Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (7 page)

Jeff Christie was doing no better professionally than Rush Limbaugh was doing matrimonially. He was fired twice in 1978, first by KUDL and then by KFIX. The radio business was in flux, and disc jockeys rarely lasted long. Besides, Limbaugh had personality conflicts with superiors who found him argumentative.

Luckily for Rush, Bryan Burns had moved up in the Royals front office. He offered his old roommate a part-time job in the marketing department, and Rush took it. Even when the position went to full-time, Limbaugh was still making far less than he had earned in Pittsburgh a decade earlier. Not only was he broke, he was treated like a nobody.

“On a baseball franchise there are some guys with real important jobs, but Rush wasn’t one of them. He did group sales and odd jobs, like finding singers for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ There was no aura about him,” says Burns.

As a teenager, Rush had been accepted by the jocks because he hung out with John Rueseler, a star athlete who went on to play college football at Memphis State. George Brett filled a similar role in Limbaugh’s life. They formed a highly improbable friendship—baseball stars seldom pal around with front-office flunkies—and suddenly Limbaugh was a part of the Royals in-crowd.

“Rush didn’t have a lot of friends,” says Brett. “I don’t think he felt very good about himself. But I thought he was smart and funny. On Sundays after games we’d go out for fried chicken dinner at Stroud’s, or he’d come over to the house and help me hook up electronic equipment. We talked about personal things, sports trivia, whatever, but I can’t recall ever talking about politics. When he left Kansas City and went on to his new career, I was surprised to find out he knew anything about it.”

In the off-season Brett included Rush in touch football games with professional athletes and other jocks. “Sam Lacey, the NBA player, was in the games, and a lot of Royals employees, too,” Brett told me. “When we chose up sides, Rush was always the last one taken—he was overweight and not very athletic, an old guy. But you know what? He always came up with the play that won the game.”

Limbaugh worked for the Royals for five years. In addition to working in group sales he “produced” the scoreboard during games. “Back then baseball teams didn’t really believe in marketing themselves,” says Burns. “It was looked down on. A team might have a bat day or hold some kind of promotion, but actually putting on a show during the game was considered inappropriate.” Putting on a show was what Limbaugh loved. “He played Michael Jackson songs between innings. Nobody was doing anything like that back then. He bought a cart-machine and played sound effects over the scoreboard. I think he was the first one in baseball to produce games that way.”

Limbaugh was good at his job, but he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. “For one thing, they didn’t like it when I played Michael Jackson,” he told me. “They used to say, ‘Where do you think we are, Oakland?’ ” Rush Limbaugh, racial pioneer.

In 1983 Bryan Burns left the team for a senior role in the office of the commissioner of Major League Baseball. That was the beginning of the end for Rush’s career in the Majors. “He had an edgy attitude,” says Burns. “He tended to be frank and honest, and when he thought people in the organization were wrong he said so. I was more or less his protector, but after I left he lost his job.”

Rush left the Royals and eventually went on to stardom, but he never forgot George Brett’s friendship. In 1992 at Brett’s wedding reception, he sang a sentimental song (he says he can’t recall which one) and handed Brett a letter thanking him and offering to treat the newlyweds to a honeymoon anywhere in the world for as long as they cared to go. When Brett reached his three-thousandth career hit, Limbaugh flew to Kansas City and hosted a large celebratory dinner party at Stroud’s. And they are still golfing buddies.

“We were sitting around talking one day, and I suggested to Rush that I come down to Palm Beach to play with him,” Brett told me. “He seemed surprised by that. ‘You’d want to come all the way down there to play with me?’ he said. After all his success, he’s still a little bit insecure.”

Just before Rush was fired by the Royals he got married for the second time. His bride was Michelle Sixta, a student at Central Missouri State University who was working her way through school as a stadium usher. They were married in a small ceremony at the Stadium Club.

Out of work once more, Limbaugh caught on at KMBZ in Kansas City, where, for the first time, he began openly expressing his conservative opinions on the air and engaging in right-wing satire. This was controversial, and the owner of the station, Bonneville International, a company controlled by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was uncomfortable with controversy. Limbaugh drew a crowd but he also upset a lot of people.

Shock radio, rude and irreverent, was catching on around the country at the time. Less than a decade earlier, Larry Lujack had been forced to publicly apologize for telling a listener that he would play more Jim Croce songs when Croce (who had been killed a few months earlier in a plane crash) went back into the studio and recorded some. Now, in New York, at WNBC, Don Imus and Howard Stern scored gigantic ratings with tasteless, offensive, often topical humor.

Sacramento’s version was Morton Downey Jr., who was drawing big audiences and national attention for his show, broadcast on KFBK. Downey was a ranter with a taste for pushing boundaries. He reached his boundary when he told a joke about “a Chinaman,” an ethnic term that offended many, especially City Councilman Tom Chinn, who thought it had been aimed at him personally. Chinn complained to the owner of the station, C. K. McClatchy, who fired Downey. As luck would have it, Limbaugh was fired again right around the same time. He was done in by football. Unbeknownst to him, KMBZ was trying to get the rights to broadcast the Kansas City Chiefs games. Limbaugh, a fanatical football fan, had taken to blasting the team and its executives as price-gouging, incompetent cheapskates. That made him a liability, and he was canned. The pink slip came with a curt note. “Unfortunately,” the station manager wrote to him, “I cannot share your enthusiasm for your performance.”

Norm Woodruff, who met Limbaugh while working as a consultant to KMBZ, was now the acting program director of Sacramento’s KFBK. He knew Limbaugh’s show, and he thought Rush would be an ideal replacement for Downey. Limbaugh had too much attitude for Kansas City, but compared with Downey he was a model of easy listening and good humor. Woodruff hired Limbaugh and gave him marching orders that Rush described in a speech in the summer of 2009: “We want controversy, but don’t make it up. If you actually think something—if you actually believe it, and you can tell people why—we’ll back you up. But if you’re going to say stuff just to make people mad—if all you want to do is rabble-rouse, if all you want to do is offend and get noticed—that’s not what we’re interested in, and we won’t back you up.”

Limbaugh was a hit in Sacramento. He was using his real name now. The station let him go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests, and encouraged his highly personal, right-wing monologues. For the first time in his career he was marketed heavily and aggressively. There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a button, captioned: “How Would You Like to Punch Rush Limbaugh?” Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Bryan a snapshot. Morton Downey Jr. had been a big star in Sacramento, with a 5 share of the market—5 percent of people listening to the radio in a given fifteen-minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that. He was sharp edged but good humored. “The new morning host espouses many of the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Jr.,” reported the
Sacramento Bee
, “but he skates a little farther from the edge of the hole in the ice.”

Rush was rewarded for his success with a six-figure salary, an estimable income in the mid-1980s, even by his father’s standards. More important, for the first time in his life he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches, just like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns. Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on the air.

The audience in Sacramento was more sophisticated than the one he had had in Kansas City, and more liberal. Jerry Brown, known as “Governor Moonbeam,” had just finished his years in the statehouse, and California was swinging to the right, but it was still a long way from Kansas. I was in Sacramento in the mid-’80s, and I vividly recall boarding a bus bound for San Francisco on which the driver nonchalantly announced that smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and joints was prohibited.

Marijuana wasn’t Rush’s thing. (In 1993 he told an interviewer for
Playboy
that he had only tried it twice, inhaled but hadn’t liked it.) Hippies smoked marijuana. Rush wanted to belong to the square adult world, and in Sacramento he had that chance. “For the first time in my life I actively appreciated where I lived,” he wrote in
The Way Things Ought to Be
. “I was no longer a passing personality but rather a functioning, practicing, and participating member of my community—aspects of life that were new to me. And I loved it.”

Michelle loved it less. She had a job at a printing company but quit to become her husband’s assistant, and she found the job boring and tedious. She was an outdoors type; he hated nature. When he did venture out he was a klutz. One day fellow disc jockeys Bob Nathan and Dave Williams convinced him to go rafting on the American River, which runs through Sacramento. “It’s a very, very mild ride,” Williams later wrote. “Bob gave Rush an oar and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current . . . Rush panicked, stuck the oar out, his arms stiff as a board, and upon impact he fell overboard . . . We got Rush back in the raft and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the grim reaper.”

Rush’s fun, as always, came in the studio. An evangelist in Ohio claimed that the theme song for the old
Mister Ed
television series (
“A horse is a horse, of course, of course . . .”
) contained a satanic message when played backward. Limbaugh told his audience about it and informed them a Slim Whitman recording played backward also contained a message from the devil. To his delight, a lot of listeners took him seriously, calling the station to report that they were trashing all their Whitman albums to “keep the devil out of the house.”

The Limbaugh persona, which had been germinating since the “Jeff Christie School for DJs” in Pittsburgh, flowered in Sacramento. Limbaugh became “El Rushbo, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing Maha Rushi,” “a harmless little fuzzball,” and the “Epitome of Morality and Virtue.” His show was carried “across the fruited plain” on the (fictitious) Excellence in Broadcasting Network, from behind the golden EIB microphone. He was on “the cutting edge of societal evolution,” “serving humanity” with “talent on loan from God,” and opinions “documented to be almost always right, 97.9 percent of the time” by the Sullivan Group (another fictitious entity named for local DJ and Limbaugh buddy Tom Sullivan).

The stylized, satirical lingo began then, too. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep “Uglo-Americans” off the streets. Militant feminists became “Feminazis.” The green movement was full of “environmental whackos,” the American left became “Commie pinko liberals,” and the residents of Rio Linda, California, were synonymous with stupidity. A ringing
“Dadelut! Dadelut! Dadelut!”
introduced news updates on what he regarded the absurdities of liberal activism. Liberals, of course, hated him, which he found inspiring. When they attacked him as a dimwit, he responded by claiming that he was so much smarter than his critics that he could vanquish them “with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair.”

Bruce Marr saw that Limbaugh had the ability to go beyond Sacramento and introduced him to Ed McLaughlin, the former head of ABC Radio. McLaughlin had started his own company, and he was syndicating the
Dr. Dean Edell Show
nationally. He agreed with Marr that Limbaugh had the potential to go national as well. McLaughlin offered a partnership. Rush brought in his brother, David, to work out the details. The arrangement made a fortune for both Limbaugh and McLaughlin, and revolutionized the style and content of American radio.

But first Limbaugh had to get out of Sacramento. His contract with KBFK stipulated that he could leave only to accept an offer by a top-market station. But city stations wanted local programming, not shows aimed at a national audience. McLaughlin came up with an ingenious solution. Limbaugh would go to WABC in New York, where he would do a local program, essentially for free. In return, the ABC Radio Networks would carry a second, national program each day on its affiliates.

The New York City show started in July 1988. A month later, on August 1, the national program followed on fifty-six stations in second-tier markets with a total of about 250,000 listeners. The EIB Network was on the air. It had been twenty-one years since Rusty Sharpe’s first show in Cape Girardeau. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had finally made it to what he hoped would be the big time.

CHAPTER FOUR

L
imbaugh came to New York with trepidation. “I decided to leave Sacramento in April but didn’t go till July,” he told a reporter for the
Sacramento Bee
. “I realized that everything I’d been searching for in seventeen years I’d found in Sacramento in the last year and a half. Friends. Security. Stability. A house.” After being fired in Pittsburgh, Limbaugh had retreated to Cape; in Sacramento, with New York looming, he once more holed up. “I got so depressed, I guess you could say I sat around the house in my underwear, sulking,” he said.

Bryan Burns had moved to New York. One Saturday morning he got a call from Limbaugh. “You’re not going to believe this,” Rush said, “but we’re moving to New York City. Can you help us find a place to live?”