Not Just Another Pretty Celebrity : Howard Stern calls a cease-fire in his hate-hate relationship with the media just long enough to: plug his new book (surprise!), bash the FCC, ruminate on celebrity and explain why radio will always be The Show

Ronnie, the limo driver, who goes professionally by the name Ronnie, the Limo Driver, is about 10 hours into his day but still looks as crisp as the early fall afternoon, his shoes shiny and black, his tie, vest, shirt and slacks with the creases clean and proper.

Ronnie leans, as he has for a couple of hours now, against a railing in front of a dry cleaner on 13th Street in Greenwich Village, watching the passing scene, waiting for his boss, who is upstairs in an antique radio store doing business. A young lawyer, idling in what might be the last gorgeous New York afternoon of the year, works up a chat with Ronnie. She’s getting married soon and her fiance may want a limo for the wedding. She wants Ronnie’s last name.

“Does he listen to The Show?” Ronnie asks. The lawyer nods. “Then he knows who Ronnie, the Limo Driver, is.”

The lawyer’s fiance is one of millions who listen to The Show, who know who Ronnie, the Limo Driver, and Jackie, the Joke Man, and Fred and Robin and Baba Booey and Stuttering John--who are all part of The Show--are. And they especially know Ronnie’s boss, Howard Stern, whose show is The Show, “The Howard Stern Show,” the most-listened-to morning radio program in New York, Philadelphia and, for much of the past year, Los Angeles.

Stern, 39, has reached this pinnacle while pretty much disdaining reporters, giving only a handful of interviews in his climb to the top.

But on this exquisite day, Stern is trapped inside the minuscule antique radio shop with a crew from the network newsmagazine show “Dateline NBC.” There he is explaining to host Stone Phillips why his radio show is filled with descriptions of his sex life, scatological humor, gibes at any number of ethnic groups and his problems with the Federal Communications Commission--those problems being based on Stern’s use of his sex life, scatological humor and gibes at various ethnic groups to spice up “The Howard Stern Show” to popular success.

“These kinds of pieces can kill you,” Stern said after he had finally escaped from the antique radio shop and into the haven of Ronnie’s $50,000 modified Lincoln Town Car limo. “What they do is they interview me, I make a couple of good points, then they chop it up. You’ll see. Not one of my points is going to be there. I never do pieces like this. I’m only doing it because of the book. I always get (expletive) by pieces like this.”

The book is Stern’s opus, “Private Parts,” 448 pages that are part autobiography, part diatribe, part comedy routine and all Stern. The book, which reached stores on Friday, has chapter titles like “Pig Virus,” “If You’re Not Like Me, I Hate You,” “Yes, I Am Fartman” and “Another Lesbian Story.” The cover jacket photo is of a nude Stern, his private parts covered cleverly only by the book’s title. The legions of Sternophiles will adore “Private Parts,” and it is Stern’s fondest hope that the book will bring reinforcements from near and far to those legions.

“With the book, if I can find a new audience, that’s great,” Stern said. “I wanted to write something of substance, so people thought I wasn’t ripping off the public. I think I accomplished what I set out to do with the book, and that’s why I’m doing all the interviews.”

Stern has actually endeared himself to fans by avoiding the press for most of the eight years since he was fired for his antics at WNBC-AM in New York and moved to a then-foundering FM rock station, WXRK. Many members of the press decried Stern for his slew of bits, which they found raunchy, imbecilic, juvenile or worse--bits like “Bestiality Dial-a-Date,” “The Adventures of Fartman,” “Butt Bongo Fiesta” and “Bobbing for Tampons.” Women regularly strip off large sections of their clothing on the show to Stern’s explicit description. Lesbians lavish him with tales of their sex lives. Stern asks celebrities, sometimes by phone at 4 a.m. their time, about their toilet habits. He can become opinionated on nearly any subject at the sight of an open microphone, and those opinions are rarely endearing to the PC brigade.

For this, his fans--who constitute 5.4% of the morning audience in Los Angeles, 8% in New York and a whopping 9.8% in Philadelphia--have formed a fiercely loyal front, defending Stern at every turn. Stern fans call phone-in shows to promote his name; they became particularly evident during the 1992 presidential campaign when the candidates were on national television. They join him in “burial” rallies when he overtakes local radio competition city by city. They watch him conduct offbeat interviews on his weekly TV show on the E! cable network.

And since they can hear him for more than four hours each weekday--Stern regularly goes past his official 10 a.m. sign-off time, once going as late as 11:27 a.m.--they have apparently lost their need to have him interviewed.

“There is calculation on my part,” said Stern, riding in the Friday afternoon traffic toward his home on Long Island’s North Shore. “As a defensive measure in my career, for my own sanity, I stopped doing interviews. I felt they affected me in a negative way. I didn’t like my words being edited. I didn’t like someone else interpreting what I had to say. For the most part, I was being burned.”

But for several weeks preceding the release of his book, Stern acquiesced to myriad interviews: People, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, the television networks, newspapers from across the country. They may have reviled him in the past, complained about his disdain for them, but now they line up for a few precious moments with him. Now Stern has clout, and so the flocking to the self-proclaimed King of All Media continues unabated.

Most reportorial visits start with a turn in Stern’s working quarters, the WXRK studios on the fourth floor of an office tower on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. “The Howard Stern Show” lair is typically radio-cramped. Stern himself, with his hair billowing Rapunzel-like down his 6-foot-5 frame, sits at the control board, surrounded on all sides by tape cartridges, albums, CDs and other recording detritus piled claustrophobically around him. Facing Stern, at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock angles, respectively, are Jackie (The Joke Man) Martling and Fred Norris, Stern’s foils-writers-special effects guys-confidants.

Martling is constantly writing quips with his marking pen on 8 1/2-by-11 sheets of paper, then carefully but quickly placing the sheets on top of the control board for Stern to use or reject. Norris calmly fiddles with the equipment between him and Stern, providing the noises and squeaks the show requires. Each has a microphone, the better to respond to his gibes.

Behind them, in a windowed booth of her own, is Stern’s longtime right-hand woman, Robin Quivers. Quivers was paired with Stern more than a decade ago in Washington, D.C., as his news reader. The former Air Force nurse, who keeps her private life well guarded despite Stern’s endless prying, still acts as a news reader of sorts but is more often Stern’s foil and occasional conscience. Producer Gary Dell’Abate, affectionately known as Baba Booey, flits in and out at a frantic pace from his nearby office.

Guests shoehorn into whatever small space is left. Though Stern’s take from the show has been estimated by Broadcasting & Cable magazine at $6 million to $7 million a year, his work space is paltry. Yet it is intimate enough to skewer anyone who dares enter up close and personal. Write about, talk to or visit Stern at your peril. He doesn’t even exempt himself from his taunts.

“I try to be true to who I am, and even if that’s being a jerk, that’s OK,” he said. “I think that every guy has elements of my personality, if you ever let your guard down and say how you really feel about your appearance, how you feel about your penis, how you feel about your sex life, how you feel about how the world treats you. I feel that people respond to that most about the show, the fact that it’s brutally honest.”

That is apparently what the Federal Communications Commission has also responded to. Since 1988, “The Howard Stern Show” has generated fines of more than $1 million against Infinity Broadcasting--which owns WXRK and syndicates Stern to 12 other stations--and other outlets. Los Angeles station KLSX-FM (97.1) was fined $105,000 for airing allegedly indecent material from the show on 12 separate occasions in late 1991.

Although each of the fines is being contested, Stern acknowledged that the tussling with the FCC has bugged him.

“The FCC stuff has had a tremendously chilling effect in the sense that I can’t get it resolved,” said Stern, who complains that the agency has not given him any explicit guidelines. “I just want someone to say to me, ‘You’re indecent. This is why you’re indecent. This is what you now have to do.’ So it has the effect that now you’re on the air and you think, ‘Gee, so now they’re telling me if I say breasts , it’s wrong?’ ”

There is an FCC regulation that prohibits “material that depicts or describes in a manner that is patently offensive, under community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory functions, activities or organs.” So even if Stern got his explicit guidelines, he said he would probably find them preposterous.

“From what I gather, vagina , penis , sexuality--we’re completely repressed. We’re so uptight about this. I don’t know what it is about the vagina or penis that says that that is indecent,” Stern said. He also discounts the idea that children are affected by what he says on the air.

“If you look at the ratings, we don’t have children listening to the show. They don’t listen to talk radio,” he said. “ ‘The kids’ is the thing they fall back on. Number one, I’m on 6 to 10 in the morning, and 6 to 10 in the morning is the one time even the worst parents supervise their kids. They’re getting ready for school, getting ready for work. It’s the only time people are together as a family. It’s the one time parents can actually monitor (the radio). Then (children are) off to school.

“Secondly, no one has ever done a study that has ever shown there is one bit of evidence that if a child hears about sexuality, he will become a pervert. I don’t know what all the hoopla is about. They say ‘excretory functions.’ My daughters are 7 and 10. (He also has an infant daughter.) Since they’ve been 5 or 3 years old, we’ve been making doody jokes around the house. The FCC thinks people can’t handle talking about bowel movements. This is something we all do, for crissakes.

“If you buy into the FCC’s argument, then you’re going to have to say to yourself, ‘What are some of the worst societies we know about?’ World War II Germany,” he goes on heatedly. “There were no violent movies. No ‘Howard Stern Show’ on the radio. I was not there. The society was in complete chaos. They were putting Jews into ovens. There was maybe some of the worst of times. Bosnia today, people killing themselves all over. No Howard Stern. No violent movies.”

The FCC question clearly gets Stern’s goat. It is an issue he can neither ignore nor bring himself to make too much fun of. The specter of fines and ad boycotts could possibly silence him. He says that he owes his existence on the air to Infinity--that any other broadcaster would have pulled him, not wanting to absorb either the fines or the legal fees to fight them.

In any case, he believes he is being treated unfairly by the FCC:

“Because I get home earlier than most people, I get to watch Oprah, Donahue, Geraldo, soap operas. Oprah can talk about bestiality,” which Stern describes in a most glowing and unprintable form. “She’s doing it, and the FCC says that’s OK because Oprah’s serious. She’s got a psychiatrist there and it’s structured.

“But when you talk about freedom of speech, you can’t say it’s OK for Oprah because she’s serious and Howard is not because he’s comical,” Stern said. “We’re both doing it for the same reason, to get audience. We’re doing it to make money. . . . But they wouldn’t dare go after her, because then, all of a sudden, it would be a serious threat to our freedom of speech and the FCC would be in some serious (expletive) hot water.”

But if Stern gets rambling and riled about the FCC, it is, he said, because he lives for his work, so much so that he himself has gotten confused about where the “real” Howard Stern is.

“People ask, ‘Is the guy on the radio the real guy? Or is the guy we’re meeting the real guy?’ ” Stern said, as he even seems to ponder himself. “I say that in terms of my life off the radio, I have to role-play, I have to pretend. To me, the radio is the only place I can be the true Howard Stern I think I am. I don’t have to worry about who I’m offending.”

Stern claims to have had an odd mixture of warped and normal experiences growing up. He spent his early years in Roosevelt, a white ethnic town on Long Island that rapidly succumbed to white flight in the early 1960s. He said he was beaten up and otherwise harassed continually by black students, eventually being the last white student in his class.

When he was in high school, his parents finally moved farther out on Long Island to a primarily Jewish area. By that time, as he relates in long passages in his book, Stern’s almost singular concern was “getting laid.” He was preoccupied with sex and his lack of physical good looks. One thing he didn’t have was a radio idol.

“Nobody was doing anything then. Radio was super-dull,” he said. “The only thing I can really remember in that regard is that I’d be driving to work in New York with my father (who had a recording studio) and radio would be so dull that whenever something weird would happen--a guy would yell at somebody or you heard a sound effect of a book dropping, something not typical--it would be great. If somebody told you what happened and didn’t ignore it, it was fun!

“I was not a radio fan. I listened to music radio,” he said, wrinkling his face in recognition of the awful sameness of rock radio in the 1960s. “My father gave me an old Wollensack tape recorder, and I’d do shows into it. I’d put the microphone on the phone, and I’d start making phony phone calls to people. I’d pretend to be (game-show host) Gene Rayburn and give away prizes. I’d do insane stuff like that and then tape it and make it part of the shows I’d do when I was a little kid.

“I go on in the book about puppeteering. I thought my mom’s solution about giving me a doll substitute was great,” he said. “She said, ‘I thought a boy shouldn’t have war toys and all that stuff. I want you to play with puppets and be more creative.’ But I even perverted that, you know. . . . And then I just got disinterested in it because I perverted it so much. My life is following a pattern.”

Stern said that he never really had career goals, but he always knew he would be doing radio. He worked first in the New York suburbs, then in Hartford, Conn.; Detroit, and Washington, D.C., before getting to WNBC in 1982.

“I guess there was really no game plan except going to bigger and bigger markets,” he said. “Except when I was a kid, I was thinking, ‘One day, I want everyone in New York to know my name.’ That was the big goal. And the fact that that’s worked out blows my mind.”

Of those who know him and love him, Stern said, most do so because they are otherwise-bored commuters.

“My fans are really protective,” he said, as his own outbound commute slowed to a crawl on a Long Island expressway. “Guys who really commute and get caught up in traffic are the most rabid fans because the show is really a godsend to them. Anybody who is in a car two hours a day, 2 1/2 hours a day, and they can suddenly pull into their job and they have to sit in their car for five more minutes (to finish hearing a segment) of this show, that’s unbelievable! So being in your car isn’t so bad. It’s now something they look forward to: ‘Hey, I wonder what’s doing on the show today.’ I think that’s who most appreciates the show, and that’s who I design the show for.”

All those guys in cars--and the Stern demographic is heavily male--have made Howard Stern, self-acknowledged shy guy, into Howard Stern, major celebrity. Stern said it is not something he wears comfortably.

“I do like it on the level, this seems so simplistic, that if I go to a store or a restaurant or something, I can walk in and be known. . . . Things are done for you,” he said. “On the other hand, I also feel very awkward and gawky and 6-foot-5. I can’t go anywhere with my kids and feel normal, because too much commotion goes on and you can’t concentrate on your kids.

“But the alternative would be worse. If I wasn’t a celebrity it would be because my radio show sucked, nobody cared about it, and I’d have no way of supporting my family. I’m someone who needed this. I really needed this. But I don’t really feel I have the life of a celebrity. I picture the life of a celebrity as someone who gets to go to parties every night, who gets laid a lot. Meeting women is the whole point of being a celebrity.

” . . . I know for me, I wanted to be successful in New York just so I could sort of say to every woman who rejected me, which was every one, ‘Hey, look at me! Aren’t you sorry?’ But I don’t get to (expletive) other women. I don’t get to parties, because I have to go to bed so early, nor am I interested in them.”

Stern said the last time he was in Los Angeles, he thought he’d try out celebrity-hood. He went with frequent show visitor Tori Spelling and her “Beverly Hills, 90210” bud Shannen Doherty to the Monkey Bar. The women wanted to go over and meet another club-goer, Tom Cruise, but Stern wouldn’t consent because he had done some fairly vicious material about the actor.

“I’m uncomfortable meeting celebrities because I don’t know what to say to them,” Stern said. “Nine times out of 10 I’ve said something (expletive) about them, so I certainly don’t want to meet them. So I don’t really get the full benefit of being a celebrity other than massaging my own ego.”

Stern spends the bulk of his time off the air at home with his wife of 15 years, Alison, and their children. “Howard Stern Show” fans know just about everything about Alison and Stern, from their petty arguments to when and how they make love. Stern talks to Alison, as well as his parents, Ben and Ray, at least weekly on the air. They are the only people, save for maybe his radio crew, with whom he said he actually feels comfortable.

“I think my parents are generally proud of me. I think my wife is proud of me. There are certain aspects that make her uncomfortable when I discuss our sex life. I know they do, and I do it anyway. It’s probably bad for a marriage and it’s not right, but I do it,” he said. “It’s taken a lot of work. I know with my wife, it’s taken a lot of talking about what I do. . . . I try to say to my wife, ‘This is what I do for a living. This is the way I know to be funny.’ The way I know to be funny is to really comment on what is going on in my life, and 90% of my life is around her.”

And for the foreseeable future, at least, Alison apparently will have to live with that. Stern has no 10-year plan and, despite the 3 a.m. wake-up calls and clashes with the FCC, no great desire to give up his gig. He loves his radio crew, all of whom have been with him for more than five years: “The fact that they can deal with the fact that I get all the credit means they are all twice the person I am.”

Though a deal with New Line Cinema for a movie based on the Fartman character fell through earlier this year because Stern and New Line couldn’t agree on contract terms, Stern said he would still like to do a movie. He’s doing a New Year’s Eve pay-per-view special. He has his E! network interview show. He’s got his book. But the radio show is still the thing.

“I don’t want to quit. I want to be successful. The idea that you can do the same show and be on all over the country, that’s exciting to me,” he said. “You’d love to be a big shot and say, ‘Yeah, I’d love to leave it.’ But this is what I do well.

“I’m always the first one to say look at these (expletive) rock stars who finally get into a hit band. They beat the odds. It’s a million-to-one that they’re going to be successful. And then all of a sudden they break up when they get successful.

“I know I have a good thing,” he said. “I may be a lot of things. I may even be what the FCC thinks. But an idiot, I’m not.”*