Dueling Howards

His motivation has always been very simple, really. It has nothing to do with challenging the 1st Amendment or even shocking or titillating people.

“He’s a kid screaming for attention and also genuinely trying to make you laugh,” says Howard Stern, speaking of himself in the third person. “That’s all I’ve ever been about.

“Guys who have to sit in their cars all day, like cabdrivers, you’re like a god to them, because you’ve given them some fun,” he continues. “It was always about some guy in his car and impressing my father. . . . I got caught up in proving that I wasn’t a moron.”

He is no moron, though his detractors would love to think so.

“I know one thing: I know there’s a big brain behind everything he does,” says film director Betty Thomas, who directed Stern in his movie debut, “Private Parts,” which opens March 7. “He’s a creative, smart guy who knows what he’s doing. There’s nothing haphazard about his show. It takes great talent to make it look like it’s coming off the cuff.”

OK, we can buy that the morning commute is a drag. That gives Stern a captive audience and a chance to enliven freeway time with his distinctive brand of high-intensity humor, which the media have labeled “shock radio” and his fans simply call honesty.

But can the self-proclaimed king of all media actually conquer Hollywood?

“The whole broadcast industry and media don’t know where to put me,” Stern says. “Everything I’ve done has been successful, and yet I almost feel like people expect it not to be successful. They’re wanting me to fall flat on my ass.”

Still, the word from preview audiences and at test screenings is positive, according to Paramount executives and Stern, who is known for expertly hyping any project he is associated with.

Stern is playing himself in “Private Parts,” but which self is it? The movie takes the focus off his notoriously ribald radio shtick. Instead of playing up the obnoxious loudmouth Howard, known for regularly spewing politically incorrect invective and spanking naked women in the name of entertainment, it highlights his lesser-known persona: that of a relatively normal, nice guy.

And it’s a role he plays with surprising ease, both on screen and during the flurry of interviews he good-naturedly submits to in promoting his on-screen debut.

He even went so far as to drop in on the taping of a TV program his radio self might normally mock mercilessly--”Wheel of Fortune”--amiably presenting hostess Vanna White with flowers and a gift while shamelessly plugging his movie. (The episode is set to air, not coincidentally, the day the film opens.)

During a breakfast meeting the next day at a posh Beverly Hills hotel Stern initiates an exchange of pleasantries with a busboy, and on a whirlwind promotional tour in Los Angeles he charms journalists who breathlessly reveal on their television reports that Stern is, of all things, a real gentleman.

“It’s always disturbed me that people say, ‘He’s a racist and a sexist and a homophobe,’ ” Stern says. “They really don’t get it. They don’t understand that I’m ridiculing all that stuff. It’s amazing how people take it so seriously. Why doesn’t everybody get the joke? I would love people to get the joke, but maybe it’s healthy that some people never get it and that it causes so much outrage, because I feed off that outrage.”

Much as he feeds off the outrage, he does seem to crave the approval of the masses.

“I want them to love me,” Stern says in a voice-over early in the movie. “Not the myth, but the real man.”

It was the impetus to reveal the real man inside the wild-haired overgrown adolescent on the radio that no doubt drove Stern--and producer Ivan Reitman, writer Len Blum and director Thomas--to fashion the cinematic translation of “Private Parts,” a bestseller that has sold more than 2 million copies.

Initially, Stern says, a movie version of the stream-of-consciousness biography was not on his mind.

“I didn’t write a book to make a movie,” Stern said, though before the book’s release he had titillated his radio audiences with the prospect of a movie called “The Adventures of Fartman.”

“I didn’t want a nice little Hollywood movie,” says Stern, whose favorite films of last year were “Sling Blade” and “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” (The latter’s heartbreakingly smart and gawky pre-teen protagonist might have been a young female Stern.)

It took seven scripts, 15 rewrites and four years (switching studios from New Line Cinema to Paramount Pictures) before anyone could pull off “Private Parts.”

“It was a frustrating experience because every script that I saw was over the top,” Stern says, having quickly adapted to Hollywoodspeak. “Richard Simmons chasing me around my house, even babysitting my kids, all jive crap. I was getting them every two weeks. People told me I was foolish, these will be hits. I saw them as a rip-off to my audience. I said, ‘You know, I think my real life would be more interesting.’ ”

Reitman signed on relatively late in the game but was the film’s spiritual godfather throughout.

“Ivan was a friend of mine, he was a fan of the show and I would call him and say, ‘I know you’re really busy but could you just read these scripts?’ He would call me back and say, ‘I have no agenda, but these scripts are all wrong. Your instincts are correct. If you do these, you’ll be a laughingstock.’ ”

Reitman said he had thought about making a documentary-style movie several years before “Private Parts” came out and had strongly discouraged Stern early on from making “Fartman.”

“Shortly after ‘Private Parts’ came out, I said, ‘There we go. I think there’s a real movie there.’ But it was about the time Stern’s pay-per-view came out and I think it horrified all of Hollywood,” Reitman says, referring to the super-sleazy and amateurish New Year’s Eve special that Stern says has grossed more than $40 million.

The biggest surprise to most audience members who watch the movie version of his best-selling biography will no doubt come from seeing the raunchy radio personality focus on the non-raunchy aspects of his story. Indeed, the double entendre title actually refers to the areas in his life that are not held up for public amusement.

“The movie lives up to its name,” Stern says. “I’m showing something private about my life, something people don’t expect.

“We all know who I am today. I wanted to show that guy 20 years ago who was a geek. And I wanted to show the guy who goes home to his wife. I wanted to show the guy who had to be a diplomat with these guys [in radio management] who were undermining his career. . . . So in a sense, yeah, it is the kinder, gentler Howard, and that’s what’s interesting about the movie.

“If I gave you the Howard of today, you’d say ‘I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Who needs to go to the movies to see that?’ ”

Still, audiences who know Stern from his radio show and two books (“Private Parts” came out in 1993, and “Miss America,” his second bestseller, came out in 1995) are familiar with the geeky, early Howard and his ongoing battles with station management (and the FCC, for that matter), many of which have been conducted on the air over the years.

But they may not expect to see Howard Stern as the star of his own love story.

“I think the humanity of the film, if you will, is the relationship between me and my wife,” he says. “Here’s this guy who wasn’t good with women, certainly he was no Don Juan and he finds this woman who hooked up with him, for whatever reason. She found him funny and their private moments together are fun and she’s willing to travel the country with him, which is so great. It’s just so wonderful to find somebody early in your life who feels like you’re a superstar for her.”

Reitman thinks Stern’s stable, 18-year marriage is what grounds him and allows him to be such a wild man on the air.

“I remember telling him six years ago, ‘It’s a really good thing you’re married,’ ” Reitman says. “ ‘If you were a single guy trying to score with every stripper that came on the show, it would be worse. It would be much more vulgar.’ There’s a wonderful tension that speaks to most people in long-term relationships--the mixture of wanting to stay true to the one you love and the natural curiosity most of us have about what it would be like to have a different partner, particularly sexually.”

Stern sees his film transformation from misunderstood child to awkward young man and eventually into a confident megastar following “in the classic ‘Rocky’ tradition.”

“A lot of people said they were inspired by the film,” Stern says with an appropriate note of incredulity in his voice. “They were inspired to follow their dreams.”

The film traces Stern’s broadcasting career, which began rather inauspiciously more than two decades ago when he tried to merely spin records and keep his personality off the air.

“I could have been a homogenized broadcaster,” Stern says. “I could have been a good interviewer who had a nice radio program. I could have played that game. It just bores me to tears. I feel my career has been so much more exciting, even though I’m sort of an outlaw in a sense and some people really find what I do distasteful and among my fellow broadcasters there’s a huge contingency who hate my guts. All in all, I wouldn’t change any of it. I think we’ve had enough people on the air not taking risks. The risk takers should be applauded somehow.”

A pivotal point in the movie is when Stern, as a fledgling deejay, decides he must talk about this life and risk hurting his family, who are often fodder for his four-hour daily shows.

“The audience wants me to be just this uncontrolled id,” Stern says. “I have to not censor myself, even if it means discussing our private life and that’s a difficult thing to pull off. I feel guilty sometimes, I don’t want to betray Alison, because she’s such a good friend. But, if I ever find myself thinking ‘I better not talk about that,’ then I go ‘Uh oh. Talk about it.’ I don’t ever want to get into the mind-set that I’m a fat cat now.”

Stern said he particularly liked that the tension that his on-air antics cause in his marriage is left unresolved in the movie, as it has been in real life. The movie does not neatly tie things up in a bow and make it all seem OK.

“I think one of the most realistic scenes is when Mary [McCormack], who plays my wife, is in the car with her friends and they’re listening to the radio and I’m on the floor with a naked woman. She’s faced with the dilemma: ‘Do I turn the radio off in front of my friends?’ When my wife saw the film she said, ‘You know, that’s what I would do: I would turn the radio off.’ It’s not an easy situation. Through it all, you can see why there’s this love. You see that there’s a sense of humor and there are two people making each other laugh. . . . People have said to me they understand now why Alison’s with me. Because it also shows some tender moments between us.”

One of those tender moments is shattered after Stern talks openly on the air about Alison’s miscarriage, much to her chagrin.

“It is a betrayal and here I’ve made this decision--a quite selfish decision in many ways in terms of a relationship--that I have to talk about whatever’s going on in my life,” Stern says. “And what I liked about the movie is that it never really gets resolved. Because it’s never been resolved in my marriage. We’ve never been able to figure that out. What is the line? At what point do you keep your mouth shut?”

By exploring these more intimate issues, it could put off Stern’s hard-core fans who delight in “Butt Bongo Fiesta” and Stern’s other more outrageous on-air behavior.

“What will the old core group of fans, the boys who think Howard is their champion, think of this?” Thomas muses. “It’s taking a chance to reveal that it’s kind of an act. The fact that your real life is pretty tame and pretty defined and respectful and filled with family values. Howard has finally revealed that there isn’t anything controversial about him. He’s taking a calculated risk.”

Thomas says she was not a Stern fan initially but was won over after meeting him, particularly when she noticed that his hand shook when they were introduced.

“He was shaking and I thought ‘Oh my God, how cute,’ ” Thomas says. “It immediately made me remember he’s a vulnerable human being and he’s stepping into a new world and he doesn’t know much about it and he’s going to have to trust someone.”

Stern vividly recalls his initial jitters with Thomas.

“I was very nervous,” he says. “I wanted badly to impress her. I wanted her to understand me. There was all this emotion going on. It was somewhat overwhelming. She seemed to understand that I was a little more complex than who I appeared to be.”

In “Private Parts” Stern proves he can play himself, but does he have what it takes to be a real actor?

“If you had asked me that the first couple days of shooting, I would have have said I don’t think so,” Thomas says. “But now I do. He always listened, which is exactly what he needed to do. . . . He plays a great nerd. He has a great awkwardness and innocence. He could play any fish out of water guy. I think he could play a cowboy. A nerdy cowboy.

“He has a nice quality with women. He could play the best friend of a woman. There’s a certain softness to him, though I know that sounds ridiculous.”

But even if his edges seem a tad softer, Stern will not give up that outlaw persona.

“The real guy is the guy on the radio,” Stern says, then flashes an enigmatic smile. “Don’t forget how freeing that is. I’m good at play-acting the rest of my day. My wife firmly believes she’s married to two different people.”