The phone rang early on a Wednesday morning while I was still in bed.
It was a producer from Howard Stern’s radio show. He wanted to know if I would talk to Howard on the air about my column in the paper that morning.
I said no, muttered something about still being asleep, hung up and slept some more.
Meanwhile, it was 6:30 a.m. and Stern was throwing a temper tantrum. He had already spent a half-hour berating me on the radio. “You know, last night I was thinking about what I’d do on the show today and then little did I know that Adam Buckman from the New York Post would just blast me all over the place,” Stern said to sidekick Robin Quivers at about 6 a.m. “Did you see his love letter to me?”
The “love letter” was a column in the Post with the headline “Stern warning for Howard” followed by the subhead: “Come up with a new act or flop again.”
This type of column was something we used to call a “scene-setter” (also known in some newsrooms as a “curtain-raiser”) – which is a piece of reportage, story or column, written and published in advance of an upcoming event. In a scene-setter, you could report on the circumstances surrounding an upcoming, highly anticipated event or, in the case of an opinion column, you could make bold predictions about how the event would turn out.
This particular column fell into the latter category. Written in the form of a “Dear Howard” letter, it was filled with supposed insights into Stern’s newest attempt to conquer television. He was preparing to launch a new weekly TV show, his third one (not counting some occasional pay-per-view specials). Titled “The Howard Stern Radio Show,” this new one was due to premiere in three days, on Saturday night on CBS TV stations, where it would compete with the dominant show in Saturday late-night, “Saturday Night Live” on NBC. Since no preview tape of the new Stern show had been provided to TV columnists, my only option was to speculate airily on what the show would be like.
In the column, I noted that most of Stern’s TV shows amounted to little more than videotaped rehashes of shocking segments from his radio show. The column expressed the hope that Stern would offer something different this time around. “Your fans are intensely loyal, and they’re likely to support your CBS show,” I wrote. “But aren’t you sick of doing the same thing all the time? Can’t you come up with something new for a change?”
Stern felt my column amounted to an unfair “review” of his show, sight unseen. “The new TV show hasn’t even aired yet and already he says I suck and that I’m tired and old and that I do the same thing everyday,” Stern complained irritably.
His summary of the column was inaccurate. I never once used the word “suck” in describing Stern’s “sorry record of noncreativity on TV.” Nor did I call him “old,” though I did use the word “tired” in a reference to his radio show. And besides, “Saturday Night Live” came in for as much abuse in the column as Stern did and no one from NBC ever complained about it.
“With a rigid format that hasn’t changed in 24 years, comedy sketches that have no punch line, a dreary reliance on idiotic stock characters created chiefly for spinoff movies, and endless repeats during the regular season, ‘SNL’ has for years frustrated viewers who nevertheless continue to tune in out of force of habit, only to be cheated again and again,” I wrote.
I then addressed Stern directly – a device a columnist uses to make it seem as if he and a column’s subject are familiar with each other, though Stern and I had no personal relationship whatsoever.
“A tired format?” I wrote. “Idiotic stock characters? That sounds like your radio show! You haven’t had a new idea in 15 years.”
I went on to describe Stern’s first TV show – a locally produced show seen in the early 1990s on the then-independent WWOR-TV in New York – as “cheap,” and Stern’s infamous 1993 New Year’s Eve pay-per-view special as “the most vile TV show [that] ever aired.”
The column was far from being the worst I had ever written about Stern, but true to form, Stern reacted as if I had just shown up at his doorstep and suddenly sucker-punched him in the stomach.
“I just read [the column] and I went, you know, gee, you know, that’s exactly why I don’t want to do anything anymore,” he whined to Quivers, “because imbeciles just keep, you know . . . I mean, isn’t it exciting that on Saturday night now you got something else to watch? And what is so innovative on television that I’m so un-innovative. I mean, what is that? And how do you review a show before . . . How do you say a show sucks before it’s even on the air? What’s the fairness of that? It’s just so weird.”
Stern went on to read lengthy passages of the column aloud, pausing occasionally to comment on them. “ ‘Now you propose to unseat ‘Saturday Night Live’ with a new show on 12 CBS-owned stations and a string of affiliates’,” he said, reading from the newspaper.
“I’m on 75 percent of the country,” he interjected. “Is that just a string of affiliates? And I don’t propose to unseat ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I propose to put my TV show on and let the public decide. And what’s . . . ? Isn’t that exciting? To have something different to watch? I don’t understand why you would be against that!
“He says,” Stern said, continuing his recital of my column, “ ‘It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. You’ll sit there [on the new show] pontificating on the things that bother you about the world while [sidekicks] Robin, Jackie [Martling], Fred [Norris] and Gary [Dell’Abate] hoot and break wind in the background.’ ”
That last sentence apparently served as a sound-effects cue as a chorus of flatulence filled the air. “So be it,” Stern said, “if I can get on TV and talk and beat everybody? What’s wrong with that?”
While I blissfully slept, Stern accused me of feeding off of his career. “Well, let’s see what Adam’s done in the years that I’ve been doing all this stuff,” Stern said. “He’s written the radio column for the New York Post.”
“Well, actually he’s written about you,” added Quivers.
“Yeah, in fact, I don’t really see him writing about anything else,” Stern said, “except the TV column every once in a blue moon. . . . He’s written the TV column for the Post for as long as I’ve known him, for like 10 years and has done nothing else. And [he] doesn’t even write the TV column on a regular basis. And now he’s reviewing television shows. Talk about being in the same job too long – now you’re reviewing me after not seeing the show? Unbelievable.”
The truth was, I had only recently become a full-time TV columnist – that very month, in fact, August 1998, after working as editor of the Post’s TV section since first coming to the paper in January 1991.
It was also true that I had occasionally contributed columns while working as the TV editor. And some of them happened to be about Stern, but certainly not all of them.
Of course, the only columns Howard Stern would remember were the ones about him. What he didn’t seem to realize was that his life and work were irresistible topics. Choosing to write about Stern was a no-brainer. His radio show was hugely popular and his fans worshipped him like a god – which meant that any story or column you wrote about him was sure to be widely read.
Moreover, any writer – newspaper or otherwise – could recognize the aesthetic benefits of writing about Stern. Here you had this radio personality who trafficked in all kinds of controversial material – lesbians (yes, there was a time when lesbians were controversial), strippers, transsexuals, people with various deformities – the mere description of which was sure to punch up any column you could write and make for titillating reading. Then there was his insecure propensity for dissecting the columns on his radio show, providing priceless free publicity for the Post and for me.
Antagonizing Stern was a guilt-free pursuit. I wrote some of the harshest columns of my career about Stern and never felt remorse because Stern could be just as mean. Concerning another New York TV critic – Kay Gardella of the Daily News, who had worked the TV beat since the 1950s – Stern said, “I’d like to give her a gynecological examination with a shovel” after she offended him with a critical review some time in 1988.
I figured it this way: With Stern, every public figure in the news, along with anyone who rose to oppose him, was grist to be ground up into fine powder on his morning radio show. If he can dish it out, then he would have to take it.
“Everyone just wants to knock me,” Stern lamented on the air that morning. “It makes me sick! I’m so sick of it. I gotta admit – it does get to me.”
That happened to be the whole point of writing the column in the first place – to bother him and get under his skin, to afflict him – perhaps not quite in the noble manner set forth in the old credo that directed newspapermen “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” but to upset him with an act of journalistic mischief, which is what you might call a newspaper column composed for the express purpose of undermining a radio personality’s confidence and raining on his parade.
“Why would you bad-mouth a show before you’ve seen it?” Stern asked in exasperation. “What kind of TV review is that? Watch it and then tell us it sucks.”
Which is exactly what I did.
Next: Chapter 3, Part 2: The Science of Picture Picking
Tags: Adam Buckman, AdamBuckman.com, Fred Norris, Gary Dell'Abate, Howard Stern, Jackie Martling, Kay Gardella, NBC, New York Post, Robin Quivers, Saturday Night Live, The New York Daily News, TV, WWOR
