When George Michael was in Wham!, I said to him first thing, “Are you gay?” OK. So on terrestrial radio, where you’re getting rated literally every minute, a guest would walk in and I say to myself, “I gotta get right to the fucking outrageous.” I had to entertain the audience and give them more and more. As the radio show grew and we were doing things that the government was freaking out about and religious groups were up my ass, I was really feeling pressure, like my career could be over any day.
I wanted to be as big as the music I was playing. I didn’t want to be the guy just spinning records.
You say that you didn’t like your old interview style. But I always had an idea for an interview book because I thought it revealed more about me than the person I was interviewing, just based on the questions and where my head goes. It’s just revisions, revisions, revisions.
Sitting down and actually being on my computer while the sun is shining outside is just brutal. I’d say to my agent, “I don’t want to do another book.” They fucked up every summer I ever had. What took so long for you to write a third one? It’s the sort of third-act surprise that few people would have ever predicted for the guy formerly known as Fartman. In an era when former heavyweights like Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer have been pushed out of the industry due to their treatment of women, it’s no small irony that Stern’s couch is now where some of the biggest names in the industry go for in-depth interviews. He says he no longer has any desire to humiliate or insult guests to score ratings. In the book, he also says that after many years of psychotherapy he has come to terms with his narcissism. They said there was a 95 percent chance it was cancer, and he had major surgery, only to wake up and learn it was a cyst that had burst. Then, in a hypochondriac’s nightmare scenario, he got a full-body scan and doctors saw a spot on his kidney. First, he almost underwent chemotherapy when his white-blood-cell count was off the charts, but discovered at the last moment that he was suffering from mercury poisoning from eating too much fish. As he reveals in his new book, he recently had two cancer scares. (Oddly enough, they all seem tuned in to current show developments.) But as Stern settles onto the studio couch usually reserved for show guests, he says he doesn’t care about the Reddit crew. Superfans gather each day on the Howard Stern subreddit to blast their former hero, calling him “Hollywood Howie” or “PC Howie” and arguing over when they stopped listening. To Stern die-hards, this is blasphemy - the equivalent of Johnny Rotten singing Pat Boone songs. He vacations with friends like Jimmy Kimmel and Jennifer Aniston, and goes to parties with Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin and others he used to torment. Gary is almost never seen when he is, Stern lovingly calls him “Gary the Conquerer.” “Retard” has vanished from Stern’s vocabulary, along with bits that demean women or minorities. Stern is now friends with ex-antagonists like O’Donnell. Howard Stern photographed in New York on April 19th, 2019, by Alexei Hay.
I can just see that quote in Rolling Stone, ‘I was a selfish prick.’ But it’s true.” They are snapshots of who I was back then, and I want to take that guy and shake him. “If I read them, I’d want to jump out a window,” he says.
#HOWARD STERN RONNIE LIMO GIANT LIMO FREE#
The Howard Stern of 2019 - who spends his free time fostering rescue cats or painting watercolors - can only shudder when that book and its 1993 predecessor, Private Parts, comes up. “I needed her to make me come,” he wrote about a woman he called a “hot little slut.” “My balls were bluer than the tip of Walt Disney’s frozen nose.” Back in those days, he was a guy who didn’t think twice about calling Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig” using a giant, rotting fish as a mallet to spank a naked woman on the air or viciously mocking a member of his “Wack Pack” with Down syndrome he’d dubbed “Gary the Retard.” On the cover of the book Miss America, he dressed as a drag queen, and inside he offered detailed accounts of his private cybersex sessions with fans. Howard Stern hasn’t released a book in 24 years.
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