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KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE 8/28/2010 5:54:39 AM
There was a time back in the ‘80s when I co-hosted a PBS television show that was taped in various locales around suburban Rochester, and often while driving home I listened to Bruce Williams on NBC-Radio.
Williams was an “early-on” financial and consumer guru with a huge national audience on nighttime radio. Listening to him one night, I was struck with a remarkable idea: promote Williams, who often talked about tourism, to lead group travel tours—-perhaps starting with a cruise.
The next day in my office I wrote Bruce (whom I had never met and who didn’t know me from Cain) a lengthy, detailed letter outlining my brazen plot. Much to my surprise, a few days later I received a call from the man himself from his home in New Jersey. He was ga-ga over the concept and asked, in his Joisey accent, “Could you fly down tuh duh City an’ meet witch me at NBC?” When Bruce talked he always sounded like he was chewing a wad of bubblegum
A week or so later my wife and I found ourselves sitting with the renowned broadcasting icon in the Rainbow Room at 30 Rock. Over cocktails we formed a new company (Bruce Williams Travel, Inc.) and worked out a plan whereby Bruce, as an initial offering, would personally host a New Year’s 1985 Cruise to the Caribbean. And he agreed to promote the venture on his radio show, starting immediately.
Later that day he arranged for us to attend the taping of the David Letterman Show (on NBC-TV back then) and join him (Williams) afterwards as he concluded his live radio stint; he would then drive us to the Newark Airport on his way to Franklin, where he lived.
The flight home was an unexpected omen: we shared the First Class cabin with a gregarious Buffalo Bob Smith (“Howdy Doody’s” father.) Meeting him was as exciting as doing business with Bruce Williams, and when told of our exciting innovation, he was enthusiastically supportive.
Earlier I had asked Williams, as we walked down the hallway at NBC, if we could meet Laura Schlessinger.
“She’s not here,” Bruce said. “I don’t think she even does her show from here. Wanna meet Sally Jessie Raphael instead?”
Williams, in the end, did not host the New Year’s 1985 Cruise. He took ill just before embarkation, and my wife and I had to step in and conduct the tour ourselves; it turned out to be great fun—-it gave me the opportunity to quit smoking—-in the ensuing twenty five years I have never touched a cigarette, cigar or pipe. It was also our last cruise before the arrival of our daughter.
We suffered neither cancellations nor ill-will due to Bruce’s absence, but after our daughter’s arrival, our lack of interest (and time constraints) precipitated the unraveling of Bruce Williams Travel, Inc.
Fast forward to 2010. Bruce has long been retired from NBC and lives near Tampa, Florida; we now live in metro Atlanta where I devote fulltime to writing. I thought of my old compatriot recently when Ms. Laura made headlines by inserting her dainty Prado amidst her pearly incisors.
Her announcement on “Larry King Live” that she was shutting down her radio show at year’s end made me wonder: are you just resigning or did Talk Radio Network give you the axe and a gracious way to bow out? Hmmm.
I don’t know and frankly, I don’t care. Her dilemma is, she used the N-word eleven times to make a point when once would have served the purpose—-even then the point, obviously, was missed.
Some comments from the Daily Beast (“my Bible”, as Jay Leno would say) regarding Sarah Palin’s defense of Ms. Schlessinger was worth noting: “Black Republicans [say] Sarah Palin's tweet in defense of [Ms. Schlessinger] was itself indefensible-—and she [Palin] may be no longer fit to lead." (Surprise.) “A few black conservatives . . . are not amused. They are now saying what many in the GOP increasingly believe: Sarah Palin is not fit to be a serious leader.”
One syndicated conservative columnist went so far as to write: “Sarah Palin’s [comments] resemble something scribbled by a ninth-grade cheerleader. Is it asking too much for a reputed American political leader to communicate in complete sentences? Palin's gravitas gap is growing into the Gravitas Canyon."
The Daily Beast article stated further: “She is on the wrong side of history. . . . And those are odds you can’t wink your way out of.”
For the record, the N-word was used a couple times in my first novel “The Better Angels” and it never occurred to me there was need for concern.
During World War II and especially in the South and parts of the North and Mid-West (among whites as well as blacks,) the word was a casual part of our vocabulary, a term if not overly affectionate scarcely one of derision or malevolence. Also, in literature, according to either John O’Hara, John Steinbeck, John Updike (or was it Jon Stewart?) there “is not any usage of any word or phrase that is, or should be, taboo.”
Anyway, by commercial standards, “The Better Angels” was not a bestseller. A company no one had ever heard of published it, and while the publisher moved on shortly after the book’s release, my detractors suggested (with humor, I hope) the novel might have been responsible for the imprint’s disappearance.
Be that as it may, the minuscule sales of the novel had nothing to do with use of the N-word or any other nomenclature. It was, despite Nobel Prize qualities, the first novel of a pitifully obscure (and apparently permanent) unknown.
There are those, of course, who say Ms. Schlessinger (I cannot call anyone “doctor” who does not have an MD or DDS degree—-in fact, to those “pretenders” the N-word seems justifiably appropriate) was just plain stupid to have publicly engaged in such discourse. She is, after all, nothing but a white Italian Jewess; what right has she to use the N-word while having a discussion on semantics and marital relations with, of all people, a black woman?
What would Rev. Sharpton, Sarah Palin, or other world-class wannabees say if the black woman had referred to “Honky Italian Jews”-—you know, those Hebrew Dago Christ-killers?
I am neither apologizing for Ms. Schlessinger nor condoning her witless verbal transgressions—-but I think I know where she’s coming from. As an American, she had the right to think anything she wants, while the 1st Amendment to our Constitution gives her the “right” to say what she thinks, even if the consequences are debatably deserved.
To speak openly and publicly on any subject without considering the consequences is the height of stupidity; that is a sacred territory only we authors of literature may inhabit.
But I remember something Bruce Williams, the early guru, once said. His wife Susan and he were having breakfast with my wife and me at the Strathallan Hotel in Rochester one morning a lifetime ago when I asked him: “How do you get away with some of your controversial remarks on the air?”
I may have been referring to his recent innocuous and uninformed chiding of Eastman Kodak for abandoning the “disc photography” bonanza.
Bruce munched quietly on a Danish and looked around to see if a waiter, busboy, or other late-risers were listening. Softly, he said, “Whenever you say sumpthin tuh anybody, make sure you know your audience.”
Know your audience. Profound words to live by—-and from a Joisey boy, no less.
