Private Parts (49 page)

"Did she put her hand on your butt?" I asked. "Yeah, her hands were pretty good," Gina said. "There was also a pretty wild dance where about fifteen girls were all dancing nude together and one girl would go underneath all the other girls' legs. The girls would touch you as you went underneath them."

"Is this a nudist colony or a sex orgy place?" I asked.

"The party got pretty wild that night," Gina admitted. "Then we left the dance. We were pretty hot and we just turned to each other and said, 'Let's get some air,' so we started walking outside." "You're walking around naked?" "I had my top with me, but it was off and

my skirt was hiked up," Gina said. "She had the top of her dress pulled down. Then we walked to my tent."

"I have to take my pants off," I suddenly said. "I just pitched a tent myself. I'm right in tune with the story."

"She was a little bit nervous," Gina said. "She had never done anything like this before, so we talked for a long time. I took her by the hand."

"You're like the old crow lesbian," I said. "So you go into the tent..."

"We just started kissing. Clothes came off and we had a good time," Gina reported.

"Everything? How long did you spend?" I asked.

"A couple of hours," Gina said. "We fell asleep in there, actually."

"And did the guys come and join in?" I had to know.

"They came in, but they didn't join in. They watched."

"Your boyfriend doesn't get horny from all this?" I asked.

"I did stuff with him. It was discreet. The other couples were sleeping. It was a pretty big tent," Gina said.

"So the other girl dug it? Did you guys get it on the whole weekend?" I had to get back to LESBIANISM!

"The next day, Sunday, we had a really great time outside. We put a blanket down in the woods, behind some trees. The sun was out. It was really nice. We thought nobody could see us, but there was a guy who was watching from far away. He thanked us afterwards," Gina said.

"Jesus Christ, what's going on in America?!" I said. "I did nothing for my whole two weeks' vacation. All I did was work. Nobody put on a lesbian show for me. You would dump your boyfriend for me, wouldn't you?" I said.

"Oh, yeah," Gina replied.

"I'd move you up to New York. You'd have to give up your nursing job so we could go full-time to the nudist colony," I explained.

"You would have a great time, Howard," she said.

"And you know, you're smart, you're not a bimbo. I could have a conversation with you. You're no dope. You know what you like. I'm

aching for you. We have to clone you. Every girl should be like Gina, Robin."

"Well, you have three daughters that we can start with," Robin said.

"Oh, put a knife in my heart. You just be quiet!"

Gina took pity on me.

"We took some pictures together. I could send you some," she said.

"Overnight them!" I begged.

LESBIANS! LESBIANS! I LOVE LESBIANS!!

Stuttering John

Hero of the Stupid
Chapter 17

Look, in an ideal world, there wouldn't be any need for a Stuttering John. In an ideal world, celebrities wouldn't be on their high horses all the time and they'd all come on the air with me and have a good time. But we live in an imperfect world and I soon realized that if I was going to get all the celebrities on my show that I really wanted, I would have to go out and stalk them in their natural habitats.

I was the original celebrity interview stalker. I started showing up at the Grammys, the Emmys, and the Oscars, where I could confront the celebrities who avoid me and my show. I'd stand out on the red carpet with all the other press with my trademark megaphone in hand, booming insightfully moronic questions to the glittering stars.

One time at the Grammys as I was battling asshole paparazzi who were pushing and kneeing me to get at the stars, Dan Rather came strolling in. It was mass pandemonium. I clawed my way to the front, turned on the megaphone and blasted: "DAN RATHER! DAN RATHER!" Rather saw me with my long hair and he had no idea what was going on. He came up to my mike and said, "Hello! Rock 'n' roll forever!" and walked on. How hip, Dan.

But I was soon to retire as an on-location celebrity interviewer. I felt like a real dick when all the press would gang up and scream at me that my stupid questions were getting in the way of their own moronic questions. And God, were their questions stupid! I remember Jeannie Wolf from "Entertainment Tonight" asking stars ridiculous hairstyle questions as they walked in, like, "I noticed your new hairstyle. Have people been complimenting you on it?" She asked everybody the same question. And in another corner there was a guy from England representing the so-called Legitimate Press asking every single celebrity this riveting question: "Your fans want to know, will you be coming to England soon?" What a dope! How could anyone be annoyed by MY stupid questions?

I hated being subjected to constant ridicule from the press and from these arrogant stars. What I needed was someone less self-conscious, someone with a higher tolerance for abuse. In short, I needed an innocent, someone with childlike curiosity. A lightbulb flashed in my head, and two words stood out clearly: BOY GARY!

Gary started out fine. We went out to the Emmys the first year Fox hosted the show and they had no idea what was going on. I sent Gary out on the red carpet with Fred and Jackie, who were writing down questions as they saw celebrities. They'd hand a dopey question to Gary and he'd ask it. Gary got Mary Tyler Moore really pissed off when, at the beginning of the AIDS scare, he asked her if she would actually touch her Emmy or was she afraid of getting AIDS from it.

Gary was the first one we sent out to cover a specific event. Diahann Carroll was going to be signing books nearby, so we dispatched Gary and his tape recorder and some silly questions. But we were novices at this art form, so I told Gary to tell her that we had polled our listeners that morning and these were the questions

they wanted answered. I figured this was a way Gary would feel more comfortable asking stupid questions. After a few fluff ones about "Dynasty" and her youthful appearance, we hit Diahann with our zingers: we asked her how she felt about Reagan bombing Libya and why she broke up with David Frost. She managed to avoid answering these tough ones. Even though they were pretty tame by today's Stuttering John standards, they stood in stark contrast to the totally lame questions most celeb puff-piece journalists routinely asked. We were on the road to mayhem.

Gary did a few more interviews with people like Yoko Ono and Robert Plant, but it was his short encounter with Itzhak Perlman at a Grammy ceremony that pointed us in a new direction: total absurdity. The more absurd the question, the more foolish the celebrity might look. So we asked Itzhak Perlman, a staid classical performer, whether he thought that the Grammys were discriminating against Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folksinger from the sixties who happened to be an American Indian:

GARY: Itzhak, do you feel the Academy is anti -- Buffy Sainte-Marie?

PERLMAN: I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question.

GARY: Do you feel the Academy is anti -- Buffy Sainte-Marie? They

never nominate her for anything. PERLMAN: I don't know. I wouldn't know if they were anti-anybody.

That's an inside tip I suppose. All right? Okay?

We were honing our methodology and refining our interview aesthetic. Unfortunately, we lost our interviewer. It happened when we sent Gary out to interview Van Halen at their concert at the Meadowlands. Gary was ushered backstage to a private dressing room where he conducted the interview. It went off without a hitch and then Gary joined about a hundred other people who were partying at a preconcert publicity dinner in a huge adj oining room. Alex Van Halen happened to bump into his manager and he told him that he had just done a "wild" interview.

The manager asked him what he meant by "wild." Van Halen told him that one question to Sammy Hagar (the singer who replaced David Lee Roth in a controversial move) was: If you were driving by a shopping center on a hot day and you saw a dog and David Lee Roth locked up in separate cars, who would you save?

The manager was beside himself. He rushed over to Gary and

started going through his bag to get the list of questions. When he started reading the actual questions, he went ballistic. "OH, MY GOD!" he screamed. "YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT. YOU PIECE OF SHIT. GET OUT OF MY DRESSING ROOM, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!" Gary was being screamed at in front of a hundred people.

Gary felt like such a dick that he decided to hide behind his mantle as "producer" of the show and he delegated the task of doing these interviews to a lowly intern named Dave. He was a good-looking
GQ
type of guy, but when he'd interview a celebrity he'd just read the questions right off the page in an incredible monotone. Thus, "Dead Dave" was born.

He did a great interview with Dr. Ruth. Dr. Ruth wouldn't even let him finish his first question:

DEAD DAVE: When I was in boarding school I had anal sex with my

roommate . . . DR. RUTH: I don't want to hear such nonsense, okay?

After Dave, there was Mitch, another intern. Mitch was a little neurotic Jewish kid who aspired to be a comedy writer. He loved the notoriety of being on the air but he was afraid that the interviews he was doing would ruin him in the business. What business? He wasn't in the business.
I'm
barely in the business. He worried, but he was fearless.

At HBO's "Comic Relief," Mitch asked Norman Lear if he thought Fox Television was responsible for the death of Joan Rivers's husband, Edgar Rosenberg. Lear freaked out and Mitch was thrown out of the press conference. HBO was so angry that we were banned from all HBO events for the next few years.

When Mitch left, he suggested that we hire a New York University classmate of his as the new intern.

Gary came into my office. "Mitch says this guy John Melendez would be a good intern, only there's one problem, boss." Gary got serious. "He stutters pretty bad."

"What a find! Hire him!" I screamed at Gary.

"I haven't even met him yet," Gary protested.

"I don't care, fucking hire him," I said. "I don't care how lame he is, I don't care if he's fucked up on heroin, just fucking hire him right now!" I couldn't believe our good fortune. A stutterer! Now we could really go after those pompous stars. We could ask them the most

degrading, disgusting, and tasteless questions and they'd be fluttering out of the crippled mouth of a stutterer. These celebrities would have to listen to these questions -- better yet,
work
to listen to these questions -- and then they'd have to respond or run the risk of being accused of being insensitive to the handicapped. Thank God for political correctness!!

When John came up, he was even better than we imagined. John is a long-haired rock 'n' roller with a cherubic face that becomes instantly demonic when he starts to gag on a difficult word. He is a blank slate, with no basic knowledge of contemporary culture. He's never heard of any of these celebrities or their problems. This is a man who has no idea what Mike Wallace does for a living! Combine that cultural illiteracy with a bulldoglike dedication to pleasing his superiors and you have the most awesome celebrity stalker/interviewer possible: STUTTERING JOHN, HERO OF THE STUPID! There was no doubt in my mind that in a short while John himself was destined to become a
st-st-st-star.

John's first assignment was to cover a grape protest. We knew that Carly Simon would be there but John also came back with some tape of Danny Glover. But what was great was John's patter in the studio. Right off the bat, he told us he was so nervous he was going to shit a brick. He was totally oblivious to the fact that he was on the air. Then, as he started stuttering like a machine gun, he was almost flying out of his chair. Perfect!

John was great on the first few interviews. Even though he was instructed to just ask about grapes, he managed to ask
both
Carly Simon and Danny Glover why James Taylor had lost all of his hair. He even managed, while walking on a California grape boycott picket line in front of a supermarket, to ask Danny Glover if he thought the pope was the Antichrist.
Awesome.
I knew I had my man.

That was confirmed when we sent John to Ringo Starr's press conference. Ringo had assembled a couple hundred reporters to hype his upcoming American tour. They were treating Ringo like the president, then Stuttering John strode up to the mike:

STUTTERING JOHN: Whot did you do with the money?

RINGO: What money?

STUTTERING JOHN: The money your mom gave you for singing

lessons. RINGO: Well, I actually spent it on fish and chips.

398

Thank God this was Ringo, the nice Beatle. John escaped unscathed and he even got a mention for the question in
Rolling Stone
magazine. So when Paul McCartney held a press conference to announce
his
upcoming tour, the p.r. people were lying in wait. John got thrown out of the press conference about four times. Yet he managed to sneak back in!

STUTTERING JOHN: Hi, Paul. Stuttering John from the "Howard Stern Show." What's the most girls you've had in bed at once?

PAUL: Difficult question. Think I'm gonna tell you that on live television with my wife in the building? Think again, buddy. Fat chance.

You have to put these events into perspective. Here's poor Stuttering John, who's convinced he's blowing his life's goal of making it in the rock business by asking these musical demigods these embarrassing questions, YET HE'S DOING IT FOR THE SAKE OF THE SHOW! Hey, is it great to have a guy who'll take a bullet for you, or what?

Thankfully, John wound up interviewing some musicians who were hip enough to really dig his act. ZZ Top were captivated by John's penetrating questions to them:

Did you guys ever throw up and get big chunks in your beards? How many people compliment you on your cough drops? Since you look Jewish, why don't you call yourselves ZZ Dreidel? In a pinch, would you wipe with your beard?