Everyone who has ever known Michael Weiner seems to agree that he has always been a big talker. One of his classmates from Jamaica High School in Queens, which Weiner graduated from in 1959, recalls him as a garrulous character: "He was on the short side, and he was intense -- a fast talker, and always hatching some scheme or other." "The fellow I knew was a natural comic and as reliable as a clock," remembers another classmate, who says the teenage Weiner was "non-political." His yearbook page notes his participation in the Chemistry Lab Squad, school government, and the Rifle Squad, presaging his interest in science, politics and firearms.
Weiner was also something of a dreamer, and he hoped to follow in the footsteps of his hero, the naturalist Charles Darwin. After getting a biology degree from Queens College, he went as far west -- and as far from home -- as possible, winding up in Oahu, Hawaii, where he earned master's degrees in anthropology and botany from the University of Hawaii. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, he traveled to Tonga, Fiji and other South Pacific island nations to study traditional herbal medicine. His new wife, Janet, and their young son, Russell Goldencloud, often accompanied him on his travels. Local healers warmly welcomed him, and he became passionately convinced that their expertise could be used to cure modern ailments. Thus began a quest to salvage-- not savage-- this "ethnic wisdom" before Western influences destroyed it. His research on the sedative kava kava and other Fijian medicinal plants served as the basis for his doctoral work at U.C. Berkeley. His 1978 dissertation, on file in the U.C. Berkeley library, shows his degree was in nutritional ethnomedicine. However, the bio in the back of Savage's book and on his Web site says it was in epidemiology and nutrition science.
In 1974, Weiner moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. His family first settled in Fairfax, a sleepy town in Marin County that Michael Savage would lambaste three decades later as "un-Fairfax," hometown of "Taliban Rat Boy" John Walker Lindh. From there, he started making trips into San Francisco to hang around the North Beach literary scene. According to Stephen Schwartz, who was then a left-wing activist and writer, Weiner carried an unusual letter of introduction. "He had met Allen Ginsberg in Fiji," he recalls. "He had this photograph of himself swimming naked with Ginsberg." Poet and biographer Neeli Cherkovski says Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of City Lights Bookstore, introduced him to Savage in 1976. "All I knew was that he was this hip guy who'd been traveling in the South Seas, finding ways to use tropical plants to help end diseases," he recalls. The two became friends. "We had a lot of fun times. He's very smart, intelligent and very lively," says Cherkovski, who is now writer-in-residence at San Francisco's New College. Weiner told Cherkovski that he dreamed of becoming a stand-up comic in the mold of Lenny Bruce and they talked of doing a comedy routine together.
But he didn't make the big splash he had hoped for. Schwartz says Weiner's increasingly bizarre behavior eventually alienated him from the North Beach crowd. "After he had been there a while, his personality began to change. He became much more aggressive. He would collar you and demand that you eat with him, listen to him," he says. According to Schwartz, Weiner openly carried a gun and made public scenes when he ran into his former friends and acquaintances. "He would come into Cafe Trieste and start yelling at me that I was a nobody and he was a somebody."
Today, Savage still has few kind words for his old lefty literary friends. In "The Savage Nation," he writes off City Lights as "that once-famous communist bookstore" and rips into an unnamed beat poet, calling him "latrine slime." "Now he just screams at us in the streets," sighs Ferlinghetti, who once went to Hawaii with Weiner and his family. He views Weiner's reincarnation as Michael Savage as "total opportunism," the crowning achievement of someone who was "always looking to make a fast buck" and "always trying to think up new schemes to get famous."
Weiner did have a knack for combining the promise of herbal medicine with good old-fashioned hucksterism. From his home, he started vanity projects such as the Fund for Ethnic Medicine and the Alzheimer's Research Institute, which he plugged on his book jackets and in letters to the New York Times. He concocted feel-good beverages like Tea of Life and Herbal-Seltzer and sold a line of herbal supplements from a Web site called Herbs That Heal. Visitors to the now-defunct site were welcomed with photographs of Weiner collecting herbs in the South Pacific, soulfully soaking in the culture of what Michael Savage belittles as the "turd world." The 1992 edition of "The Herbal Bible," published by his wife's imprint, Quantum Books, modestly noted that its author was "credited with starting the herbal revolution."
He was also a prolific writer, churning out 18 titles in 20 years. "[D]on't assume for a minute that they were junk books and marginally published," he snaps in "The Savage Nation." "They weren't. They were top of the line. They were the Rolls-Royce of the field." "Earth Medicine -- Earth Foods" and "Weiner's Herbal" are well-respected references and are still cited widely on herbal and homeopathic Web sites. Most of his books, with their glorified lists of plants and their properties, are about as dry as a handful of powdered dogwood root (which, according to Weiner, makes a good tonic for treating fevers). But buried in the details is a sprinkling of flaky affirmations and kooky assertions.
For example, in "Plant a Tree: a Guide to Regreening America," Weiner wrote dreamily about our "plant allies" and suggested that every state appoint its own "tree czar." "Dictators seem to like trees," he ruminated. "Who knows what a benevolent, nature-loving tyrant might do for the retreeing of America?" In "The Way of the Skeptical Nutritionist," he ventured that a person's ideal diet should be determined by his or her ethnicity. "Getting Off Cocaine: 30 Days to Freedom" promised blow addicts "an alternative plan for getting 'high' -- legally and naturally!" The treatment involved ingesting a daily cocktail of Sudafed, vitamins C and E, and amino acids, as well as self-administering the occasional coffee enema. "Use a good quality coffee," Weiner advised. "Not decaffeinated or instant."
Next page: "Inner voice screaming at me ... first rational, then crazy"