The Wendy Williams Experience

by Wendy Williams

  And she was no wallflower either. Miss Wallace brought the heat. She not only talked about her age and how she hadn’t had sex in years, but she also talked candidly about her son, Biggie, and his relationships with different women. The conversation led to Lil’ Kim. And that’s when it got interesting. There had been allegations made that Biggie was abusive to Kim during their relationship and that he even pointed a gun at her. Miss Wallace said, “If my son held a gun to her head, he should have pulled the trigger and blown her brains out!”

  Whoa. She dropped that like a bomb and when the smoke cleared the entire studio was quiet. Hell, I imagined everyone in listening distance froze wherever they were with their mouths wide open. I mean, it was so quiet that you could hear a strand of hair from a weave hit the ground. And what was so crazy was that Miss Wallace meant every word. She was angry and she was dead serious. She was the Notorious M.O.M. That turned into one of my most memorable moments and it wasn’t with a rapper or a singer or a movie star. It was with a sophisticated woman— a mother.

  Another great radio moment was had with model Tyson Beckford. It was in 1999 while I was still in Philadelphia. I met Tyson for the first time in 1993 outside Club Bentley in New York. It was a hot summer night and he was with some of his boys. People knew Tyson Beckford back then but he wasn’t a supermodel yet. He was just a model. I was better known in New York. We exchanged greetings then and it was all very pleasant.

  I had never talked about Tyson on the air at this point. Oftentimes I find that if I’ve never talked about a celebrity but they know about my reputation, it is pretty easy to meet them. If I haven’t talked about them, then there’s no dirt on them. Or you can look at it that perhaps if I haven’t talked about them that they need to heat it up a little. Because my radio show, for good or for bad, is reflective of what the people are talking about. And if you’re a celebrity and I’m not talking about you, then you aren’t at the top of your game.

  Tyson certainly stepped up his game. Through the years, I got to learn more about him and he became fodder for the Experience. We would talk about Tyson and his bikes—he was into motorcycles. Tyson and his lady friends. Tyson and his guy buddies. We started teasing him on the radio. Tyson is a New Yorker and it’s a small island and a lot of your business gets out. And then we started talking about Tyson and New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter.

  The first time I got to interview Tyson on the radio was when I was in Philadelphia doing the morning show. He was scheduled to come on to talk about a major promotional event he was doing in town for Polo Ralph Lauren in conjunction with my station.

  He got into Philly and apparently upon turning on the radio realized, “Uh-oh, Wendy is a part of this show!” See, the morning show in Philly was called the Dream Team Morning Show. My name wasn’t in the title and Tyson had no idea I was there. When he got into the Philly area and heard it was going to be me who would be interviewing him, there must have been a panic in his camp. But it was too late to back out of the promotion because Polo and my radio station had sunk a lot of money into it. So his people called up my general manager at home and said, “Look, if she says anything out of order, he’s leaving and not doing the promotion! Polo will never work with you again!”

  Oh, it was a big stink. My general manager called my program director, who called me in the studio with a very stern voice and a very firm delivery talking about “You better not blow this for us!” He told me that I couldn’t ask him questions centered on his relationships, his sexuality, his sexuality, and his sexuality. Well, I do have other lines of questioning, everybody!

  So when he walked into the studio, he plopped down into the swivel chair and he swiveled around with his back to me, facing my two cohosts. My two partners knew what was going on and they found it to be the most comical thing, so they were ripping him. So he swivels away from them, too, and faces the wall during the entire interview. He conducts the interview facing the wall with sunglasses on. The whole interview became about Tyson and his anger toward me. It was very funny.

  I ended up asking him about who he was dating and about his sexuality. I didn’t ask in a way that would get me in trouble, though. I said, “Tyson, I already got the memo and I can’t ask you about your sexuality and I can’t ask you about your relationships. Why is that, Tyson?” So I am asking him within not asking him. He was very curt, very cold. He gave me one-word answers and grunts. I still laugh about that interview.

  The next time I got to talk to him was on the red carpet at the VH1 Fashion Awards in 2003. I was there filming a segment of my show, Wendy Williams Is on Fire, for VH1. I’m among the throng of media and paparazzi and I call out to Tyson as he walks by. He sees it’s me and instead of walking on—the way many celebrities who see me do—he stops and creates the following scene.

  Since our last interview in Philly, I had made it back to New York on the radio, and every so often Tyson Beckford would be a topic of conversation on the Experience. The rumors were heating up with Tyson and Derek Jeter, and one major rumor had it that Tyson had a tattoo somewhere on his personage of a Yankees symbol with Jeter’s number on it and the initials DJ under that.

  The rumor apparently got back to Tyson, who, upon seeing me on the red carpet, started to disrobe right there. He took off his shirt while the paparazzi around us were looking like “Ooh, what is Tyson doing?!” No one knew what was going on, but they were loving it. We became the center of attention on the red carpet. Tyson made quite a spectacle as he pulled off his shirt and started gesticulating and carrying on. He turned around to show me his back. He turned and showed me his pecs and his arms. He turned his wrists inside out to show me that there was nothing there either. “See, nothing!” he said. “No ‘DJ,’ so stop it! Tyson Beckford is not gay, so stop it!”

  It was moment of high drama. And it made for a great experience. I loved Tyson for that moment.

  Most of the celebrities who I interview are amazingly candid and open. I believe they recognize the unique opportunity of coming on the Experience. A lot of people ask me why people don’t just walk out when things get too hectic. Walking out is the absolute worst thing a celebrity can do. And in my almost twenty years doing radio I have only had one person actually walk out on me—Flava Flav from Public Enemy.

  I was in Philly—where I actually had some of my wildest interviews. Oftentimes when a celebrity such as a rapper leaves New York to do media, they expect kid-glove treatment. They feel that perhaps other jocks in smaller markets aren’t going to ask them the tough questions and that they can truly go on and promote whatever it is they want to promote.

  But I brought my style with me to Philly. The easy interview time they thought they were going to have changed dramatically when they found out that I was part of that morning team on Power 99. “Oh, damn, I thought we got rid of her when she fell off the face of the earth after leaving New York,” they would think. Wrong!

  The interview with Flava Flav was quite crazy. He was very defensive. I asked him about his substance abuse, something he had been very open about in the past but wasn’t in the mood to talk about on this day. Words were exchanged, and somewhere in there he called my mother a crackhead. I called him a bum and he ended up walking out of the studio. He went to the car in the parking lot, sulking. I didn’t realize at the time that he was so pissed that he had to leave. I thought he had simply gone to the bathroom or something. I thought he was coming back. They managed to get him back into the studio after the show was over. He was still mad. Even when we took our promotional picture he was arguing with someone off camera about the whole thing.

  But most people, even when they are feeling the heat, even if they want to leave, sit there and take it. They suffer through it and are better off for having done so. What I have learned through my years of interviewing and having people sweat through interviews—and almost everyone I interview, when it’s over, has moist or sweaty palms, even seasoned vets—is that celebrities are basically cowards. And many of them do
lots of the things that you hear me talk about on the radio.

  Why not just stay and play it out? Even if they lie their way through it—and some have—it’s better than making a scene or walking out. Staying and playing it out has proven to be your best weapon against The Wendy Williams Experience.

  I have often thought about why more people haven’t walked out or hung up on me, as I expected Whitney Houston to do long before she totally lost control of her senses. And I have concluded that they don’t because they are afraid that it will never end, that I will continue to dig up bones on them. And they are probably right.

  At the end of the day I do have the mic. And that mic is power.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Scandality

  Scandals, gossip, innuendos, rumors—we love it all! We love it because it takes us out of our own reality. It gives us an opportunity to look at somebody else’s problems and know that we are not alone. Hell, if a celebrity is going through so much shit, our lives cannot be so bad after all.

  There is another aspect to the world of scandal that we love too. Many of us love to hate. And we love to build people up to tear them down. We love to watch a celebrity take a fall. It reaffirms that even with all of their wealth and their fame and their success, they are just like us. They put their pants on the same way—one leg at a time.

  I was introduced to the world of scandal at quite an early age. I remember being in the sixth grade and shopping in the Family Pharmacy at the Middlebrook Shopping Plaza, a little strip mall near my Ocean Township home. I was probably getting some candy or some other goodie to eat and while at the checkout counter, my eye caught a National Enquirer with its salacious headlines. I’m not sure what that particular one was about, but I remember buying it and reading it cover to cover. I was hooked.

  I couldn’t wait for the weekends or the summers, because that’s when I could really get into the Enquirer and the Star. When I was growing up, most of the stories were about movie stars—stars of the big screen. There was always an item about Elizabeth Taylor and her relationships or her battles with drugs or something. There were stories about Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal, Diahann Carroll and Diana Ross, Natalie Wood, and even Jack La Lanne and Mike Douglas. And there was always something about one of the stars of Dallas. I loved reading every juicy morsel.

  I also got hooked on Divorce Court, the original Divorce Court. And while I was young, and while what they were talking about was way over my head, I loved hearing the tawdry details of who was cheating on whom and why they were breaking up. I graduated to reading Dear Abby in the newspapers, which is probably where my desire to give advice was awakened.

  So now, doing what I do in radio is about as natural as breathing. I didn’t inherit this lust for the lascivious. My mother didn’t buy the Enquirer or the Star, she wasn’t into gossip. Neither was my sister, Wanda. That was my very own thing that I developed. And today someone is paying me for it!

  Not a night goes by that I don’t watch E!, Access Hollywood, and Extra. I must know what’s going on. And I love working the red carpet. I want to know what the celebrities are wearing and what they are doing and who they are doing it with.

  And oddly enough, I have become a leader in the gossip industry, someone whom the others call on when something goes down. They actually want my take on a particular scandal.

  And for those who accuse me of creating this frenzy around gossip, I will tell them to look around—this thing has been going on long before Wendy Williams got ahold of it. That genie was let out of the bottle a while ago, and she’s not going back.

  Don’t get me wrong, though. As much as I love the scandals, there is a part of me—the very human part of me—that is saddened by our lust for it. We have become desensitized to everything, and we seem not to care about people and their feelings or the impact that this stuff will have on our kids. We want to know and we want to know more. And it goes beyond celebrities. We even want to know what our neighbors and everyday average citizens are up to. That’s why these reality shows have become so popular. It’s sick, really.

  The sickest things I have seen of late are images generated on these telephones that take pictures. I cannot tell you how many listeners want to show me a photo they took on the sneak from their telephone of someone doing something they shouldn’t be caught doing. Those camera phones are the most evil invention. I wish they would go the fuck away. It’s a great invasion of privacy.

  So is the E! Celebrities Uncensored show, which spies on celebrities. Yeah, I watch it. But I do so with both hands over my eyes and my fingers separated so that I can barely see through them. I think shows like that go too far.

  Am I a hypocrite for saying that? I guess you can call me a hypocrite. But I am still human and still a mother and understand the impact all of that has on society. Dammit! And damn us as a society for loving it so much. And damn me for sharing it and not being able to let it go.

  There was a time when I was just a regular deejay, spinning the hits. But before I knew it, I had gone from spinning hits to telling people’s business, and you people wanted to know more and more. It’s to a point now where if I can get one song in during the course of an hour, I’m doing well. This gossip thing has had a snowball effect. The more I talk, the more people want. And believe it or not, I hate the g-word. I hate being identified as a gossip. It’s ugly. I try to disguise it by saying we’re talking about pop culture. But we all know what it really is.

  I comfort myself by saying that gossip doesn’t ruin people anymore. So many of us have dark pasts and secrets that we cannot afford to point our finger at the next person and judge. Thank God, we live in a forgiving society. And black people are among the most forgiving. So in terms of ruining someone, there are so many ways to make a wrong right. We don’t have time to hold people’s feet to the fire for but so long. Before we know it, there is the next scandal to focus on.

  But there are a few scandals that I think we will be talking about for a while. The O. J. Simpson trial is something people still talk about, and it’s been more than ten years since that verdict.

  Did he murder his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman? What was that ride in the Bronco all about? And why didn’t the glove fit? They still refer to his trial as the “Trial of the Century.” Hell, it may be the trial of the millennium.

  In 2003, I met O. J. Simpson—who, by the way, was acquitted of the double murder in the criminal trial but found responsible for the deaths in a civil trial—for the very first time on my radio show. My station, WBLS, which happens to be a black-owned radio station, set it up. They basically sprang the interview on me without asking if I even wanted to interview him (which I didn’t).

  Sometimes people feel that because we’re all black, we all have to support one another. We all have to vote for the black man because he’s running for president. We all have to believe the black man is innocent of murder because America shows black men so much injustice. Well, I’ll tell you what, when they told me O. J. was at the station to be interviewed, I was upset. I was very upset. They never asked me if I wanted to sit face-to-face with someone who I believe is a murderer—someone who I believe got away with murder.

  He was in town doing some sort of media something. Cameras were following O. J. around wherever he went, as he mentioned on my show, to document exactly how people treat him. He contended that people still love him and that only the media twisted his acceptance around:

  Wendy Williams (WW): Interesting. So, um, when you travel and when you’re walking down the street and things like that, what type of reaction do you get from people?

  O. J. Simpson (OJ): The exact reaction may be a little more emotion—

  WW: Okay.

  OJ: —than I got fifteen years ago. If you took a walk with me down the street, you’d be amazed. I don’t care where I go, white, black, wherever I go. Everybody’s terrific; it’s only the media that dogs me.

  WW: I don’t—
>
  OJ: And that’s one of the reasons why we’re chronicling—

  WW: I don’t think so, O.J.

  OJ: What do you mean, you don’t think so? Hey, how many people [who] are in this room have been in various cities with me? You ask every one of them . . .

  (someone says something, claps)

  WW: Really?

  OJ: You know what really bothers me?

  WW: Okay.

  OJ: Uh-huh. They were saying one thing and whenever I was asked I’d say everywhere I go people are terrific, right.

  WW: Yeah?

  OJ: Well, what happened was Esquire magazine—

  WW: Uh-huh.

  OJ: —decided to find out the truth.

  WW: Okay.

  OJ: So, I didn’t know it, but for a month and a half they had a writer follow me.

  WW: Okay.

  OJ: And after a month they made themselves known to me.

  WW: Uh-huh.

  OJ: And they did a cover story, and what did the story say? No matter what anybody say, everywhere this guy goes, everybody, old ladies, young ladies—

  WW: Really?

  OJ: —white, black. Everybody’s terrific wherever I go. I have trouble buying a drink in a restaurant. Last night I couldn’t buy a drink when I got here at the hotel restaurant. People buy my dinner, they buy my lunch. And I mean, it’s nondenominational, white, black, blue, green, it’s whatever it is. It’s the media and only the media [that tells a different story].

  He even talked about having a good relationship with the parents of Nicole Brown. He talked about himself and the Browns attending the school sports games of O. J.’s kids, Sydney and Justin. He said he is well received at those games too.

  And I have to admit, he might be right. I found O. J. Simpson to be perfectly charming in person. He was actually very attractive to me. Yes, he charmed me. I still think O. J.’s a murderer, but he’s a damned charming murderer.