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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Going gets strange, strange get going
Hottest sideshow on earth packing it in; one Fat Lady eulogized eggsactly the way she would have liked; is that a gun in your paw or the new NRA-sponsored Milkbone?
By Amy Reiter
[08/23/99]

Nothing Personal
Everybody wants a piece of "The Body"
Nevada brothel to commemorate governor's visit; Brooke Shields' biological clock's a-rockin'; Stiller and Garofalo didn't do it -- really. Plus: Exciting results of Gore vs. Bradley cockroach race.
By Amy Reiter
[08/20/99]

People Feature
Julia Child: Still cookin' after all these years
At 87, America's most famous and influential chef is about to serve up a new book and a new TV series, and again take us into her culinary embrace.
By Kathryn Kellinger
[08/20/99]

Nothing Personal
Of plummeting pants and racing roaches
Charlize Theron: "I drop trou all the time ..."; a couple of cockroaches named Gore and Bradley; Hef sez: Thumbs down on Nick Cage. Plus: Newt spares no expense on his horn-blowin' honey.
By Amy Reiter
[08/19/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Tony: Portrait of a cereal killer
When hot tubs are outlawed; what if God was a doper? Son of Sam killer not lookin' back; and the importance of knowing where your wallet is at all times.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[08/19/99]

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By Lorenzo W. Milam

August 23, 1999 | Years ago, she would have been called "a common scold." Today, she's deemed "a pain in the ass," "dictatorial," "rude," "overemotional," "a fraud," "Laura the hen," "a psychological bag lady" and "our national mommy."

"I pretty much preach, teach and nag," Dr. Laura Schlessinger told a reporter from the Washington Post. "It's not pop psychology at all. If anything, it's a new genre ..."

Schlessinger can be heard three hours a day in almost every corner of America. They say that her audience exceeds 18 million on 450 radio stations and over 50 percent of her listeners are men. Fifty-thousand people try to call in each day. Her syndicated show recently sold for $71.5 million.

Schlessinger's themes are protect the child, practice family unity, use sexual restraint, stop making excuses and don't interrupt me. "Tell me what you think, not what you feel," she says. "Everything I say is true," she confesses.

She grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. She was a loner in high school and college, but no one could miss her intensity. She was fascinated with science, and got her Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Dr. Laura: The Unauthorized Biography By Vickie L. Bane St. Martins Nonfiction 258 pages

In the midst of her divorce in 1975, she moved to Los Angeles, and tuned in to Bill Ballance and his radio talk-show. She called up during a program about divorce, and they spoke, on the air, for 20 minutes. He then arranged to meet her, using the oldest of come-hither lines, "Someday you're going to be an international radio star."

The radio gods must have been smiling down on her, because Ballance was the originator of a new, and rather daring, on-the-air confessional program. Before Ballance, call-ins had been people discussing their fishing trips and their kids and cats and politics of the non-confrontational variety. Then suddenly it was all love, lust and passion. Ballance, according to those who knew his show, "talked about sex incessantly."

Dr. Norton Kristy, another on-the-air radio shrink, said the program "evolved into an invitation being extended to women to talk about their most intimate fears and hopes and issues in their lives. Bill did that. He was the first in America to do it, and within three years, he was widely copied in America and around the world."

If Dr. Laura was seeking to become famous, she picked the right guy. If she was looking for someone who would keep her deepest secrets, she didn't. Over the years, Ballance seems to have lost whatever little affection he had for his old squeeze. His uncensored memories of their time together have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair and other newspapers and magazines. They are uniformly obnoxious, highly personal and hilarious.

For instance, there's the matter of pet names. He called Laura his "Little Plum," she called him her "Pillow Plumsicles." She wrote notes to him signed, "Your Tottle Bug." "We used to thrash around like a couple of crazed weasels," he told Vanity Fair. He dubbed her "Ku Klux." Why? "Because she is a wizard in the sheets."

He didn't limit his comments to their love affair. "We were sitting in the Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard one day and I said, 'You're scratching your head and a cloud of dandruff is floating over into my consommé.'"

"Talk about gnashing your teeth; it was an actual snarl. She said, 'Don't you ever tell anyone I have psoriasis.' I said to Laura, 'If it weren't for your psoriasis you wouldn't have any character at all.'

A while back, as most everyone knows by now, Ballance sold off some photographs he took of her. In the buff. These went for a pretty penny ($50,000 is the figure mentioned) to the Internet Entertainment Group. Like every other lurid thing you could possibly want -- or have nightmares about -- they are now online, listed as "Dr. Laura's Dirty Dozen." As the folks over at "Mr. Showbiz," commented shortly after the pictures were published: "There are several frightening things you hope never to hear in life. The first might be, 'It's malignant.' But the next up would have to be, "Nude pictures of Dr. Laura are now available for download."

Next page | Her doctoral training included "pulling fat pads off rat testicles"