Oprah Winfrey has been busy with some preemptive spring cleaning, auctioning off 300 of her own items in order to raise $600,000 for her charity, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy College Fund.
The legendary talk show host said she knew things had gone amiss when she found herself remodeling her bathroom around a hand-carved onyx bathtub, she said in the issue of O Magazine set to hit the stands Feb. 18.
According to a Daily Mail sneak peek, Winfrey wondered how she had come to be so fixated on an inanimate object.
The tub, she realized, represented much more than a place to soak after a long day.
"It represented wealth. And 'I've truly made it,'"' she explained. "It made me feel special. Lots of people have nice houses, but not many have a hand-carved-out-of-one-piece-of-onyx tub."
The time came, she realized, for a purge.
"When you're coming into your own, nobody ever teaches you how to ask for less," she said. "But over the years, you begin to make distinctions; you start to focus on what's important, and you start to realize what's superfluous."
Winfrey selected 300 such items and on Feb. 8 opened them up to the highest bidder.
According to the Los Angeles Times, among those possessions Winfrey parted ways with were a set of six 18th century Louis XVI armchairs, which sold for $60,000, a TV Guide cover photo featuring Winfrey for $3,000, a set of crystal lamp bases without shades for $2,500, and canvas banners promoting the star's role in "The Color Purple" for $4,100 and $6,000 - evidence the draw of owning an Oprah Winfrey heirloom was much stronger than the objects themselves.
The whole thing gave the 60-year-old a "midlevel anxiety attack," she revealed in O Magazine.
"For just a split second, I considered bidding on my own folk-art needlepoint rug with the lovely leaf design," she said. "But knowing what you need is more than knowing what you want."
