The Sidekick No More

Her Spanx, actually. And she had help. Production assistants sprinted onto the set of “The Gayle King Show” and, like naughty versions of the birds sprucing up Cinderella, peeled her orange and yellow dress off her. She wanted to be wearing only shape-taming black underwear when she greeted her next guest.

Out came Lady Gaga, to behold Ms. King in all her girdled glory. She smiled, then stopped, because suddenly Ms. King was squeezing back into her dress. The tease, confined to a commercial break, had been a private joke, in honor of Lady Gaga’s unclothed interview on “60 Minutes.”

“If only all of America could see it,” Lady Gaga said to Ms. King, and pouted. “You look nice naked.”

America will have to take her word. Ms. King isn’t ready for quite that degree of exposure. But for something more than being the most steadfast and favored of the moons orbiting around the great planet Oprah? That might be nice.

Ms. King’s cable talk show, which is taped in Manhattan, made its debut just over two months ago, and as her antics with Lady Gaga in late February suggested, she is reveling in the moment — pumped up by her new platform and eager to make an impression on the stars who stream onto her set.

She is, in one sense, one of them. But, in another sense, not. That’s the peculiarity of Ms. King, who is invited everywhere, widely known and constantly mentioned — but almost always in terms of someone else. And while the same can be said of politicians’ spouses, plutocrats’ children and two elder Lohans, it’s rare for such auxiliary glory to come without blood tie or marriage license. Ms. King is a BFF with extraordinary benefits.

And drawbacks, inasmuch as she is partly eclipsed. The first sentence of her Wikipedia entry defines her as the “best friend of Oprah Winfrey.” She says that people who recognize her nonetheless ask: “What’s your last name? I only know you as Best Friend Gayle.”

Her new show appears on OWN, shorthand for the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the sonorous, unmistakable voice you hear introducing it is Ms. Winfrey’s.

Although Ms. King had a distinguished career as a TV news reporter and anchorwoman in Hartford in the 1980s and 1990s, her principal job for the last dozen years has been as editor at large of O magazine, where she plays in-house proxy for the woman who gave it its vowel but can’t give it her all, on account of everything else she does. Other editors rely on Ms. King, 56, to know what Ms. Winfrey, 57, would want without even having to ask. She is, in other words, a licensed Oprah-ologist.

None of that was foreseeable when they first met in the late 1970s at a Baltimore news station where Ms. Winfrey was an anchor and Ms. King a production assistant. But then Ms. Winfrey became arguably the most famous woman in the world, and it redefined Ms. King, too. Whatever awkwardness followed, Ms. King says, was outweighed by the friendship itself.

“It’s very nice to have someone who really gets you — really gets you,” said Ms. King in a recent interview in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “Our sensibilities are very much the same. Just the other day, we had a conversation, someone was talking, we both at the same time said, ‘Really?’ The same inflection. Our brains are wired very similarly.”

In a separate interview, on the telephone, Ms. Winfrey said: “We are so much alike. That’s why we became friends. It’s easy for people to think she’s trying to be like me, when in fact she isn’t. We’re just very much like each other. That’s what happens with friends: over a period of time, you start to sound alike, and your inflections are alike.”

They overlapped in Baltimore for less than two years and have never again lived in the same city, but they have rarely let a day pass without talking, mostly on the phone and usually at length. They socialize together, attending Hollywood parties as each other’s escorts. They vacation together, sometimes with cameras in tow, as they did when they camped in Yosemite National Park last fall.

They even have nearly identical hers-and-hers cream-colored Bentleys, gifts from the moviemaker Tyler Perry. It’s sometimes as if they’re conducting a grown-up pajama party for all the world to see.

Inevitably, there has been speculation about a lesbian relationship, which they have repeatedly denied. Both say they are heterosexual. Although Ms. Winfrey has never married, Ms. King has an ex-husband, William Bumpus, who is a prosecutor in Connecticut, and a daughter, Kirby, 24, and son, Will, 23. Her children call Ms. Winfrey “Auntie O,” and Ms. Winfrey not only attended their college graduations (from Stanford University in Kirby’s case, Duke University in Will’s), but also gave the commencement address at each.

Ms. King said that she used to complain to Ms. Winfrey: “It’s hard enough for me to get a date on Saturday night, and now people are going to think I’m gay? You’ve got to straighten this out.”

Now she’s resigned. “There will always be people that believe it,” she said, “and there’s nothing I can do, and I truly no longer care.”

Theirs is a relationship of uncommon tenderness. Ms. Winfrey began crying when she talked about Ms. King in an interview with Barbara Walters late last year, telling her, “I don’t know a better person.”

Asked during the telephone interview to elaborate, Ms. Winfrey recalled a day 17 years ago when she was having the actor Denzel Washington and his wife, Pauletta Pearson, over to her Chicago apartment for dinner.