Contents
INTRODUCTION The Experience
CHAPTER 1Scandality
CHAPTER 2One Bad Dude
CHAPTER 3What Happened to Hip-Hop?
CHAPTER 4The Elvis Factor
CHAPTER 5Negroidian
CHAPTER 6Puff, Puff, Pass
CHAPTER 7A Wendy Williams Exclusive Wardell Fenderson, the Driver
CHAPTER 8BMs (Baby's Mamas)
CHAPTER 9Misa Hylton-Brim, the Mother of Justin
CHAPTER 10The Dirty Backpack Clique
CHAPTER 11Boob Jobs, Liposuction, and Rhinoplasty
CHAPTER 12How You Doin'?
CHAPTER 13Whitney Houston
CHAPTER 14Advice Hour
CHAPTER 15Ask Wendy
About the Authors
DUTTON
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First electronic edition October 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Wendy, Inc.
All rights reserved
Williams, Wendy.
The Wendy Williams experience / by Wendy Williams, with Karen Hunter.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-1012-1046-8
Set in Esprit Book
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ALSO BY WENDY WILLIAMS
Wendy’s Got the Heat
I dedicate this book to my husband and son, who give me the courage to get on the radio every day with fire on my tongue and no fear in my heart. I also dedicate this book to my mother and father, who have always encouraged my freedom of expression.
And lastly, but certainly not least, I dedicate this book to my fans—through love and hate, laughter and tears, I love you for listening!
INTRODUCTION
The Experience
The Wendy Williams Experience. That is the name of my nationally syndicated radio show. But the Experience is almost twenty years of growth and insight. It is a reflection of where we have come from as a society and a reflection, in many ways, of where we are going. I started in radio at a crucial time in our history. America was going through the Reagan years of the 1980s, heading into a very selfish, me-first period. The thing that was called rap was evolving into a hip-hop movement. The thing called cocaine had moved into the darker period of crack and was infecting our neighborhoods throughout the country.
What was once fun and games was becoming very serious— in music and in life. And my career has chronicled this period. And as I have grown up, my radio show has become one of the history makers of our times. Some will say that perhaps I reflect the worst of what we human beings have to offer. I say, I reflect exactly what is out there in its natural state. If you don’t like it, look in the mirror.
The Experience has evolved itself over the last decade into a brand of entertainment that I must say is totally for the people. Many tune in to my show and think it’s all about the gossip and all of that. But the show is, more than anything else, about you people and what you want to know about and what you have to say about the things going on. And as I comment on the things you want to know and want to hear, and relate these events to my own life, this show has become the experience.
Take, for example, my interview with Whitney Houston. Diane Sawyer had made history just a couple of weeks prior to my interview with Whitney. It was the second-highest-rated broadcast in entertainment history—behind Barbara Walters’s Monica Lewinsky interview. A huge buzz followed Diane Sawyer’s sit-down with Whitney. There was so much fodder for conversation that by the time I interviewed Whitney—who will be covered in great detail in a chapter in this book—people were still talking about it.
Diane Sawyer asked all of the right questions. In fact, for me that interview solidified Diane Sawyer’s place as the number-one interviewer in the game. But . . . Diane Sawyer couldn’t duplicate what I did with Whitney on the Experience. My interview with Whitney Houston was more than a one-on-one—it was a culmination of years of discussion on my show about her with the people. It was answers to the questions many of you had. And it was an insider’s look into what was really the deal with Whitney. See, Whitney, for those listening to the Experience, is family. Her appearance on my show was like a homecoming long overdue.
While she was trying to keep it together in front of Diane Sawyer, on the Experience Whitney Houston could—and did—let her hair down. She could be herself. She was raw and got down and dirty—as you will see in the transcript of that interview. And it was the best radio I had ever done. That interview was a prime example of what the Experience is all about. It’s real. It’s raw. It’s about and for the people. And more than anything, it’s not predictable. I love doing my show because it’s as much a surprise for me most days as it is for you all.
And while I may go down in history as delivering the most interesting interview with one of our icons—Whitney Houston— my entire career has been built on such moments. I have become known for my celebrity interviews. People enjoy the kinds of questions I ask, they enjoy the kinds of answers I often provoke celebrities to give.
I don’t do interviews based on a celebrity bio. People come into the studio with their publicist, a bio, and a list of questions I should ask. Pu-lease! That all goes in the garbage. I hate that. The last thing I get around to talking about when I do an interview is a celebrity’s actual product of the moment. Boring! It might be that a person is coming out with a movie or a new CD. But we won’t talk about that. I will mention it in the beginning and I will mention it in the end, but everything that goes on in the middle is about their personal lives.
I like to find out about people for the first time while the mics are open. If I have never met them before, I will learn about them when everyone else does. I don’t want anything to taint the purity of the interview. During commercial breaks I won’t even sit in the studio with my guest because I don’t want to be tempted to have any conversation with them that might be interesting and then have to try and re-create that moment on the air. So in order not to waste one drop of entertainment, I will s
end my guest into the other room with their publicist or whoever they came to the studio with. And I will bring them back when the break is over. That formula has worked well for me over the years.
There are many celebrities, including rappers, and other entertainers who avoid my show like the plague. And there are others who are forbidden—by their handlers—from coming on my show. Babs from Da Band, which was featured on MTV’s Making the Band, wanted to come up to the show to get some things off her chest. When her label, Bad Boy, found out, however, they put the clamps down and forbade her to come. That happens a lot. (She has since come on the show.)
But those with the courage to come on the show soon realize it’s probably the best thing they could have done for themselves and their career. It’s not coming on the Experience that can be detrimental to a career, because not only do we go on talking about those people anyway, but they never get to clear the air about such things as might be said about them.
Even those who I have had a sticky relationship with find that, in the end, the ordeal is not that bad. Once you get in the studio with me, it’s a different story from what you might have expected.
I feel like I’m a very nice person (no, really!) and I try to be fair. I try to bring up as many things from the past that I’ve free-for-all talked about and I ask them if they’re true. I dissect them as many ways as I can think of. The Wendy Williams Experience is the place where celebrities should want to come to clear up gossip, rumors, and innuendos. They have the opportunity to put their story out there. It’s their chance to tell the people what the real deal is.
My show is almost a necessity if a celebrity expects to take it to the next level. Celebrities must share themselves with the public if they expect to stay on top. That’s just the way it is today. There are so many people out there with great talent. But what separates great talent from stardom is that surrounding excitement, that buzz. On the Experience I always use Deborah Cox as an example of someone who hasn’t figured this out. Deborah Cox has a nice body; she’s got a cute face; and she can really sing. So why isn’t she as big as Ashanti or Beyoncé? I’m going to tell you why: She doesn’t have a certain je ne sais quoi. She’s boring. There are no rumors swirling about her. She isn’t linked to anybody exciting. She’s just another talented woman who will never be a superstar.
The National Basketball Association’s Nets suffer from the same malady. Here is a basketball team that has beaten everyone in their conference and played for the NBA championship two years in a row. But despite their success, they couldn’t seem to get sellout crowds in the Meadowlands. Why? Boring! You don’t hear about any of those Nets out in the clubs, getting into trouble. You don’t hear about them getting into fights or getting stopped by the cops for a DUI. None of them are linked to a sexy celebrity. They are just there—boring! Who cares?
Celebrities who put themselves out there—whether on purpose or by mistake—can really get some mileage out of their career. Look at Paris Hilton. She and her sister Nicky Hilton were mildly interesting. It was cool that these two rich girls would be on the red carpet and all of that, but it wasn’t until Paris Hilton got caught out there with that sex tape that her career really took off. Because of the controversy, her television show, The Simple Life, became a hit. Now she is even talking about a music career, and that may fly, because people want to know Paris Hilton.
And there are those like Britney Spears who manufacture buzz. Her kiss with Madonna (another pro in manufacturing buzz) was front-page news and a top story in entertainment for days. Britney was shown in the tabloids smoking, was reported to be a teen drinker, and even admitted to having used drugs. And I believe all of that has helped keep her at the top of pop. Her last album wasn’t selling as well as the previous one, and what does she do? She gets a quickie marriage in Las Vegas. That marriage cost her more than half a million dollars in payoffs to the groom for an annulment, but how many more albums did she sell? Britney figured out that controversy sells. And it does.
So celebrities should be thanking me for keeping their names out there, because shows like mine help their careers.
I can’t remember when I first started doing celebrity interviews the way I do them now. I cannot remember when I first started asking questions off the beaten path. But I can say that my style developed once I realized that I wanted to ask the questions and get the information for the people, not the industry. When I realized why I wanted to do radio, everything changed.
I do radio for the people, for John and Jane Q. Public. As a result I am not part of the “in crowd” of entertainment. I do not get invitations to some of the fabulous events and great parties that other disc jockeys, who are a little more kissy-kissy in their manner of interview, get to enjoy. But it’s a sacrifice I gladly make.
Once I chose to be on the side of the people instead of on the side of the celebrity, I no longer had any boundaries in terms of the kinds of questions I could ask, because I was no longer worried about offending anybody. I wasn’t worried about not being invited to their wedding or getting backstage passes to their concerts. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I cared more about the people, my people, than about the celebrities.
LL Cool J was the very first celebrity I ever interviewed who is still a celebrity today. I was in college at Northeastern in Boston, and was a jock on my college station. We were actually one of the largest stations in the Boston area that played rap and R & B music. LL Cool J was just coming on the scene with “I Need a Beat,” and was making his rounds promoting his new album.
He was about seventeen and I was . . . well, whatever. And I remember giggling and blushing through the whole interview. I don’t even think I asked him one solid question; I was so caught up in his lip licking and his flirting. If he ever stopped flirting with me I would not have been ready to ask him any gripping questions, anyway. So the interview went much like this, “Ooh, LL, tell me about your new single,” I said. “Well, sweetheart . . .” he began as he licked those lips of his about a dozen times. And I was finished.
The next time I interviewed LL Cool J was around 1995. He had become one of the biggest rappers in the game and had already broken into television with In the House. He had also done his first starring role in a movie in Out of Sync. I was the “it” girl at 98.7 KISS FM and was number one in my time slot, doing the popular Top 8 at 8 Countdown.
This interview was quite different. I wasn’t falling for the flirtations. Somewhere along the way I realized that I wasn’t somebody LL Cool J was checking for, or looking at in that way. I wasn’t the “Around the Way Girl” he was rapping about. I was older and wasn’t buying it. “Don’t try to slay me with your lip licking,” I was saying to myself. “I can see through it! You like small girls, not girls like me.”
Let’s just say, it was quite a different interview. He was seasoned. I was seasoned. He came in guarded and I was throwing questions that went way beyond “What’s your next single off the album?”
Throughout the years, LL Cool J has been a topic of conversation on my show. Our talk about him prompted him to devote almost an entire chapter in his 1997 best-selling book, I Make My Own Rules, to discuss how I was such a negative influence and a terrible role model. To this day, if he sees me on the red carpet at a music award show, he will run in the opposite direction. And that’s fine. We’re not friends. But to me, he is still the GOAT— the greatest of all time—in rap music. That title, however, doesn’t exempt him from being talked about on the Experience.
I have had the pleasure of interviewing so many icons and divas, so many stars and fading stars. And I have learned never to predict what is going to happen in an interview, because you never know. Even the most seasoned vets of the game can be thrown off course by an off-the-beaten-path question. I have had many interviews that I thought would be complete duds that turned out to be very exciting.
Judge Greg Mathis, of the Judge Mathis show, came on the Experience in 2003 for what I thought would be a per
fectly boring interview about a man who pulled himself up from the streets and from a troubled past to become a judge and a role model. And it turned into a disgusting free-for-all where I was cussed out and yelled at. This judge completely lost his cool. I cannot give you any details about the question that I asked him that set him off. Unfortunately, after the interview Judge Mathis went back to Detroit and slapped a gag order on me, preventing me from ever talking about that interview or rebroadcasting it. But I can say this: It was one of my more memorable interviews that took a turn for the unexpected.
Voletta Wallace, the mother of the Notorious B.I.G, Christopher Wallace, was a guest on my show in the spring of 2003. She was coming on to promote “Big’s Night Out,” a charity event to raise money for the Christopher Wallace Foundation, which provides books and computers to schools primarily in the Brooklyn area where Biggie—who was shot to death in 1997— grew up.
I thought to myself, “This is going to be the most boring situation.” In my mind I wasn’t billing it as a full-fledged interview. Miss Wallace came to the show with R & B songstress Faith, who would normally get the Experience line of questioning—but because she was there as the dutiful daughter-in-law instead of as the First Lady of Bad Boy Records, I couldn’t go there with her either. I mean, she was there with Miss Wallace—mature, motherly Miss Wallace. I couldn’t ask those kinds of questions in front of her. Miss Wallace was bringing this dark cloud of maturity over the whole damn studio!
But I have to tell you, that woman just came in with her honesty, her smile, and her wisdomatic ways and changed everything I was feeling. She just lit up the room and ended up being one of my best interviews.
She was, surprisingly, a lot smaller in person. Her hair was done proper in an upsweep. Miss Wallace was not shiny. She was understated elegance. You could tell by the fabric that she was wearing good clothing, expensive clothing, but she wasn’t wearing labels and jewelry. Miss Wallace was no Janice Combs, if you know what I mean.
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