Oprah Winfrey and close friend Maria Shriver were on Hoda Kotb’s pod cast this week and the topic of real friends came up.
It makes sense, really, that Oprah would keep just a choice few as her nearest and dearest. When you’re worth billions you never know who you can trust.
O said she doesn’t ‘have a lot of friends’ and has hardly ‘expanded that circle’ since meeting Gayle King and Maria Shriver over four decades ago.
‘So, I don’t have a lot of friends. Everybody knows Gayle [King]. There’s Gayle, there’s Maria, there’s Bob [Greene]. And that’s — that’s about it, you know?’ Oprah said.
‘Gayle and Maria I met around the same time,’ she added. ‘And I never really expanded that circle. Until recently, I’ve become friends with a couple of people in my later adult life, in the past five years.’
Maria agreed that Oprah has always had a ‘core little group’ that hasn’t changed much throughout all of her big life changes, which she thinks is ‘awesome.’
‘If I’ve had a dinner for Oprah’s birthday, it’s the same — she has a core thing there, and you feel safe in that core friendship,’ Maria said.
I respect that. Although I’ve seen her throw shindigs that were several hundred deep and she referred to them all as friends.