Decked out in jeans, black turtleneck and Justin boots, Jerry Springer is a very urban cowboy tonight. The place is Bub City, a Chicago barbecue restaurant tricked up to look like a Texas roadhouse, not the natural stomping ground of a nationally syndicated TV talk show host. But Springer seems to feel at home here-among the conventioneers and secretaries, account executives and blue-collar suburbanites.
This is part of his true talent-to be at home in a variety of situations, with a variety of people; to be part of the flow and yet, somehow, above it.
This talent has served him well in his 51 years. It has taken him down one road and then another. It has brought Springer-a lawyer who once was a campaign aide to Robert Kennedy, a politician who once was the mayor of Cincinnati, a news anchor who once was No. 1 in that town, a TV talk show host (2 p.m. Monday through Friday, WMAQ-TV, Ch. 5) who once was considered the heir apparent to Phil Donahue-to Bub City tonight. He’s here to make a music video of his first country-western song, “Dr. Talk.”
“So, where’s Milli Vanilli when I need them?” he says, a reference to the stylish duo who only pretended to sing their own songs.
This particular gig started when Springer took his daughter Katie, a 19-year-old college student, to Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.
“As I was listening to all the music,” he says, “it dawned on me that the subject matter of country music is the same subject matter as talk shows’-divorce, broken relationships, pickup trucks. So I tried writing a song, one thing led to another, and then I recorded it. But you can’t sell the CD with just one song, so I had to record eight covers to go along with my original.”
Of course, these days, you can’t sell a CD without a music video. So it’s into the bar for Springer’s version of a somebody-did-someone-wrong song. Up on the stage, some gals who look like leftovers from the “Hee-Haw” show gather around a side bank of microphones. Springer loops a guitar around his neck; he also holds a crib sheet to the lyrics in one hand-which might explain the presence of the heavy fogging machines that have started polluting the air.
And then the singing begins:
“You say things
Aren’t going well. You’re halfway to hell.
You’ve lost everything that counts.
Gone is your spouse . . . and maybe the house.
All you haven’t lost are pounds.
The kids are bawling, creditors calling,
When did life become this curse?
The car won’t run, your days seem done,
Could things ever get worse?”
At this moment, the answer might be no. Then the song moves into the chorus:
“But then there’s Oprah, Phil and Sally,
And Jerry Springer, too.
A little dose of a talk show host,
You won’t seem quite as blue.
‘Cause if that’s the world, or part of it
Where Madams are sometimes Sirs,
You’ll quit complaining. Things could be worse.”
It’s not often you run into a guy who makes a handsome living dealing with the sleazy side of human misery and then publicly spoofs it. And his song’s just the beginning. At the break between takes, Springer grabs the standing microphone and pulls it towards him, while swiveling his hips. He starts singing a sexy ballad, his delivery part Elvis, part The Big Bopper. Then he breaks himself up. It’s all just a goof for him.
High in the NBC Tower, Springer is preparing for that evening’s taping of a show. His office looks like a boys’ club for one member. Baseball caps line the walls; photos of his heroes-Yogi Berra and the Kennedy brothers-are displayed prominently. Unlike feature film personalities, Springer is bigger in person than he appears on the tube. Tall and casually disheveled (later he’ll slip into one of his Armani suits), he comes across as just a nice, extremely articulate guy who is not in the least embarrassed at where he finds himself.
At the moment, he is explaining why he thinks Talk Summit-the political firestorm that has descended upon controversial TV talk shows, including his-is a silly debate.
“It’s just not a serious issue,” he says. “Our show is about outrageous people or relationships; by definition, it’s outrageous. And yet, in the almost 1,000 shows I’ve done in the last five years, never once have the kids in the audience ever cheered a racist or a wife-beater or a woman who’s cheating on her husband. Every single time, the kids in the audience get it right. They understand what is morally acceptable and what isn’t.”
Also, a stage manager named Steve helps. He stands just outside camera range and leads the audience in its cheers or boos.
But an observation of the taping of two Springer shows indicates that-to some degree-the show’s host is right. Not even Steve, with all his sweeping arm gestures, could whip the crowd into its level of frenzy were it not filled with willing participants.
“In fact, it would be a great idea for young people to watch our shows,” Springer says, “because they couldn’t help but get what is morally right and what isn’t. But that’s not why we do the show. We do the show for fun. It’s crazy; it’s an escape; it’s entertainment.”
But how entertaining is it for those guests whose lives shatter on the air? The woman who finds out her boyfriend is sleeping with her mother? The man who learns that the sexy woman he went out with is really a pre-op transsexual?
“Well, that’s giving too much power to television,” he says. “The truth is that they’re angry at the moment, and the day after, they’re angry at home. And they were angry the day before they came on the show. It isn’t as if they’re these very calm people and then all of a sudden, they come on television and their lives fall apart.”
It isn’t? Because it sure looks like that. On an average, the Springer show may erupt into physical scuffles four times a week. In one recent show, there were six physical confrontations.
“No one on the planet is surprised anymore by what talk shows are like,” says Springer. “They know if they get up and say bad things, they’re going to be booed. They know they’re going to meet someone who’s going to take the other point of view. They don’t think they’re going on ‘Queen for a Day.’ “
“No one gets on a talk show anymore who doesn’t want to be on. We get 3,000 to 4,000 calls a day on our 1-800 line from people who are begging to be on.”
But what about those shows where someone drops a nuclear secret on someone else?
“They are absolutely told ahead of time what the possibilities of that secret could be,” says Springer. “They are not blindsided. They don’t come on thinking, ‘Oh, great, it’s going to be a show about dancing.’ They are told, ‘Now you understand, he is going to tell you something and what he tells you may be that the relationship is over, that he’s cheating, that he’s gay.’ And we say, ‘Are you OK with this?’ And they all say, ‘Yep, I want to hear it.’
“The whole point of talk shows is that everybody wants to hear it. It’s all about entertainment; it’s all about having fun.”
Growing up, Springer was a clown among kids. He can’t remember any sad moments in his childhood. “Oh, maybe I had a couple of bad days,” he says, “but I was totally loved and I loved everything I was doing. I lived a ‘Brady Bunch’ kind of life.”
Well, yes, if “The Brady Bunch” had started out as Holocaust survivors. Springer’s grandparents had owned a shoe store in pre-World War II Berlin. During the war, they and their families were sent to concentration camps. His grandparents died there; his parents survived and resettled in London, where Springer was born in 1944. When he was 5, the family moved to New York City. Even there, the Holocaust permeated Springer’s childhood in unexpected ways; his parents avoided seeing the movie “The Sound of Music” because they felt it would be too painful. Their experiences shaped Springer’s life philosophy: He learned never to judge people by who they are, but by what they do.
His father made stuffed animals and sold them; his mother worked as a clerk in a bank. Today, he treasures his memories of filling up the car with stuffed toys and driving around with his dad to stores. Summers he spent on the boardwalk in New Jersey, hawking stuffed tigers and bears.
After receiving a B.A. degree from Tulane University, Springer attended law school at Northwestern University. He graduated in 1968; in 1969, he passed the Ohio state bar exam and joined a law firm in Cincinnati. He was young, liberal and Jewish in a staid, conservative, German Catholic town. Still, he felt he had a calling to local politics. His first attempt, a Democratic run for Congress in 1970, failed. In 1971, at the age of 27, he was a boy wonder elected to a nine-member city council.
In April, 1974, the gossip column on the front page of the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a blind item speculating on an unnamed city politician who was being questioned in a federal vice investigation. Two weeks later, Vice Mayor Springer-only six months away from a year’s term as mayor, an arrangement agreed upon by a coalition of two political parties represented on the council-resigned from office after admitting that he had paid a Kentucky prostitute with a personal check.
For several months, he kept a low profile; then in 1975 he ran for city council again and was elected. In 1977, he was re-elected with the largest plurality in the city’s history and was elected mayor by the council.
His was a popular reign, and one filled with fun and games. Springer would show up with his guitar at folksy coffee shops and sing. He initiated “Switch Your Career Day” by turning the mayor’s office over to someone else while he drove a bus. When the Beach Boys came to town, Springer jumped up on stage for a round of “Good Vibrations;” when the circus arrived, he wrestled a bear.
Two or three times a week, he also started turning up at the city’s premiere rock ‘n’ roll radio station to read a little commentary he’d written. The subjects ranged from local issues to the death of John Lennon. Enormously popular, the commentaries paved the way for a new career. After a failed run for governor in 1982, Springer was hired by WLWT-TV, the NBC affiliate, as a political commentator. So personable was he in front of a camera that, two years later, he became the station’s primary news co-anchor. At the same time, he continued to do his commentaries during the 11 p.m. newscast.
“Jerry was tremendously well-liked,” says John Kiesewetter, the TV critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer. “By 1987, his station was No. 1 in the news ratings and they held that rating for almost the next five years.” A collection of Springer’s commentaries was published and Springer’s popularity seemed to know no bounds.
“People listened to him whether they agreed with him or not,” says Kiesewetter. “After the news, he would sit around and take phone calls from people who wanted to discuss what he’d just said.”
In 1991, the station set him up with his own daytime talk show; at the same time, he continued to anchor the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. news, plus present his commentaries. A year later, the Springer show was sold to Multimedia Entertainment and moved to Chicago. For six months Springer commuted almost daily between the two cities-doing TV talk in Chicago and returning to Cincinnati to continue his news commentaries. He even started doing a new twist on the commentaries by adding “A Final Thought”-a human nature sermonette-at the end of his talk show.
“In the beginning, it seems obvious that Multimedia wanted Springer under contract in case Phil Donahue retired,” says a television industry insider. (Multimedia Entertainment produces both Donahue and Springer, plus shows by Sally Jessy Raphael and Rush Limbaugh.) And, clearly, Springer’s earliest shows cast him in a serious Donahuesque mold: Waco survivors, AIDs issues, homeless people.
But the high road led to low ratings. By May 1994 the Springer show had been totally reformatted as a relationship-issue, youth-oriented show. As audiences got wilder and the show’s topics raunchier, ratings made a significant jump.
Today, Springer’s show is No. 3 overnight (after Oprah and Sally Jessy); in Los Angeles, where it airs at 11 p.m., it beats both Letterman and Leno.
“The changes in that show’s content have been amazing,” says Kiesewetter. “And in interviews with me over the years, he presents the changes with no excuses, no apologies.”
One place that’s not very happy with Springer’s show now is Cincinnati, where Springer won the Enquirer’s contest last year for worst talk show host.
“Well, I think that result came out of people who remembered and respected him here,” says Kiesewetter. “A lot of people feel sad and even a bit hurt to see such a bright, intelligent guy-who was a true leader in the council here-doing such topics as ‘Confess, You Liar!’ as opposed to the real contributions he once made.”
Ensconced behind a desk suitable for a professor or an attorney, Springer ponders the question of what he knows now that he didn’t know when he started in TV talk.
“That it’s purely an entertainment form,” he says. “When I started out, I was still doing the news in Cincinnati. So I had to be concerned about my credibility if I was dancing around with the Chippendales during the day and then, at night, doing a story about a murder. So we kept the show fairly serious. But once I gave up doing the news, then the subtext became, ‘This is an entertainment show.’
“I am now an entertainer, as if I was a comedian or a singer or an actor. My job for one hour is to entertain. You either accept it or you find another job-that’s the way I look at it.”
So far, he’s happy with the job he’s got. His contract with Multimedia runs for another five years; after that, he says, who knows what he’ll want to do?
This kind of question doesn’t bother him, because he doesn’t define himself by his job-whatever his job at the moment might be. He is still a news junkie, even though he’s no longer an anchor. He still is interested in reading political histories, even though he’s no longer a politician. His conversation topics might include baseball or the character of Franklin Roosevelt.
He spends his free time with his daughter, Katie, who is attending college in the Chicago area (for the last 6 years, he and his wife have been formally separated); he plays golf; he hangs with the guys.
“I have the most normal existence,” he says. “I’m just an easy-going guy.”
But then, there is the lawsuit. In January, 1995, four members of a Toronto comedy group pulled a hoax on the Springer show. They were presented as real-life guests who had quite a few problems: Johnny Gardhouse played a husband who had had an affair with his kids’ baby-sitter, played by Mini Holmes; Suzanne Muir played the unsuspecting wife; and Ian Sirota played the baby-sitter’s boyfriend. When the “husband’s” affair was revealed to the “wife” on the air, screaming accusations and sobbing tears followed.
The show aired Feb. 7, 1995, and quite a few people in Toronto recognized the four actors. When the story hit the news wires, Springer was not amused. Neither was Multimedia, which has filed a lawsuit for the costs of producing and broadcasting that show, as well as the travel and hotel costs, and living expenses incurred by the four performers. In total, Multimedia is asking for an award of damages in excess of $50,000.
“They were good,” says Springer of the Canadians. “They had me going. But this lawsuit is not that we can’t take a joke; it’s kind of like ‘Quiz Show”‘-a reference to the film depicting the TV quiz show scandals of the 1950s. “The only reason these shows have any value in terms of people enjoying them is that you can sit home and scratch your head and say, ‘I can’t believe these people are real.’ But if they’re not real, then you have no show. I know it sounds hypocritical, but you have to protect the reality of your show. You can’t let people make up stories on talk shows. You have to set some standards.” (The show’s staff does some informal checking into a prospective participant’s background, such as as asking for family photographs and bills bearing the person’s name.)
“Oh, is he saying we – – – – – – with his integrity?” asks Suzanne Muir. Reached by phone in Toronto, Muir-a 27-year-old comedian who appears on a Canadian TV show-is angry about the lawsuit. “They’re suing us for ‘breach of contract,’ but everything the producers told us about the show was a lie-excuse me, a misstatement.”
Muir’s claims contradict Springer’s assertion that no one is ever set up for a nasty surprise on the show. “When the producer (George Washington, who has since left the Springer show) called me, thinking I was the wife,” she says, “I was told that they wanted me to be on a show called ‘How to Put Romance Back in Your Marriage.’ When the show was taped, Jerry asked me, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ and I told him about this ‘Put Back the Romance’ thing. But that was edited out of the show when it aired.”
What about Springer’s claim that guests are warned beforehand that they might be told anything by another family member? And that they are totally warned about the potential consequences of what someone wanted to tell them?
“I wasn’t told that I would find out anything,” says Muir. “In fact, I was told, ‘Don’t worry. We’re kind of like Oprah. We help people.’ And the people in the audience were disgusting to me-200 screaming 18-year-olds and just because I’m there on stage, they have the right to hate me. They’re yelling, ‘How can you not know your husband’s messing around?’ and ‘Are you a total idiot?’ I mean, what if I had been a real housewife? What if that had been my real life blowing apart?”
“The purpose of the lawsuit isn’t to punish anyone,” says Samuel Fifer, an attorney at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, who is representing Multimedia.
“But when you have a group of people fabricating a whole set of relationships, you have to make it clear that this kind of behavior isn’t acceptable.
“If the people won’t say, ‘Yeah, we’re sorry we did it. And we shouldn’t have done it,’ you have two choices: You can ignore their behavior and walk away or you can take it to the courts. Multimedia has chosen the latter course.”
So if the Canadians would just apologize, that could be the end of the lawsuit? “That’s a hypothetical question,” says Fifer, “and they haven’t offered anything like an apology. But, hypothetically, if they did, I think Multimedia would regard that as a positive thing.”
“Television talk shows should feel some responsibility for what they do,” says Rick Gering, an attorney at Arnstein & Lehr, who is representing the Canadians. When producers lure unsuspecting people onto shows under false pretenses, for the purpose of capturing their shock, pain and agony and selling that as entertainment, someone has to say that’s unacceptable. What the show thought it was doing to this woman went ‘beyond the bounds of decency.’ And it’s just plain wrong to say that their only options were to walk away or to run to a courthouse.
“The more appropriate response would be for ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ to examine the truthfulness of its own house. And, hypothetically, if they did that, the defendants in this case would regard that as a positive thing.”
Springer is sitting at his desk, writing on a yellow legal pad. He is finishing his “Final Thought” for the day’s program; shortly, he will go and tape this show, which is called “KKK Families.”
“Final Thought” is something that sets Springer’s talk show apart from the others; it’s a minihomily, ripe with ’90s-style emphasis on tolerance, self-fulfillment and understanding.
Sometimes, Springer says things like, “All of us can be a talk show waiting to happen” or “We can’t tell others how to live.” He always ends with, “Take care of yourself and each other.”
“I do my commentary because we’ve had an hour on a particular issue-as crazy as it might be,” says Springer “and I personally feel a need to separate myself from what just happened. I think anyone has the right to be on television to give their point of view on anything. But the trade-off is that, at the end, I get to say, ‘Uh-huh, I’m not buying it. That’s the purpose of Final Thought.’ “
“Well,” the reporter says, “I noticed last week when I was watching your shows. . . . “
He interrupts. “Oh, don’t watch the shows.” Is this a kind of “Final Thought”?
Reporter: “A way to take care of myself, if not others?”
Springer: “Absolutely. You’ve got to start somewhere.”
