Queen of Some Media

Peppy and raring to go, Stephanie Miller bounds out of an hours-old black minivan on a near-empty KABC-AM (790) parking lot, and rushes to the passenger side. It’s less than a half-hour to showtime, and this June night she brings special company to her radio table--another Stephanie Miller, her mother.

Here the talk-show host’s disparate worlds will collide--well, sort of:

That of her proper, conservative-Republican, Catholic-school, country-club upbringing, as exemplified by her 75-year-old mother, who has just come from the funeral of Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 chose her husband, Rep. William E. Miller, Stephanie’s father, to be his vice presidential running mate--and her own persona, as expressed weeknights, 7-9, on her irreverent, liberal, sexually-charged, topical, personal, funny, flirty, sometimes mean, sometimes silly and altogether entertaining show. She does not bore.

“Ladies and gentlemen--my mom,” Miller opens, with a dash of happy music--an uncommon formality from a host who greets male callers with pet names like “love puppet” and “stud monkey.” “We had to get the headphones over the Republican helmet hair, had to take the Republican earrings off. Are you OK with that, Mom?”

“I think I’ll manage--if you don’t insult me too much,” replies her soft-spoken mother gamely, noting that people will now hear “my actual voice” instead of Stephanie’s “mimic.” But her mother is a veteran at these duos, having done them when Stephanie worked at outlets in Rochester, Chicago, New York and KFI-AM (640) in Los Angeles.

“Guess where I’m taking her tonight, Faith,” Miller tells listeners and executive producer Faith Beth Lamont, a six-foot-tall woman who began working with her 4 1/2 years ago. Lamont’s low-toned, soothing voice, reining the host in as much as she cheers her on, is backdrop to the show. “I’m taking her to see the drag queens [at a local restaurant club].”

And it’s off to the talk hustings. Ask her mom anything in the next two hours, about the run with Goldwater, the funeral, “and, of course, me,” urges Miller, whose Cleopatra bangs frame ironed-straight hair. “Because, really,” she tweaks herself, “what is more fascinating than me?”

Under Miller’s prodding, her mother mentions that House Speaker Newt Gingrich told her at the funeral that he campaigned for the 1964 ticket. “So that’s what happened,” Stephanie says of the landslide defeat. “It was Newtie’s fault.” Miller Sr. also says that Nancy Reagan “referred to the wonderful speech her husband Ronnie gave in support of the Goldwater-Miller ticket.” ’How’d she look?” Stephanie interrupts. “Come on, dish with us.” No meat here; she looked “fabulous.”

Then her mother allows that Bob Dole “referred to the time he was up in Buffalo to help in the campaign [when] your brother was running for Congress” (he lost in both 1992 and 1994).

“Did he discuss his Viagra use at all?” Stephanie asks. “I don’t mean to be indelicate . . . but did he appear aroused? . . . You were looking there?”

“Oh, Stephie, you leave me speechless . . . “

At 36, single and the youngest of four children, Miller personifies that new multi-faceted media phenomenon: Performer-pundit-commentator-comic. The entertainer as news maven. And vice-versa. She is that soundbite-friendly hybrid--comfortable in a variety of arenas, not unlike Bill Maher, the comic-turned-host of ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” or Susan Carpenter-McMillan or Arianna Huffington--conservative good buddies with whom she can parry on-air one day and party the next.

Like a politician rising from the ashes of a stinging defeat, she has overcome a failed late-night TV talk show to achieve national prominence. Besides her radio show, which will be syndicated nationally in September by ABC Radio Networks, she was until recently co-host of the public-affairs show “Equal Time” on cable’s CNBC, paired with conservative Bay Buchanan. She is a regular on the local stand-up scene but also talked politics as a guest three times this year with Larry King on CNN, among other appearances. She will soon be seen on the Fox Family Channel and hopes to star in her own sitcom.

Miller’s radio program is itself a hybrid--one minute serious, next funny, sometimes hard to tell the difference. A few weeks ago, for example, a caller named Paul asked: “Don’t you feel deep down inside as a woman that [Clinton] betrayed so many women?” No, she said, he’s been been strong on women’s and feminist issues--and a good president. But look at his personal life, Paul persisted.

“Allegedly, allegedly . . . “ Miller retorted. “I don’t know that. A lot of the women who have come forward, their stories are so shaky.”

Yet in a stand-up bit on air that night, Miller played Hillary Rodham Clinton, about to write a book with Buddy and Socks: “What do you see that big horndog do in the Oval Office? Come on, talk . . . We’re never going to get a book until you start cooperating.”

Then, a Clinton-like voice: “Nice job, guys. Buddy, here’s some Chateaubriand for you. Salmon roe for you, Socks.”

The latter bit was part of “The Stephanie Miller Show’s” signature feature, the slickly-produced “Stand-up News”--a 7- to 10-minute news roundup that leads the broadcast. Her introduction: “Give me 22 seconds and I’ll give you a big fat headache.” Modeled originally on “Saturday Night Live’s” “Weekend Update,” it now features sketches, song parodies and sound effects.

To put the package together, Miller reports to KABC most days just after 4 p.m. Ahead of her are three hours of intense work. First, she tells production coordinator Chris Lavoie, whose fingers dance over the sound board like an acrobat, some of the effects she’ll need while clipping newspapers for her sketch material. Then two more hours with Lavoie and one of her two “voice-guy extraordinaire” performers--Carlos Alazraqui, the voice behind the Taco Bell Chihuahua, or actor Jim Ward--as she crafts dialogue for her little skits.

In these routines, Paula Jones is portrayed as a neighing horse; Monica Lewinsky is a mooing cow or “Big Bird on crack” in those Vanity Fair photos; Linda Tripp is an elephant or heard gurgling with a male voice; Ken Starr is a wacked-out, barking Nazi; Charlton Heston is a gun nut--and Clinton is, well, lascivious.

For a woman who says she left her Republican roots because of the “mean-spiritedness” of the GOP on matters of race, gay rights and abortion rights, Miller’s material can sometimes sound harsh.

Jones, for one, isn’t laughing. During a recent appearance on “Equal Time,” she spoke only to Buchanan; Miller said later that Jones hears her on the radio and thinks she’s “mean” to her. Carpenter-McMillan, Jones’ spokeswoman, says she too dislikes what Miller says about Jones. But she adds: “Stephanie doesn’t do anything to be mean. [She’s] a bright light in a gloomy day.”

‘Can I be the queen of all media?” Miller asks only half in jest, a shade of vulnerability to her voice. “Can I apply for that job?”

She says that Oprah Winfrey does it. So does Rosie O’Donnell.

She is talking about the bifurcated media world she inhabits, as she sits on the patio of her five-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills with two of her three dogs nestled at her feet. “Hotel Miller,” as she jokingly dubs it, is also home to two female friends--a comedian she met in Chicago and a psychic she met at an Indian sweat lodge in Arizona--and to nephew Paul Fitzgerald, an actor.

“What cracks me up, like the minute you’re on TV for two minutes, you’re an expert. I got introduced on the ‘Today’ show as a political expert. How did I become an expert? I’m not. My thrust has always been as a comedian and actor.

“I talk about issues,” she continues, “but just hope I make them funny [and] entertaining. I talk about whatever’s in the news. I don’t look at them as issues--I’m not really serious about issues. I have an opinion on things--sometimes it’s entertainment, sometimes it’s politics. I don’t like to get into the details of politics because I don’t find it all that fascinating.”

But doesn’t one tend to undercut the other--the humor vs. the serious side?

“I hope that one enhances the other,” she replies, “that the best way to get a point across is with humor. I think when you can make someone laugh, you can disarm them. And then it’s like they’ve learned something before they know it, [instead of] trying to beat people over the head with a message. . . . If you can get ‘em laughing, then it’s the most powerful tool in the world.”

As for any discrepancies in her own message, she says: “It’s a joke, and when it’s a joke anything goes.”

She adds: “I think some people take everything so seriously, and they, like, want to dissect a certain bit or [ask], ‘Why did you say that?’ It’s, like, I don’t know. I’m filling two hours a night. I thought it was funny.”

But does she ever feel she goes too far? Like the time she depicted Paula Jones spokeswoman Carpenter-McMillan shooting the neighing horse? “Paula Jones put herself in the spotlight,” Miller says. “What she’s doing is really mean-spirited and political. I don’t believe her, she is full of [crap] and this has all been about money . . . Plus her looks is fair game--because she made an issue of it--the make-over, you know what I mean?”

Miller has also poked fun at the man who committed suicide on the freeway. “Some people will be offended, but if you scout around, a lot of people were joking about it.”

After the false announcement of Bob Hope’s death, she had a bit with a male voice saying, “Welcome to ‘Who’s Dying Next?’ ” And an imitation Hope answers, “Hi, this is Bob ‘one-foot-in-the-grave’ Hope.”

Of all of it, Miller says: “If you’re doing it right, hopefully you’re going to offend somebody. But certainly I don’t ever do it from a place of mean-spiritedness. Hopefully it’s entertaining, and people have a sense of humor.”

The Clinton humor occurs almost nightly. In one bit, she had Clinton coming home at 3 in the morning to face a furious Hillary. Miller was Hillary, while engineer Lavoie retrieved actual Presidential soundbites to supply answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions.

Isn’t that just the sort of stuff, she is asked, that would be lapped up by Rush Limbaugh dittoheads?

“Right--but I think, hopefully, that’s what keeps me entertaining to a lot of people. They know what my political beliefs are. Humor is different. The essence of humor is: Anything’s a target. I don’t know what the real truth is. There’s certainly an image that [Clinton] has that you can poke fun at but, you know, when I’m talking about it seriously, I do believe his private life is private. As should everybody’s be. It’s not relevant.”

Geoff Rich, executive vice president for programming at ABC Radio, sees Miller as a cross between Jay Leno and “Saturday Night Live.” “One of the problems in radio, while people have looked for the ‘liberal’ Rush Limbaugh, is that they’ve tended to put on sanctimonious stuffed shirts who are more interested in their positions than in just not taking life so seriously . . . Stephanie may be liberal but she is not politically correct.”

Miller discovered her comic bent in Catholic high school. She did a sketch, “Torn Between Two Lovers,” requiring a specially-sewn dress with panels that boys ripped open every time a chorus of the song was heard. “I got my first laugh,” she says, “and that was it. It’s like a drug. It’s always been my only drug.”

Her mother sewed the dress but her lawyer father--the subject of the first American Express do-you-know-me ad in 1975--was clearly the major influence on her life. “People always think I must have been a rebel. But I loved my dad. My dad loved me. He was one of the kindest, most generous, most loving people in the world. Remember Pat Buchanan’s [1992 convention] speech? Dad would have been appalled [and] embarrassed to be a Republican.”

‘My father probably wouldn’t have agreed with me on every issue” she adds, “but he would get a pretty big chuckle at me on these shows as a liberal political ‘expert.’ They always say comedians come from this tragic childhood but I had a pretty normal childhood.”

She was a tomboy who found the country-club life “snobby.”

In her senior year, she recalls her father watching a comedy she’d written, “and just saying it was really great. I remember saying, ‘I just want to be half as great as you are someday,’ and I’ll never forget him saying, ‘Honey, you’re going to be far greater.’ ”

A theater major, Miller graduated from USC in 1983, shortly before her father’s death. She went home for the summer to be with her mom, then returned to Los Angeles where she interned for about a year at the Laugh Factory. Founder Jamie Masada recalls her “tremendous energy” working through the night, “talking to comedians and giving them suggestions. She had a very fast and quirky mind.”

She returned to the Buffalo area, did local comedy clubs and got into radio by accident.

At first she did characters on a music station in Buffalo. Then she got her own comedy show on WLVL in Lockport--”a teeny station where I went from evenings to afternoon drive to mornings in three months.” She worked her way up the radio ladder, reaching WQHT-FM, a hip-hop music station in New York City, in 1989.

In 1993, Miller returned to Los Angeles. Her contract was ending, the station was changing format, and she thought she had a sitcom deal. That didn’t pan out, but by the end of the year, she had landed a weekend show on talk station KFI. Soon she had her own weeknight show.

“I mean, to get to the level of Limbaugh or [Howard] Stern or whatever, I think you really obviously have to do talk, you have to do your own show,” she says.

In June 1995, Miller left KFI to do a late-night television show. The program, which aired locally on KCOP-TV Channel 13, lasted just 13 weeks. She believes she wasn’t given enough time, that it was overproduced, that she wasn’t allowed to be herself. “It’s like, ‘We love what you do on the radio show; don’t do anything like that.’ ”

“I often thought I must have felt the same way my dad felt. I know I didn’t have a shot.”

She was off the air for 16 months after that, but then returned to radio 13 months ago as nighttime host at what was then KTZN-AM (710). She moved to KABC last fall.

No one mocks the TV show more than Miller herself. “We couldn’t get the same guests. I would turn on TV: Leno would have Mel Gibson, Letterman would have Jim Carrey, and I’d have Binky, the Balloon Blower Guy.”

She can afford to laugh, now that she has made her way back.

Even as she prepares to take the radio show national, she has segued from “Equal Time” to a new TV gig, “Show Me the Funny,” a 30-minute video clip show that will air weeknights on the Fox Family Channel, beginning Aug. 17. “It’s to be a cross between ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ and ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” says Miller, who began shooting on Friday. “They sort of gang a two-month shoot, 110 episodes, for the entire year. And it will be a boatload of money.”

Which leaves her the opportunity to pursue sitcom, her holy grail. The idea she has now is “sort of a fictional version of my life--about a 30-something liberal woman who does a television talk show with this conservative woman who hates her.” She has elicited some interest from producer Barry Kemp (“Coach”); he recently cast her in a pilot for ABC.

Where does she hope to see herself in five years?

“Oh gosh, I hope with a successful radio show, a successful sitcom,” she answers without hesitation. “I’d love to do film.

“And yes, I’d love to have a partner, a happy personal life,” she adds, noting that her parents were married 40 years, and if she does marry she wants it to be for keeps. “After all, my sister didn’t get married until she was 50 . . . I have one friend, a reporter [on] ‘Inside Edition,’ same age, ambitious, very driven. She met a guy, fell in love, has two kids now. . . .

“I don’t necessarily have to have [that],” says Miller. “If I do, and it works out, great. If it doesn’t, I think I’ll be happy. Life is good right now. It’s all a learning process, right?”