The King of Raunch, Reconsidered

On the day his movie “Bulworth” opened in New York and Los Angeles, Warren Beatty subjected himself to a publicity root canal: an interview on “The Howard Stern Show.”

For Beatty, it was a Faustian deal that an increasingly high caliber of celebrity is making with the radio star--submitting to a Stern flogging in exchange for access to the estimated 17 million people who listen to him daily.

“At what age did you lose your virginity?” Stern, heard from 6-10 a.m. weekdays on KLSX-FM (97.1), asked Beatty at one point. “You had to be, like, 12.”

And later, when the subject turned to Beatty’s routine of eating oatmeal for breakfast, Stern was moved to ask: “Do you move your bowels generally in the morning or in the evening?”

Beatty, a notoriously dry interview even when he’s not heading the other way from questions about his sex life and bathroom habits, treated Stern like direct sunlight, rarely giving an answer that spanned more than seven words.

But in the end it hardly mattered: Stern had once again established why, at a time when stars have unprecedented control over their own press and the talk-show genre is badly in need of a unique voice, he is among the few who have the power to make a celebrity interview worth listening to.

His questions may often be crass but at least they haven’t been asked a thousand times before. And whether the celebrity bobs, weaves, laughs or gets angry, Stern gets what he wants--a spontaneous reaction.

David Duchovny, for one, appearing last month in the middle of a promotional blitz for “The X-Files” movie, seemed glad to entertain Stern’s obsessions (penis size, a tabloid report that he’d had an affair with an assistant) rather than do the obligatory press junket dance.

The bulk of Stern’s in-studio guests are still the stuff of depraved vaudeville: comics, breast-implanted porno stars, a Ku Klux Klansman and a drunken dwarf. But celebrities of all stripes now make Stern’s show a publicity junket stopover--everyone from Beatty to Roseanne to Tim Allen to Howie Mandel to pop star Fiona Apple--and he turns their appearances into an entertaining, lowbrow version of “This Is Your Life.”

That Beatty, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, would sit down with Stern raised at least a few eyebrows in the publicity community, among them Leslee Dart, whose clients include actor Tom Hanks.

“I just can’t imagine subjecting someone to Howard asking, ‘How big is your penis?’ ” she says.

To author and cultural critic Neal Gabler, however, Stern’s crassness offers celebrities a rare chance to show the public they have a human, fallible side.

“There’s a huge upside in saying, ‘I’m not like these other celebrities who just go on “Rosie” [O’Donnell] or “Barbara” [Walters] and are treated with kid gloves.’ It’s the same quality that [David] Letterman used to have. The guests were cool if they went on that show, because they knew they would have to show they could take his abuse.”

Robert Morton, former executive producer of “The Late Show With David Letterman,” agrees. Not only is Stern a refreshing break from the love-ins that make up most chat shows, Morton says, but he now has the ratings with which to draw top guests.

“If you’re a celebrity and you don’t want to talk about getting arrested for soliciting a prostitute or the breakup of your marriage, there are plenty of shows you can do. . . . Stern set the tone early that he wasn’t going to play by those rules. And in the beginning, he didn’t get guests. Now, if you want to sell a movie, you do Stern’s show. Warren knows if he wants a successful opening [for “Bulworth”], that Friday he’s gonna be on his show.”

Indeed, Stern’s ability to get stars on his own terms is all the more impressive given how much stars and their publicists now control how the press covers them.

The issue resurfaced most recently when Jerry Seinfeld obtained a copy of a Vanity Fair cover story before publication and asked for a few changes in the piece, although the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, denied giving Seinfeld the story to edit.

Shortly thereafter, a New York Times story detailed the concessions magazines make to secure a star for a cover story--bartering with publicists about what questions can be asked of the star, who will write the piece and what lenses the photographer can use.

Given these terms, is it any wonder so many celebrity profiles have the same warm and fuzzy spin (you know, where every actress with a child is a “doting mother” and every top-line star is remarkably “down to earth”)?

But if you can still sometimes believe what you read, television is another story.

With their unhurried formats, PBS’ Charlie Rose and Bravo’s James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio,” do sometimes get good anecdotes out of their actor and/or director guests. They’re the exceptions. Roseanne and Donny and Marie Osmond are set to join a talk-show field in which one predetermined soft interview is virtually indistinguishable from the next, on a TV landscape already bursting with celebrity sycophants, from the talking heads of “Entertainment Tonight” to KABC-TV Channel 7 entertainment reporter George Pennachio.

By comparison, says Gabler, “Stern rips through the pretense and all the malarkey. He says, ‘Look, all we really want to know about a celebrity is who he’s [sleeping with].’ . . . He understands the subtext of celebrity, which is that we are voyeurs, that we want to exert control over [celebrities’] lives. And we do that by invading their privacy. The tabloids offer this same feeling of power over celebrities, which accounts for their popularity.”

Four years ago, Gabler published “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity,” a biography of Walter Winchell, generally considered the father of the modern-day gossip column. While Stern’s persona is often traced back to fathers of confrontational talk radio like Joe Pyne, it’s striking to note the number of similarities between what Winchell represented to his time and what Stern means to his.

Like Stern, Winchell, who during his heyday in the 1930s and ‘40s had an estimated audience of 50 million with his newspaper column and radio show, was a bigger star than his star subjects, a “King of All Media” force alternately hailed and reviled. Publicists, then called press agents, had to tread lightly; cross the omniscient columnist and you risked banishment to his so-called Drop Dead List, a kind of publicity purgatory that Winchell meted out arbitrarily, to remind the press agents just who was boss.

“One of the things that Winchell was constantly conveying,” Gabler says, “was that . . . no matter how big these celebrities were, ultimately they were subservient to him.”

Stern doesn’t exactly have a Drop Dead List, but he does get a rise out of hounding vulnerable celebrities (actor Lou Diamond Phillips, for instance, because his wife left him for another woman) into submission. Phillips eventually consented to discuss the matter on the air with Stern, because, says Phillips’ publicist, Eddie Michaels, “there’s only one way to deal with Howard: Attack the problem head-on.”

Magic Johnson turned the ritual on its ear recently by using Stern in kind; after enduring weeks of Stern’s merciless critiques of his fledgling talk show, “The Magic Hour,” Johnson had Stern on as a guest and got a huge boost in ratings.

Finally, where Winchell had an army of snoops providing items for his column, so too does Stern have his foot soldiers. For years, his point man was “Stuttering” John Melendez, whom the Stern show still sometimes sends out to movie premieres, book signings and charity functions with insolent, scripted questions like this one, fired at Mr. Rogers years ago: “Do you want to machine-gun Barney?”

Off the air, Stern is low-key, shying away from interviews unless he’s in the middle of a press junket of his own, like the one last year for his movie “Private Parts.” Repeated interview requests through his agent, Don Buchwald, went unanswered; sources familiar with the show say Stern keeps staffers on a tight leash. Approached at a party when Stern was in Los Angeles to tape his appearance on “The Magic Hour,” producer Gary Dell’Abate avoided all questions, finally saying, “I just can’t talk about the show.”

But Stern has discussed his guerrilla tactics with celebrities both on the air and in his two books, “Private Parts” and “Miss America.”

“I never like doing typical interviews,” he wrote in “Private Parts.” “ . . . Just because a celebrity is going to come on doesn’t mean he is just going to come on and plug. I want people working hard for me.”

“You have to be able to be comedically honest about your life,” says comedian Bob Saget, who went on the show recently to plug the movie “Dirty Work,” which he directed. He spent most of the session enduring Stern’s probing of the breakup of his marriage.

“I knew it was going to happen,” Saget says. “You assume Gary is in the next room looking for [callers] who will say the weirdest things about you. But I’ve always felt an affinity for [Stern]. He’s a Jewish guy, he’s got three daughters, he’s tall . . . although I’m positive his mike is louder than anyone else’s.”