20 Questions: Robin Quivers

It seems Robin Quivers doesn't care about equal billing with America's best known (and most fined) radio shock jock, Howard Stern. After all, she says, "Suzanne Pleshette was an integral part of 'The Bob New-hart Show.' It was just named after him."

Quivers doesn't fuss about her job description, either. She's been dubbed co-host, foil and even Stern's conscience. She balks at defending him, though. Taking the high road, she insists, "In a society where there's supposed to be free speech, there is no reason to defend anybody who exercises his right."

Quivers considers herself a rarity: She's a graduate of broadcasting school who made it. Last spring she published an autobiography (plugged relentlessly on the air by Stern) detailing her troubled youth in Baltimore, her experience with the Air Force (she was a registered nurse who left the service with the rank of captain) and stints as a radio news reporter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and her hometown. Those jobs led to an offer to team up with a Washington, D.C.–based jock who was pushing the bounds of taste and altering the traditional radio mix of news and music. The clincher: when she heard a tape of Stern interviewing a prostitute. "I don't know whether it was the sound of his voice or the way he was handling it. All I know is that every reservation I had about taking that job flew out the window."

Contributing Editor Warren Kalbacker met with Quivers after a couple of her on-air shifts. He reports: "I had heard her laugh a lot on the air. She has been accused of being Stern's laugh track. But I didn't realize that the laughter would make it so difficult for us to tape our conversation."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Infinity Broadcasting forked over $1.7 million to settle the Federal Communications Commission's proposed fines against the Howard Stern Show for "indecency." Do we now know the exact price of free speech?

[A] Quivers: No. It's our right to do what we do. The fines are attempts to censor us. It's like Wal-Mart refusing to sell Playboy. There's something wrong with wanting the right to tell people what they can read or look at or hear. People already have the power to limit us by not listening. The Howard Stern Show is being fined because it is the only genuine article of free speech. We fought, and we lost jobs for this. We were the people who paid the dues so that everyone could have freedom of speech on the radio. There's no free, freer, freest. Free is an absolute. You can't have limited free speech.

2.

[Q] Playboy: Won't you give some credit to the framers of the Constitution for including the First Amendment?

[A] Quivers: If Thomas Jefferson had heard us, he probably would have said, "We shouldn't have free speech." There are a lot of other things he would not appreciate about today's society. Jefferson was among a group of guys who were elite in their thinking. They dragged an entire country into a revolution. Theirs was a little cabal that decided to break away because it was economically beneficial. And when they sat around making the rules, they made them for themselves. There were no women included. Blacks weren't included. I don't think Jefferson was a great guy. But thank God the Constitution got written. I forget if he had a black woman. But there are all these black people named Jefferson.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Describe your ideal candidate for a seat on the FCC.

[A] Quivers: A blind man who can't hear. Maybe he would read the rules in braille and go out and check frequencies. And that would be the end of it. Making sure that one station doesn't bleed into another's signal and infringe on another's right to broadcast on that band—that's what the FCC is supposed to do. It has no right to comment on content. Unfortunately, the courts disagree with me on this point. Newt Gingrich has said there's no reason for the FCC, and I applaud that.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Do you and Howard conspire over an early-morning cup of coffee before you go on the air?

[A] Quivers: Please. We don't even talk in the morning. We don't talk with each other unless we're on the air. We're doing the Regis and Kathie Lee thing—keeping it fresh. We've never planned the show. It's "I'm going to throw this at you and see what you do with it," or "I'm going to throw this back and see how you catch it." I choose what we talk about when I'm doing the news. Is it provocative and interesting? Will people be talking about this later in the day? I don't do stories just about men who have been arrested for hanging around under outhouses. We spend time talking about O.J., and if troops are being sent to Saudi Arabia, we certainly talk about that.

5.

[Q] Playboy: One last time, recount the Selena controversy.

[A] Quivers: I discovered on coming in after a weekend that this young woman who was called the Madonna of tejano music and who had won a Grammy had been murdered. I had never heard of her. I played a tape of her music to give people some idea of what she did. Now, when we talk about somebody in the news, we try to make it as lively and as auditorily stimulating as possible. If somebody has fallen down a flight of stairs, you'll hear a body drop. If somebody has crashed in a plane, you'll hear the sound of a plane falling and then the splat. So when I talk about somebody who has been shot, you'll hear a gunshot. I said on the air, "Here's Selena, who sang tejano music. She was the Madonna of tejano music. I don't even know what tejano is, but here's an example of what she does." We played the tape and then the soundman played a gunshot. Then Howard said, "Wait a minute, that music!" He started to listen and he played the tape again, and he said, "Ah, I don't like this. Who listens to this?" The people who never listen to our show and don't understand what we do were very offended.

6.

[Q] Playboy: Tempers flared when you and Linda Ronstadt happened to appear together on The Tonight Show shortly after Selena's death. She complained that your defense of Stern "upset" and "distracted" her during her performance and accused you of "shilling" for Stern and letting him take advantage of you. You made no apologies. Are we correct in assuming you don't have many Ronstadt albums in your collection?

[A] Quivers: None, thank goodness. I have never spent any money on that fat cow! She ripped off black people with those stupid covers of hers. Like when she sang Tracks of My Tears. That's a Smokey Robinson song. Linda Ronstadt didn't write that. Smokey sang it better, and Linda just did it exactly the way he did it. She didn't add anything. She recorded a couple of Smokey's songs. She does a disservice to great music with that stupid soprano of hers. I thought something might happen when I saw that she was booked on the show with me. It was right after the Selena situation and she had done a couple of Spanish albums. But I thought, What the heck, I'm on before her. I'll do my bit and that will be it. No big deal. We'll never interact with each other. But I was wrong.

7.

[Q] Playboy: You're the only woman on the Howard Stern Show. Are you really "one of the guys"?

[A] Quivers: I was the only girl in a family of boys. I have three brothers. So it seems I've been re-creating that scenario. I've always found men to be the most fascinating creatures. It really is like looking into a locker room. They don't always remember that they're in the presence of a woman and they let their guard down. I have a different relationship with each of the guys on the show. My feelings toward Howard and Fred Norris, one of the writers, are very family oriented. Jackie "the Joke Man" Martling is more of a sexual friend. He hits on me all the time. Stuttering John often sidles up to me and tries to get a good hug.

8.

[Q] Playboy: Do you crack the whip over Howard and Company?

[A] Quivers: Oh sure. They perform for me. Men always do that peacock kind of thing. They try to be as funny for me as they can possibly be. When they do a recorded bit, they're always asking, "Robin, what do you think? Judge us now." "Robin, come look at my butt and tell me if it looks better now. Is this the kind of butt that would turn you on?" Bare butt, sometimes.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Radio studios tend to be cramped and poorly ventilated. How do you deal with flatulence?

[A] Quivers: That's why I have my own room. Men will fart, given space. I think it's because guys like their own smells. And they like to gross each other out. They like to share that stuff. It's a bonding thing. I can't imagine two women sitting around and one cutting a fart and saying, "Ha-ha." Certain things are guy things. There are women things too, like shopping. Guys don't get that.

10.

[Q] Playboy: You presented Howard and his wife, Alison, with a vibrator. Was the gift appreciated?

[A] Quivers: Absolutely. I have been thanked profusely on the air because I introduced the vibrator into their lives. A lot of thought went into it. A guy says he doesn't like foreplay, that foreplay is boring and he would like to just get to the act. But she wants foreplay. The vibrator provides it and it's fast, so they both get what they want.

11.

[Q] Playboy: "By any means necessary." A fair description of your quest for high ratings?

[A] Quivers: Absolutely not! We're having a good time. That's all we do when we come here in the morning. Our objective is to entertain as many people as possible. Is that crass? I never come in and say, "Now I'm going to do something that totally offends me or that I don't believe in, just for ratings." We have discussions that anyone would have anywhere else. They have just never happened on the radio before. You might have these conversations when you're at a bar with a bunch of your guy friends or when you're in a locker room. Nobody has had them on the radio before.

12.

[Q] Playboy: As the show's newscaster, are you in charge of target selection?

[A] Quivers: I bring up everything. We never know what's going to be controversial. We're not doing it to raise a ruckus. We're amazed at what gets a reaction. We do things and think, Oh, everybody will get crazy about this, but we're wrong. The other day we had some people bring in the bones of a close friend who had been a regular on our program. She died of a drug overdose. We found out who had her bones. So we told them to bring them in, that we wanted to see them. We were going through the bones on the air. Outrageous, but nothing happened! Nobody said a word! Then there was the guy who called from the George Washington Bridge and said he felt like jumping. We kept him on the phone until help arrived. We thought, This will get us nothing but positive press. People thought it was a stunt.

13.

[Q] Playboy: Fess up. Do you screen telephone calls like every other talk radio show?

[A] Quivers: Everybody else does that to make sure that the person on the phone doesn't appear better or smarter than the host, or so the host won't be put into a situation where he has to say "I don't know." We're not afraid of being in that position. We always work with a delay because there are certain words you can't put out over the airwaves—the seven dirties. I don't know all of them, because I don't use those words. Piss is one. Asshole. Motherfucker. Fucker. Goddamn. That has softened the past couple of years. They started regulating the number of times you can use these words.

14.

[Q] Playboy: You express surprise and dismay when people say Robin Quivers doesn't sound black. Analyze the social and linguistic issues here.

[A] Quivers: I keep asking people what black sounds like. I spoke this way when I entered broadcasting school. My mother taught me to speak this way. She refused to allow us to slip into bad habits. If you talk on the phone with someone who you think sounds black and then you discover that he or she isn't, what does that say about your definition? I am black. I can only sound black. This is what black sounds like. My point is that if you're talking about somebody who is uneducated, illiterate, has bad syntax or can't speak standard American English, it has nothing to do with the color of his skin. People always talk about how racist this country is, but when you tell me I don't sound black, that's a racist statement.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Does radio—without face-to-face audience contact—foster a confessional atmosphere?

[A] Quivers: Absolutely. It makes it much more intimate—not like talking with a shrink but rather with a friend, a buddy, a pal. I don't even know you're there. I'm always shocked when people say things to me on the street that somebody said on the show. Before I had my breast-reduction surgery, I was getting out of a cab and the driver said, "When's your operation again?" I thought, I don't know you. What are you doing talking to me about something like that? People wanted to call in and vote on whether I should have the surgery, and I said, "My body is not a democracy. This is not up for a vote."

16.

[Q] Playboy: We acknowledge a debt to the Howard Stern Show when we ask, "What is your cup size?"

[A] Quivers: I'm a D. Used to be a double D, somewhere in there. I never actually bought the E bra I needed. My (concluded on page 193)Robin Quivers(continued from page 146) breasts are lovely now. I think my doctor is an artist.

17.

[Q] Playboy: You've said you would marry a man who is like a cat. Are you attracted to Siamese, Persian or tabby?

[A] Quivers: It has nothing to do with the breed of cat. It's the cat's attitude. Cats are independent, self-sufficient and very cool. Low-maintenance. When I walk into the house, my cats aren't chomping at the bit because they missed me. They tell me when they want affection, and when they don't they let me know. It doesn't mean they're angry or that they don't love me. When I don't want to be bothered with them, I can do the same thing and they don't hold a grudge. I have two oriental shorthairs and a Heinz 57 garden variety, and I have one who is mostly Maine coon. He's a huge cat. He is my first cat and the one who made me fall in love with cats. He is the kind who goes, "It's all right for me to just be in the same room with you. I don't have to be lying on you. I don't have to be licking you. You don't have to acknowledge my presence. But I'm here for you if you need me." Every once in a while, he'll walk up and say, "I want a rub now."

18.

[Q] Playboy: Howard recently said on the air that your love life resembles a Vulcan's—sex once every seven years. Your response was: "Because of listening to you guys, I haven't had sex in a long time." Do you maintain a no-date policy among co-workers and guests?

[A] Quivers: If you're looking among this group, you can find a number of reasons not to bother. I'll date guys if I like them. I don't care where they come from. I told Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band that I don't date guests because I was trying to get out of dating him and I wanted to be nice.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really want to thank Oprah Winfrey for teaching you how to treat yourself well?

[A] Quivers: I'm sure that Oprah has many things to teach. She was one of the first people I've heard talk about doing good things for yourself. She mentioned bubble baths by candlelight, and I thought, Why didn't I think of that? That became a nightly routine. I would end my evening with candlelight and a bubble bath, listening to beautiful music. That was my time of the day, and it was very healing, refreshing, restorative. I do get into the more expensive luxuries, too. Diamonds are awfully fun. I don't think guys understand. I don't understand everything about men, so why should they have to understand everything about women? I hate when men give women practical gifts. You don't want to give a woman a vacuum cleaner and tell her it's a present.

20.

[Q] Playboy: Is dead air the worst nightmare of any broadcaster?

[A] Quivers: There's plenty of dead air. Kato Kaelin was hired by our Los Angeles station to do an air shift. Howard and I talked with him, and at one point we were just sitting there thinking, and Kato started to talk. I said, "It's all right, Kato. Don't go by the rule that there's no such thing as good dead air." Too many stupid things are said because everybody is trying to avoid dead air.

the woman who shares the mike with howard stern sounds off on her breast reduction, her boss' butt and why good ventilation is so important

I get into expensive luxuries, too. Diamonds are fun. I hate when men give women practical gifts.