At the start of the interview, King recalls how complete strangers will walk up to her and introduce themselves in a very unique way.
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“At the airport on Sunday, these two people walked up to me and said, ‘This is my Oprah. No, she’s my Gayle,'” King says. “Or I’ll be walking and someone will hand me their phone and say, ‘Hey, could you say hi to my Oprah?’ Oprah, you get that, too.”
“All the time,” Winfrey responded. “Still, people will always say, ‘This is my Gayle. ‘She’s my Gayle.'”
And their secret to an everlasting friendship? For starters, being brutally honest with each other.
“She is a blunt truth-teller,” King says of Winfrey. “Even if you don’t want to hear it.”
They also genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and apparently, they also share quasi-telepathic powers.
“Sometimes we’re both thinking, ‘I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork right now. Oh, my god. Why am I here?'” Winfrey says in reference to events she’s attended in the past. “A couple of times Gayle has said, ‘Should I hand you my fork?'”
There’s also zero envy between the media mogul and CBS Mornings co-anchor. Well, maybe except that one time.
It was back in July 2021 when there was a unique scenario in which King admitted she wished she was Winfrey.
“I did have one time where I was like, ‘Man, I wish I could do that.’ You know what that is?” King asked her pal in a video for Oprah Daily.
“I know. The only time that I’ve ever sensed a hint of, ‘Man, I wish that was me…'” Winfrey recalled. “And that was when I was singing on stage with Tina Turner.”
“And you got to come down those steps and dance with her,” King noted of the 1997 performance.
“Gayle said, ‘I wish I could do that,'” Winfrey shared, before turning to her friend, and saying, “But you can’t sing!”
“Can you?!” King retorted.
During an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April 2021, King also became emotional while discussing what King has meant to her all these years.
“I never had therapy — I had all my therapy on television in front of all of y’all — and what I realized is that Gayle was my regulation,” she told Barrymore. “It makes me want to cry now thinking about it. Every night after the show, I would come home, and I would have these sessions with Gayle where we talked about what happened on the show, or what didn’t happen on the show, and that was the way I kind of regulated myself. So, I would talk to Gayle before bed, and then I would be calmer.”
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