RADIO : If We May, Sir . . . : For Michael Jackson, the Persian Gulf War is the most compelling topic of an enduring career in L.A. talk radio

Michael Jackson, just for a moment, is seen in what many of his listeners might think of as an uncharacteristic pose. The ambassadorial talk-show host of KABC-AM (790) radio is seated at the push-button controls of his electronic embassy of the air on a recent morning, leaning into the hanging microphone that enables a vast radio audience spread out across Southern California to hear him get a gentlemanly grip on the Persian Gulf War, Los Angeles politics, trucking regulations, the Oscar nominations, pediatric AIDS and a daunting pile of other topics unloaded by the day’s events in the world.

Between interviews conducted with his far-flung network of correspondents and callers, he bears witness to the virtues of pain remedies, vacuum cleaners, luggage, Princess Cruises, loan companies, a Beverly Hills rib joint, a Mercedes dealership and enough goods and services to supply the gross national product of a small Caribbean nation.

Jackson wears a finely striped oxford cloth shirt with a white buttonless collar cinched neatly at the neck by a red silk tie. His white French cuffs are clasped with gold cuff links. A crisp blue blazer hangs from the back of his springy desk chair. This is a typical outfit. “I always dress for the show,” he says. Nothing, in fact, is out of the ordinary about the way Jackson looks at 11 a.m. in the middle of his four-hour program this morning except for one small thing, which his radio audience cannot see, any more than they can see his French cuffs: He is thumbing his nose wildly at Gore Vidal, right in the middle of a Ben-Gay commercial.

Vidal, the writer and political provocateur , is seated directly across the console from him preparing to do some serious damage to conventional notions of patriotism stirred up by the war. Suddenly he is listening at close range to Jackson’s winsome pitch for Ben-Gay deep-heat rub (“It’s a couple of pain relievers, not just one”), and Vidal starts to laugh. American warplanes are dropping thousand-pound bombs on Iraq, but the folks back home still have those aching shoulders!

Jackson, who is nothing if not hospitable, puts his right thumb to his nose and wiggles his fingers at Vidal’s impertinence while gamely finishing the spot. Not to worry, though. The host is still smiling. This is as close as Michael Jackson usually gets to ire, which probably has a lot to do with why people like him so much and why he has been on the air at the same station since 1966.

Ted Koppel can flatten a guest with his national security airs, Terry Gross of National Public Radio has a divining rod that aims straight for the heart of an inconsistency, and Larry King just hangs up on people. Michael Jackson is the guy who prefaces questions with such phrases as: “If I may, sir. . . .”

When a woman calls in to complain about Vidal and remind him of the “Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait,” Jackson immediately rewards her with, “Good for you!” and then perches on the edge of her remaining remarks, as he so often does, interjecting encouragement (“super,” “I understand,” “good point”) at every opportunity.

In Los Angeles, Jackson’s sunny British accent has been the reassuring radio voice rising above the clouds of Desert Storm, ceremonially questioning colonels, diplomats, professors, newspaper reporters, ABC correspondents, war opponents and war apologists and, last but not least, you . “Those are the views of (fill in the blank),” he commonly announces, introducing the call-in segment of a given hour. “Now let’s hear what you think. 1-800-222-KABC.” There are a lot of you out there, according to audience estimates recorded by the Arbitron ratings service. Not as many as there were five years ago, but “The Michael Jackson Show” still pulls in more than 600,000 listeners per week--most of them “information junkies” 35 or older--making it the No. 2 radio program in Los Angeles during its time slot, following the soft-rock giant KOST-FM (103.5).

In his nearly 25 years at KABC, Jackson says he cannot remember another topic that compares to the Persian Gulf War, one that so captivated his listeners and pushed other subjects off the air for this long. Though there have been other crises that sent people running to be close to their talking radios--the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, the space shuttle disaster in 1986--the public’s absorption in media coverage of the Persian Gulf War evidently has made Jackson appear more than ever the standard-bearer of KABC. The station’s demagogically inclined early morning comedy team of Ken Minyard and Roger Barkley, who immediately precede Jackson, pull in a larger audience and twice the advertising revenue in their more advantageous drive-time slot, but they don’t often chat with Ramsey Clark and Caspar Weinberger.

Whatever his true status in the city of so many celebrities (one of whom bears his name and is a better dancer), it’s very hard to imagine being Michael Jackson. Not the part about growing up in South Africa, training in London with the BBC, making it across to America and then all the way west to the childhood dream of Los Angeles and even marrying into Hollywood royalty. No, not that part. One can imagine that. What’s difficult is imagining doing what Michael Jackson does every day, five days a week, which is a mental version of hanging 10 on a 30-foot wave while playing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the French horn.

During the four hours he must fill every weekday, he surfs the morning’s breaking news, pointing at this and that development, raising thoughtful questions in a five-minute interview with an ABC correspondent in Dhahran or Boston while simultaneously scribbling notes for his two producers regarding experts who need to be contacted for the third hour. A stray L.A. city councilman must be tracked down along with other interesting voices who are at large around the world. All the while he sneaks glances at the book of an author due in the studio in 10 minutes, keeps an eye peeled on the list of incoming listener calls displayed on a video screen to his right and searches for the text of the next restaurant commercial to be given a touch of his singsong sincerity.

For Jackson, each day is another headlong adventure at the microphone that requires him every hour or so to remind himself and his listeners where they’ve been and whom they’ve heard. (He does this by keeping a diary in front of him, which he fills out in his spare seconds.)

“He’s able to keep six conversations going in his head at once,” says Lyle Gregory, one of Jackson’s young producers, in what might be only an exaggeration by half.

The day after Vidal laid out his analysis of the United States as “a garrison state” led to war by a President fleeing dire domestic problems, the news directors from three Los Angeles television stations sit across from Jackson discussing television’s coverage of the Gulf War. The host hastily reworks a music cue with his engineer, immediately sails through an ad-lib commercial and manages a split-second segue to a recorded announcement. Then he rests back in his chair with visible pleasure at this nifty piece of radio virtuosity and says to the news directors, “I’m still a little boy who likes to get the timing right.”

Ever since his show came back home from its five-year sojourn with the ABC radio network last year and began addressing L.A. again, Jackson has found himself on many days running a desert-to-the-sea town hall meeting. But, during the last month, like Mutual Radio’s Larry King and other talk-show hosts, he has been preoccupied with the Gulf War and seen his program become an extra nerve ending for a large segment of the public.

His wartime supporting cast has included the voices of retired Col. David H. Hackworth, who is covering the war for Newsweek; Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo La Hat; Vice President Dan Quayle; former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, and reporters from the Toronto Star, the New Yorker, Time, the New York Times and The Los Angeles Times--Washington bureau chief Jack Nelson is a frequent guest. Bill Moyers was heard criticizing President Bush’s continued bombing of Baghdad the day after the Soviet proposal raised the possibility of an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The Washington Times’ amusingly pompous editor Arnaud de Borchgrave has been on hand to stick up for the White House. And there have been dozens more. After 25 years on the job, Jackson seems to have the home phone numbers of everyone who’s anyone, from Henry Kissinger to Joan Baez.

One day Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky checked in from Israel, where he had gone to inspect Scud missile damage. When he finished that phone call, Jackson turned to a visiting reporter and said earnestly, “When he gets back, I’ll ask him who paid for his trip, but now was not the time.”

Throughout the emotional bangs and bumps, the vicarious thrills and horrors of a war being relayed largely by satellite and Pentagon public relations experts, Jackson has managed to maintain a vague neutrality on arguments for and against U.S. involvement, allowing his long parade of guests and callers to fill the air with the strongest ideas. Jackson is generally regarded as a liberal, whatever that means anymore. “We’re politically poles apart,” says his wife, Alana, the daughter of actor Alan Ladd, the man who played “Shane.” “I’m much more conservative.”

Her husband is in favor of gun control and women’s right to have abortions. He is an ardent defender of Israel. On the Gulf War, he has been less gung-ho than the average caller (most of whom support it, he tells news organizations that call him regularly for the latest reading on the public mind), but he has not wandered far from the received wisdom that America’s role in the Gulf War is just, our military leaders trustworthy and yellow ribbons de rigueur . He has an American flag flying at his house in a canyon in West Los Angeles.

The day the news directors were on the show was the day after the bombing of the bunker that housed Iraqi civilians. The reports of hundreds of women and children killed in the bunker prompted one caller to question White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater’s claims that the United States valued the “sanctity of life” more than Saddam Hussein did. None of the news directors was willing to take a crack at that one. Nor was Jackson.

“I said six months ago there was going to be a war,” Jackson says when we sit down to lunch in Beverly Hills after the show. Without hitting the point too hard, he concedes that he thinks Bush went ballistic sooner than necessary.

“Now my concern is that we’re forgetting what our mission is while supporting our fighting forces.”

How is it he is able to rein in his own opinions on so many subjects so deftly? Or is he, like a sandbagging prizefighter, simply pulling his punches? Certainly he is the antithesis of the confrontational all-night showman epitomized by actor Eric Bogosian in the 1988 movie “Talk Radio” (Jackson says he hasn’t seen it) or, for that matter, of right-wing ideologue Rush Limbaugh, who is carried opposite him on KABC’s main competitor, KFI.

“Most subjects I try to have a point of view on, but you can’t have it on every call. Sometimes you hold back your point of view. And I think, what if I’m wrong?”

Indeed.

“I’d love an iced tea,” Jackson says to the waiter in a voice that makes everyone within earshot want one too.

For someone so famously affable and warm, in close quarters Jackson doesn’t maintain eye contact easily. His gaze is mostly trained elsewhere as he talks over lunch about his past. At 56, he is a handsome man, 5 feet 7 with small features and a healthy thatch of silver hair. It’s tempting to say he looks something like he sounds. In March of 1984, while horseback riding in Griffith Park, he suffered a mild heart attack and was off the air for eight weeks. While in the hospital, he received 214 floral arrangements from well-wishers. Since recovering, he has been more active than ever, he claims, frequently running 4 miles a day.

“I had a very gregarious couple of parents,” he says, trying to explain his gift for gab. “My parents adored people, and we always had a house full of people.”

His parents were English. His father owned several pubs in London, and Jackson was born there. But when he was 11, the family moved to South Africa in search of “sunshine and decent food,” as he puts it. From a very early age he envisioned himself in radio. By the time he was 16 and finished high school, he was on the air in Johannesburg, having lied about his age.

“It was a phenomenal school for radio because just about everything was live and to be a radio man I had to learn everything from directing radio drama to how to place the microphones for a symphony orchestra. It was real radio.

“I like television, but I love radio. I can be dead tired and put a microphone in front of me and it galvanizes me.”

He didn’t want to stay in South Africa. “Even when I was 11 back in England I dreamed about Hollywood. It was the American movies. To me, Los Angeles was the most glamorous place in the world.”

Jackson says being young and Jewish in South Africa was not a shaping experience. “It was far more significant being white. I didn’t notice being Jewish that much. There was a very large Jewish community in Johannesburg. But I don’t think it made that much impact.

“Now, South Africa itself was a shaping experience. I don’t pretend at the age of 11 to have had a social conscience.”

It was the 1951 British film of Alan Paton’s novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” the first major movie to address the pain of South Africa’s racial discrimination, that Jackson remembers igniting his political consciousness. “If there’s one thing that turned me into a liberal it was a scene in that movie between Sidney Poitier and Canada Lee. I was 15 at the time and I can’t even remember now exactly what happened in the scene except that it had a powerful effect on me.”

After a stint as an announcer and game-show host with BBC radio and television in London in the late 1950s, he landed in America as a morning man at a station in Springfield, Mass. He moved on quickly to San Francisco as a rock jock, then in 1961 was given his first talk show, in an overnight slot. “The instruction was, do anything you like, you’re starting at midnight, just don’t lose us our license.”

What he did, which was novel and unfamiliar as talk radio itself, attracted attention and a full-page article in Time magazine. KHJ hired him away to come to Los Angeles.

“The accent was never a problem, at least not in Los Angeles,” says a radio executive who remembers when Jackson hit town. “A lot of people thought he sounded like Ronald Colman, and that was good.”

But when he went from KHJ to KNX (1070 AM) he ran afoul of his bosses for devoting too much of his program to the Watts riots. The year was 1965, the same year he became an American citizen and married Alana. “They wanted me to be more like Joe Pyne,” he says of his old employer. Pyne, a creature of Los Angeles, was a prototype of the hit-man persona in talk radio. “I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I just wasn’t good at being rude. And they fired me.”

Next stop was KABC, where he started his four-hour daily routine the next year.

The program went national, along with other KABC shows, in 1984 when the network tried to find the same success during the day with syndicated talk shows that Larry King and others had found at night. Ultimately, it didn’t work, though the experiment lasted until 1989. “The network collapsed,” Jackson says with a hint of bitterness in his voice. “They never supported the show. They didn’t sell it. It was a relief to get back to what we were doing before. I think the show is better now than when it was national. The best calls always came from L.A. anyway. L.A. is where the stone hits the water.”

Today, he sees the show as “a sort of newspaper where the letters to the editor are more important than the news.”

A newspaper with lots and lots of inescapable advertisements, it might be added. To younger listeners weaned on FM radio, the 16-18 minutes per hour of commercials carried on KABC can be an earful. But Gore Vidal’s laughter notwithstanding, Jackson is not troubled at all about doing double duty as a pitchman. “I would like to see the commercials cost more and there be fewer of them,” is about as far as he will go on this. “Every cultured friend I have says I shouldn’t do commercials. But I’m a radio man.”

Years ago, Jackson said that his goal was to become a combination of Edward R. Murrow and Johnny Carson. He dismisses that Dream Team concept now, perhaps because what he has become is its own reward. “I don’t want to appear as self-important as Ted Koppel,” he says, searching for other comparisons. In radio, one has to think of late-night VIP chum Larry King (who also does a TV show on CNN). But Jackson doesn’t think King does what he does. “It’s a Q&A;, but there’s not much discussion on his show, is there?”

A large, ruddy-faced man with thick glasses comes over to the table. “Michael Jackson,” the man says happily, extending his hand. It is Rod Steiger. “You did the best interview with me anybody has ever done,” Steiger says to him, turning to me and adding, “It was supposed to be 10 minutes but we went on for an hour and a half. It was great.”

George Green, the president and general manager of KABC, will not reveal how much Jackson makes, but he does say, “There is nobody in the country on daytime radio that earns as much as Michael Jackson.” (In radio parlance, “daytime” is distinguished from morning “drive-time.”)

Best guesses are that he makes well in excess of $500,000 a year. Or, more than NPR’s Noah Adams and less than Rick Dees.

“We give him some direction, but we don’t tell him what to say,” says Green, who hired Jackson back in 1966. “We have certain production directions and policies. Mainly we want to make sure we are airing the kind of topics that have mass appeal.”

When there is not a war on, with half a million Americans in uniform on the other side of the world, Jackson queries doctors, travel writers, best-selling authors and Hollywood people, but his favorite topic seems to be politics. Nevertheless, when he hears that someone had described him as “a political animal,” he says, “That might be a slight exaggeration.”

The show has made news, like the day in 1987 that Gov. George Deukemejian was a guest and had to take a call from state Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who wanted to discuss school funding and had been unable to get an audience with the governor for five months.

“He’s at his best when he’s talking to other journalists,” observes Joe Domanick, a columnist for the L.A. Weekly who has been listening to Jackson regularly for 10 years and has also been a guest on the show. “He’s a good anchor man. He’s at his worst when he’s dealing with light stuff.”

“He seems to be taking more stands now than he used to,” says George Oliva, program manager at competitor KFI and someone who carried Jackson’s network show when he was a program director in Cleveland a few years ago. “There are types of shows he does now that I don’t think he would have done before Rush (Limbaugh) came into the market.”

With the war on, Jackson’s tone has been more dour than usual, but its hasn’t completely obscured his playful side, the side that pushes him into puns and gags with the traffic reporter and the occasional needling of a sponsor.

“Hi, Gene,” he greets a caller, “and I’m in favor of hygiene.”

He is, after all, part journalist, part actor. There was a slow moment during his interview with the news directors when he started doing an imitation of Peter Finch’s character in the film “Network,” that of the mad-with-truth anchorman Howard Beale. It was a good impersonation.

The pace of the show on some days leaves him feeling pent-up and nervous. For relaxation, he likes to get on a horse and ride up into the Angeles National Forest. But he only finds the time for that maybe twice a week.

Most days, he leaves the KABC studios on South La Cienega after he gets off the air at 1 and heads back to his home in West Los Angeles, where he reads, thinks and prepares for the next morning. He and his wife have three children, ages 14 to 23. He says, “My kids take up a lot of my time.” Among his friends he counts restaurateur Bob Morris, who owns Gladstone’s and R.J.’s, and surgeon Marc Friedman. “I have no close friends in my own industry. Lots of people I like, but I don’t socialize with anybody in my profession. I suppose Danny Kaye was the best friend I developed in this town.”

Yet he cannot say enough about Los Angeles. What he says is, “Everything I ever dreamed of is here.”

The next day, when a caller voices concern and confusion about the war, Jackson comforts her by saying, “It’s tough to be an American right now.” His brow furrows, and his voice wrinkles softly into notes of grave concern. “There are some really wonderful people trying their utmost not to kill any civilians,” he reassures her.

One might ask, how does he know this? But whatever his source, this is a quintessential Michael Jackson answer, one that will make many of those listening feel a little better about some of the more ominous things happening in the world in 1991.

“It is show biz,” he says. “Radio is the art of being unnaturally natural. The point is, I have to smile out loud on the radio. Is that phony? No, you have to do that. Silence is open to interpretation. But if I laugh, you know that it isn’t anger.”

It’s the top of the hour and the network news is droning from a monitor overhead. Jackson has a few minutes to catch his breath, but assistants are scurrying in and out handing him notes and taking others from him.

Looking down at his computerized log on the desk, he says, cheerfully, “I think I’ll ad-lib a commercial here.”

The voice of Lyle Gregory comes over the intercom. “Cronkite may be calling in the next hour and we’re trying to get Alan Simpson,” he says, referring to the senator from Wyoming who thinks CNN’s Peter Arnett is aiding Iraq.

“Ten seconds,” an engineer says.

When he’s back on the air, Jackson does a spot for Princess Cruises, then looks down at his daily diary and says into the microphone, “Let’s check up on where we’ve been and where we’re headed.”