Aretha Franklin sang “Amazing Grace.” Tom Hanks acted as host for the evening. Michael Jordan, who led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships during the 1990s, told Winfrey she inspires him. Tom Cruise, famous for his couch jumping on Winfrey’s show, was there. Jerry Seinfeld wore a tuxedo to give a comedy routine. And Madonna said she is among the millions of people who are inspired by Winfrey.

“She fights for things she believes in, even if it makes her unpopular,” Madonna said.

Winfrey announced in November 2009 that she would end her popular talk show after 25 years. Tuesday’s taping will air May 23 and 24, before Winfrey’s final show on May 25.

“You always had the power, and that is the message you brought into our lives,” Cruise told Winfrey.

The show highlighted Winfrey’s charity efforts over the years. About 300 Morehouse College scholarship students walked along the United Center aisles as Kristen Chenoweth sang “For Good” from the musical “Wicked.” Grammy winner John Legend was beamed in from a New Orleans school and Winfrey’s book club was lauded for getting millions to read.

Josh Groban and Patti LaBelle sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as Winfrey sat in a white chair onstage. Jamie Foxx and Stevie Wonder sang “Isn’t She Lovely” to Winfrey. Wonder followed with his own song, singing to her, “Oprah thank you for using your gifts to uplift so many hearts.” Simon Cowell made an appearance; Rosie O’Donnell sang a Broadway-style song.

Winfrey’s longtime partner, Stedman Graham, introduced Franklin after telling Winfrey he loved her and was proud of her.

“It really does amaze me that I get to be around a woman who changes people’s lives every day and who also takes her own lunch to work,” Graham told the crowd. “You know what really is amazing? You have done this, sweetheart, through all of the sacrifices you’ve made, humility you have and through God’s amazing grace.”

That’s when Franklin took the stage in a one-shouldered white gown to sing “Amazing Grace.” She later joined Usher for the show’s finale song, “Oh Happy Day,” as sparkly confetti filled the arena.

Maria Shriver, the TV journalist and Kennedy heiress, appeared on the same day it was revealed her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, fathered a child with a woman on his household staff more than a decade ago. Shriver did not mention her husband during the taping.

“You have given me love, support, wisdom and most of all the truth,” Shriver told Winfrey. “And I know I’m not alone in receiving those gifts from you.”

The taping of the second show began with Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who thanked Winfrey and told her she mothered millions and “that puts you in the status of a goddess.”

Actresses Halle Berry, Queen Latifah, Katie Holmes and Dakota Fanning all appeared, along with newswoman Diane Sawyer.

Beyonce sang her song “Run the World (Girls)” backed by dozens of dancers. Rascal Flatts performed too.

“Oprah Winfrey, because of you women everywhere have graduated to a new level of understanding of who we are, of what we are and most of all who we can be,” Beyonce said.

The stadium was decorated with pictures of Winfrey at seminal moments over the course of her talk show. Boxes of tissues were on scattered seats throughout the audience.

Harpo Productions received more than 154,000 ticket requests for seats to Tuesday’s event. Tickets were free and distributed to fans through a lottery.

Winfrey also received messages from some less-famous admirers. Female American soldiers gave a taped message from Iraq and three female fans from countries around the world came on stage. The show was interspersed with clips of Winfrey’s fans and flashbacks of previous episodes.

Fans started lining up outside hours before the taping started.

Bessie Carroll, 70, of Chicago came to the show with her daughter.

“I think we’ve gotten everything we could have and more than we should have from her,” Carroll said. “If she feels it’s time to go, we have to release her and let her enjoy her life.”

Mashonda White, 41, an engineer from Aurora, called Winfrey an inspiration.

“She’s a blueprint of what I would like to become,” White said. “She never takes anything negatively. She always makes it positive.”

Celebrities such as Lisa Ling, Carson Kressley, Jessica Seinfeld, Ally Wentworth, Bob Greene and former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley sat in the audience.

The content of the final episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” is still under wraps.

——

AP reporter Alicia Rancilio contributed to this report.

After anointing his harrowing memoir of addiction, “A Million Little Pieces,” her book club selection back in 2005, the daytime queen was none too thrilled when the Smoking Gun  uncovered what it called “A Million Little Lies” in Frey’s narrative, including his boasts about his criminal record. Though Frey initially brushed off the inconsistencies by saying the book reflected “the essential truth of my life,” persistent nagging questions about his history and the characters in his book, including his tragic girlfriend “Lilly,” kept arising. His publisher, Random House, had to hastily rebrand the work as fictionalized and Frey added an apologetic note to his readers. Worse for Frey, in January of 2006, was that he had to do the march of shame and come on “Oprah” for one of her most blistering hours ever aired.

“I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate. Absolutely,” he told her then, to which she icily replied, “OK.” And when she grilled him about his drugged-out persona: “Did you cling to that image because that’s how you wanted to see yourself? Or did you cling to that image because that would make a better book?” he cringed, “Probably both.”  By the end of the hour, Frey had officially replaced Paris Hilton as most despised memoirist ever.

Yet two years later, it was Winfrey who was expressing contrition for her part in the fiasco, calling Frey to say, “I feel I owe you an apology.” And on Monday, as part of the Most! Exciting! Finale! Month! Eveeeeeerrrrrrrr! the man who conned the Big O herself returned to face her scrutiny. In a subdued pretaped interview, free from the scorn of an audience that does not regard him as one its favorite things, Winfrey and Frey sat down to answer those lingering nagging questions, process their feelings, and let the healing begin.

It’s clear that Frey, who has gone on to create terrible movies and the controversial, awful contracts-dispensing Full Fathom Five publishing house, has had his share of ups and downs over the past five years. On Monday afternoon’s show, he described being pursued by the paparazzi and hit with lawsuits after his disgrace. And he affirmed one of the more fascinating aspects of the strange tale of his blockbuster pseudo memoir: that it had been originally pitched as a novel.

As Frey explained it, “I’m more influenced by artists than writers. Let’s say you look at a cubist self-portrait. It doesn’t look anything like Picasso. So when I was writing the book I was thinking of it like that.” He went on to cite his influences — Celine, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac. “They tried to make art out of what they lived,” he said. “They were just trying to tell a story.”

For Frey to be inspired, as many writers have, by the heavily embellished storytelling of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac makes sense. Have you ever read “The Autobiography of Mark Twain”? It’s brilliant. But those authors Frey so admires were working in a very different era and within a different set of literary constraints. The memoir of today comes with an expectation of truth — one that, by the way, anybody who’s heard of Google can check up on. Even if you’re David Sedaris, writing in the vein of broad humor, when you slap the word “nonfiction” on a book  there are going to be stick-in-the-muds out there who expect your work to not be fiction. As in made the hell up.

You can do fictionalized versions of your life. They’re called novels and plays and every movie Woody Allen’s ever made. But they’re presented as fiction. Frey, instead, told Winfrey, “There came a day when a decision was made. I went out and promoted it as a memoir. “

Frey’s major public shaming will serve forever as a window into the aggressive, hit-hungry world of book publishing, and the spectacular pressure on writers to sex up their tale, regardless of whether it’s accurate. But when Frey told Winfrey, “I don’t have a lot of respect for memoir. I think most writers of memoirs do what I do, you play around with things, you tell the best story you can,” it was a flabbergastingly cheap and lazy shot.

As someone who’s written a memoir, who has good friends who’ve written some fantastic memoirs, I think it’s safe to say that memoir doesn’t have a whole lot of respect for Frey either. How you tell a story is crucial; memory is maddeningly pliable and suggestible; and friends and family sometimes need the protection of concealed identities. But any writer worth a damn, any editor with a shred of integrity, would no more sell a piece of imagination as the truth than they would peddle a box of Kool-Aid as a case of Screaming Eagle. And Winfrey seemed to sense this Monday.

A woman who’s spent 25 years on television being remarkably candid about her weight struggles, about her drug use, about her painful history of sexual abuse, about her family’s long-hidden secrets — and become a television legend in the process — may not have the highest threshold for the “Nan Talese had a party and Kurt Vonnegut was there” excuse.  Though Oprah maintained a cool, polite tone with Frey throughout, even asking him if he felt she’d been fair in her original confrontation (which he described as an “ambush,” though he said he “deserved it), she kept her face locked in the “Oh really?” expression throughout.  And if Frey were really so impressed with Vonnegut, he might have realized he was standing in the presence of a great man who knew how to craft a story and still show respect for the readers who were paying for it. A man who once said, in the kind of observation that seems totally lost on Frey, that “The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

“Oprah apologized to James a couple of years ago, and he appreciated it. So he agreed to go back on her show and talk about everything that’s happened over the last five years.”

Sorry, I missed that: What did Oprah apologize to James Frey for? Calling him out on lying about his memoir? Creating a firestorm that drew enough international attention that James was able to create a writer-factory to churn out teen alien romance novels, befriend artists and intern for Gawker? I actually think Oprah should be apologizing to us, not Frey.

Oh, and in case you are wondering what Frey’s been up to in the last five years (besides not paying people to write “I Am Number Four”), he’s been writing a book designed to tap into the lucrative “Christian Outrage” market:

“The Final Testament of the Holy Bible,” out tomorrow …  in which the Second Coming of Christ takes place in the Bronx projects — but the messiah turns out to be a former alcoholic who impregnates a prostitute. It’s being published in a limited edition of 10,000 copies by Gagosian Gallery and as an e-book by Frey and WME.”

Hey, Oprah, I know you only have a couple of shows left for your syndicated program, and you’re probably thinking that since the Frey scandal was such a huge deal five years ago, this would remind people of some of your bigger stories. But please don’t let this dick come on your show and give him even more free publicity for his tour of smugness.

I’m just hoping that the fact that your people refused to comment on this story means it was something James leaked himself in an effort to force your hand into letting him back on again. And for all our sakes, I hope you don’t. Because, in truth, I would watch that show. I would hate myself for it, but the ratings would be amazing.

Salon spoke to Lofton over the phone about Oprah’s message, the daytime guru’s own skeptical views of religion, and what our love of Oprah tells us about the American hunger for help and guidance.

What was it about Oprah that made you think of her in the context of American religious history?

Within these very corporate formats of daytime television, extraordinary forms of suffering were being confessed to and described. There’s a great book about Oprah by Eva Illouz, “Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,” and Illouz points out something that I dig into, and that is the strange way in which the extremity of human despair — not merely estranged spouses, we’re talking stories of people coming home and seeing that their spouse has murdered all their kids and then themselves — are being dealt with in the same way as these topics that are seemingly shallow. Good glasses for a spring party, best new strategies for boyfriend wear. This exposure of human need at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon made me think, “What is this thing?” We’re so accustomed now to reality programming and a whole spate of shows spun off from Oprah, but, as a scholar of a religion, I think it’s one of our jobs to be cued into how people manage pain, and the idea of evil, or whether or not we live in a just world.

What is Oprah’s religious background?

Oprah talks about a Baptist church that her grandmother took her to in Mississippi. She tells an anecdote about how she was a successful young churchgoer and was asked to preach in front of that audience and was a very good girl who memorized scriptural passages. Then in her adulthood, she has some criticism of male figures in the church and the dominance of male authorities and it seems that by the time we get to the ’90s, it’s circulating that she’s no longer a member of the church but she continues to use Christian idioms in her conversational speech. She says, “Jesus lives.” She’ll say, “Amen.” She’ll occasionally sing lines from obviously Protestant hymns, but she claims now that she’s no longer interested in organizational religion, and she’s more interested in a personal relationship with God. Indeed, she has around her a large collection of spiritual purveyors of a wide variety: Buddhist, Hindu, Unity Church. Every flavor of the contemporary, spiritual rainbow is welcomed into her studio.

What does our reverence for Oprah say about our culture and religion in America today?

I think it says that most Americans see very little that is contradictory about connecting consumption and spirituality. I think it also shows that no matter how anti-establishment, or anti-authoritarian, or freedom-hungry Americans claim to be, they are also, always, hungry for help. Hungry for recognition. Hungry for guidance in the mad excesses of the American material world. Hungry for someone to limit their choices a little, and offer some discriminating preferences on your behalf.

If Oprah is a preacher, what is she telling us? What is her gospel?

Her gospel — her good news — is you. The good news is that if you take hold of your life; if you discover (as she says) your best life, anything is possible. Of course, this good news is translated not only through her exhibition of you — you through her audience members, guests, columnists, message board commentators — but also through the unending rehearsal of her. The good news is her revelations about her best life — lived, she says, in service to you.

Why do you think so many people who shun religion are comfortable looking to Oprah for “spiritual guidance”?

Precisely because she says she doesn’t seem typical in her authority. Because she represents — in her race and gender and origins — being utterly outside established power. Also, she isn’t preaching to sell you something singular. She says, over and over: I am here to let you be you. My answers are mine, and they made my struggling life something fantastic to share. You’re not joining a group, you’re just finding your inner fabulous. This is appealing to people who associate religion with controlling authority, rigid dogma or social adherence. This is a religion for those who don’t want to be religious, but want to feel revelation.

You connect Oprah to early traditions in American evangelical preaching. Not just her charisma and eloquent speaking ability, but less obvious connections. Can you explain that?

I connect her to two figures — George Whitefield, a prominent 18th century minister, and Charles Finney, a 19th century minister — who weren’t merely interested in spreading the gospel but also eliciting conversion. There’s an idea that a gospel is true if the purveyor is willing to talk about how it’s made. Oprah does that every time she does a show about “Oprah without makeup” or a confession about her weight gain — this is her showing the strings of her own construction.

The other tradition I connect her to is the emergence of women as evangelical preachers, who always had to be conscious that they were being somewhat insurrectionist to the Word by even being out in the public. Oprah tries to appeal to an audience that wants to see a successful and capable woman without being too perfect. She can’t be too obnoxious in the face of the conservative domestic idea that we still have for women. So Oprah isn’t married nor does she have children because if she had those things and was also trying to be Oprah, her audience would be uncomfortable. That she is free to minister only to them and is not responsible to a domestic life actually puts her in a long line of preachers with similarly ambiguous lives.

What do you think of Oprah after spending so much time scrutinizing her?

I think that I’d be doing a great disservice to her work if I don’t emphasize that her viewers take from her inordinate comfort and a life that they describe as asking too much of them. The second thing that I think about is the extraordinary American fact of her. She talks about this a lot too, and this is where she becomes a great subject for me. She is an indication of the American dream. I’m interested in how that dream is unbelievable, extraordinarily powerful, and possibly corrupt.

As a Chicago native, I remember when going to the “Oprah” show was something you did for an afternoon’s pleasure. If my sister was coming “downtown,” as all suburbanites call the city in Chicago, we’d call WLS and see if we could get tickets to see Oprah. A nice lunch at the Wishbone down the street afterward, and she’d still be able to get on the Stevenson expressway before rush hour to get home to her husband and kids. I was on camera a few times with Oprah too, asking questions, and back then she would shake everyone’s hand in the audience after a taping. Oprah was a hometown girl and more accessible in the late ’80s and ’90s, before she was OPRAH and tickets were as hard to get for her show as they were alleged to be for the Bozo show when I was a kid. But times change, and I’m in Los Angeles now, and she has an empire, so she just isn’t as much “mine” as she once was. I don’t watch the show much, but this last season has sucked me in, and she’s on the DVR now, which is much easier to do than it was to program my VCR back in the day.

Good lord. “Back in the day”? I suppose it’s 25 years later whether I like it or not, and I’m typing on my computer instead of writing in my Moleskine journal. My dear friends, the comedy duo Frangela, used to use the phrase “There was a time in this country” on their radio show to hilarious effect. They, and I, and I suppose all of us who have found ourselves in middle age, look at the world through bifocals and see how things have changed, for better and for worse. And last night, Oprah had a show that touched me in ways I couldn’t have imagined she still could with “Coming Out on the ‘Oprah’ show: 25 years of Unforgettable Guests.”

Oprah began the show by quoting a statistic that in 1987, 70 percent of Americans thought homosexuality was a sin. On one hand, I found that shocking; on the other, I remember 1987 all too well. In 1987, I was 22 years old, drifting in and out of college, and grappling with my own sexual identity as it related to my family in general, and my father specifically. My father had gotten to a point since I came out in high school where he saw my “lifestyle” as my “choice,” one that he hid from others and preferred I not share with anyone outside of our family. What he didn’t realize then was that he had raised a fighter, one who took his staunch liberal values to heart. My father and I were more alike than either of us ever realized, and it breaks my heart that he died too soon, in 1988. But because he was a decent if flawed man, the last thing he said to me, on St. Patrick’s Day 1988 when neither of us knew we would never see each other alive again, was “I love you.” In the last 22 plus years since his sudden death in June of ’88, I’ve often wondered where our journey would have taken us had we been blessed with more years together. What would he have thought when Dick Gephardt, a man he knew and respected, was featured in the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So” in 2007, talking about his lesbian daughter?  Knowing my father, a man hungry for growth and new knowledge, he would be a member of PFLAG at this point. I’ll never get to find out.

But this is about me and Oprah, and last night, she provided me with a show that spans my adult life, and through her clips from the last 25 years, I could remember what it was like to have those haircuts and wear those clothes, and what it was like to assume that most of America couldn’t stand me. I remember Greg Louganis coming out as gay and HIV positive on her show, and I remember going to the bookstore to buy his book the next day. (Not ordering it on Amazon.com, mind you, but going to an actual independent bookstore to buy it.) I remember her show about a small town in the South where the powers that be drained a pool and closed it down because a man with AIDS had gone swimming there. A dear friend of mine came out when she was married to a man and had children with him, and she watched the tape of an Oprah episode about a woman in a similar situation to help her get through it. On last night’s show, one of the guests was a gay man, now happily married and living with his husband in Hawaii, who at the age of 12 had seen Greg Louganis’ episode in 1995. This man, just a boy in 1995 (!), choked back tears as he tried to express to Oprah what Louganis’ coming out had meant to him. Then, when Louganis took to the stage to surprise the young man, he and I dissolved into tears. In this day and age when we are learning so much about teenage bullying and suicide, just to see a gay man say he survived being an adolescent is worth cheering.

This is what real television can mean to real people, and it’s precisely why Oprah is a gay heroine to me. Although she’s not gay herself, she has never assumed that heterosexual privilege meant she couldn’t put herself in another’s shoes. As an activist and liberal, I don’t think it’s enough to have gay friends, or claim to have gay friends, and not do anything about the iniquities we suffer under (Sarah Palin, anyone?). In her own billionaire way, Oprah has managed over the last 25 years to be quite revolutionary.

As our respective communities are wont to say, “You go, girl!”