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Complete archives for People

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I asked a friend of mine who works in the field what "Methylglucose Transport" is all about. He said, "It's the standard, routine, crushingly dull thing done back in the days before DNA research. Physiology is the term used for lower-level biochemistry. However," he concluded, "it does not sound like an obvious portal into psychology, even of the broadcast variety."

Despite all this, and despite the fact that many consider Laura Schlessinger the dragon lady of talk radio, some of us can't help but admire her. She is snippish, overbearing and often insulting --- but anybody who has the temerity to call in to her program knows what they are going to get, especially if they plead ignorance or innocence.

Not only does Schlessinger stick it to all those tedious people who call up on the air, she does it, in spades, to those who pay for outside appearances. In 1997, she appeared before the League of Dallas at a benefit. It was a question-and-answer session. In response to what she thought was a dumb question, she said, "If you listened to my program, you'd know those are the kind of things I'm not even going to address: They are too frivolous."

Later, at another meeting, she said, "I'm glad to be in Dallas. You look so good. I expected to find a bunch of overweight people." Someone got up and says she wanted to know how to deal with being grandmother to "intermarried children." Laura snapped, "My grandmother's dead. I wouldn't say anything because my grandmother's dead."

The Dallas contingent paid Dr. Laura $30,000 to come and insult them. So be it. There are some fine people out there in the world of psychotherapy, those who have rare insights into families and the theories of family therapy, those who have spent years in the trenches --- people like Jay Haley, Cloe Madanes, Salvador Minuchin and Mara Selvini Palazzoli. Any organization fool enough to pay $30,000 for an appearance by a drive-time bug doctor instead of getting an honest professional for a tenth of the cost deserves, we do believe, what they get.

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Vickie Bane, the author of "Dr. Laura," writes for People magazine, and it shows. She's one of those writers direct from the breathless school of journalism, where a sentence, for some reason, is considered to be co-equal to a paragraph.

The book starts out with an interview with Schlessinger's mother, who Laura hasn't seen or called for 14 years. Bane puts it right up front. Now we know what kind of hypocrite she is, it seems to be telling us. But if Laura doesn't necessarily practice what she preaches --- who does? I've gone to psychotherapists who've had hideous family lives --- brothers and sisters not speaking to each other, parents murdering each other with hate, cheatin' husbands and wives. That didn't stop them from encouraging me to maintain good communication with a parent or with my siblings.

Bane quotes endless nosy speculations about Laura's psychological state-of-mind --- doubtful insights not from professionals, but from other on-the-air gab-fest shrinks. "My own observations were that Laura had experienced a great deal of childhood insecurity and need," intones Dr. Norman Kristy, who has his own on-the-air psychology pop show, "and that it had left her with a rather hard outer shell in which she was sardonic and humorous, and pretended to a degree of tough-minded strength that really did not go very deep."

Dr. Carole Lieberman, who writes a "celebrity psychoanalysis column," mutters darkly, "Dr. Laura has a lot of demons that are hidden, suppressed."

Marilyn Kagan, with her own television agony show in Los Angeles, says, "[Dr. Laura] has a right to her own opinion, but the way she expresses herself is so demeaning ... It supports the denial of her hostility."

As my beloved mother would say, "Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth."

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Marshall McLuhan famously opined that television was a "cool" medium, while radio was a "hot tribal drum."

"For tribal peoples, for those whose entire social existence is an extension of family life, radio will ... be a violent experience," he wrote in "Understanding Media." "It takes cartoon characters seriously." At the time, he was referring to Nikita Khrushchev --- but if McLuhan were alive today, these cartoon figures would be the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Gordon Liddy, Toni Grant, Don Imus --- and Laura Schlessinger.

If you think of Dr. Laura as an expert, offering true psychological insight, forget it. She's an expert motivational entertainer, right up there with all the other McLuhanesque drummers. Her medium is the harsh, raspy voice of AM radio. With her terse comments, her impatience with her "clients," her famous rants --- she's perfect for the job of being the national nag.

I would also suggest that we have to love Dr. Laura not only for being so tacky, but also for having posed au naturel for an old sweetie. There are those of us out here who would give a pretty penny to have such a shrink; one with the chutzpah to strip down to nothing more than skin and bone for her honey's camera --- calling him "Your Tottle Bug" all the while.

Most of all, I believe we should love Schlessinger for her bubbles.

As Bane tells it, when Laura and her husband Lew moved to Lake Arrowhead, Calif., she bought a Cobalt --- what some call "the Mercedes of speed boats." After she got it, and more than once, according to people at the local marina, "She kept insisting there was something wrong with this boat because of the bubbles, and she wanted the owners to take it back."

Something wrong with the bubbles?

Yeah. She said that "the bubbles that come up from the back of her boat didn't look like everyone else's bubbles."

How could you not love her for that?
salon.com | August 23, 1999

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