Obsessions of the media phenomenon whom everybody loves to hate — when they’re not laughing too much — including…
Howard Stern’s Small Penis
I was at a birthday party a couple of years ago with a guest who was a recent emigre from the Soviet Union living in Hackensack, New Jersey. He is a chemical engineer with a doctorate in biochemistry, a major achiever who was going to become a professor at a leading university and a consultant to industry. And he was saying that his favorite radio program was Howard Stern in the morning.
His wife was furious. She is a child psychologist, an author, and she hated Howard with a passion. Steam came out of her nostrils as she described the disgusting things he had said. The biochemist shrugged. “I think he’s funny.”
“He likes it because in Russia they couldn’t do those things. Such a man would be shot, put away in the salt mines,” she explained.
Howard Stern — that living monument to free speech, who will someday be on Mount Rushmore with such other big heads as Lincoln, Washington, and Roosevelt — has divided thousands of homes. He is the most beloved and most despised in America today. Men usually love him; women hate him. It’s hard to have no opinion about this amazing media phenomenon, a radio and TV star who is in the air as often as fluorocarbons (six days a week, between his weekday morning radio show and his syndicated Saturday night TV show).
For years I had studied the controversy as the media critic of a New York newspaper, which could not even print what he regularly said on the radio. After much consideration of all the positives and negatives, I came to a rational opinion: Nuke him.
I first started writing about this disgusting fellow in 1985, at a crucial moment in his career. “The thud you could hear in broadcasting yesterday, even without a radio, was Howard Stern’s body landing,” began one of my cheerful essays the day Howard was thrown out on his mike, fired by WNBC Radio management, an event that caused more controversy in New York than the disarmament talks, a nuclear winter, and the end of the world.
Believing in the old American principle of kicking a man on his way down, I explained that I was not a frequent listener of Howard’s afternoon drive-time show, where he had been a legend in his own mind. But that didn’t prevent me from saying the man was a dirt bag. There was nothing clever about him; he was simply offensive. He specialized in insulting all religions, races, and ethnic groups; homosexuals and heterosexuals; his audience; telephone callers; his enemies and friends. And not only that, he needed a haircut.
Somehow Howard got back on the radio without me — he was hired by Infinity Broadcasting Corporation as the morning man on the New York City classic-rock station K-Rock. And then an amazing thing happened one morning two years later. I noticed that I liked Howard Stern.
I actually started to look forward to Howard’s dial-a-date, especially when he had lesbians on. (“So Jennifer, what’s your cup size? Are you wearing crotchless panties? Who’s your favorite actor — Charlie the Tuna, Dick Van Dyke, or Butch Cassidy?”)
Howard often walked a dental-floss line between split-a-gut-hysterical humor and morally offensive, bad, yech. One must be able to tolerate and forgive, rather than lash out when he oversteps moral boundaries and goes up to his nose in slime and occasionally even goes under, glub glub.
This outrageous person is the man whose syndicated Saturday night TV show often outdraws “Saturday Night Dead” in 52 markets, and whose four-hour radio show is heard by four million listeners as far away as Los Angeles, an event comparable to the arrival of Balboa. His once local radio show is now in five cities and will soon be coming to a radio in your town (“You might as well start writing hate letters to the F.C.C. now,” he explained on a TV show. “Be the first one to report Howard, even before he gets to your town.”)
When Penthouse asked me to do a profile of this loose cannon of the airwaves, all I could think of was the abuse to my reputation as a journalist. He hates to be interviewed, as anyone knows who has heard him on his radio show ridiculing the many attempts people have made to do so. Still, I wanted to talk to him anyway. It only took five months until these two giants of broadcasting could get their. schedules jelling for my exclusive interview.
“There is no subject he won’t talk about, from the skid marks on his underwear to his secret desire for his wife to have a lesbian relationship.”
Was I wrong. Howard Stern is some strange duck.
In person, Howard Stern is not the foul-mouthed imbecile he can be on the air. It’s just an act, one that he began using in his early days as a disc jockey in Hartford, Detroit, and Washington. It set him apart from the other 48,000 D.J.s and talk-show hosts. How many ways can you spin a record and say, “Here’s Duran Duran” (then) or “They Might Be Giants” (now)?
It’s not easy to talk to him. He lives in a secret hideaway, a bunker in Nassau County, Long Island, the location of which I won’t reveal because of all the crazies waiting to get their hands around his ostrich neck. He wakes up at 4 A.M. and is driven into the radio studio at Infinity Broadcasting’s headquarters on Madison Avenue, where he talks continuously for four-plus hours, interrupted occasionally by assorted guests and phone calls and the silky laughter and words of Robin Quivers, the former trauma-center nurse/journalist and resident sane one on his radio and TV shows. Then he meets with producer Gary Dell’Abate, writers Fred Norris and Jackie “the Joke Man” Martling, and various producers and writers of the TV show. By 3 P.M. he is driven back to a life that would impress the father superior of a Trappist monastery for the silence-impaired.
Stern, whose salary is estimated at $1.5 million, lives very quietly with his wife, Alison, a clinical social worker (she has a master’s in social work) — whom he met when they were both students at Boston University in the 1970s — and their two children. He eats a dinner of healthy salads. Then he settles back and watches TV like any normal person.
Others may lead more exciting lives as celebrities than Howard. But he has a richer public-fantasy life that he talks about all the time. He is a by-product of the electronic revolution. Stern uses his radio show — and, to a lesser degree, his TV show — to expose himself on a mega-scale that would impress Freud.
There is no subject he won’t talk about, from the skid marks on his underwear to his wife’s and his fear that he has a small penis. He will tell you about his secret desire for his wife to have a lesbian relationship. (“Kiss Sandra,” he told Alison on his TV roast, making a match with Sandra Bernhard. “I’m horny. Loosen up, honey.”)
He is a psycho-chondriac, a person who talks incessantly about his mental health, real or imagined. He thinks, for example, he has this problem of a small penis. And he has even set up a foundation to help those afflicted with S.P.S. (small penis syndrome). And you don’t know if he is joking or not… about his penis.
It works for him to confess. There is always a segment of the audience that either has similar problems or thinks it does, which is the same thing.
What Howard says on the air is basically true. “He exaggerates,” as his mother, Ray Stern, explains. Exaggeration is an essential tool of humor. So is minimization.
So when he says he suffers from small penis syndrome, is a member of a penal colony, or whatever, I tend to believe him, without being the investigative journalist that I am. So maybe he exaggerates a little. When he says, for example, that he masturbates every weeknight so he can get to sleep to be able to work the next day, it’s probably only four nights.
He is a dedicated workaholic.
“There is very little time to go out,” he explained at the studio the day we finally had our summit meeting. “I am always working, and on weekends you are so blasted from being the life of the party in life — see, as a kid growing up, I was never the life of any party; no one paid any attention to me. And being on radio and TV certainly gets my rocks off when I have all of this tremendous attention paid to me by what I am saying and what I am doing. By the time I get home, I just want to decompress. You know, you have a weekend and that’s it. So I love to stay home.”
“I hate being bothered. I built an office in my house. My secretary has an office and I have an office. So I’m just in that office all the time, writing all weekend. And I see the wife and the kids and that’s it. I don’t understand how people have fun going out. If I go to a party, it’s just not fun for me. Sitting there having a meaningless conversation, talking to some guy I don’t know, is bullshit, a conversation about the Mets or something. I just don’t enjoy it. Because all week I get conversations, constant talk. It is enough already with the talking.”
Howard was such a sweet, innocent child when he was growing up reading my column on Long Island. Where did he go wrong?
Was it in college, when he did a bit for the Boston University radio station entitled “Godzilla Goes to Harlem,” which got him fired, a career move he was to duplicate in every job he got, in Hartford, Detroit, Washington, and at WNBC Radio in New York? Getting fired works for Howard better than for most of us. The uproar (“People don’t want boring radio anymore”) boosts him to the next higher pay level. Someday it will be taught at business schools as the Howard Principle.
Or was it as a boy growing up in Roosevelt, which became a heavily black community, Eddie Murphy’s hometown? Howard was the token white in his school. They beat him regularly, like a gong. Still, some of his best friends were black.
Or as a ten year old, doing dirty marionette shows for his friends, starring his hero, the puppet Jerry Mahoney? He was a teenage show-biz geek.
Or when he got his own TV show, fulfilling a dream?
The first day I met him, he was returning exhausted from having another fight with WWOR-TV, where he tapes the syndicated “Howard Stern Show.” Throwing a fit is Howard’s second favorite indoor sport, next to watching TV. His fights with management are as periodic as turning the transmitter on at Channel 9, located in the heart of beautiful downtown Secaucus, New _Jersey, next to the outlet malls.
Management had shut the lights off on Howard’s weekly taping the night before with five minutes still to go. “What a place,” Howard was saying. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
The management of Channel 9 had first come to Howard in the summer of 1986. When it began in the rerun season of 1990, there were only supposed to be four shows. They were poorly produced, done on what Howard called “no money.” But Channel 9 loved the ratings. They had never been in syndication before, and they were excited that other stations were buying it.
The show was a hard sell. Howard had a reputation that frightened general managers. “The guy in Toledo had a picture of me with horns. In Hartford one station canceled. The general manager couldn’t handle the Lesbian Dating Game. In an hour they had another station, they tell me,” Howard said.
The show had just been taken off the air in Boston the week I saw him. “Now if I can get 150 other stations to take it off,” he explained, “I’ll be free of the albatross.” He keeps saying he doesn’t want to do the show anymore, but I don’t believe him.
Fifty-five percent of the country, according to the new syndicator, All-American Television, now see the show. The other 45 percent either have their tongues hanging out or they don’t know what they’re missing.
It’s a completely unique show in TV history. “Look,” Howard was explaining, “I’m not the handsomest person on TV. Who the fuck needs another Maury Pavich show, starring Howard Stern? It’s supposed to be an alternative.”
What other show would start off with crack journalist “Stuttering John” Melendez asking celebrity Mike Wallace, “How is it a man of 70 years old still has pimples?”.
Who else would have a “Spokesmodel of the Year Pageant” (November 16, 1991), featuring spokesmodels named J.J. (36D), Chelsea (33B), Lisa (34C), Veronica (36D), and Pamela (42D)? “One of their breasts costs more than the whole show,” Howard observed while doing his Bob Barker “Miss America” impression. The judges included hunk Mason Reese.
Contestants were to be judged by such criteria as talent. “In ten seconds,” explained Howard, “show us your talent.” One balanced a fruit bowl on her head, another blew bubbles, a third ate cherries with whipped cream, while Robin was giving interesting facts about contestants (“average age they lost their virginity, 15.89 … average bra size, C minus … combined S.A.T. scores, 832”).
Contestants also answered questions (the educational-TV side of the show). “What would you do to stop air pollution?” for example. “Very good,” Howard said of one reply. “She used five complete words.”
What made this show memorable in broadcasting history was that before the envelope with the winners’ names was delivered by Gary Dell’Abate on a horse, Howard announced, “$500 to anybody who takes off their top!” Veronica (36D) won the bonus prize. “What’s the matter with the rest of you?” Howard said as the pink bar went up across Veronica’s chest on the screen. “You got gold in there?”
“Absolutely vile,” Howard said.
I told him he had to keep on going with the show. Who else would do a Bob Hope interview in a Bob Hope mask (which Hope didn’t recognize as himself) and say, “If I’m out of line, stop me.” Howard said he didn’t want to get involved in the question of Hope’s will, “But who are you leaving your kidneys to?” The juxtaposition of the two of them doing a straight interview was right out of Feyerdau’s theater of the absurd.
“Vile,” Howard said.
And then there was “Black Folks With White Features… the show that axes the question, Is you black or is you white?… Hosted by the man with less-than-prominent African features, Howard Washington Stern.” Stern was wearing a big hat with an X (as well as an X on his chest), which, as the host explained, stood for “Xtra-crispy.” Howard the host said, “Yes, many of us do not wear our race on our sleeves. Yes, I’m a black man born to two black parents, and yet I can pass for white.”
“There are other people who have the same problem as me. Kim Basinger looks white, but she’s black. And George Takei, Sulu of ‘Star Trek.’” The dialogue continued:
Robin: “And now for the real shock. I am Howard Washington’s biological sister.”
Howard: “That’s right, Robin. We have the same parents. But oddly enough, you have full African features, as well as a full set of chocolate knockers.”
To support his claim, Howard brought on his parents, Ted the janitor (from K-Rock), a very black guy, and Janie, the cleaning woman from NBC. And they hired a black dwarf to be his brother. Actually, his half brother. And then, without rehearsal, they brought out the night’s major guest, “Sabrina Le Bott,” as Howard called her, from “The Cosby Show.” “Le Beaut,” Robin said.
Howard talked to her about her work on “Cosby” with “Fellatio [sic] Rashad” and “all the ‘Cosby’ kids, who are so black they could have passed for Nigerian exchange students, and yet you could be an Ivory girl.” Howard Washington also outed Nick Nolte as black, and Ed Begley, Jr., too.
“That was vile,” Howard said later. And then there was the famous “Star Trek” spoof, in which Howard played Captain James Kirk of the starship Enterprise, which was circling the planet of Lesbos in the Clitorian Galaxy, a planet inhabited by very well-meaning but annoying lesbians.
“You can see we are very literate here,” Howard explained. “Totally vile.”
I should point out that Howard’s favorite adjective is vile. It means very good. What is beyond vile? Nothing. It’s the highest honor, an expletive meaning “the most outrageous thing ever done,” at least until the next show.
What are the most vile things they have ever done, I asked Howard and his producer Gary. They conducted a poll. The results:
- Made two women kiss on the Lesbian Dating Game.
- Dangled Cornish hens and potato chips on sticks in front of Richard Simmons and two of his “fat” guests.
- Stuttering John’s most outrageous questions, i.e., asking Ted Williams, “Did you ever fart in the catcher’s face?”
- Had a woman with no arms and legs demonstrate how she eats.
- Gay “Munsters” sketch.
- Locked Bob Geldof in the trunk of a car and made him perform.
- Had a woman strip to the National Anthem before a basketball game.
- During a Madonna parody, Howard (as Madonna) lit his farts, and made two men kiss and go over to a burner and place their genitals on it.
- Had Vanna White on via satellite and told her his two guests in the studio were Bruce Willis and Kristy McNichol.
- During a “Family Feud” sketch, pitted call girls against hookers.
- “What’s My Secret” game show with Kitty Carlisle Hart and Arlene Francis. The secret: The woman was a lesbian beauty queen.
- Christmas show featuring Howard giving birth in a manger.
There has never been stuff like this on late-night TV, even in the best “Saturday Night Live” days. But there is a love-hate relationship thing going on between Howard and his TV masters, now called Pinelands, Inc. On the one hand, as Howard admits, “They have been awfully good about a lot of things. Most networks would not take a chance on me. Who the fuck is going to put this guy on TV? He won’t take off his dark glasses. His fucking hair is too long. He’s way too skinny, way too hideous.”
He keeps saying he doesn’t want to do the show anymore. He means it — especially near contract time this summer. But he would no sooner lose the show than his penis, as small as it may be.
The TV show is validation to Howard. And he doesn’t want to be doing just any TV show. Howard’s great fear is for the show to be perceived as a cable-access show. He thinks that turns off the audience. Unfortunately, the budget at Channel 9 makes the show look tacky.
His dream is to do the David Letterman show — not with David, but with Howard. His kind of thing on NBC’s money, with David’s look and sophistication, and Howard’s outrageousness. Howard is amazed every time he sees the 12 writers run onstage when the Letterman show gets an Emmy.
Howard’s show has a light stafffour writers and eight production people. It’s, as they call it, “a lean, mean machine,” which, as Howard explains, is a euphemism for overworked.
They meet once a week in a conference room at the Universal Pictures building on Park Avenue, several blocks away from the radio studio. It’s usually a closed-door session. They never let the Channel 9 executives in to hear what trouble is being hatched. “We don’t clear anything,” Howard explains. “They get stuck with it. After it’s over, they can argue.”
I had the honor of sitting in at a writing session. “I’m completely wasted from the show,” Howard explained, arriving in his usual work clothes — jeans, a black leather jacket, George Custer hairdo, and an attache case. He is just back from a three-hour argument about such vital issues as the crack of a spokesmodel’s ass. “Did I show too much cheek in the Fartman sketch last week?”
Howard is really into production values. It’s an obsession now. Radio is a medium that uses imagination. Some good sound effects; you just talk. You can easily imagine, for example, Robin without her clothes on. At least I can. TV is different. You can’t fake it. “It looks amateurish,” Howard explains, “unless you spend a million bucks.”
The show looks like a big, sloppy mess. You’d never even think it has scripts. But it’s highly scripted. There is a lot of planning that goes into the sloppy mess. In order to maximize the spirit and minimize the chaos of his life, toward has hired a new producer, John Lollos — who once worked with Ernie Kovacs and who thinks Howard is the next Ernie Kovacs — to help organize the mess.
Howard reigns over a conference table as long as Sepulveda Boulevard, like King Howard and his knights, with his trusted Robin and radio producer Gary by his side.
“What have we got?” he asks in the organized mayhem of the session, with his 12 people conspiring and perspiring for King Howard before he takes his coach back to the bunker.
“We’ve got Tawny Kitaen and Sally Kirkland,” Dan Forman, the line producer, says, “and Denise Miller.”
“Who’s she?” Howard asks.
“The Kielbasa Queen.”
“What does she do?”
“She swallows kielbasa. She started out by swallowing her first hot dog. Then four hot dogs.” (“Honey, you must have been great at barbecues,” Howard later said on the show.) “Her latest achievement is swallowing a 12-inch kielbasa.”
“What else we got?”
“There’s the Dr. Penis guy, who enlarges penises. Takes fat from someplace and it’s inserted into the penis. He’s willing to come on the show and demonstrate his operation.”
“What agents turned us down this week?” Howard asks. Ellen, the booker, reports, “George Hamilton… Dana Plato.”
“Why?”
“She can’t take the mental abuse,” Ellen said.
(The show pioneered the practice of running the excuses on-screen: “The following stars refuse to appear on ‘The Howard Stern Show.’ Here are their agents’ reasons: Bill Cosby, ‘Not crazy about Howard.’ Sally Jessy Raphael, ‘Doesn’t want to stoop to Howard Stern’s level.’ Liz Taylor, ‘Sends regrets at this time. Her schedule is very hairy.’”)
“Any ideas for Tawny Kitaen?” Howard asks.
“Yeah,” a writer says. “Who is she?” “She’s the new Loni Anderson on ‘WKRP,’” a production assistant says. “I think she’s real hot,” Howard says.
“Why does she want to do the show?” Fred Norris, a writer, asks suspiciously.
“Her P.R. people can’t understand it, either,” Ellen says.
“Let’s do the Juiceman sketch with her,” somebody says from behind a pastrami sandwich. “Richard Bey [a Channel 9 talk-show host] comes in and says, ‘I’m Juiceman.’ All the people waiting in the wings have cancer, cerebral palsy. We’ll cure everybody. No pushing. Suddenly they’re all transformed into Tawny Kitaens.”
“Let Robin do Richard Bey,” Howard says.
Jackie the Joke Man says, “What about doing something on JFK? That’s very hot now. Call it ‘Grassy Knoll.’”
“How big was that kielbasa again?” Howard asks.
“Twelve inches,” Dan Forman says. “And I don’t think she’s reached her potential.”
“Let’s get her on with Tawny and Sally Kirkland, who’ll do anything,” Howard says, his hair flying in excitement. “Let’s see how much kielbasa they can swallow.”
“Three young actresses,” Jackie says. “Three of the hottest actresses in the country. That’s the way to go.”
“Could be funny,” Howard says.
“They sit with you,” Fred Norris says, “either as Maury Pavich — ”
“No, no, I think it’s a Helen Stern,” Howard says (his favorite in his cast of stock characters: a transsexual talk-show hostess). They finally decide it’s a Larry King sketch. “They all have the potential to be future Mrs. Kings,” Howard points out. “He hasn’t married any of them yet, has he?” (“Tawny, have we been married yet?” he asked on the show.)
“The penis guy doesn’t need a bit,” Lollos says.
“Right,” Howard says. “That’s a bit in itself.”
“What about the penile-implant guy surrounded by girls in bikinis,” a production assistant says.
“We can never have enough naked bodies,” Howard agrees. “What do we know about this doctor guy?”
“Can we get away with graphics?” somebody asks.
“You say this guy puts fat inside? He probably has an x-section diagram we can use,” the director says. “We’re not going to have him do a demonstration of the operation?”
“Why don’t we take a sausage and shoot fat into it?” another brainstormer says.
“You know what’s a funny gag?” Howard asks. “I’m doing it as Geraldo. And I have a giant thing coming down my pants leg.”
“The oldest joke in the book,” Jackie says. “Here’s one of the doctor’s happy patients — in a wheelchair.”
“Patients are willing to come on,” Forman says. “But they don’t want to be identified.”
“Good, I’ll hold up a blue dot in front of their faces,” Gary says.
They go back to the Kielbasa Queen sketch. “The joke here,” Norris says, “is they all think they’re serious actresses, talking about serious roles and careers. All are taken with themselves. Sally is in this show, Tawny is in that series. And what do you do, Miss Kielbasa? All are deflated by the Kielbasa Queen as she does her stunt.”
“It’ll work,” Howard says.
And it does.
So does the penis doctor bit, which they do as “Dr. Stern’s Amazing Sexual Discoveries,” which first told you about money-condom belts, stereo bras, and digital panties. “We all love the look of full genitals,” began Howard at his most unctuous, introducing the real Dr. Ricardo Samitier, a cosmetic surgeon from Miami. A satisfied patient came on to be interviewed, preceded by a crouching Gary holding a large blue dot on a stick. Under the dot, just to be safe, the patient is wearing a mask. “Did you have a micro-penis like me?” Or. Stern asked, to a thunderous applause from the studio-audience machine.
Letterman’s writers wouldn’t fit in here.
Fred Norris — who has been with Howard the longest, since the Hartford days in the late 1970s — and Jackie the Joke Man, “two of the best writers in the world,” according to Howard, are the twin screws propelling the show, which is anchored by Howard. At least one of the younger writers is from another planet. “UFO Marc” Berglass will be a genius someday, but right now he is the resident scapegoat. He is the one who had to get into the mud with the mud wrestlers. At the roast, food poured down on his head as he tried to read his speech. “Before I used to humiliate myself in front of ten people. Now that I’ve come to work here, I can do it before a nationwide audience. Thank you, Howard,” he said, wiping the food out of his eyes.
“He’s the only writer who never contributes anything to the show,” Howard says proudly.
“The Howard Stern Show” is pioneering a new look: sleazy but not totally tacky, with socially redeeming values. There are the spokesmodels, average girls-next-door in bikinis who hold up sponsors’ products-bottles of Snapple and the Brother P-Touch label-making machine — while being abused by the host: “Oops, I’m spilling the Snapple all over you…” (as he pours the drink all over the girl).
They do elaborate production numbers that can be fun, with Howard in disguises. One small problem. Whether he is Merv Griffin, Bob Hope, Larry King, or William Shatner, they all look the same. Howard suggested in one show — after hauling out his makeup man for some degradation — that he wear name tags so we’d know who he is.
And he is always lowering (or raising) the level, going beyond the bounds of decency to the outer limits. Who else would do a sketch called “The Head Injury Club for Men,” starring “film giant” guest Gary Busey, who looked mighty perplexed by the panel of members in wheelchairs — all of whom had had motorcycle injuries — with their heads wrapped in bandages with green Jell-O coming out as if from brain pans. Tres vile, even disgusting.
One good thing Howard does is provide employment for the handicapped who couldn’t get on any other TV show, like Fred the Elephant Boy; Kenneth Keith Kallenbach, who blows smoke through his eyes (or thinks he does); Becky the mental patient; dwarfs, stutterers, epileptics — his show is like Lourdes. Howard also points with pride to Augusto, the homeless man the show found in the streets. They cleaned him up and got him a job in a car wash. (“Augusto would have preferred to be president of IBM,” Stern told me.)
“So Jennifer, are you wearing crotchless panties? Who’s your favorite actor — Charlie the Tuna, Dick Van Dyke, or Butch Cassidy?”
The TV show is quietly spreading across the country, market by market. It stunned the broadcasting world on April 25, 1992, beating the network news and “Saturday Night Live’s” first half hour by six share points in the New York market with its “Tribute to Breasts” show.
His greatest achievement is still in radio, however. Howard is very good on radio. He has spontaneity. He talks intelligently nonstop without scripts, the best free-associator and ad-libber since Jean Shepherd.
I told Howard about my friend Joe Muzio, who is a professor and the chairman of the biology department at Kingsborough Community College, in New York City. He drives to work with Howard every morning, and sometimes he laughs so hard that he has to pull off to the side of the road.
“Does that turn me on!” Howard says. “Since I was a little boy, I wanted to be on the radio, and I might have been five or six when I started, you know, talking in a tape recorder pretending to be having my own show. And the image I always had of the typical listener was my father, because when I went to work with my father, we had this horrendous commute from Roosevelt to the city. We would be in the car in this fucking traffic, just sitting there, and we would wait for something to happen on the radio. My father was not going to sit there and talk to me — he had to listen to radio.”
“To me that is the greatest compliment. That is my vision, the average schlub who has to drive to work every day is trapped in the car. He wants to laugh at something on the radio so he doesn’t give a fuck that he is commuting.”
My favorite part of the radio show is the news. Robin says what happened the day before, and Howard comments on it. Robin is actually the spine of the radio show, the one who holds it all together. She is the rock, the bridge that Howard — the bungee jumper of the airwaves — leaps off.
Howard does a lot of media and show-biz celebrity-gossip reporting and commentary. He has the kind of energy, zest, and instinct for the jugular that Joan Rivers used to have in the wonde rful bad old days, before she started slobbering on guests.
Howard tells it like it is. He has the courage to question the idolization of superstars. “When I first said the Magic Johnson stuff,” Howard recalled, “there was such an uproar, especially because it was our first week in L.A. and Magic is such a big hero there. I was just saying, you know, stop all this carrying on. The guy was a womanizer. ‘Oh, he was not a womanizer. You don’t know that,’ they said. He was a womanizer. Maybe not compared to Wilt the Stilt, who slept with 22,000 women. Nobody wanted to discuss it honestly. They wanted to somehow create a new past for this guy.”
“Michael Landon?”
“That guy has always blown my mind. That Michael Landon was treated with this reverence, that great family man and that great family show. He was a fucking guy. He ditched his wife, he abandoned adopted children, he married these new women, he’s a complete fuck. I mean, call a guy what he is. I feel bad when anybody dies of cancer, has a horrible death like that, dies young, although he wasn’t that young. I’m saying I felt bad about that, but don’t create this phony image of a guy. This guy was a real son of a bitch. ‘We’ve got to have family television.’ Well, fuck family television. I am a better family man than he ever was.” Howard gets involved in politics. He was an early Jerry Brown supporter. He said he didn’t want a political appointment for delivering his four million listeners in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, et cetera. He only wanted to write the inaugural address. (Later, Howard dropped Brown because he wouldn’t promise, if elected, to name Stern chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.)
But he is at his best for me with the news. It’s very refreshing to hear his slant. If you ask me, Howard should be on “The CBS Evening News Without Dan Rather.”
Helped by Robin, of course. The bright, gorgeous, laughing newswoman is essential. Robin is the linchpin, the touchstone with reality. Without her, Howard would be off the planet. Howard and Robin could be the Huntley and Brinkley of tomorrow.
No matter who else does the news, it always sounds the same. Whatever is happening in the world, it’s all boiled down to the same five minutes. And that’s the way it is. When Robin and Howard do the news, it’s different.
While most of the people in broadcasting have the courage of their lack of convictions, Howard sticks to his guns in the most difficult, inflammatory situations. After a City College of New York basketball game-rap concert stampede in which several attendees were crushed to death, he blamed the kids who did the pushing to get in, when the official inquiry finally blamed everybody else in sight — City College administration, the police, the promoters.
“I don’t give a fuck,” he explains. “A long time ago in my radio career, I decided I’m not going to hold anything back. I am just not going to think about it, because as soon as you start going, ‘Uh-oh, maybe I shouldn’t do that…’ If I worried about the guys in L.A. finding me acceptable, you know, the powers that be; if I worry about getting a TV show like [L.A. disc jockeys] Mark and Brian, or worry about the WOR guys saying, ‘Hey, can you turn back a little? We can sell this a lot better’ — I know as soon as I do that I won’t be talking like a real guy on the street.”
“It is sad. As soon as you say something that is a little way out, you see the shit that it causes. There is mass panic. People cannot deal with the truth anymore, especially people in Hollywood. I see these infants on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and I want to throw up.”
Robin will be reading a news item, and Howard will interrupt to make one of his outrageous phone calls. During the Gulf War, he distinguished himself as Fartman. Powered by a special mixture of navy beans and broccoli, as a biographical blurb reads, Fartman made his K-Rock debut in June 1988, when he phoned the Iranian consulate to explain that the commercial airliner that had been blown out of the sky by the U.S. military had been mistaken for a war plane.
A year later, in his blazing style, K-Rock’s superhero called the Chinese consulate to blast its government for its actions against Chinese college students. At the consulate, he reached an answering machine and proceeded to blast the Chinese government several times. To further this cause, Fartman called one of New York’s largest toy stores and asked that they boycott the sale of Chinese checkers during the crisis.
More recently, he came out of the sky when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. After arriving at K-Rock studios, Fartman called Iraq’s embassy in Washington to warn them that they had 24 hours to get out of Kuwait or face the poots piper. On the other end of the phone was a woman who took notes while Fartman issued this warning: “We will kill all sheep and your men will have nothing to make love to.” After that little blast, the woman hung up.
It’s crazy out there and everybody is afraid to say so. Not Howard.
“Howard arrived in jeans, black leather jacket, and an attache case. He is just back from a three-hour argument about such vital issues as the crack of a spokesmodel’s ass.”
What Howard is is a revolutionary, a guerrilla, a sheep in sheep’s clothing. His radio show, especially, is a clandestine pirate station, spreading sedition all over radioland, getting them where they sit in traffic jams.
His latest conquest is in the land of silk and money, La La Land, which began getting the Stern show in July 1991. His show is Radio Free Los Angeles, beamed into the capital of culture, the center of everybody’s universe, which sets the taste for the rest of the country and the world. What people in Los Angeles think goes into the shows and then into all the homes.
“L.A. totally dominates the environment,” Howard says. “L.A. is in your mind. The presence of L.A. is there through television and every other piece of crap that comes out. The same mentality is spreading everywhere in the country.”
Howard’s being in L.A., at last, is a propaganda weapon for bad, the first hope for change. More and more people are going to hear him. Howard’s being in L.A. means he finally has his fingers around the throat of culture.
He is having an incredible effect on everybody in the land of the living dead. His audience started with all the intellectuals who went out there from New York. The kind of people who are listening to him now are on the cutting edge, the young TV executives, the ones who have the real power, who in their own lives want to be ahead of everybody else, these guys who do all the crap on the air. Howard is hitting L.A. like a slap in the face.
“There are aspects of it that frighten me, too,” Howard said. “Because I’m getting calls from people I shouldn’t be acceptable to. You know what I mean — now, all of a sudden, we’re like L.A.’s new darling. You know, the other day, I mean, we got Albert Brooks calling in!”
“The Mark and Brian Show” was the biggest thing in L.A. radio before Howard. He can undermine the whole country if this syndication keeps up.
Some people are ahead of their time — by as much as five minutes. Howard is right on time; in the right place as society is disintegrating.
The problem with satire is that there is no establishment left to be stung. You can’t make fun of the president or the pope. Everybody has learned how to take a joke. Stand-up comics had to go into dirty words and drug jokes.
Howard is redoing the basics: sex, politics, religion. But he is doing it on radio, the last square establishment left, and on its evil, ugly twin sister, TV. Radio takes itself very seriously. Ninety-two stations fighting over the kind of music they play left the flanks and center open. Howard came in like a tank.
The F.C.C. has been trying to suppress Howard since 1986. They have managed in all these years to fine him $6,000 for his sins. And his bosses at the time, Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, are still appealing. The F.C.C. is so macho in thinking it can curb Howard. And so hopeless. It’s nothing to Howard, grist for his mill.
Joan Rivers asked Howard, “Where do you want to be ten years from now?”
“Off my TV show,” he said cheerfully. “It should be canceled, and I’ll be sitting on a farm.”
A few years back, Brandon Tartikoff called Stern “the future of TV.” That was easy for him to say. The then chief of programming at NBC went out and hired Mark and Brian for prime time, doing old Howard Stern-type stunts that worked better than Sominex.
Forget the TV show — anybody can do that. Howard should become the next president of programming at NBC, replacing Warren Littlefield. Even better, he should be the censor, head of standards and practices. He should say what’s decent and indecent, who and what gets on the air. TV would be livelier. All of which he could do in his spare time, before going to bed to whack off.
Of course you will now definitely want to see what all the fuss may be about, and SiriusXM makes that easy — well, if you have the money for a SiriusXM subscription. Howard nees two channels there, it seems. Should have no interest at all by now, well don’t click that link for sure.
