Robin Quivers’ Role as Sentry of Sanity : A Marred Childhood, the Journey to Stability and a Tell-All Book--There’s More to This Life Than Howard Stern

When Robin Quivers laughs, the New Yorker listens.

The magazine recently conducted a laugh analysis and determined that the on-air eruptions of “The Howard Stern Show” co-host pretty much resemble Gaul--they’re divided into three parts: “a low rumble, conveying impending dissatisfaction; a cacophonous chuckle, conveying complete dissatisfaction, and an outraged squeal, which can mean anything.”

Pooh on the Broadcasting Institute of Maryland, which said Quivers would never have a future in the business with her “incessant nervous giggle.” For 14 years, she’s been aiming her fecund laugh--and occasional dart--at the notorious shock jock’s more outrageous barbs for fun and reasonable profit.

But when Quivers hit “The Tonight Show” last month to plug her new autobiography, “Quivers: A Life,” she stopped laughing.

“I think you’re shilling for [Stern] and he’s taking advantage of you,” fellow guest Linda Ronstadt hissed at her. The singer’s salvo joined the Latino chorus of protest against Stern’s parody of tejano performer Selena’s murder.

“You don’t like that kind of radio, you don’t have to listen,” Quivers, 42, shot back. “There’s a whole dial.”

Oh well. One man’s “voice of sanity,” as Stern likes to call her, is another woman’s shill. Unwritten in Quivers’ job description is the thankless task of defending herself as Stern’s sidekick. On a show where nothing is sacred, most glaringly race and gender, she’s often labeled “a self-hating black woman,” a charge she denies.

Quivers’ book, which cruised up to No. 5 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, shows her to be more complicated than her critics suspect.

She writes about her “black radical period” in high school, when her bible was Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice.” “My solution to every problem became KILL WHITEY,” she writes. “I figured that white people had already robbed us of everything.”

Quivers has also been rapped for laughing while women strip for Stern, and she writes about a college incident in which she stopped a drunken classmate from disrobing in the boys’ dorm: “I grabbed her arm and pulled her down. A struggle ensued between [classmate] Morris and me, with my friend in the middle, being jerked back and forth like a rag doll. ‘She’s coming with me,’ I yelled at him. . . . Suddenly Morris dropped her arm and announced, ‘OK, then, you take her, you dyke. You want her more than I do.’ ”

“If you look at the evolution of my story, at one point I’m stopping a woman from stripping,” Quivers says, as a TV drones softly in her room at the Four Seasons Hotel. “Then I’m considering becoming a stripper. Then I’m in a building where all the women are stripping.

“So the point is, I don’t have a right to tell anybody what’s right or wrong about their lives. Who am I to tell you at any given moment of the day what would be right for you?”

Early in her radio relationship with Stern, Quivers did take him on for his bruising comments about women. But she now chalks it up to overreaction stemming from the sexual abuse she endured as a child.

“Because of my hypersensitivity,” she writes, “there were occasions on the air when I couldn’t help thinking that Howard was attacking me personally. They usually occurred while he was making some broad generalization about women. All he’d have to say was something like ‘Women are stupid’ to set off my alarms. . . . I finally got so angry, I stopped speaking to him off the air.”

Quivers later decided that Stern’s provocative remarks were nothing more than mischief-making.

“I don’t know if it’s shtick so much as a person who really got stuck at a certain level of development in some sense,” she says. “The level of, ‘If I say this, I know I’ll get everybody’s attention in the room.’ ”

One’s take on Quivers’ political correctness aside, it’s been something of an in-joke on the show that Stern’s sentry for sanity on the air would, off the air, be howling bloody murder if the coffee was cold.

“It wasn’t like this was a natural thing for me to fall into, that I was going to sit here and be the voice of reason while everybody knows I’m ranting in the halls,” says Quivers, with--you guessed it--a laugh. “And I think that’s caused a great deal of confusion about who we are and what kind of show we do. People would understand it so much better if it were on TV and we didn’t use our real names. Then it would be OK.”

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Quivers writes that her great reserves of anger were stoked by a childhood marred by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s rages. She talks about a harrowing journey to emotional health with troubling stops--a flirtation with stripping, suicidal thoughts, agoraphobia. She says she recovered by the grace of San Francisco self-help workshops and three years of therapy.

Quivers writes about coming to terms with her parents after a 10-year silence, but when she talks about their recent detente, her idea of peace sounds like someone else’s idea of war. She sent her parents the book before publication and gave them a preview of her oft-quoted description of her father’s sexual abuse when she was 11: “[He was] pawing at my breasts with his big, ham hands and forcing his fat tongue down my throat.”

In March, shortly before the book came out, Quivers visited them at their home in Baltimore. They all talked about her childhood for the first time.

“It was really quite emotional because my mother had no idea that I saw my life this way,” Quivers says. She recalls telling her mother, “I never trusted where we were going or what was going to happen, and you’ve got to figure, Mom, that something was wrong because when the worst thing possible happened to me, I didn’t come to you. So you can’t just put that away and say you weren’t this person.”

Quivers says her mother ultimately accepted her tell-all book, but her father was a different story.

“In the midst of this conversation between me and my mother, I hear my father say, ‘Well, you didn’t have to write it in a book.’ And for a moment, I didn’t pick up on it. And then my mother and I continued to talk, and he said it again. And I simply turned to him and I said very calmly, ‘Dad, you really ought to be glad that the statute of limitations has run out on the crime you committed against me.’ ”

Quivers’ publicist says her parents declined to comment on the book.

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Other stops along the Quivers route: trauma nurse, Air Force recruit, finding fame in the Yellow Pages when serendipity prompted her fingers to walk to broadcasting schools. At the end of her journey, after years of conflict on air but mostly off, is a union with Stern that makes her somehow nearly exempt from the radio verite embarrassments he even heaps on his family. Stern isn’t doing interviews for Quivers’ book tour, a representative says.

“If you walk into that office or that studio and you try to attack Howard, I don’t care who you are, you’ll have two people you’re fighting,” Quivers says, “Always. . . . We can say anything we want to each other, but don’t say anything about him to me or don’t say anything about me to him.”

So is there life after Howard?

Quivers says she isn’t fretting. She doubts Stern will quit radio in November, as he keeps threatening. “I can’t imagine him having to get through life without being able to do radio every day.”

Which is just fine with Quivers.

“I sat down and we started talking and we haven’t stopped in 15 years. We seem to always want to talk to each other, and we’re still fascinated by the whole thing, so it continues. I’m not a person who knows much about relationships, so this is all new to me.”

And then she laughs.