Herewith, a peek into the private lives of the court of the King of All Media —
The Gang’s All Here — A Stern Welcome
Unless for the past few years you’ve been holed up in a remote cabin in Montana, sharing a can of beans with the next Unabomber, you know that Howard Stern is the “King of All Media.” Every weekday morning, for five hilarious hours, Howard and his fetching sidekick, Robin Quivers, put millions of Americans in a good enough frame of mind to drag their millions of sorry asses to their mind-numbing jobs. And besides waking up with Howard, most Americans now have the option of going to sleep with him as well — edited for television, his show is broadcast six nights a week on the E! cable network, and on Saturday nights it is syndicated by CBS.
Both Howard’s and Robin’s lives have been amply documented in their best-selling books. But what of the support team that has helped propel Howard to creative and commercial heights hitherto unattained in the generally lame arena of radio? What makes celebrity interviewer John Melendez stutter? Is co-writer and sound man extraordinaire Fred Norris really as weird as Howard makes him out to be? Just how (and why) did head writer Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling learn all those dirty jokes?
To answer these questions, I threw myself into high research mode. A Stuttering John CD signing in midtown Manhattan. A frenzied King Norris band concert at Wetlands in TriBeCa. Jackie The Joke Man’s triumphant homecoming appearance before a howling audience at Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. Not to mention the interviews. Hours and hours of delicately probing and parrying, peeling away the on-air personas to reveal their essential core. Here then is a side of Stuttering John you’ll never see when he’s judging a best-butt contest at your local titty bar. Here is Fred the wizardly sound man, who is not from Mars. Here is the human face beneath the jesterish Joke Man. Here, my friends, is a peek into the off-air lives of the court of the King of All Media.
The Stuttering John st-st-st-story – Hero of the stupid
It’s not easy being stuttering John. He no sooner sits down to sign copies of his latest LP, Everybody’s Normal but Me, at an HMV music store in midtown Manhattan than the third guy on line starts busting his balls. The guy has a tape recorder and claims to be from a college radio station. He wants to do a quick interview.
“Do you think this album is going to go aluminum?” he barks. “Do you stutter when you snore? Does stuttering help when you’re performing oral sex?”
John just smiles, sighs, and signs the next CD. How else can he react? For the past ten years, in the service of Howard Stern’s radio and television shows, John has crashed parties, openings, and press conferences armed with a microphone, a camera, and a list of rude, crude questions with which he ambushes unsuspecting celebrities. Their responses are a litmus test of sorts. Some ignore him. Some goodnaturedly hang in there and answer. Then again, some assault John.
John reels off his war stories. “Morton Downey — hit me and I fell off a chair. Eric Bogosian — I asked him if there was going to be a Talk Radio 2 and he grabbed me by the neck. Lou Reed — I was backstage at the Bob Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden and all I asked him was ‘Do you still masturbate?’ and he didn’t say anything, he just started choking me.”
Then there was Raquel Welch. John nabbed her coming out of an auction at Christie’s. She was striding briskly to her limo and John was right at her side.
“Are they dr-dr-drooping yet?” he stammered. She ignored him and continued walking. John repeated the question. Without missing a step, Raquel gave him a backhander right to the nose. “The next day my nose was killing me, and I went to the hospital. I was gonna sue, but I was talking to Andrew Dice Clay and he goes, ‘You’re gonna sue? And tell the whole world you got your ass kicked by a chick?’ So I didn’t.”
But it’s not just celebrities who vent on John. One night shortly after he’d gained notoriety from his interviews, he was on the Long Island Rail Road, riding home from the Stern show. Suddenly, a well-dressed executive came up to him. “Are you that guy from the Stern show?” he asked.
John smiled, happy to be recognized.
The executive threw his cupful of orange soda all over John. “That’s for making fun of Tommy Lasorda,” he said and stormed off the train.
Stuttering John has experienced this sort of abuse for as long as he can remember. Born John Melendez on October 4, 1965, the fourth (and final) product of the union of a Spanish/Puerto Rican Port Authority engineer and a Danish homemaker, he remembers that his father was basically a decent guy who would fly into uncontrollable rages.
“My childhood was shaky,” John says. “I remember when I was five, I saw my mother run down the stairs, half naked, and jump on my father’s back to prevent him from going nuts on my sister.” Soon after that, he says, the stuttering and his ongoing obsessive-compulsive disorder began. Of course, back then he didn’t know that terminology — then it was just The Fear. He couldn’t play baseball because of the fear that he’d drop a fly ball. He couldn’t read a book because of the fear that he’d get a bad thought about his mother dying. He couldn’t be tickled by his brother or sisters because of the fear of suffocating. And he couldn’t go out of the house because of the fear that he’d open his mouth, stutter, and get beat up by the neighborhood bullies in Massapequa, Long Island. Ultimately, John befriended those bullies and began to amass J.D. (juveniledelinquent) cards for throwing snowballs at school buses and pulling the tops off unsuspecting females at the beach. That’s when he began to fear the wrath of God.
“My father was into scaring the crap out of me with Armageddon and hellfire stories, how I shouldn’t be fooled if I met the Antichrist,” John remembers. So, after he’d raise hell with his friends at the mall, John would stop at a statue of the Virgin Mary on the way home. “I’d sit there and pray and beg for forgiveness for being a bad kid.”
But if the child is father to the man, it was John’s fourth-grade teacher who recognized his unique abilities. “Johnny asks some unusual and sometimes penetrating questions,” she wrote on his report card, “and tends to stutter when excited. He still needs to control his silly behavior.”
It was precisely those qualities that immediately endeared him to Howard Stern years later. In 1988, John was a student at N.Y.U. film school, fronting a band named Rock Slide. When he wasn’t jerking off to the latest issue of Penthouse, that is. “All my friends would deny that they masturbated, so I felt like a wacko. Then I heard Howard talking on the air about jerking off, and it was like, wow, there’s somebody else who does it too!”
So, when John’s roommate Mitch had to leave his job interning at the Stern show, John begged him for a reference. Mitch recommended Melendez to Gary Dell’Abate, Howard’s producer, with one caveat — John was a stutterer. That was all Howard had to hear. “Hire him on the spot,” he told Gary, sight unseen, stutter unheard.
For both parties, it was a marriage made in heaven. For John, he’d get valuable radio exposure to promote his band and make contacts to further his acting and directing ambitions. For Howard, John would be the quintessential celebrity interviewer. At that time, Stern’s show was too déclassé and outrageous to attract Grade A celebrities, so they would have to stalk stars in their natural habitats. At first Howard himself tried his hand at the kamikaze interview, but he was too embarrassed by the outrageous questions that show writers Fred Norris and Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling would craft. Gary was the next interviewer, but he pawned the job off on an intern after Van Halen’s manager called Gary a “piece of shit” for asking new lead singer Sammy Hagar if on a hot day he came across a dog and former Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth locked up in separate cars, which one would he save?
A stuttering interviewer was a godsend. For one, in the interests of political correctness, stars would have to be nice to a stutterer. On top of that, because he would invariably garble the question the first time, John would get to ask and the celebrity would be forced to listen to the outrageous question a second time. Another of John’s virtues was that he was basically culturally clueless. He could approach Ally Sheedy and innocently ask her. “Have you puked today?” totally unaware that she was reportedly in the midst of battling bulimia. Basically, John was a programmed assassin.
And he was an instant hit. Not only did he begin garnering recognition for his radio interviews, but when Stern’s Saturday-night show began to air nationally on WOR-TV, John emerged as its first star. And why not? Now not only could you hear the sounds of revulsion and anger emanating from the celebrities, but you could actually see them shudder and flinch from the questions posed by the cherubic, long-haired, stuttering grungehead. It’s a priceless moment in the annals of TV when baseball legend Ted Williams, sitting at a desk signing autographs, does a double take and then contemptuously swats John away when John asks him if he ever accidentally farted in a catcher’s face.
But it was John’s amazing performance at Gennifer Flowers’s first press conference that established him as a national figure, worthy of discussion on “The McLaughlin Group,” of all places (where they referred to him as “Mr. Melendez”). If ever there was a sanctimonious event worthy of puncturing, it was Flowers’s public revelation of the sex-filled taped conversations between herself and then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton.
“Gennifer, did Governor Clinton use a condom?” John’s booming stutter cut through the packed hall.
Flowers tried to suppress a grin, but her handlers became irate. They tried to field more dignified questions, but John was persistent: “Will you be sleeping with any other presidential candidates? Was there ever a threesome?”
A st-st-star was born. “I remember Robin [Quivers] and I were on the street one day and all the people were stopping us and going, ‘Stuttering John, we love you. Stuttering John. Stuttering John.’ No one mentioned Robin. So, she turned to me and said, ‘See, John, these are all your fans. The stupid people. You’re the hero of the stupid.’” On the WOR show the following week, “Hero of the Stupid” became John’s official moniker.
John deserved his accolades. He was one of the hardest-working men in show biz. “I remember waiting eight hours for Chevy Chase to come out of a building one night – that’s how motivated I was,” John recalls. “I would never sleep. If I was at a party, I would drink the free beer, get drunk, and go straight to work.’’
And he was incredibly resourceful, sneaking past publicists and security and nabbing his prey. “All that truant behavior from my childhood suddenly became useful. I’d sneak into places. I’d lie about who I was. When they began recognizing me, I’d get disguises. I’d buy a fake mustache and spirit gum. I got fake teeth. I cut my hair.’’
Once at an event, John turned it into his personal forum. Most of the press are fairly reserved and reticent, if not respectful. John was another breed altogether. “The press is way too calm and laid back. I was right in the celebrity’s face,” John remembers. “If you watch the old tapes, it’s always me next to the celebrity and everyone else all behind me yelling at me to move away. I would crawl under people’s legs. I was aggressive because it meant airtime to me, which meant I was going to be a star.”
In the ten years he’s been stuttering for Stern, John has built a career of sorts. He’s been the lead in the Off-Off Broadway hit Tony and Tina’s Wedding (where he met his actress wife, Suzannah). He was the cohost of a short-lived latenight network show, “Last Call.’’ He’s had bit parts in the movies Airheads, Meet Wally Sparks, and of course Private Parts, as well as on TV’s “Wings” and “Baywatch Nights.” And currently he hosts a lunchtime request hour on K-Rock, Stern’s New York radio station.
Then there are his albums. Stuttering John, his eponymous 1994 debut, sold a respectable 40,000 units. Still, John suspects that his association with Stern was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it doubtless helped to get him signed. On the other, it was hard to get airplay on stations whose morning jocks were being destroyed in the ratings by Howard. And because of his wacky reputation, many people in the industry, without even hearing him, might have dismissed him as a Weird Al Yankovic wannabe.
“I think the reason why John’s first record didn’t do that well was that people thought he was a novelty act, but it really was a good solid pop record,” says John Titta, an executive at Warner Chappel Music Publishing. “When he played his songs for me, I loved them. And when I played them for the people at Atlantic, they signed him right away”
Last October John released his second LP, Everybody’s Normal but Me, which has been selling well if not spectacularly. This time around, the critical consensus was almost overwhelmingly positive. No less than Entertainment Weekly praised its “earnest, catchy surprises,” and The San Diego Union Tribune lauded the effort as “straightahead, honest, and refreshingly heartfelt hard rock with a self-effacing, comedic edge.” But problems persist. MTV would not air the video for the first single, a takeoff on the Jerry Springer show, deeming it “too campy.”
While he awaits music superstardom, John continues to show up for work every morning at six A.M. — after his morning obsessive-compulsive shower ritual. (“I wash under my arms ten times, each arm. I wash my balls three times, my ass three times. I wash my hands ten times, ten with one hand, ten, ten, ten, ten, and ten. My back three times. Three’s a good number.’’) At work, he dutifully screens the calls that come in to the Stern show. He’s been responsible for getting a murderer to confess his crime on the air (after various Stern interns hung up on the guy three times because he was calling the show collect from jail). He’s nurtured wacky callers like Ian the Drunk and Dr. Remulac, a California dermatologist who suffers from O.C.D. and calls the show and repeats robotically, “I am Doctor Remulac.’’ Via the phones, John also discovered the newest member of the Wack Pack, Gary the Retard (but after hearing Gary’s empty-headed gleeful rants, that — no pun intended — was a no-brainer).
And despite being the b-b-b-butt of everyone’s jokes, John is beloved by his colleagues. Though she jokingly denies it on the air, Robin often treats John to a movie and dinner. Fred regularly gives him musical-equipment tips. And now that John has moved his family six blocks from Jackie’s home in Bayville, Long Island, The Joke Man and John have become inseparable.
“I love Stuttering John,” Jackie gushes. “He’s very talented, he’s very energetic, and he has a heart as big as the hole in his wallet. My wife, Nancy, and I and John and Suzannah go to dinner together, drink together, get stoned together, ski together, swim together — We do everything together. So, I guess I have to say that he’s one of my best friends. Fuck, does that pain me. A speechchallenged half-Spic who’s 20 years younger than me. Help!”
But lately John’s doing less of what made him famous. Partly it’s a function of Howard’s newfound semi-respectability in show-biz circles. Many of his former targets are now happy to come into the studio and plug their latest projects. Plus, John’s wild and woolly days of latenight Manhattan celebrity parties are now over. These days John gets into his Jeep after the show and drives straight home, where he plays for hours with his three-year-old daughter, Greta. In his stead, Howard has been sending out the new crop of interns, with mixed results. Recently, a young female intern had to make an emergency weekend call to her therapist when she was consumed with guilt for having asked Richard Simmons, hero of the fatties, if he’d gotten laid lately.
It’s times like that when John gets the itch again. Sure, he can dream about a gold record or a major role in a blockbuster movie or a hit sitcom, but as long as Richard Simmons is holding a press conference to introduce his new line of diet cards, or Kathie Lee is signing her new Christmas cookbook, or Madonna is studying the cabala, playing with Greta can wait. After all, one day she’ll be old enough to brag that her dad was Stuttering John, Hero of the Stupid.
Jackie the JOKE MAN is content – sort of
Jackie the “Joke Man” Martling is running around like a kid in a candy store. Except we’re at a fish market in East Norwich, Long Island, and it’s not Jujubes he’s picking out, but beautiful, succulent-looking lobsters. Twenty of them. He darts to the other side of the store, blond ponytail flapping in his wake. We need seafood bisque, and some large shrimp, and baked clams. Jackie now has enough food to feed an army, but he’s got to feed only me, his wife Nancy, his motherin-law Eileen, and Jace, the other employee of Jokeland, the family cottage industry (the office is literally a cottage) whence all the Jackie The Joke Man T-shirts, comedy CDs, mugs, joke-in-a-boxes, screensavers, and other Jackie paraphernalia are shipped to the clamoring fans of the head writer of “The Howard Stern Show.” The counterman dutifully tallies up the huge bill, and Jackie blithely has him put it on his tab. “Don’t cheat me,” he warns good-naturedly. “It’s weird being rich,” he sighs as we lug the booty out to his spanking-new Volvo. “I’m not used to it.”
A self-made Joke Man, Jackie is proud of his heritage.
Before heading back to Jokeland, we pay a visit to his parents’ home, located a few blocks from the fish market Since his mother’s recent death, Jackie has been renovating the house. One thing is for sure: He isn’t selling it so some yuppie can come in and tear it down. “This is where my parents battled for 40 years,” he says dryly as he gives me a tour of the stately old home his grandfather built in 1910. He shows me the kitchen where his father was born, and the kitchen table where his father died of a stroke in 1993 at age 80. “So, he moved about six inches in his whole life,” Jackie says with a laugh. Jackie’s great-grandfather, he explains, was East Norwich’s premier pickle deliverer, as well as a hustler, and Jackie proudly points out the yellowing, framed contracts for pickles, trees for making telephone poles, and whatever else his forefather could sell that hang on the walls of the ancestral home.
But Jackie has also experienced his share of family dysfunction, specifically his father’s alcohol problem. Through family connections in the local Republican party (Jackie’s great-great-uncle was Teddy Roosevelt’s coachman), Jackie’s dad was named deputy superintendent of highways of Nassau County. But supporting Jackie and his two brothers and one sister meant hustling for more money, and at night the elder Martling would head off to Roosevelt Raceway, where he was entrusted with the responsibility of getting the horses to pee in a jar to test their urine. In between and after, he’d stop for a drink or four.
“I never felt abused,” Jackie remembers. “But he was a remote guy; his whole family was. I’m not sure that if he were stone sober, my father would have said a word. Therapists keep trying to tell me I had a miserable childhood, but I still have my kindergarten report card that says I had a sunny disposition. So, they say I must have been having fun to cover something up. But wait a minute, if I think I’m having fun, am I having fun or not?”
Jackie learned early on that one way to have fun was to amuse people by telling them jokes. In third grade he saw how his cousin Pete’s popularity soared after he recited a dirty version of “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” “I swear I remember every filthy joke I’ve heard since then,” Jackie says. He became the class clown, the jokester slyly flipping the photographer the bird in his eighth-grade class picture. He honed his craft at a local country club, where he supervised the busboys for four years. He’d stand in the kitchen for hours on end, telling joke after joke to a deadpan Dutch pantryman named Jake. “That guy would not smile, so the harder that Jake didn’t laugh at me, the harder I laughed at myself.”
After graduating from Oyster Bay High School in 1966, Jackie headed to Michigan State University. “I did the math,” he says. “There were 40,000 students at M.S.U. Forty thousand divided by two, that’s 20,000 girls.” Jackie went off to East Lansing and played the odds. “I fucked plenty of horrible women in college. Hey, you’re having fun, you fuck an ugly one, you fuck a pretty one — nobody was keeping score.”
The scoring was easy because, by the luck of the draw, he was assigned to the freak dormitory in the liberal-arts college. No jock Spartans for Jackie — he was living with the hippies, the pot-heads, and barefoot babes. “Those were very formative years,” he recalls.
Jackie’s college days and nights were filled with keg parties, bong blasts, shoplifted steaks, and, naturally, the pursuit of pussy. Once Jackie surreptitiously miked his dorm room, ran the line to a friend’s room down the hall, then had his date hum the “Star-Spangled Banner” while she was blowing him, to the delight of his pals. No wonder it took him five years to graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering. And he still had no idea what to do with his life.
For a while he played guitar in a Lansing-area band, but quit when he overheard the drummer tell a friend,
“One day we hope to tour Ohio.” Reality check, please. Then he did construction work in Denver, until an old high-school friend, Chris Bates, lured him back to New York in 1973 to play music. For the next few years, they gigged around Long Island as the Off Hour Rockers. They were just two guys (later they added a keyboard player) playing acoustic guitars, telling jokes, and generally being assholes. It was a dead end. “We were too big for wine-and-cheese gatherings,” Jackie remembers, “but too small to play the Hamptons.”
Then one night in 1975 he happened to be at Catch a Rising Star, one of the then hot new comedy clubs in New York City. It was open-mic amateur night, and when one of the comics bombed and left the stage before his time was up, Jackie leaped onto the stage and told an old, stale dirty joke that immediately brought the house down. When the emcee complimented him on the joke, Jackie had a revelation. “If the emcee at Catch a Rising Star hasn’t heard that joke, maybe other people haven’t either. Maybe I’m sitting on something here.”
Jackie began researching in earnest. He pored through bunches of old dirty-joke books, collecting every joke he could. By 1978 he’d worked up enough nerve to do comedy gigs at Dixon’s, a club in Long Island. Soon he was promoting a comedy night at a local bar named Cinnamon’s. That same year, he self-distributed his first comedy LP, What Did You Expect? Then he hit on the idea of creating a telephone joke line that someone could call up, hear funny jokes, and then get hit with a plug for Jackie’s latest show and albums. Dial-a-Joke, (516) 922-WINE, was born.
Jackie leads me up the stairs of his parents’ house to the attic, which harbored the first Jokeland. And there they are: ten tape recorders, lined up in a row, still spewing out dirty jokes to the faithful who’ve dialed Jackie’s joke line for the past 20 years. Upward of 8,000 people a day call 922-WINE and hear Jackie laughing, whooping, and hollering dirty jokes. All around the attic are faded posters from those early days, along with glossy photos of Jackie with then unknown comics Eddie Murphy, Paul Reiser, and Bill Maher. Jackie finds a 1980 wall calendar marked up with bookings. “I’ve been hustling for a long fucking time,” he remarks as we walk down the stairs and out to the car. It’s time to go to the current Jokeland and cook those 20 lobsters.
The Joke Man now resides in Bayville, a sleepy little town on the North Shore, about five minutes from East Norwich. He owns three houses here — one where he and Nancy live, another that’s rented out, and a third, Jokeland, where Nancy and her mother, Eileen, greet us and begin preparing the seafood. Howard and the rest of the gang continually ridicule these modest domiciles, which are under constant siege from the vagaries of the nearby Long Island Sound. But in some ways they’re the houses that Howard Stern built.
Jackie wasn’t exactly on fire when he met Howard in 1983. Two years earlier, Jackie had hooked up with Nancy Sirianni, a local girl who left her job managing a recording studio to guide Jackie’s nascent comedy career. (They were married in 1988.) Together, they promoted comedy shows at Governor’s, a comedy club in Levittown. For one week a month, Jackie would hit the road to perform. He also sold jokes to Rodney Dangerfield (at $50 a pop) and Phyllis Diller (who paid $3 a joke). When a friend in Washington, D.C., told him about this outrageous disc jockey who was leaving D.C. for WNBC in New York, Jackie sent Howard a package of his three homemade comedy albums. Howard listened, amazed at this character who seemed to know every dumb dirty joke ever invented, and invited him up to the studio.
“Here I am at 30 Rockefeller Center, pictures of Carson and Donahue and all on the walls, at this big-time radio station. I was star struck,” Jackie remembers. “But there was Howard, this big Jewish guy with a bad mustache and short hair, acting goofy. I just hung out on the air and laughed a lot. And at the end of the day, Howard asked me to come back the next week.”
Best of all, Howard plugged the joke line during the show. Jackie had reached hundreds of thousands more potential callers in a matter of minutes than he had in five years plastering Dial-a-Joke stickers all over Long Island. Soon Jackie was bringing other comedians to the studio to play “Stump the Comedians,” a game in which people called in with the beginning of a joke that Jackie and his pals would have to finish. Jackie never failed — his encyclopedic knowledge of jokes did not let him down.
It was a brazen act that cemented Jackie and Howard’s relationship and led indirectly to the sumptuous lobster lunch that Jackie and I were about to enjoy. While Jackie was hanging out with Howard on the air one day, he slipped him a note with a joke on it. To Jackie’s amazement, Howard read the line and it got big laughs. Although to this day the two have never discussed exactly how, Jackie found himself writing for Howard.
At first, he wasn’t even paid. In fact, soon after Jackie came aboard, there wasn’t even a show. Despite having the highest-rated afternoon show in New York, Howard was fired by NBC. Shortly after he resurfaced at K-Rock, however, Howard called Jackie and asked him to rejoin the show, for one afternoon a week. This time, at Nancy’s insistence, Jackie asked for parking money. Then in February 1986, when Howard moved to the morning drive-time slot, he asked Jackie to come up with a price for appearing two days a week. Two days led to three days, sometimes even four days. Jackie summoned up his courage and decided to quit touring. In August he was offered a full-time job on “The Howard Stern Show.” The only problem was that K-Rock’s general manager, Tom Chiusano, arrived at his salary by multiplying his day rate times five. Jackie, in his naivete, had grossly undervalued his services.
It’s no secret around “The Howard Stern Show” that Jackie wants more money — he’s resigned from the show four times in various ploys to get his salary raised — and he’s taken a lot of shit for it on the air and in private. But part of the blame has to be laid at his own feet. When Jackie first joined the show, Howard persuaded his own (and Robin’s and Fred’s) agent, Don Buchwald, to represent the newcomer. Astonishingly, Jackie turned Buchwald down. “I figured Robin gets what falls off of Howard, and Fred gets what falls off of Robin. It didn’t make sense to have the same guy representing me,” Jackie reasoned. So, for years he did his own negotiating, which led to walkouts and letters of resignation (which, in sublime Stern style, wound up being read on the air). “I’ve never been a troublemaker, unless trying to get your due is trouble making,” he says. “Then, yes, I’m absolutely a troublemaker.” Nowadays, Jackie is represented by a lawyer and a manager and, after his last walkout last year, seems at least reasonably content. Anyway, he looks content polishing off his third lobster.
“Look, it was just a ballsy thing where I got up my nerve and handed Howard that first joke to read, and it’s developed into a seamless thing,” he explains. “And with Fred writing down notes too, Howard now has three different senses of humor at his disposal. It’s this monster coming from three different angles.”
Over the years, Jackie has become a larger-than-life, Falstaffian character on the show. Endless stories have been told about his drinking exploits, his potsmoking antics, his sometimes-repugnant attempts to embrace life in all of its base aspects. Tales have been told of a drunken Jackie on a cross-country triptossing his fresh urine out the front window of his car — only to have the wind blow it into the backseat, where it splashed in his mother’s face. Legend also holds that he’s taken shits out of car windows mid-moon, painted his face Indian-style with the fresh menstrual blood of a college girlfriend, and posed for a picture at a Super Bowl party while inserting one of his fingers in the anus of a New York Giants hater who had GIANTS SUCK painted on his butt cheeks (and then ate chicken wings without washing that finger). ’’I’m out there living a little,” Jackie shrugs.
Not surprisingly, Jackie’s antics, whether fact or fiction, have become fodder for the show. But when the rest of the gang piles on, he lets it roll off his back. “I would say I take more abuse than anybody on the show,” he allows. “Number one, I don’t have a choice. And number two, I write some of the horrible things that Howard says about me. I mean, there’s nobody more generous than I am, and every time Howard calls me cheap it makes me fuckin’ nuts, and he knows it makes me nuts. But do you think he’s gonna stop? I could give away my fuckin’ house and he’d say, ‘Oh, you cheapskate, you just didn’t want to have to pay the electric bill.’ There’s no way to fight back.”
Jackie opens another Heineken and offers me a third lobster. My eyes wander the room here at Jokeland. Stacked in one corner is a pile of recording equipment, Nancy’s home studio, which is being relocated to the soon-to-be-renovated garage out back. (Doting husband Jackie has been supporting singer-songwriter Nancy’s music ventures for some years now, the latest being a group called The Scoldees.) On one wall hangs a framed poster proclaiming Private Parts the number one-grossing movie, with a platinum Private Parts CD next to it. Over the bathroom door hangs a sign that reads RECEIVING. My eyes stray to a huge barbecue grill on the patio. Top of the line. Must have cost a fortune. Not. Nancy rolls her eyes and relates the story of the free grill. Seems a Weber distributor who was a fan of the show heard that Jackie needed a grill for a party he was throwing at Jokeland and offered to give Jackie a top-of-the-line grill in return for being invited to the party. Afterward, they couldn’t get rid of the guy; he began pestering them for invitations to all of their parties.
“I like to barter for stuff,” Jackie says.
“I want to pay for everything,” Nancy retorts. “We can afford to buy the beer. We don’t have to invite the beer distributor to the party.”
Not now they don’t. Jackie is on a major career roll. Last year Simon & Schuster published a collection of his dirty jokes. He recently signed a deal with Oglio Records to distribute his new CDs. (The first, Hot Dogs and Donuts, is in better music stores everywhere.) He also has his own Website, a regular column of jokes in this very magazine, and has been playing class venues everywhere from Las Vegas to the Westbury Music Fair. So, has success mellowed The Joke Man?
“Maybe I worry a bit less,” Jackie reflects. “Now every year I’ve got a little bit more money and a few less years it has to last. If the show closed tomorrow, I could do cruise ships for the rest of my life, going around the world half the year. It’s like Jackie Mason says, ‘I never have to work another day in my life. Unless I want to buy something. That’s a different story.’”
If the show ended tomorrow, I suggest, he could always go into real estate with all his houses.
Jackie winces. “Fuck you. Look, the bottom line is our houses are small, on small lots, because it’s Bayville. There’s no such thing as sprawling pieces of land here. We could spend the same amount of money and go inland a mile or two and get a nice big place. But I love it here. You ever been to the other house?”
Next thing, we’re piling into the Volvo. Jackie drives a few blocks and parks in front of a modest house near a marina. This is where Jackie and Nancy live. We park in the driveway, and Jackie gives me a tour of the back. There’s a shed that’s been converted into a workout room. A large Jacuzzi on the rear deck. Another huge gas grill. We enter the house. There’s a giant television that dwarfs the small living room. On the second floor is the master bedroom.
“We actually tore a hole in the wall and built an extension so we could fit a nice-size TV in here,” he says, demonstrating. Then he’s off, rushing up the narrow stairs to a converted attic. He wants to show me the view of the marina. Years ago, when they first bought this house. there was this tiny, slatted-up ventilation hole in the wall of the attic. Jackie got stoned one day and started bending the metal slats. Each time he’d go up to the attic, he’d bend them a little more, until one day he clawed at the slats and – eureka — he realized they had a water view from that vantage point. So, they tore out the slats and put in windows, and now Jackie can actually see the marina where he stores his beloved jetty.
Ah, the infamous jetty. Another much-discussed topic on the show. After the disastrous winter storm and flood of ’92 (when Jokeland was under six feet of water), Jackie, walking along the beach, came upon a four-by 20-foot ragged wood dock slip that had washed up on the sand. It lay there until that summer, when Jackie painstakingly cleaned and painted the wood, then floated it 50 yards out from shore. where he anchored it. Voila, instant jetty I Each winter Jackie dutifully stores this hunk of wood until the first harbinger of summer, when it’s time to relaunch the jetty so Jackie can rush home from work, grab a couple of Heinies, swim out the 150 feet, and bask on that slab of wood for hours on end. It’s a good life.
Jackie stares wistfully at his water view. “Hey, I love it here. I love coming home and swimming and going to my computer and then going back swimming. We’re in fuckin’ Oz. We got our little hot tub, our little restaurants. It’s our little shit-hole of the world.”
Jackie smiles contentedly. Then it’s time to go downstairs and get on the computer and check out the new 3-D animated Joke Man performing on his Website. And maybe eat just one more lobster.
Fred Norris is normal – (for a Martian)
If you listen to Howard Stern, you might think that Fred Norris, his sound-effects guy, song parodist, and radio show co-writer, is the most dysfunctional person on his staff. According to Stern, Fred fits the profile of a serial killer, carries a shovel in his car trunk, is so much of a hayseed that he’s incapable of opening a checking account by himself, eats by collecting food in a pouch in his mouth, mocks his mother by buying her a Carvel Cookie Puss ice-cream cake for Mother’s Day, wears two watches, has two different sets of names, and might just be from Mars. And that’s just for starters.
But over lunch at a very nice restaurant located a stone’s throw from the K-Rock studios, Fred is successfully rebutting these charges with quiet elegance. Buying his mother the Carvel cake for Mother’s Day was merely his idea of a joke. He carries a shovel because he once got caught in a sudden snowstorm and suffered frostbite when he had to abandon his car. The analog watch is for his general time-keeping; the digital watch is for the more precise task of timing commercials. His biological father’s name was Nukis; his stepfather’s was Norris. He never liked the name Fred, so after discovering that his mother originally wanted to name him Eric but was overruled by his father (because a previous boyfriend of hers had been named Eric), Fred legally changed his first name to Eric — although everyone still calls him Fred.
Fred/Eric cuts another chunk off his steak and puts it in his mouth. His cheek balloons out.
“Maybe I do pouch,” he admits, “but at least I’m neat. Howard just lets the food fly all over the place. Let’s talk about these meteorite-size pieces of baked potato that I used to find on the front of the board, and the shreds of turkey over by the telephone button.”
So, given all these rational explanations, why does Fred have this weird rep?
“Oh, I’m so mysterious, I’m so bizarre,” Fred mocks. “Yet there are many people, friends of the show, who come up to me and go, ‘You know something? They knock you, but you’re the most normal human being on that program.’ I don’t even know what normal is, to be honest. I didn’t have the greatest upbringing in the world. I spent a lot of time by myself, which is probably why I lack certain social graces. But that’s also probably why I know shitloads of useless pieces of information, which somehow prove to be useful to this program.”
Not having the greatest upbringing is a bit of an understatement. Born July 9, 1955, to a pair of full-blooded Latvians, Fred was raised near Manchester, Connecticut. in a rural area famous for its vast tobacco fields. By the time Fred, the second of two sons, was born, his parents’ marriage was already on the ropes. His biological father left home when Fred was five, but those first few years were pure hell. “There was always tension and rage,” he remembers. “My father had an alcohol problem. When Dad came home, you hid in the closet because there was always something going on you’d rather not be a part of.”
Fred spent most of his early childhood alone. When his older brother wasn’t using Fred as a human punching bag, the brother wanted nothing to do with him. So Fred would escape by reading books, taking long bicycle rides, or watching lots of afternoon TV reruns (whence came his encyclopedic knowledge of trashy fifties TV). “I’d like b state for the record that every person on this show of Howard’s, even Robin, at least had a father figure to guide them,” he says. “Me, I was on my own.”
Despite the lack of guidance, Fred managed to navigate his adolescence without major incident. When Fred was 13 his mother married his stepdad, Louis Norris, a cabinetmaker, whom Fred credits with finally making his mom happy. Around this time, Fred started playing guitar and began hanging out with a “better class of people.” Namely, people who could afford instruments — a step up from his neighbors, who, he says, could have stepped right out of Deliverance.
An avid reader, he always got good grades without much effort. Yet when it came to girls, Fred remained a misfit. “I was painfully shy. I still am,” he says with a laugh.
Did he have any girlfriends?
‘I remember there was a lot of starring,’ he says. “I was so scared of being rejected that I couldn’t even approach them. It was very sad.”
After a short stint at Manchester Community College, followed by a few years working in an airplane-parts factory, Fred succumbed to pressure from his parents and enrolled at Western Connecticut State College, where he majored in communications. He figured he’d wind up in radio because “everybody kept telling me that I had a decent voice.” While a student, he landed a job working the night shift at WCCC in Hartlord, which is where he met the station’s new morning man, a tall, lanky Long Islander named Howard Stern.
“Howard had so much energy,” Fred remembers. “What struck me the most was how hard he worked. Most of the other disc jockeys would come in hung over, put a record on, and try to pick up girls on the request line.”
To amuse Howard during commercial breaks, Fred began doing comic impersonations, which Stern insisted he reprise on the air. Comedic talent aside, what most impressed Howard about Fred was his unselfish act of picking up and filing away the albums that Howard had strewn all over the floor during his shift. For that alone, Howard vows that Fred will always have a job with him.
“The one thing that my mother tried to impress on me was to be polite and helpful,” Fred says. “I was just being me. If Howard thinks I secretly wanted to get into his pants, he’s totally wrong.”
After Stern split Hartford for a job in Detroit, he’d call Fred and have him do his Howard Cosell or Muhammad Ali impersonations long-distance. And when Stern relocated to Washington, D.C., in 1981, he called Fred and offered him a job as his producer. It was time for Fred to finally leave his parents’ home and venture out into the real world. Only he looked like he let his mother dress him before he left.
Howard describes Fred’s sartorial style in those days as “Latvian hillbilly.” He wore farmer blue jeans, a drab work shirt, and Kangaroo sneakers straight from the K-Mart bargain bin. To top it all off, a floppy cabdriver’s cap would cover his rarely washed hair. Besides looking out of place, he felt it.
“Robin was there already, and when I saw the ease of their interaction, it was like, ‘What the fuck am I doing here? I can’t compete with this.’ I felt like I was playing high-school playground ball and they were in the Olympics,” Fred recalls. “I was ready to leave after a week. But Howard said, ‘Hang in there. You’ll catch up. ’”
Howard and his wife, Alison, became Fred’s extended family. Alison found Fred an apartment. They fed him. They all hung out on weekends. The only thing they didn’t do was to get him laid. He still couldn’t score, despite ample opportunities and entreaties from many of his more-than-willing coworkers. So Fred buried himself in work-writing and producing bits, working sound effects into the mix, doing his impressions and song parodies.
It was more of the same when the Stern show moved to New York in 1983, first in the afternoons on WNBC-AM, then back in the mornings at K-Rock. Except now on the weekends, Fred would drive home to Connecticut to spend time with his parents. His lack of interest in things sexual had Howard wondering aloud whether Fred was, well, light in the loafers.
“I was focused on the work, which I probably used to prevent myself from getting involved with a lot of people,” Fred says, with the benefit of hindsight and a few years of analysis. “I guess I had, like, a low-grade depression that just kind of sapped me from zipping out into the world. But I’ve gotten better,” he says with a chuckle.
In fact, Fred’s metamorphosis has been nothing short of remarkable. It began with a determined effort to change himself, and came to fruition under the tutelage of the first (and only) serious relationship he’s ever had — with the winner of an on-air Dial-a-Date. But first, the change. Off with the floppy cabby cap. A distress call to Alison Stern resulted in a visit to a hair salon to get a perm. Then Fred consulted with a saleswoman at K-Rock, who schlepped him down to a cut-rate clothing store and helped him pick out an entire new wardrobe. A human being was slowly emerging. Now it was time to date.
But this is still Fred. No social skills.
So how does he score a date? Easy. He has Howard get him one on the air. For years Howard had been playing his own unique version of Dial-a-Date on the air. He’d bring a lesbian, or a handicapped person, or a fatso into the studio and have them choose their date from three people who called in. The winners would get a free dinner at one of the restaurants that advertised on the show.
“It was one of those mornings when a fat Dial-a-Date didn’t show up,” Fred recollects. “Maybe because we were making cow jokes all morning. Then Gary goes, ‘Hey, how about Fred?’ Howard immediately went, ‘Nah, he doesn’t want to do it.’ And I go, ‘You know something? I’ll do it.’ I thought Howard was gonna drop a load right there.”
So they got three girls lined up on the phones. The first two were Grade-A sluts who guaranteed Fred sex. The third was a nice Jewish girl, an aspiring actress, coincidentally named Allison, who was temporarily staying with her parents in Long Island. During the contest, her irate father picked up an extension and tried to disconnect the call. Of course, Fred picked bachelorette number three.
“Howard was totally against it,” Fred says, smiling. “He’s like, ‘Go with the girl who’ll blow you! What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ “
Fred and Allison met at a restaurant and had dinner with the winners of the one-legged Dial-a-Date, the one-eyed Dial-a-Date, the spotted-zebra-face Dial-a-Date, and, not surprisingly, they only had eyes for each other. One thing led to another, and, later that night, Fred broke his long drought.
But he couldn’t tell anyone! He’d promised that to Allison. “Howard tried to worm it out of me, and if there was anyone I wanted to tell, it was Howard,” Fred laughs. “ ‘Now, Howard, you’ve been thinking I’m a queer. And I went on Dial-a-Date and I got fuckin’ laid. Not once, but twice.’ It was painful that I couldn’t tell him.”
Allison introduced Fred to a whole new world of choices. Thai food instead of cheeseburgers. Sapporo instead of Budweiser. Armani instead of Oshkosh. Then one-night Fred arrived at a K-Rock party wearing fine Italian loafers without socks and offering his opinion that you hadn’t seen Lost in Yonkers on Broadway unless you’d seen it starring Mercedes Ruehl. This from a guy who hadn’t known how to hail a cab a few months earlier. The transformation was complete; the rube had turned into a sophisticate.
Still, Fred wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that when it was time to get married the least he could do was inform, if not invite, his radio family. In July 1994, after eight years of living together, Fred and Allison took the plunge during one of the Stern-show vacations. They had a lovely wedding on the beach in Amagansett, Long Island. After the ceremony, Fred called Howard and left a message on his machine: “Howard, this is Fred Norris. [Twenty years of working together and he still identifies himself as ‘Fred Norris’!] I just wanted to let you know that Allison and I got married.’’ Fred neglected to make the same call to Robin and, deeply hurt, she stopped talking to him. Until he almost killed himself at his bachelor party at Scores, New York’s premier strip club.
When the radio show convened after Fred’s marriage, Howard decided to throw a bachelor party for the newlywed, the theory being that any occasion is an excuse for a party at Scores. Fred vowed not to drink that day, until a celebrant insisted they toast with some tequila shots. One shot led to the next, and before you could say “country bumpkin” Fred had thrown up all over Howard’s lap, nuzzled with Gay Rich, a Stern-show intern, and, on trying to exit the V.I.P. room, missed about four steps and flew headfirst into the floor, rendering himself unconscious and the carpet a deep-crimson hue.
“When I woke up, I saw curtains and other people and I go, ‘Oh, Scores has a room in the back where people go and lie down when they drink too much. How cool,’ “ Fred says with a chuckle. “Then I realize this isn’t Scores, it’s a fucking hospital. ‘Oh, my God, what did I do?’ Then I saw my mortified wife.”
Despite its rocky start, Fred’s marriage has endured. Indeed, married life has enabled him to explore creative outlets outside the Stern show. When his father-in-law died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 59, Fred, realizing that life is way too short, decided to seriously pursue his first love, music. He formed the King Norris band, and released a CD that showcases his guitar virtuosity and songwriting skills. Appearing regularly on the club circuit in the Northeast, King Norris now attracts not only Stern-show devotees but an ever-increasing number of loyal fans.
Following his wife’s lead (and without the knowledge of his Stern-show colleagues}, Fred also began taking acting lessons Since then, he’s appeared in a number of independent films, and received critical kudos for his performance in Private Parts, the screen adaptation of Howard’s best-selling autobiography. Maybe Howard is right after all: Fred is like a chameleon, taking on the attributes of whoever he’s with at the time.
The Stern show remains Fred’s bread and butter. There, his mastery of sound effects continually expands the show’s aural palette. (Fred has been fascinated by the use of sound ever since he took a tour of the NBC radio network soundstage as a little kid from rural Connecticut.) Back in the early days in D.C. and at NBC, Fred and Howard created most of the sound effects live, whapping drum kits and cymbals. But over the years Fred has accumulated a library of prerecorded sound clips with which he unerringly punctuates the proceedings. On any given day a listener is likely to hear 0. J. Simpson’s observations on a gruesome murder (“It happens”), the tarantella when producer Gary Dell’Abate enters the studio, and corny circus music when Howard plugs Jackie The Joke Man’s T-shirts, mugs, comedy cassettes, and CDs (“because he reminds me of this carnival barker hawking his wares”). And when Robin gets on her high horse and delivers one of her impassioned opinions, Fred gently deflates her with schmaltzy soap opera-ish theme music.
Perhaps his darkest (and most hilarious) sound bite features Jackie cackling at the most horrific news stories imaginable. “I will never forget the first time I did that,” Fred smiles. “There was this story about a child who someone wrapped in Saran Wrap and left in the middle of the desert because they thought he was possessed by demons. At that point you go, ‘I could either scream or make a joke out of it.’ Then I realized, ‘Who’s the ultimate joker? He’s sitting right across from me.’ Jackie will laugh at things, and I’ll have no idea why. So I played him laughing.”
Jackie’s reaction?
“Shock. It was as if I had killed the baby in front of him. He was mortified because he didn’t want anybody to think it was actually him laughing. He was gesturing to me to quit it, and the more he did that, the more I played him laughing.”
In fact, Fred is reputed to possess the most vicious sense of humor on the show. Stuttering John will sometimes blanch at the sheer savagery of the questions Fred writes. When Fred dons his Nazi uniform and plays Kurt Waldheim, Jr., hosting the game show “Guess Who’s the Jew,” he’s so convincing that he gets fan mail from Aryan Nation members.
“The show probably gets too meanspirited sometimes,” Fred admits as he polishes off his steak. “But that’s what makes it as exciting as it is. We’re willing to go that extra mile. People don’t realize how much it’s like emotional S&M on the air sometimes. People call me vicious? I’m just trying to be helpful. The ‘Fred, the Man from Mars’ label? That’s that dick Jackie. He’s just a curmudgeonly old troll. Howard once asked where Burt Reynolds’s dinner theater is, so I said, ‘Jupiter, Florida.’ And since Jackie never reads a book or picks up a magazine, or knows anything that happened in the twentieth century, he has contempt for anybody that has any knowledge, information, or perhaps a coherent thought in his head that doesn’t pertain to ‘Why did the drunk take a duck into a bar and fuck him in the ass with a bottle of Chivas?’ So Jackie says, ‘And you’re from Mars.’ That’s where that started — basically a bad joke that Jackie found funny and laughed at a lot, so everyone else thought it was funny, and now people look for my antennae.”
Fred’s been working himself up during this monologue, and I can’t tell how much of this is shtick — little Freddie Nukis inhabiting a character — and how much is Eric Fred Norris really getting pissed. But since he does carry that shovel in his car trunk, I ain’t risking it to find out. I remember what Jackie told me about Fred: “Nobody works harder than Fred. He’s the soldier who would take a bullet for you. He’s the guy who will write 20 pages to my one page. He’s the guy with the broom that has to clean up. But all the time, Howard breaks his balls about doing nothing, and it upsets him. And there’s nothing funnier than that, because nobody works harder than Fred. Someone said they had good news for Howard, and I wrote, ‘What? Fred’s gonna quit?’ So Howard says it, and Fred immediately wrote me a note that said, ‘I was here before you, fat boy.’”
Jackie still doesn’t know if Fred was kidding. And neither do I.
“But you’re really so normal. I don’t see how anybody can believe any of that weird shit about you,” I lie.
Fred nods. He seems calmer now.
“It’s funny, when people on the outside meet me and they have these perceptions from the crazy shit that goes on on the air, they’ll go, ‘My God, you’re really a nice person. Why do they say these things about you?’ And I go, ‘They have a show to do.’ What the fuck do I know? I show up, they abuse me for a few hours. That’s my life.’’
Fred shrugs and picks up his plastic shopping bag. It’s time to go home. Of course, no one on the show has ever been privileged to see Fred’s home. But home he goes. To practice guitar? Run some lines for an audition? Put some freshly butchered human remains in the freezer? Contact his superiors back on his home planet?
Your guess is as good as anyone’s.
