The Booking Agent of the Bizarre

An autographed portrait of Maury Povich hangs on his office wall. “My hero,” Christopher Darryn quips.

It’s not that he has a crush on Connie Chung. It’s just that he was treated so well when he appeared on “The Maury Povich Show.” Even by the often lurid standards of the genre, this program last October was, you might say, a bit incestuous.

It was a talk show about talk shows. Chris Darryn shared Povich’s New York stage with a UFO abduction insurance salesman; an Ohio woman, named Irma Spriggs, willing to share a special diet secret; a fellow named Ronald Regen, who seems a bit fixated on Ronald Reagan, and a call girl/actress aptly dubbed Gabby, who is said to hold the record for TV talk show guest appearances. (So far, at least 12.)

“It was great,” says Darryn, sitting at his computer in his Reseda office. “They give you the star treatment. They book your flight, send a car, put you in a nice hotel, give you a per diem. . . . It’s all a very nice experience.”

And what qualified Darryn for this show?

He’s an agent of the odd, a middleman for the strange, the link between Gabby and Maury.

When Maury or Geraldo or Oprah or Montel or whoever need, say, an unrealized transsexual of lesbian orientation who is planning to run for President in 1996, they call Chris Darryn.

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That isn’t a joke. Chris Darryn is the founder of the National Talk Show Guest Registry. Among the 1,800 people on his roster, he says, is someone who might be described as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. He/she is undergoing a sex change and dreams of living in the White House.

To be in this line of work, Darryn explains, “you have to have an open mind.”

Chris Darryn, 40, is an affable, soft-spoken and thoughtful man who lives with his wife, their 4-year-old daughter and a teen-age stepson in Encino. After years of struggling to make it in show biz, he seems to have found his niche. There was a time Darryn wanted to be a star. Now his work is built on the notion that just about everybody wants to be a star, if only for a few minutes.

Andy Warhol famously said that, in the media, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. Darryn’s business suggests that people not only expect it--they’ll pay for it.

For a fee of $3 per month, you too could join Darryn’s registry. You could become a candidate to tell a national audience about anything from your collection of belly-button lint to some sort of deep, dark family weirdness involving an Arkansas state trooper. The fee, Darryn explains, “weeds out” people who aren’t serious.

Fame isn’t the only motive. Some people want to promote causes or products. Some, Darryn says, seem entirely altruistic, convinced that sharing their own miseries may help others avoid a similar fate. In some case, revenge is the goal.

“I’ve got women who want to expose their spouse for the dirty, cheating rat that he is on national TV.”

A glance at the TV schedule demonstrates that there’s a ravenous appetite for this stuff.

“Talk shows work on the premise that one person’s misery is another’s inspiration,” Darryn says. “People either look at it and gain strength. They think, ‘They can survive despite all their troubles.’ Or they say, ‘Thank God I’m not that pitiful.’ ”

Darryn took a roundabout way to his odd calling. In the ‘70s, the Boston native did stand-up comedy. After moving to Hollywood, he did shtick as tour guide at Universal Studios. He tried acting. He wrote sitcom pilots. As for success, it was modest at best.

He landed research jobs for radio shows and TV talk programs that died an early death. Once such shows were canceled, Darryn would be out of work.

“I figured there’s got to be a better way--to work for three or four shows at a time, so if one gets canceled, I’m OK.”

Eight years ago, he founded The Research Department to do just that. He’s the whole department. Instead of working for three or four shows, more than a dozen use the service. His clients range from such shows as “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Hard Copy” to “The Tonight Show” and National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

Sometimes he gets odd requests. One time, Sally Jessy Raphael’s staff asked him whether he could find a small newspaper story about a man with a foot fetish who would phone women and persuade them to break the heels off their high-heeled shoes while he listened.

Darryn found it.

“You know,” he added, “I think that guy was in Glendale.”

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The talk show guest registry, Darryn says, was a logical extension of his research work. Arlene June Galloway, a 74-year-old Hesperia woman dubbed “The Queen of Garbage,” is another member of the registry.

Galloway pays her $3 per month because she wanted to make her TV comeback. Back in the early 1960s, when she was known as “Burbank’s Lady of Discards,” Galloway appeared on “Steve Allen’s Playhouse” and “The Dinah Shore Show,” demonstrating how she could recycle bits of garbage into clothing and decorations. For example, she makes earrings out of roll-on deodorant applicator balls.

Galloway clearly enjoys the attention. And she has a message about the environment.

“People laughed at me for decades, until my predictions came true,” she says. “We’ve got to start doing something about our garbage!”

Now it looks like Galloway, 30 years after she left Steve Allen in hysterics, will be recycled herself. “The Tonight Show” is interested. And so is “Entertainment Tonight.”

Why does E.T. care? The same reason Maury Povich did.

And if Chris Darryn soon has a picture of John Tesh on his wall, it’s not because he has a thing for Connie Selleca.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.