by Al Brumley
New York --- Here’s what you must do to understand Howard Stern:
Think back to your childhood, to a time when you were the target of a bully, to a time when getting a date seemed about as likely as the chance that your parents might buy you that Porsche.
Think back to those feelings -- anger, resentment, rejection -- and the vow you took that one day, by God, you’d show ‘em.
Howard Stern has made himself a superstar by not forgetting that vow.
His weekday morning show, his two best-selling books and his six-day, half-hour E! cable TV show all basically serve as an ongoing "up yours" to the beautiful people of the world.
But revenge is never pretty. Mr. Stern's daily diatribes, his need for attention and his uniquely adolescent artistry have made him one of the most vilified men in America. Meanwhile, as one of the most adored men in America, he continues his pitiless march to ratings supremacy in city after city.
Then again, maybe he's just a guy who figured out that lots of Americans like dirty jokes.
As with most things strange and unusual, the secret of Mr. Stern's success defies simple explanation while at the same time begging for it.
He's a rebel with many flaws - a nightmare for the cultured man. His new book, "Miss America", has become the fastest -selling tome in HarperCollins history. He's No. 1 in Dallas on KEGL-FM (97.1) and in most of the other 22 cities where his show airs, but he's planning his own radio network so he can be heard in every nook and cranny in the country.
He exposes himself to an embarrassing degree and hunts down run-amok egos like a starved blood-hound with the scent of prison issue in his nostrils. Then he turns around and declares his show the only one fit for broadcast. He revels in sexual fantasy but has been married to the same woman for 20 years and urges his listeners to be faithful to their spouses.
Ultimately, he's a broadcaster with a very sophisticated sense of humor wrapped in the glee a teenager feels after dropping a cherry bomb in one of the school toilets.
And ultimately, he says, people need to realize that it's all a big goof.
"Well, you know, I think the majority of the audience...are aware that I'm a performer in the sense that I'm there to entertain them," Mr. Stern says during an interview at his office at New York City's WXRK-FM, his home station. "I'm not to be taken seriously, and I think that there are those people in our society who take me seriously like they take the president of the United States seriously. And they look at me and go, 'Well, Howard Stern said Jews wear funny hats-yarmulkes!' And it's like, so what? Lighten up! So I guess what I want people to understand is that my whole intention in life is to entertain them...to let them have a good time."
But he also understands why some people don't like his approach. While he finds certain biological functions funny, "some people just don't," he says. "I'm not everyone's cup of tea. Those that don't find...[bathroom humor] funny just won't find me funny. It's a mind-set - it's a psychographic, not a demographic."
As the interview begins, he pulls his long hair into a ponytail and leans back in his chair, just as relaxed and friendly as Bubba at the barbershop. He seems eager to please and even more eager to talk.
And he has a lot to talk about. "Miss America", the follow-up to his wildly successful first book, "Private Parts", hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list only a week after it's Nov. 7 release. The book knocked Colin Powell's "My American Journey" from the top non-fiction spot. He plans to be in Dallas on Dec. 18 to sign copies of his new book, though a site has not been announced.
Mr. Stern, 41, spent two months this summer writing "Miss America", often putting in seven or eight hours of work at home after his radio show. The book is part autobiography, part political discourse, part Beeline novel.
When his editor, Judith Regan, said she loved what he had written, "it was like God had told me I had done something great," he says. "It was the most fulfilling moment in my career so far. Just being able to do that was empowering. And while it's certainly not Shakespeare, or I don't consider myself one of the great writers of all time, for me this was a tremendously fulfilling experience."
The title refers to the book's introduction, in which Mr. Stern, under the premise that he won the Miss America crown, thanks the people who helped him reach his goal.
Those people include his father, pictured in female-bathing suit drag sometime in the '50's. "Every day he would dress up like this and teach me what it meant to be a woman," Mr. Stern writes.
The first chapter reveals in unrelenting detail Mr. Stern's search for sex in cyberspace. He goes on to discuss his struggle with obsessive/compulsive disorder, his drug use, his run for the office of governor of New York, his battles with the Federal Communications Commission and a hilarious meeting with Michael Jackson.
The back cover features a picture of Mr. Stern with O.J. Simpson at Donald Trump's wedding. Printed over the picture in large white type are the words "Getting Away With Murder."
Mr. Stern says he wrote a chapter about the Simpson case but didn't include it in the book. "The problem was, while I was writing this, O.J. was on trial every day, the story was changing constantly and I really felt that anything that would come out, you know, two months later for my book would have sort of been outdated," he says. "I didn't even know the verdict at that point."
"And you know, some people have criticized the meat grinder picture," Mr. Stern says. "I see it a whole different way, man. I mean, that's the kind of thing that my wife and I felt strongly about-O.J. should be in jail. She was totally comfortable with it, although she looks at it and thinks it's much worse now."
He laughs when he says that, but he acknowledges that there are parts of the book he would just as soon his wife hadn't seen. Nothing is off-limits for Mr. Stern.
"My wife has a great sense of humor though," he says. "She couldn't be married to me and not have one. She's not a dope, she's not a sap. She gets it. She knows what I do for a living, and she's known it for 20 years.
It is weird, though. It was no doubt weird when I walked in seeing her reading it. I was just like, 'Oh, I don't need this.' I almost wish I could separate all that, like she could never know what I'm saying on the radio and not read this."
Why, then, is he driven to expose himself to such lengths?
"First of all, I've gotta fill four or five hours of radio every day," he says. "And to me, the philosophy of the radio show was that, hey, what made me different from every other performer on the planet was that I was willing to forget about any kind of image. Even when some success started happening, I didn't all of a sudden say, 'Hey now, I've gotta create this image, this persona,' you know? Hey man, admit everything. Tell the truth, because that's what's interesting-the human condition.
"People don't necessarily relate to me because I'm funny. I'm not always funny. I'm more interesting because of the fact that everyone can relate. Everyone's done this stuff-they're just not comfortable admitting it. And when it came to writing a book, I felt you've gotta have the same philosophy. It's the only thing that works. And my wife doesn't like aspects of this book, as you can well imagine. And, you know, I said to her, 'Hey, it's not true!' You know, what am I gonna say?"
Mr. Stern says he knew at age 5 that this was the kind of radio he wanted to do stream-of-consciousness, no music, breaking all the rules and formats. He struggled to do it at Boston University and then at stations in Hartford, CT., Detroit and Washington, DC. Moving to Infinity Broadcasting 10 years ago finally gave him the autonomy he was looking for, he says. But it took a long time to get there.
"I had to do it in stages," he says. "I recognized enough to know that I couldn't just lay out all this [stuff] that I wanted to do. You do a little bit here, you do a little bit there, you play some records. You have to keep pushing the envelope. And it was incredibly frustrating for someone like me because in my mind I wanted to be doing what I'm doing today. If you heard my show in Hartford, by today's standards you'd say, 'Hey, big deal.' But even back then the amount of freedom I was able to get on the air, even though I had to play some records, was incredible."
He says he does act differently in the studio from how he acts away from work because "I don't think I could keep that intense energy level up" off the air.
"When I'm on the air, you know, I'm concentrating. I'm making things mope fast," he says. "Is it my real personality on the air? It's absolutely real because...being on the radio is the only time in my life I can be honest. I have to be so dishonest off the air. You know, as a father you have to sort of play the Ward Cleaver role, as a husband you have to play, you know, whoever the perfect father is, as a son you have to play the perfect child. My kids ask me if I did drugs, I say no. Right now I say no. I don't want to glamorize it in any way."
People who believe he is a racist simply don't listen to his show enough, he says. He uses an anecdote from his campaign for governor to make the point.
"When I was running for governor, we lampooned the whole process," he says. "How many times have you watched during a political election, see a guy run for vice president, president, and you know somewhere behind the scenes they were saying, 'Hey, we want to have Harry Schwartz as vice president, but, you know, he's a Jew-can't have that.'"
So Mr. Stern chose Stan Dworkin, who is Jewish, to be his running mate and talked to him on the air. "I go, 'Stan, you're a Jew, you know, can't put you in-you're a Jew. People hate Jews, Stan.' So someone tunes in the radio and hears, 'People hate Jews, you can't be a running mate'-boom, Howard Stern's a racist. That's not the point I'm making. I'm saying this goes on everywhere in America, it's going on in all the back rooms, and we're doing satire here. But people hear that with half an ear on the radio."
The network will be all talk, 24 hours a day, with his show on at morning drive. He's not sure yet what all the talk will be about, but he already has one host in mind, a guy he won't name yet but who he says beats Rush Limbaugh consistently. He would like to have the network up and running in six months but doesn't know if it will happen that soon.
As for the movie, he's finally gotten what he calls an "absolutely brilliant" screenplay for "Private Parts" and says he can't wait to star in it.
In the meantime, he continues to seek out and expose all the hypocrisy and overblown egos he can find. "Maybe this is a sickness about me, but I've never felt like I was anything special," he says. "And I've certainly never felt like I'm better than anyone else. I just get this feeling that most people who get any degree of fame or degree of success in their life become these bloated images of themselves. You know, that's why every guy who becomes famous divorces his wife because, you know, here's the woman who knew them when they were nothing, and they can't deal with that. They want to be worshipped and idolized and all this kind of crap."
He says he believes in civility as much as the next person, but expecting that from his show is "like telling the cast of "Seinfeld" to be more civil to each other."
His definition of good radio?
"Good radio is something that engages you, that is entertaining, that's real," he says. "My definition of good radio is our show, and everything else blows. That's pretty much the definition...When I got into radio it was not the place to be, and I feel I helped make it a hipper medium."
Tejano superstar Selena was murdered on Friday, March 31. The following Monday, Howard Stern angered thousands of Hispanics and other listeners when he played the sound of gunshots while discussing her death during his radio show and said he didn't like her music.
Many Selena fans and Hispanic leaders accused him of belittling her and condoning her death.
Among the quotes that angered them: "I have no idea why she [Selena] would be so popular over somebody else. Spanish people have no taste in music. They don't have any depth."
In an interview on Nov. 9, Mr. Stern discussed the controversy and said that "Selena fans were duped."
"It was a weird situation," he said. "There were two disc jockeys on, I think, in Texas, two Spanish guys, and they called me up and they go. 'Did you play gunshots?' And then I go, 'Yeah, but you don't listen to my show every day.' Whenever there's a tragedy or anything...that's what we play. If there's a car crash, we have cars crashing. So they set out this whole set of lies that I had berated Selena.
"Here's what I said: The woman died, I did about an hour about the woman who shot her, how she should be strung up and hung, how it was despicable. What was this Selena doing in a hotel by herself with a disgruntled fan club president? Why wasn't there anybody protecting her? I was very upset.
"I then said, "I have never even heard of this Selena-let me hear some of her music.' I say, 'Oh, it's horrible music, I hate this music.' This is America. You're allowed to say you don't like someone's music."
Mr. Stern insisted that the statement he read on the air in Spanish three days later was not an apology.
"I never apologized," he said. "I never would apologize for what I said about that. I didn't say anything bad-why would I apologize? I made a statement in Spanish saying, 'Hey, if there's any misunderstanding, if anybody didn't get what I said, here's what I said.'" - Al Brumley
© 1995 The Dallas Morning News.
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