When newscaster Paul Harvey is honored Saturday night by the Museum of Broadcast Communications, a black-tie crowd of 950 people will pack the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel to toast a man of style-and giggles, laughs, chewed words and odd pauses followed by machine-gun bursts of prose.
What they will see will be a sculpted face that looks, from one angle, like evangelist Billy Graham`s. What they will miss-because radio studios are not built to seat crowds-is a chance to watch Harvey do what he does best: sit alone in a small room, scratch his ears, clench his fists, wave his hands, finger his tie and transmit a variety of useful news and often-entertaining information.
Listening to his programs, as 22 million people do, is like getting a phone call from an eccentric, chortling, demanding uncle. On a recent morning, for example, to warm up, Harvey played the Lone Ranger theme from the William Tell Overture. He cleared his throat. ”Ying, ying, ying, ying, ying.”
There`s a beep-and a bellow. ”Hello, Americans, this is Paul Harvey. Stand by . . . for news!”
As his wife, Lynne, whom he calls Angel, watched impassively through a window, Harvey banged and crashed through verbiage like John Wayne hacking through a sea of neck-high grass. ”Spec-tact-u-lar liftoff from Cape Canaveral this morning, into an azure sky,” Harvey said, telling of a rocket launch. Then, ”New York City. Last year. 8,064 people bitten by dogs. 1,587 people bitten . . . by people.” And, ”fashionwise, oh-my-goodness, Paris designers showing things for men for next spring . . . include silky suits and trousers and flashy shirts . . . and designer Jean Paul Gauthier has caused a fuss by including in his display a few skirts . . . for men!”
Cartoonist Richard Guindon once had a character try to explain the Harvey mystique. It went like this: ”When he signs off he goes, `This is Paul Harvey.` Then there`s this long pause and the tension builds and builds and I think I`m going to go crazy and he goes, `Good day?` I`m limp.”
Seeing all this up close, actually sitting in Harvey`s studio tucked away down a corridor on an upper floor of 360 N. Michigan Ave., is startling for a reporter, akin to seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time after years of staring at post card reproductions. He is taller, more intense and louder than expected.
”You mean,” the reporter asked, ”I could cough, and 22 million Americans would look up from their radios and say, `What was that?` ”
”Yes,” Harvey said, with a look that said ”don`t do it.” But he was more than pleased, he quickly added, to have a second body in the booth
(”gives me someone to play to”) and to talk about his upcoming museum tribute (”a great honor”). The surrounding hoopla, including a recent rare night-time TV appearance on the ”David Letterman Show,” has given him a chance to, well, speak out and tell who Paul Harvey really is.
”When I`m out on a speaking engagement somewhere,” he said, beginning an interview, ”there is usually a group of local media. The inexperienced ones want to know what I think about (Republican vice-presidential candidate Dan) Quayle or about pipelines in Arabia. But these are questions I answer every day-on the air. The ones who are close to things I think people want to know ask, `What did you eat for breakfast this morning?` and, `How in the world do you keep up that schedule of yours?` ”
So, what does he have for breakfast?
At 3:30 a.m. each weekday morning, he swallows 16 vitamins, an alfalfa capsule, oatmeal and brewer`s yeast.
At 4 a.m. he is at the curb outside his River Forest home, waiting for his limousine to drive him downtown. He has had seven hours sleep, a schedule which means that his nightlife, not counting dreams, is almost nil.
Even so, with the draining schedule he does keep during the hours he is awake, how does he get his energy level up for every broadcast? Is he like Walter Winchell, who claimed he never went to the bathroom before a broadcast because ”it gives me a sense of urgency.”
”No,” replied Harvey, who is 70, with a chortle. ”I get up in the morning like a kid going fishing. I don`t have to work myself up. I can`t wait to get down to the teletypes and find out what goofy, hilarious, heroic things people have been doing.”
One secret of his success, a reporter suggested, and Harvey agreed, is focus. Since his boyhood days when he built cigar-box crystal sets to pick up radio signals, Paul Harvey has wanted to do one thing: broadcast news. Over the last 50 years, while building a coherent, consistent public image, he has turned down hundreds of offers, among them hosting the Miss America Pageant.
”As you know,” Harvey noted, ”anyone with talent gets lots of offers. Angel, my wife, goes over them all. She asks, `Is this on course?` If it isn`t, we turn it down.”
Although his wife calls the Harvey empire ”a one-man communications business,” these days they employ a staff of 12, scattered over offices in the Loop and two floors of their River Forest home. Harvey has studios on their Missouri farm 50 miles south of St. Louis and in the new home they are building on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix. Churning out books and special radio and TV series, Harvey also does a newspaper column, sent to 300 papers by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
Some staffers, such as executive secretary June Westgaard and engineer Robert Benninghoff, have been with the operation for years, keeping tabs on Harvey programs, which go to 1,348 stations in the U.S. and 400 overseas; on his speeches, for which he gets up to $30,000; and, these days, on plans for Saturday`s tribute, to be led by honorary chairs President and Nancy Reagan.
The evening will include cocktails, dinner, speeches, and music by Stanley Paul, raising funds for the year-old museum in the fortresslike River City development at 800 S. Wells St.
Open to the public, the not-for-profit organization aims to ”celebrate and study” American broadcasting by collecting, preserving, interpreting and exhibiting historic radio and TV programs and commercials.
”Most museums are dusty places,” Harvey noted during a recent museum press party. ”Here, you can flick a switch and have great names come back to life.”
Nor does he have any plans to get dusty himself. ”I`d retire tomorrow if I could think of anything I`d enjoy more,” he said. He can`t. Nor can Angel Harvey, the woman he married 48 years ago after she showed up at KXOX in St. Louis to make some school news announcements.
He asked her out for dinner and proposed the same night in her parked car. They still have the car, now parked on their Missouri farm.
They are still each other`s closest friends.
”After all these years, she is still the daintiest, most feminine human I`ve ever encountered,” Harvey said.
”That may or may not be a compliment,” retorted Angel. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University, she is president of Paulynne Productions Ltd., executive producer of ”Paul Harvey Comments,” general manager of
”Paul Harvey News” and editor of ”The Rest of the Story” books, written by their only child, Paul Jr., 40, a writer and former concert pianist.
A strong supporter of President Reagan (”the first President whose picture I have hung on my office wall”), Harvey is often considered somewhat to the right of Superman in his devotion to ”truth, justice and the American Way.” But he is capable of listening to reasoned arguments, patiently put over the dinner table, by his wife. She turned Harvey`s views, for instance, to favor the Equal Rights Amendment and oppose the Vietnam War.
Working the hours they do, the Harveys keep mainly to themselves.
”We don`t hang out with anybody,” Paul Harvey said. ”Never had time for that. We keep our nose so close to the grindstone, we`re just not acquainted with our own fraternity, even in Chicago.” So, who do they pal around with? ”Neighbors. Longtime friends, most not in the business. Our contemporaries, like ourselves, are just so doggone busy.”
Coming up? More television, a little less travel and all the radio newscasts that he can fit in before the mighty floor manager in the sky cuts in and says, ”Good day!”
As Harvey puts it, ”When I was 65, I got out the actuarial tables, considered my health statistics and drew up a 20-year plan. We`re a couple of years into that. And I`m right on schedule.”
