Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (6 page)

“Seven minutes after six in the morning . . . As you know I am a bachelor, I live in a dinky little apartment, and all I have is a lamp and a TV set, but I’m going to play a little joke on the electrical department.” Rush dialed the phone and an unsuspecting employee of the electric company answered.

“I just moved here from Florida,” said Rush. “I have a thing for palm trees and I have a big backyard, so I thought I might start a palm tree orchard.”

“A palm tree orchard?”

“I need heat lamps for that,” Rush said. “About fifteen or twenty thousand heat lamps. And I was wondering what it would cost me.”

“How many watts?”

Rush said, “About six hundred watts apiece, twenty hours a day. What will that run me?”

The electric company clerk took a minute to calculate. “That would cost you three thousand, six hundred and forty-eight dollars a day,” he said.

Rush feigned shock. “
A day!
I could move back to Florida cheaper than that!”

Bits like this were an echo of the crank calls and fake pizza orders from Flo’s Taxi, and they signaled that Jeff Christie aspired to something bigger than record spinning. Like all beginning comics, he used the materials he had garnered from his own experience. “The Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the Air,” for example, leaned on his contempt for the radio preachers he had met at the studio on Sunday mornings in Cape, as well as showcased Limbaugh’s gift for mimicry.

“Before the show I had the divine joy of talking with the Almighty,” Shuck intoned in a fruity Southern accent. “It was in my garage and I got right straight through to Him and I got talking about some real heavy subjects. He told me that there are those of you out there with afflictions and terrible troubles. He said there’s a lady out there who believes her daughter is in terrible trouble. I don’t know if it’s you. Do you believe that your daughter’s in trouble? Don’t despair, the Almighty told me it could be taken care of. Simply send a hundred dollars. Now if you don’t have a hundred dollars, hawk something or borrow it and send it. Get it and send it to Friar Shuck!”

Sometimes Bachelor Jeff gave out faux advice. “Bunch of requests for the Christie quickie DJ course,” he said one morning. “Had a letter from a girl who desired to become a radio pronouncer, and she thought it would be a drawback because she’s a girl. Not so. You really just have to master two techniques, and I’m going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of the microphone. To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie, is cuing up the record. Get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle, place it on the outside edge of the record, then turn the record until you hear the beginning of the record, back it up a quarter of a turn, and when you get through talking the record will start.” He paused, gave it two beats. “After you have mastered those two techniques, girls, change your sex.”

Limbaugh’s bosses saw that he was talented and popular, but they worried that his humor was stretching the top-40 drive-time format. “They used to send him memos, telling him ‘Shut up and play the records,’ ” says Bill Figenshu, who worked at the station as “Bill Steele” and shared a two-hundred-dollar-a-month flat with Rush in nearby Irwin, Pennsylvania. “It was supposedly a garden apartment but it was in the basement, so there was no garden. We were both very young, ambitious, hard-working guys. He went in at four in the morning. I worked nights, so we didn’t see each other that much. We were friendly, we had a decent time, but we weren’t best buds or anything like that. Mostly we did the wash together on Saturdays and ate pizza. Rush had a good personality but he wasn’t particularly funny. He was a quiet kid, and so was I. When radio is your life, you’re a geek. Especially if you were doing AM, which was becoming uncool at that point. We didn’t smoke dope, we did air-checks. Vietnam was going on, all sorts of changes, but I can’t remember him talking about politics. We talked about radio and the careers we wanted to have.”

According to Figenshu, who went on to become the head of Viacom’s radio broadcasting division, the flat they shared was a model of bachelor domesticity, with a ratty green shag carpet, furniture pulled together from forgotten sources, and cold pizza crusting on the kitchen counter. Limbaugh, who is an extremely fastidious housekeeper, is offended by the description. He also denies that the apartment was, as has been reported, the scene of his first sexual conquest. “I have no memory of THAT,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “I don’t remember where [I lost my virginity]. Honestly I don’t. All I know is that there was NO ONE else there. That I am certain of.”

In Cape, Rusty Sharpe had been a minor celebrity. In McKeesport, Jeff Christie surpassed Rusty: He did Toys for Tots charity gigs with players of the Pittsburgh Condors, an ABA basketball team that averaged less than a thousand fans a game and whose star, John Brisker, was the dirtiest player in the history of pro basketball. Bachelor Jeff made appearances for the Variety Club and other civic organizations, and showed up on request to schmooze with sponsors at station events.

WIXZ was a starter job, and Limbaugh acquitted himself well enough to take the next step. In 1973 he was hired by station KQV, known as 14K, as a nighttime disc jockey. KQV was an ABC affiliate, the second-most-popular AM station in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately for him, ABC quickly sold the station to Taft Broadcasting. There were different bosses, different expectations, and by 1974 Jeff Christie was out of a job and temporarily unable to find a new one.

The economy was against him—the stock market crashed in 1973, and by the end of ’74 it had lost more than 45 percent of its value. Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh were especially bad places to be. The record industry was changing, too. Singles were being replaced by albums.
Billboard
reported that FM had established dominance in “market after market . . . in the younger demographics”—that was Jeff Christie’s demographic. But he had no interest in FM, which he considered a radio band for hippies and phony intellectuals.

Limbaugh put out job feelers, but he got only one offer, from Neenah, Wisconsin. After having been in a top-10 national radio market, even Cape sounded better than Neenah. He hitched a U-Haul trailer to his Buick Riviera and drove home. For the next seven months he lived with his parents, umpired Little League for five dollars a game, sunbathed in the backyard, and cruised Broadway in search of action that didn’t materialize (“I felt like I was Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
except for the mother and the girlfriend he was banging”). He also spent a good part of his time in the family rumpus room playing Strat-O-Matic baseball. Some of his friends thought he was sulking down there, but to Limbaugh it was a time of reflection and relaxation.

“I did not hibernate in the basement,” he wrote to me. “The basement in that house was the greatest room in the house!! And mine was the only bedroom on that floor. It was an above-ground basement with a dumbwaiter right up to the kitchen.”

Surprisingly, Big Rush didn’t give his son a hard time about his misadventure in Pittsburgh. The old man was approaching sixty. The country he loved and had fought for seemed to be falling apart. Richard Nixon, whom he once hosted in Cape, was forced to resign the presidency in disgrace. The Communists were winning in Vietnam. David was away at college, and it was lonely at home. “I think he liked having me around,” says Rush. “He and my mom and I went out to dinner a lot. He told me he knew I’d get my ass in gear eventually.”

Limbaugh sent tapes of his work to stations around the country. Joey Reynolds, who hosts a late-night show on WOR in New York City, was at KQV then, and he tried to help Rush get his job back. “My dad gave me the money to go to Pittsburgh to try, but it only lasted a few days,” Limbaugh recalls. “When I got back to Cape again I was depressed and frustrated. I always had a sense I would succeed but nothing was coming through. I can remember taking a baseball bat out to the backyard and just beating a tree, over and over.”

He was especially stung by a rejection from John Rook. “Rook,” he told me, “was a legend in the broadcast business. He had been the program director at WLS in Chicago, which is the station that carried Larry Lujack. By 1974 he had gone to Denver. I sent him a tape and he called me. For one hour he basically told me that the only difference between me and a bag of shit was the bag. He just ripped me to shreds. To this day I have no idea why he did that to me.”

Big Rush’s reaction was characteristic: “Why,” he asked his son, “do you want to stay in the radio business? Nobody has a sense of honor.” But he refrained from pushing. It was Millie who grew impatient with her son’s indolence. One day Jim Carnegie, who had been program director at KQV in Pittsburgh and was now in Kansas City at KUDL, called Rush to sound out about possibly coming to work there. Rush wasn’t sure he wanted to live in Kansas City, but his mother was. She said, “You are going, and if they offer you a job you are going to take it.”

Which he did.

Kansas City is 350 miles west of Cape Girardeau, and while it wasn’t Limbaugh’s dream destination, it was, like Pittsburgh, a real city with major league franchises in baseball, football, and (temporarily) basketball to prove it. His new employer, KUDL, had both AM and FM bands. Limbaugh, still “Jeff Christie,” started out playing oldies and bantering with callers on the AM dial. That changed when NBC bought the station and turned AM into an all-talk format. Oddly, it didn’t occur to anyone that Limbaugh would make a good fit. Instead he was switched to FM, where he was basically required to supervise the automated and computerized music programs the station ran, make public-service announcements, and take calls from listeners. Insult comedy was coming into its own on the radio, and Jeff Christie decided to try it. He describes the result in his book,
See, I Told You So
:

The lesson stayed with him. To this day, Limbaugh is polite to his callers who are, in any case, prescreened. He is still insulting, but his targets tend to be institutions, causes, and public figures who can defend themselves.

In time, Limbaugh developed a modest fan base. One of his listeners was George Brett, the Hall of Fame third baseman of the Kansas City Royals. “I liked listening to him,” Brett says. “He was funny. I had no idea he knew anything about politics.”

Limbaugh had another Kansas City Royals connection, Bryan Burns, a young guy who worked in the team’s marketing department. The two men met at the intersection of ticket sales and media, and struck up a friendship. Burns was from a small town in southeast Missouri about ninety miles from Cape. Like Rush, he was single. They both had apartment leases that were expiring and decided to pool their resources and rent a place together in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb.

“We weren’t wild and crazy guys,” says Burns, who is now a vice president at ESPN. “On Sundays Rush would put on his Pittsburgh Steelers jersey and we’d watch football. Sometimes a few other guys would join us. Or he’d play music—he was into George Benson, what was called back then contemporary jazz. But it was far from a party atmosphere.”

Burns, like Bill Figenshu, had no idea his roommate was a political thinker. “He was scary smart about everything, but I can’t recall us talking much about current events. He was funny, though. I was an audience of one. Now his audience is millions, but I don’t really hear a difference. The Rush I knew in Kansas City is the same guy I hear on the radio. If I had to choose a word to describe him, I’d say ‘real.’ ”

Soon after moving in with Burns, Rush met Roxy Maxine McNeely, a secretary at one of the other radio stations in town. “Roxy didn’t move in with us, but she spent a lot of time at our place,” says Burns. “She was a very fun-loving girl. She used to write notes to Rush on the bathroom mirror in lipstick. I liked her a lot.” Rush did, too, and in short order he moved in with her, although he continued to pay his share of the Overland Park lease. In 1977 he and Roxy were married in Cape at the Centenary United Methodist Church. It was a large wedding, and for once Rush basked in his father’s approval. Perhaps Roxy wasn’t quite the wife a real professional man could have snagged, but she was lovely and had a good head on her shoulders. Rush, at twenty-six, was now gainfully employed in Kansas City, plausibly successful, and conventionally coupled.

Like a lot of first marriages, this was a youthful experiment that didn’t work out. Rush was focused on his career and he was a homebody; when he wasn’t at the studio he wanted to stay home, snack, and watch sports on TV, or tinker with electronic equipment. Roxy liked going out and she felt unappreciated. After two years she filed for divorce on grounds of mutual incompatibility, and Rush didn’t object. There were no hard feelings, no kids, and not much in the way of mutual property to distribute—a clean break.