Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  Now El Rushbo steps in to frame the issue. “Snerdley! Do you realize the great thing this is for mankind? This story has lifelong application for all of us, guys, thanks to Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson. Just keep a copy of this story in your pocket . . . get out there and do whatever, and then when you’re called on it, say, ‘No, no, no, look, science says I’m still monogamous . . .’ ”

  Snerdley and Dawn exchanged looks. Rush has his unpredictable side and it wasn’t clear where he was taking this. Alarmingly, he was now reading another article about a Senate candidate in Idaho who had tried to change his name to “Pro-Life” because election authorities wouldn’t let him put his full name, Marvin Pro-Life Richardson, on the ballot. The phones were ringing. “Angela from Raleigh, North Carolina, Angela, thank you for waiting, you’re next, the EIB Network. Hello.”

  “Rush, monogamous dittos,” said Angela, using the standard jargon of Limbaugh fans to voice their agreement with what has already been said on the show before their call.

  “Thank you,” Limbaugh replied courteously. “Socially monogamous dittos, yes.”

  “Socially?”

  “Well, that’s what the story was, if I go out and cat around and get home in time to put the kids in bed, it’s social monogamy.”

  Angela didn’t think it was funny. “The reason I called, I talked to your screener and I told him that my belief is that the family is the fabric of this nation, it’s what makes us great, and because it’s what fuels everything that we do . . . And I just feel like this is—these attacks on the family, I wonder if these people know what they’re doing.”

  Limbaugh, faced with a humorless caller, headed for indignation. “Hell, yes, they know what they’re doing. Look, Angela, this is serious stuff. There are a lot of people in this country who want to do away with traditions and standards like you have discussed here . . . they want no standards, and in order to have no standards where they can live guilt free by doing what they want, they have to wipe them out for everybody, and they have to attack them . . . I did not mean to have my flippant attitude indicate to you that my devotion to such traditions and standards has wavered in any way, shape, manner, or form. I am Rush—Protector of Motherhood, Supporter of Fatherhood, Defender of Children—other people’s.”

  That “other people’s” caused Snerdley and Dawn to exchange another look. This is the sort of W. C. Fieldsian aside that Rush sometimes can’t resist. He gets away with it largely because of the demographic of his audience. The vast majority of Dittoheads are men—72 percent according to a Pew Survey in 2008. This is much higher than any other non-sports talk show on radio or television .9 This gender gap is the mirror opposite of the Oprah Winfrey Show, whose audience is 72 percent female and 28 percent male.10 There are obvious differences between Rush and Oprah, but also some striking similarities. They are both innovators who have built and kept vast audiences who idolize them. Rush and Oprah are cultural and political figures as well as entertainers, courted and embraced by candidates and presidents. And both use their personal stories and travails to forge emotional bonds with their listeners. Oprah often discusses her troubled teenage years and her battles with weight. Rush happily recounts (and usually overstates) the number of times he was fired, alludes sometimes to his marital failures, jokes about his cigarette habit, and talks about his own struggles with weight.

  Oprah is a touchstone for women who see her as a wise and empathetic counselor. Limbaugh dispenses a fair amount of advice, too, usually on how to achieve success in a capitalist society and on the value of passion in choosing a profession. On more emotional questions, he lacks Oprah’s gentle touch. One of my all-time-favorite caller exchanges was with a guy named Jerry from Ohio, who wanted to know about matrimony. “I know nothing is perfect, but I go, ‘Damn, if Rush has trouble making marriages work, I think I would have even more trouble because of your situation and everything.’ What do you think about that?”

  Limbaugh told Jerry never to compare himself to others, least of all to him. “We had a woman call and say, ‘Don’t ever get married. Your work is too important to be distracted from,’ and I think there are some of us to whom that applies. I don’t know what you do, Jer, but I’m out there saving America and so forth, and that’s a full-time job . . .”

  On my first night back in Palm Beach, we went to Trevini, one of Rush’s favorite Palm Beach restaurants, Limbaugh at the wheel and his girlfriend, Kathryn Rogers, riding shotgun. Rush had described her as cool, and she was. He met her when she was working for golfer Gary Player, and a courtship ensued. Now she was with the NFL as an events coordinator for the Super Bowl. Her father, she told me, was a naval officer who had been John McCain’s classmate in Annapolis. Her mother was a diplomat. Her sister went to prep school in Hawaii with Barry Obama, and she had spent part of her childhood in Guinea Bissau, a place that is not for wimps. Limbaugh, for whom the world sounds like a slightly muffled AM radio, has never heard her actual voice.

  Limbaugh can’t hear, but he can still do impersonations of voices he knew before he went deaf. I asked him how he pulled this off, and he touched his throat. “I know how the muscles are supposed to feel when I do the voices.”

  As we drove, music played on the car stereo. “If I put on oldies, I know how they are supposed to sound, and I hear them in my mind,” he said. “The last song I actually heard was probably a Luther Vandross tune.”

  Trevini is located on the second floor of a high-end shopping center. We climbed the stairs, Kathryn in the lead, and Rush said, “This is how I like the feminist movement. From behind.” It is a joke Limbaugh has been using since the early ’90s. It surprised me. This was the first time he had slipped into his El Rushbo character.

  If Kathryn heard the remark she didn’t acknowledge it. I imagined that being Rush Limbaugh’s girlfriend must present some unique challenges, starting with the fact the a great percentage of American women—especially women of Rogers’s class and generation (she was thirty when we met)—consider him the worst sort of male chauvinist. Then there was the fact that Limbaugh, as he told caller Jerry, did not want to get married for a fourth time.

  Rush occasionally jokes that the only people who ever hated him were his first three wives. But this isn’t really true. He parted amicably from Roxie and Michelle, and both are fondly remembered by the Limbaugh inner circle. “They didn’t marry Rush for his money, because he didn’t have any,” a close friend told me. “They left him because he basically didn’t pay any attention to them. Anyone would have left him. It wasn’t their fault and nobody thought it was.”

  The third Mrs. Limbaugh is a different matter. He met “the lovely and gracious Marta” Fitzgerald when she was still an aerobics instructor who was married to another man. She initiated the relationship by sending him a message on CompuServe. They were married by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1994, but the union ended after ten years, and when it did, Limbaugh’s family was neither surprised nor upset. “She kept him away from Cape and she was very cold to the family,” one of his intimates told me. In the last years of their marriage, Rush and Marta lived in separate houses on the estate, but Rush didn’t let on that there was trouble in paradise. His audience was taken by surprise when he told them about it. “Marta has consented to my request for a divorce, and we have mutually agreed to seek an amicable separation,” he said, and for once didn’t elaborate. The terms of the divorce are sealed and secret, and he does not mention her. After his divorce he dated Daryn Kagan, then a CNN reporter and anchorwoman (“info-babe” in Rushian).

  Trevini was packed when we arrived, but the maître d’ jumped as though he had been electrified and ushered us with great ceremony to a corner table. The decibel level in the restaurant was loud enough to discomfort Limbaugh; in conversation he sometimes cupped his hand to his ear, or asked for a repeat of a word or a sentence. All throughout dinner people approached our table, mostly prosperous-looking men of a certain age. “God bless you,” they said, or “Keep
up the fight.” Rush smiled and thanked them in a polite, good-natured way. One elderly fellow in a blue blazer and gray slacks delivered a long spiel about his own good works on behalf of conservative causes. Limbaugh nodded through the recitation, but when the man left he confided that he hadn’t understood a word.

  Meanwhile, waiters buzzed around him. They seemed to anticipate Limbaugh’s every wish, refreshing our drinks, serving unasked-for delicacies, periodically checking to make sure that everything was exactly to Mister Limbaugh’s satisfaction. I had been in restaurants with celebrities before, but this was a level of attention I hadn’t seen.

  Limbaugh turned the conversation to my impression of his home and lifestyle. That afternoon in the library he had told me about his stillunpublicized contract, and I wondered aloud what a single man with no children could possibly do with all that money and a house the size of his. He had frowned; it sounded to him like a hostile question, a Democrat question, and he wanted to clarify the issue.

  “When you saw my house today, you probably noticed that it isn’t filled with pictures of me and famous people. That’s not me. I don’t have a home that says, ‘Look who I know!’ ”

  “No, you have a home that says, ‘Look what I have.’ ”

  “Why would you say that?” He sounded genuinely surprised, possibly even hurt.

  “It might have something to do with that acre of mahogany you mentioned earlier.”

  “My home is a place I feel comfortable in, a place for entertaining my friends and family,” he said.

  “Mine, too,” I said, or maybe I just thought it. As far as I was concerned, Limbaugh made his money fair and square, and he was entitled to live the way he liked. Maybe if I made thirty million dollars a year I’d live in an even bigger house.

  Rush insisted on explaining to me that in his early years as a disc jockey, he had been poor and lived in lousy houses with noisy air-conditioners and cheap furniture, and that he simply wanted a nice place to live. He had invested not only money but effort and thought to make this a dream house where things would be comfortable and tasteful, and even the vents were quiet and unobtrusive. Later, as I was writing the profile, several of Rush’s friends called me to explain once more that Limbaugh’s house was not built to show off. One of them, David Rosow, told me: “He loves being able to spend his money on the way he wants to live. His home is his perception of what it means to be from Cape Girardeau and hit it big. Deep down he feels his plane is a symbol of hitting it big. But compared with others in Palm Beach, he isn’t ostentatious. All he uses in the house when he is alone is his library, his home theater, and his dining room. The rest is for friends.”

  Many of the articles written about Limbaugh over the years have portrayed him as a solitary figure, lonely and reclusive. Newt Gingrich, with whom Rush has had a long and checkered relationship, once suggested to a Hollywood director that Rush would make a good subject for a biopic as a modern-day Citizen Kane. But I can’t say I got the impression that Limbaugh is reclusive, especially given his hearing impairment. He holds a reunion for his extended family every Thanksgiving and spends Christmases in Cape with his brother. In April 2009, Julie Limbaugh, one of Rush’s many second cousins, wrote an article on Salon.com about spending holidays with her famous relative. A graduate of Columbia University, she has endured a lifetime of being quizzed about Limbaugh. “What’s he like? Do you know him? Is he an asshole?”

  Julie Limbaugh painted a picture of a larger-than-life relative, a cousin who flies into town on Christmas Eve with a glamorous date, brings the family down to a plush Palm Beach resort for Thanksgiving, and hands out room keys that double as credit cards:He’s fairly loud, but all the Limbaughs are. He’s that one over there with the cousins singing rowdy Christmas carols around the piano . . . He’s the guy who puts March of the Penguins on his home movie theater screen for the little cousins to watch and makes sure his candy bowls are filled with jelly beans and doesn’t swear when my nephew tries to throw his antiques down the stairs. He’s the guy who came from nothing to something and knows what it feels like to miss Missouri.

  Julie recounted a Thanksgiving when the family gathered at the dining table, under the Plaza chandelier, and Rush apologized to everyone for making it tough for everyone to be a Limbaugh. She appreciated the sentiment. As a teacher in what she describes as a “liberal high school,” she lamented the amount of hazing, taunting, and outright hostility she encounters when people hear her last name. The article made it clear that she very much disagrees with many of Rush’s political views, and she also took a swipe at another of the Thanksgiving guests, Ann Coulter, but by and large it was an affectionate portrait. “He’s cousin Rusty and he’s okay,” she wrote. It says a lot about Limbaugh’s sense of privacy and his expectation of clan solidarity that he saw the article as a betrayal.

  In addition to his family gatherings, Limbaugh maintains a very active social calendar. Each year he hosts a Super Bowl party for close friends and another celebration on the last day of the Masters Tournament, featuring a “sports bar” menu and very good wine. He spends a week every summer with the Rosows, takes an annual week-long golf safari to Hawaii with George Brett and a group of old friends, and belongs to several country clubs, including, recently, one in Cape.

  While I was visiting Palm Beach in March, Limbaugh was busy planning his Spring Fling, a weekend he hosts every year in April. The guest list included Joel Surnow, the producer of the hit TV show 24 and one of the leading conservatives in Hollywood; Stan Shuster, owner of the Grand Havana cigar clubs in New York and L.A.; political consultant Mary Matalin; Roger Ailes; Don Ohlmeyer, the former producer of Monday Night Football and president of NBC, West Coast; ex-Monday Night Football play-by-play announcer Al Michaels; and a group of friends from Palm Beach. Naturally I asked if I could attend; the answer, unsurprisingly, was no. “I have a saying to all my guests here at my home,” he wrote. “What happens here, and what is said here, stays here. They all come with that confidence assured. Our problem, my brother, is that me and my friends are into PRIVACY. Not to avoid media, but on general principles.”

  “ ‘ Flamboyant’ describes him,” Rosow says. “He’s a big man and he does everything to excess. When he’s on a roll, he rolls and rolls and rolls.”

  “Rush lives the way Jackie Gleason would have lived if Gleason had the money,” says Roger Ailes. “Some people are irritated by it because they don’t have the balls to live that way.”

  Dinner at Trevini was winding down, and I called for the check. It tickled Limbaugh to be taken out to eat on the New York Times. A few weeks later he sent me a copy of an interview, in New York magazine, with a waiter at the Kobe Club in New York named Jeremy Sullivan. A fellow Missourian, Sullivan told a reporter that Limbaugh was the biggest tipper in New York. “Several times he’s left $5,000,” he said. When I read this, I felt a stab of guilt toward the hyperattentive staff at the restaurant. If I had only known, I would have let Rush leave the tip.

  CHAPTER TEN

  INTELLECTUAL ENGINE

  Shortly after arriving in New York to start his national show in 1988, Rush told Hilary Abramson of the Sacramento Bee, “The thing that drives me is that I have no college degree. My friends stayed [in college when I dropped out] and got their degrees and didn’t have to demonstrate they were intelligent. I realized I had to demonstrate it. I became consumed by newspapers. If I stop reading newspapers, I’m in trouble in this business.”

  Whatever feelings of inferiority Limbaugh may have had disappeared as he became better acquainted with the work of his fellow commentators. By the time we first met in Florida, in the winter of 2008, his self-confidence was at a peak. William Buckley was gravely ill (he died just a few days after our meeting), and while Limbaugh appreciated some conservative thinkers—including Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Charles Krauthammer, and economist Thomas Sowell—he now clearly saw himself as the thought leader of the movement. “I take the responsibility that comes with my show v
ery seriously,” he told me. “I want to persuade people with ideas. I don’t walk around thinking about my power. But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement.”

  Jay Nordlinger is a senior editor at National Review. For many years he was in charge of hiring at the magazine, and he noticed something interesting. “We’d get really bright kids, graduates of elite schools, young people with really fancy educations. I always asked, ‘How did you become a conservative?’ Many of them said, ‘Listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ And often they would add, ‘Behind my parents’ back.’” In the overwhelmingly liberal environment of elite American campuses, Limbaugh provides young skeptics with the vocabulary for talking back to their professors. He belongs to a fraternity of self-educated American iconoclasts such as Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, Lenny Bruce, and Eric Hoffer, subversives who challenged the certified pieties and academic orthodoxies of the day.

  Like most commentators (I very much include myself), Limbaugh is not an original thinker. He belongs to a profession that toils somewhere between Plato’s cave and Santa’s workshop, hammering perceived Truths into interesting new shapes, wrapping them in shiny paper, and delivering them to the public. He calls himself an “instrument of mass instruction,” holder of the “prestigious Attila the Hun Chair” at the (entirely fictitious) Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Despite the whimsy, he takes his role as an educator seriously. Often he turns his programs into seminars on policy issues such as cap and trade, health care reform, or budgetary restraint, or goes on about American history. Once I spent a bemused half hour in his studio as he debated the nuances of ethanol subsidies and their effects on the agricultural economy with an expert from Iowa. Not even National Public Radio subjects its audience to this kind of wonkery. No other commercial talk-show host would even attempt it. Who would have predicted that Rusty Limbaugh, who saw school as a prison, would grow up and figure out how to make it fun?