Can Howard Stern, self-proclaimed "King of All Media," conquer the final frontier--Tinseltown--with a movie version of his autobiography, Private Parts? Here, he talks frankly about all matters cinematic--from the porno film he loved as a kid, to the size of Richard Gere's manhood, to why he wants to be a movie star when he knows they're all nuts.
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Here's the thing about Howard Stern--everybody's got an opinion. People say he's a moron, a pig, a racist, an animal who knows no limits, a self-serving jerk, the Antichrist, And those are people who've never even listened to his radio show!
His fans are even more rabid-- over 25,000 of them turned up in Philadelphia a few years ago when he did a book signing for his first book, Private Parts, an autobiography that went on to sell more than a million copies. His next book, Miss America, was a best-seller, too.
But almost anyone who's ever listened to Stern will tell you this: at some point, he will get you laughing so hard that you have to pull off the road. He rants for four or five hours a day on the radio--the show runs from six in the morning until 10, or until he's good and ready to shut up. (The show is filmed and parts are played back on the E! channel, too.) During his show, Stern will level his laser mouth on subjects as diverse as abortion (he's vehemently pro-choice), immigrants (why don't they learn to speak English?), politicians (he's as sure as you are that they're all idiots), his wife, Alison (he used her miscarriage as fodder for some of his sickest humor yet), the size of his penis (he claims it's as small as a raisin), and just about anything else that pops into his perverted little head. And 18 million people are usually listening to all this.
Women often take their tops off during his broadcasts so they can show him their breasts--breasts being one of the most important things in his life. He's turned up on Late Night with David Letterman in drag. His broadcasting companies have been fined millions of dollars by the FCC for indecency. In short, Stern has found a way to offend almost everyone in America.
But is Howard Stern really a threat to the nation? Not likely. It helps if you just picture Stern as a 14-year-old with a wild libido. Just like any other 14-year-old, he'll taunt and annoy you until you finally send him off to his room (i.e., switch off that radio). Stern actually was a 14-year-old once, in Roosevelt, Long Island, where he was often the only white kid in his class. He got beat up daily. He didn't have friends, money, or a good haircut. (He now has money, but as you'll see, friends and a good haircut are still out of his reach.) At some point, exhibitionism blossomed, and armed with smarts and insecurity, he was off and running. Now, as if to prove his point that he is the "King of All Media," Stern is starring in the film version of Private Parts. The thinking here is, who better to play Howard Stern than Howard Stern? We shall see.
I go to meet Stern at his radio studio in Manhattan, and sit in a waiting room with Gary Dell'Abate, Stern's producer. On the show, porn star Jenna Jamison has just given Stern her underwear. "Ummm," he says, "these smell great." Then he wonders aloud why they're so wet. After he gets off the air and goes into his office, I go in, too. All 6'5" of him reaches out to shake my hand. Yeah, right, that same hand that just caressed Jenna's wet panties. I sit down without shaking.
"I'm more germ-phobic than anyone else," Stern insists. "You don't have to worry."
Still, I keep my hands in my lap.
"Let's have fun," Stern says. "Let's get really loose."
"OK, but I'm definitely keeping my shirt on," I tell him. "There's only so much I'm willing to do for a good story."
"Didn't Gary tell you the rules? You have to get naked, and I get to finger you." Stern sees the look on my face and laughs. "Only kidding. I mean, if you feel this overwhelming desire to show me your tits, go right ahead. A lot of women do. But it's not mandatory."
"How is it possible that a guy who couldn't get laid in high school," I ask, "now has women falling over themselves to get naked around him?"
"Isn't fame great? I'm not an idiot--I know that girls used to puke when they saw me. And the only reason I can get women now is because I'm famous. But, unfortunately, my wife won't let me date..."
This is a constant theme in Stern's running monologue--how his wife stuck with him when he was a nobody, and how he isn't going to be just like those Hollywood guys who drop their wives and run off with some bimbo as soon as they get famous.
"I mean," he says, "Jenna Jamison would fuck me now. And she's the most gorgeous thing. Playboy Playmates would fuck me now! I find it all amazing. I thank God that I have Alison-- she's a great wife, a great mother, and if I didn't have her, I'd definitely have AIDS, because I would never know how to stop. I'd just fuck my brains out."
"There are those who would argue that you wouldn't have far to go."
Stern nods and runs his hands through his hair. "Let them say what they want. I truly believe that when Private Parts comes out, people will finally understand. It's a great story, sort of a cross between The Godfather and Rocky. It's my story, the real thing, about how I had this vision for radio and how every¬one tried to stand in my way. It's about how I had to believe in myself even when they told me I'd never work again. It's about how I slayed the dragon..."
Even Stern has to laugh at this point. "OK," he says, "maybe I'm overstating the point. But I don't really think so. This is going to be a great movie. It has sex, pathos, sex, a great story, sex..."
"Howard, let's talk about movies. When you were a kid, did you go to the movies a lot? Were you one of those smart kids who went to foreign films and thought you were really cool?"
"Well, actually I was movie-obsessed. My parents used to take me to movies all the time. Most Sundays, we would go into Radio City Music Hall, because they would have movies and have a floor show. I remember seeing Carousel and all those family-type pictures. No foreign films for the Sterns. Once, my father decided he would take me to the movies by himself--my mother had no interest in seeing this movie, so we went alone. There we were, me and Dad, at Barbarella.
And I'm sitting next to my father, and on comes Jane Fonda, who's one of the sexiest women in the world, and she's wearing plastic over her breasts, and my father realizes what a mistake it was bringing me to this, because I was a little kid. We're sitting there watching this movie together, and I'm definitely getting a boner, and I'm sitting there going, oh God, my father must be aroused too. I was so embarrassed, and I couldn't enjoy the film, it was just an awful experience sitting there next to my dad watching Barbarella with a bunch of guys with their raincoats over their laps.
"But I also had a stag film, an old eight-millimeter movie, and it was great," he continues, veering off the sexy Hollywood movies I'd intended to get him to talk about. "It was about this woman who's naked and her TV's on the fritz. She calls the repairman. He shows up, she throws a fur coat over her naked body, and he's sweating because there's no air conditioning, and she's sitting on the couch and her fur coat opens up and he fucks her wildly in this bedroom...now, that was a great movie, one of the best movies I ever saw. And believe me, I saw it hundreds of times.
"But trying to go see porno movies when I was in high school--before I was 18 years old--was a big challenge. The movie I wanted to see was Russ Meyers's Supervixens, and I went with my friends and all four of us had phony birth certificates with the same name on them. I was, of course, the last dufus to go into the theater. All three of my friends got in, and finally by the time I got to the door, the guy goes, 'Wait a second, you're the fourth guy tonight who's shown me a birth certificate with the same name on it! You're out.' And I never got to see the movie. It's very unfortunate."
"What movies do you find sexy now? I would think..."
"Listen, I am so jaded. My fans send us films that are illegal here, really weird shit."
"You mean with little kids or something?"
"No, no, I would never watch that shit. No, just sick porno movies, from Europe or Japan. They send me these movies with guys fucking farm animals, I swear, fucking chickens until they die. The chickens, that is. I'm fascinated by odd human behavior. We got one the other day that took place on a beach in Japan. These women come out of the water and these Japanese guys are asking these women to do something, they're offering them money. I can't speak the language so I don't understand what they're offering the money for, but it turns out they want to get the girls to take a shit on a surfboard! The whole movie is them trying to go to the bathroom on the surfboard. And in the background, real families are having picnics. So this was pretty perverted stuff."
"When you go out..." I begin.
"I don't go anywhere," Stern says. "I hate to leave the house. I do my show, then I go home and sit in the basement and watch videos and that's it. I can't go anywhere because my fans go crazy when they see me. It gets horrible. And because I'm so tall, I'm hard to miss. Really, I could be in a room with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, it wouldn't matter, because I tower over everyone and they can spot me a mile away. Everyone's watching everything I do. So I prefer to stay in my house. That's where I'm happiest."
"What happens when you go out with your friends?"
Dead silence.
"Howard, you have friends, don't you?"
"No, not really. When I first married Alison, my mother sat me down and said, 'Howard, now that you're married, you have to go out with other couples, because you have a wife and you have obligations to your family.' And I said, 'Alright.' So we used to go out with other married couples, her friends and their husbands, and the husbands would, inevitably, five minutes into the evening, start critiquing my show and telling me what they liked or didn't like. They'd say things like, 'I like your show, but really Howard, you've got to lay off the Jews.' And that was it--my eyes would glaze over and I wouldn't say another word all night. We did that a few times, and then I said, 'Alison, they seem like nice people, you should definitely have a nice social life with them, but I am never going out with them again. This is going to kill us--we'll wind up in divorce court.' And I didn't."
"But I'm not complaining. I like staying home. I hate when celebrities complain that they can't go out in public. Who would want to? You stay home, you don't have any problems. I have the kids to entertain me [Stern has three daughters]. So I can honestly say that I don't really have any friends. But I don't have a need for that."
Whew. This guy is maybe more of a nutcase than I'd imagined. "Let's talk about making Private Parts," Stern volunteers, steering us to the project he's here to promote. "It was the most grueling schedule ever. But maybe the most exhilarating thing I've ever done. I'd get off the air at 10 o'clock, which was the biggest challenge, because I'm used to going to 11 o'clock, sometimes 11:30, just talking. But I had to get to the set early [the film was shot all over the tristate area], because by seven or eight at night, I'm exhausted and ready for sleep. I really didn't believe I could do this movie--I thought the hours would be too much of a nightmare. I'd get to the set and have to go and sit in hair and makeup, and with this face, you need a lot of hair and makeup. The whole movie's about my hair. There's seven different hair changes, and it's wild, one's more geeky than the next. I never could figure out what to do with my hair."
"Did you take any acting lessons?"
"Hell, no. The only thing I did was, I got ahold of Michael Caine's acting tape. Have you ever seen that? It's the funniest fucking thing you ever saw. Michael Caine stands there, he's teaching a class, and he says something like, 'One of the things I like to do is, if it's a closeup shot, I don't blink, because if I blink it weakens me. So what you want to do is stare like this, stare at the other person's eye. Now watch what I do, now, watch this... did you see what I just did?' And I swear, there is absolutely nothing going on, the guy is doing exactly nothing. So that's the extent of my acting training."
"But you were working with real pros, right? Ivan Reitman produced it [Reitman directed and produced Dave, Twins and Ghostbusters, among others] and it was directed by Betty Thomas The Late Shift, The Brady Bunch Movie. Did they give you lots of advice?"
"Yeah, they said, 'Don't take any lessons, just go in and be yourself, we don't want to ruin whatever's you.' And the first day I was on the set, I was real tight. I didn't get it. It was so different than radio. Radio is so immediate. But by a week into the filming, I knew I had it, I just had to adjust my pacing, just slow the fuck down and enjoy it. I learned. Every part of it was fun. Auditioning actresses was great, even though they were all so short that they came up to my penis, which isn't necessarily a bad thing..."
"Your little penis?" I remind him. "You know, Howard, I don't really believe you have a small penis. You're 6'5" tall, with big feet, long fingers ... all the things that girls always tell each other point to a big penis, or at least a long one."
"Wait a minute, Martha... you think I made that up? I am not that contrived. If I'm contrived at all, it was about sitting down and making a conscious decision halfway through my career. When I was working in Washington, D.C., I was driving in the car with Alison, and I said, 'If I'm gonna make it, I have to go all the way. I have to tell the truth about everything. I can't hold back, even about the fact that my dick is little.' And I wasn't thinking that if I said I have a small penis, all small-penis guys would like me more. It was coming clean and saying, yeah, I've spent more time obsessing on the size of my penis and being embarrassed about the size of my penis than about anything else in my life. Because I cannot stand to even get undressed in front of another guy. That's why I was never active in sports, because I didn't want to go into that locker room and show the other guys that my thing was so small. I have a good trick for any guy with a small penis, though. He should always wait until he's sort of aroused before he pulls his pants down, and then you look big."
"So what do you do," I wonder, "touch yourself or..."
"No, here's my trick. I figured this out once when I had to go to a doctor. And I don't care if they're doctors, when you pull your pants down in front of another guy, they judge you. So now, before I do that, I sit there and I try to think sexy thoughts and I rub my legs together..."
I hope I can do this justice: Stern is sitting with his legs crossed, rocking slowly back and forth, squeezing his legs really tight. He's trying to give himself a mini hard-on. His eyes are half-closed. My face is beet red.
"Inevitably," says Stern, coming back to life, "when you get nervous, it's still small, there's nothing you can do about it. When it's flaccid, it's small. You gotta just grin and bear it."
He's grinning; I'm speechless. "Where were we?" I ask, trying to get my bearings. "If this movie works, are you going to want to be a movie star?"
"Fuck, yes, I would like to do another movie. I was shocked by how much I loved acting. I'm not sure if people will accept me playing something other than myself, but I hope they will. I think I pulled off what I wanted to pull off. I had three goals in this. First, I didn't want people to laugh at my acting; I wanted to prove that I could act. Number two, I wanted to do the kind of movie that wasn't a Saturday Night Live movie, like Coneheads or something. I'm embarrassed by those kind of movies. And lastly, I wanted to accurately portray my story, but not in a goofy way, not over the top. And that's why it took so long to develop a script."
"People were bringing me scripts every two weeks that had Richard Simmons prancing through my house, and none of that reflected reality. I really wanted to do a movie of substance. I would love for everyone to walk away feeling like it was a great movie. And I'm really after attracting people who have never heard the radio show. As big as the anticipation is in New York and California and all these places that I'm on the radio, there's Kansas--what is their reaction gonna be? I think that the movie is [going to be] appealing to people who have never heard me before. They'll like the movie more, I think, because they're getting to see a lot of these radio bits for the first time. For my fans it will be like, hey, I remember when he did that.
"I wanted to make a movie," he adds, "not about the Howard Stern today; I already know that guy. I want to meet the guy from college. I wanna see how the fuck he got to where he got, and what he was like on the radio back then. What the fuck did Alison see in him? If anything. And what kind of woman would have traveled the country with him? And that's what the movie addresses. You'll see the Howard Stern that gets embarrassed, the nerd, the guy who can't function in the real world. He can function when he's on the radio, when he's 'King of All Media' and all that shit. But man, get me in real situations and I fall apart. I'm a fucking mess."
Fine, I think, but I also want to hear about other movies, sexy Hollywood movies. This is Movieline's "sex" issue, after all. "Because you always have these porno stars on your show, Howard, I was wondering if there's anything out there in the sane world that could turn you on. I figured you liked Showgirls or Striptease, right?"
"No way," Stern yells. "Showgirls was the biggest piece of shit. The only thing good about it was that it was so bad you could laugh the whole way through. And Striptease I really didn't get. I fast-forwarded so I could see her crawling around naked. I would do her in a minute..."
"What did you think about Demi's kid being in the movie?" I ask, since I found it particularly reprehensible.
"Why would somebody famous with money want their kid to be famous? That's why I don't get Kathie Lee [Gilford]. She spends half her mornings talking about her kids, when really she should be protecting them from that. What, I want a child star in my house? They're the most fucked-up human beings on the planet. What sick ego would you have to want your kid to be in a movie? Especially one where the camera is up your wazoo? What were [Bruce Willis and Demi Moore] thinking? Enjoy your children. When they're adults, let them be actors. You want to know something? I realize that being an actor, especially an actress, is the most fucked-up business in the world. These actresses all think they're ugly, they all think they're fat. They could weigh 12 pounds and they think they're fat. And I gotta tell you, you've got to admire women who do this. I don't know how the fuck they stand up to it. Because every actress that you meet is this tiny." He holds his hands about a foot apart. "And they all think that at 23 they're washed up, and they're not gonna get any young roles anymore. It's sad. So why would you put a child through this rejection when you have all the money in the world? Demi is sexy, that's for sure. Yeah, I'd do Demi, if only my wife would let me."
He pronounces her name "Dummy," with the accent on the second syllable.
"But," he adds, "I don't understand why Bruce Willis is such a big deal."
"No argument from me on that point."
"I wonder how he got to be such a high-paid actor. Here's my whole bead on [the pay scale in] Hollywood. A guy like Jim Carrey, I love. I think what Jim Carrey did in the Ace Ventura movies is nothing short of brilliant. He took a shit movie and he elevated it to comic genius. Dumb & Dumber, I think the same exact thing. I think Jim Carrey's a tremendous talent. I understand why he gets $20 million a movie--the guy can put my ass in a seat. Bruce Willis, I have never seen a movie because he was in it. I know those Die Hard movies made a ton of money, so obviously they got someone's ass into that seat, but not mine. Then, I see a guy like Billy Baldwin getting, what, millions per film? I don't know one film a guy like that has done where anybody rushed out to a theater to see it. I know I can put asses in a seat. If I put out a movie, I could put some asses in the seats."
"Why would you put yourself in a situation like this in the first place?" I wonder. "You've got more money than God, you've got all these obsessed fans out there, you already can't walk out of the house. Why the hell would you want to be a movie star?"
Stern doesn't hesitate. "You know what? With my second book,_ Miss America_, Caldor [an East Coast retail store] and all these other places kept my name off The New York Times best-seller list they post in their stores. They just pretended it wasn't on the list. If the movie of Private Parts is huge, it will piss off every establishment type there is. I want to spit in the face of every Hollywood jerk-off that exists, because I see Hollywood the same way I saw radio when I got into it. I basically see an industry that rejects me, that does not want me to succeed, that in the worst way wants me to fail, because they don't understand me and they know I don't play by their rules. I got into Hollywood through the back door. I wrote a book, it was a tremendous success, it was bought for a movie. I'm playing my own game, in my own court, with my own rules. And surely, that is going to make a lot of people mad or envious of whatever they think I have that they don't. If it's a success, they'll all be pretending that they were wishing me luck from the beginning. But I'll remember. And fuck them."
I think I'll leave now.
A few days later, I arrange to call in to Stern's radio show to finish up our interview on the air. I'm hoping the King of All Media will have some fun with me in the comfort of his primary medium. Right away, after he takes my call, though, he's implying that I'm a star-fucker who just wants to be famous. But since I'm not (really, who the hell would want fame without money--then I'd just be like Stern regulars Jessica Hahn and John Wayne Bobbitt), I don't argue this point and he stops ranting.
"So, c'mon, Martha," he says, "what else did you want to talk about?"
I try again to get Stern to talk about sexy Hollywood films, mentioning both The Last Seduction and Body Heat, but Stern and his sidekick, Robin Quivers, just laugh. "Too intellectual," they both say. Pressed, Stern says he liked Jane Fonda's body in Klute, Daryl Hannah's in Splash, Raquel Welch's in One Million Years B.C., Jamie Lee Curtis's in both Perfect and Trading Places. Then he mentions two, more recent flicks, Bound and Carried Away. Bound, he says, he liked for the lesbian love scenes between Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. Carried Away, though, brings up other bodies-- men's. In that film, he explains, Dennis Hopper makes like Harvey Keitel, showing off his manhood on screen. "Almost always when a guy shows his penis, it's a mistake," Stern informs me. "[Hopper's] got one the size of an elevator button. Same with Richard Gere. They shoulda called Breathless Penisless."
All of which makes for swell radio chatter, but personally I'm not buying the line that Stern's an idiot too shallow to quite grasp the "deeper" meaning of movies that aren't outright trash. Stern--radio personality, best-selling author, and perhaps our next big movie star-- didn't get where he is because he's a dummy. But keep it quiet. Howard Stern doesn't care if you know his penis is small, but he is not so sure he wants you to know that his brain is big.
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Martha Frankel interviewed Kevin Bacon for the November issue of Movieline. Check out more about Martha Frankel here!