John Melendez is now a staff writer on The Tonight Show, but for fifteen years, on Howard Stern’s radio show on WXRK in New York (and on his cable television show), “Stuttering John”—whose favorite fictional character was Cornelius, King of the Apes, whom he resembled and imitated whenever the opportunity arose—asked, tried to ask, Barbara Eden what she sleeps in; Magic Johnson why baseball players are so horny; Valerie Harper whether she has breast implants and whether her husband spanks her; Gennifer Flowers whether then governor Clinton used a condom; Joey Adams when was the last time he had a solid bowel movement; Chaz Bono if he’d ever French-kissed Cher; Liz Smith why she’s such a fat cow; Walter Mondale whether he ever worried that Geraldine Ferraro would have gotten cramps in office; Morton Downey Jr. if his wife would dance topless to save him from poverty; Liza Minnelli why gay guys dig her mom so much; Warren Beatty what’s bigger—the Oscar or his penis.
The questions with which he discomfited celebrities were invariably sexual, which made sense: Stuttering always seems—to me, anyway—so similar to sexual tension. Melendez says that as a stuttering adolescent, “I had no problem asking other kids if they had hair down there yet. Nobody wanted to talk about it. The hardest interview was Fred Gwynne. I had to promise this girl, this beautiful publicist, that I wouldn’t ask him anything about The Munsters. I said, ‘Hey, don’t worry, this is gonna be a piece about his work in the theater,’ and she’s right next to me, right, when I ask him if he signs his pictures ‘Fred Gwynne’ or ‘Herman Munster.’ She’s there and you could see her just—that’s why I stutter so much….It’s like picking up a girl. You’ve got to go up and ask her out, but it’s the most uncomfortable thing. When I used to try and pick up a girl, I would have to turn my head.”
Melendez’s stutter got worse whenever the celebrity, stalling for time, asked him to repeat the question, but it was when he was speaking to Stern—before or after the celebrity interviews—that Melendez’s voice and face lost all claim to behavioral integrity, for Stern, nicely named, is a merciless sadist:
STERN: What happens if the show goes off the air or somethin’ happens to me—what do you do? Seriously, what would you do?
MELENDEZ: Well, b-b-b-by then I hope to have a record contract.
STERN: Let’s say a record contract is a tough thing to get, okay? You’ll admit that. As much talent as you have, as much natural talent as you have, let’s say that never happens. And it looks like it never is gonna happen. You’re twenty-six and you’re on television. I mean, I haven’t seen anybody give you a record contract. What do you do if something happens to me?
MELENDEZ: Cry.
STERN: No, really—what do you do? What is your career path in that case?
MELENDEZ: I don’t know, I haven’t really given it much, uh-uh-uh-uh, given it too much thought. Maybe I’ll take up acting.
STERN: But that’s another career. In other words, you have to have, you know, you have to have something to fall back on.
MELENDEZ: I want to be, I want to be in the entertainment industry, you know.
STERN: Right.
MELENDEZ: That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, so—
STERN: All right, so you’re in it. Okay, I understand your point. Well, okay.
MELENDEZ: I mean, what is anyone gonna do?
ROBIN QUIVERS [Stern’s sidekick]: I like that; he doesn’t even think past today.
STERN: Well, you know, they say, If you’re going to be successful, don’t think past today. That’s what all the experts say. I took a lot of courses in this and I know. You know, he wants to be in show business and the only job he’s really qualified for in show business is to sweep up elephant doody at the circus.
MELENDEZ: Could I ask you a question?
STERN: Yes, go ahead.
MELENDEZ: How come, like, you know, I go out, you know, and-and-and-and do this stuff and then, and then, and then, and then, and then you just bring me out and berate me?
STERN: I’m not berating you. I’m concerned about you, like a father to a son. It’s a question.
MELENDEZ: All right. I hope that I c-c-c-c-can work with you.
STERN: But what I’m saying—what if it should happen that I am no longer in show business? What-what if I lose my voice to throat cancer?
MELENDEZ: Maybe they’ll give me my own show.
STERN: Well, okay, maybe, but you’re a friggin’ mess.
MELENDEZ: And that’s what I’ll call it: The Friggin’ Mess Show.
STERN: That’s going to be some show.
Stern called him “hero of the stupid,” “hero of no one,” “stupid man,” “king of the interns,” “world’s oldest intern,” “stuttering baboon,” “oh you poor man,” “you idiot.” “What’s the matter with you?” “What a turd you are.” “There is no show on television that would give an animal like this a job interviewing people for a living.” “Look at him! What a mess!” Melendez would lock up and Stern would say, “Say it already, you dope. Come on, say something. If you got something to say, say it quick.” Melendez told Stern that he auditioned for a small role in a Steve Martin movie, and Stern said, “I hope Steve Martin knows hand signals, because this is going to be some movie. This is going to be the longest film ever made. This is going to be a three-hour movie. They’re going to have to release it on two separate videotapes.” When Melendez’s girlfriend appeared on the show and Melendez suffered a bad block, Stern repeatedly asked her whether she was embarrassed to be his girlfriend. A man with Tourette’s was brought on the show to compete with Melendez for his job. Stern asked Melendez if his jaw ever gets tired, then said, “You know what I just realized? Your jaw reminds me of my mother’s sewing machine. I get a headache from watching you try to talk.” “Isn’t it fun to wait for the stutter?” Stern asked Quivers. “Seriously, you know, we all feel guilty about it, and let’s face it: We all feel terrible that we’re watching a guy stutter and we’re laughing at him. But you gotta admit you wait for the big stutter, don’t you?”
Melendez told Stern, “You know what I think it is? I think—when you point—I think it almost kinda intimidates me.”
“It intimidates you a little bit? All right, well, I won’t point then,” Stern said and pointed.
One wanted to ask of Melendez, as one still wants to ask of Bob Balaban, Why do you allow yourself to be used in this way? Pleading with Liza for the interview, he promised, “One question, and I swear I’ll never talk to you again.” After Melendez asked Marlo Thomas whether she and Phil Donahue still get horny for each other, if Marlo ever stuck her finger down her throat, and what the most degrading term for women is, Gloria Steinem interrupted, saying, “You’re really hopeless,” and Melendez responded, “Why do you say that?” As Susan Sontag said (wrongly, as always) about Michel Leiris’s Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, “Leiris’s attitude is unredeemed by the slightest tinge of self-respect. This lack of esteem or respect for himself is obscene.”
Melendez insisted at the time that it was not “only funny because I stutter. It was funny ’cause I was putting these celebrities on the spot. Celebrities are used to answering the same exact questions over and over again. It was cool to have someone throw them something they’re going to have to think about for a second. You saw a lot of them break down and become who they really are. People get all uptight about it. I thought it was ridiculous because, I mean, if a celebrity couldn’t, you know, deal with being asked what they read on the bowl—it’s a goofy question, you know, and when these guys got upset about it, you could tell—that was why it was great, it put them in a true light, out of their character, you know what I mean, out of their usual mode, like ‘How’d ya get started?’—out of the mode.”
If Melendez’s stutter expressed the perfect mix of rage and awe we feel before celebrity, the entire operation was constructed as a geometrically exquisite paradox: Melendez didn’t write the questions he asked and often was unaware of the allusions they made to the celebrity’s personal problems (thus, even when Melendez was asking the questions, Stern kept him out of the loop); Melendez attempted to treat the celebrities with the same contempt with which Stern treated him, but his stutter—which was “under control, for the most part” (New York Times)—was so completely out of control that it immediately undermined his pretense to authoritarian cruelty; Melendez turned into the Jell-O that he was trying to turn them into; using his stutter to make them feel sorry for him and therefore let him talk to them, he exposed the shamelessness of all star-maker machinery, at the same time that he was piercing, with his disrespectful questions, the nimbus around them that they felt certain had made a nullity of us all. If they couldn’t laugh at themselves the way he could—if, as most did, they went grim, got mad, or ran away; John Amos, the cookie magnate, asked him, “How did you get a job like this with a speech impediment?”—they exposed the gap between their character and their character. They couldn’t stand toe-to-toe even with “Stuttering John,” but when they displayed anything resembling the reservoirs of vulnerability, nerve, and wit that Melendez did, they seemed newly, touchingly, weirdly alive. When Melendez asked Reggie Jackson if he’d ever accidentally farted in the catcher’s face, Reggie said, “Sure, and if you hang out long enough, I’ll fart in your face.” Valerie Harper told Melendez, “I have a dear friend who stuttered, but he communicated right through it and so do you. Isn’t it great that you picked this form?”
“Well, I didn’t pick it,” Melendez said. “I kind of got pushed into it.”
“No, I think it’s great. What you did is you went into the eye of the storm. That’s very courageous.”
“Thanks a lot,” Melendez said. “C-c-can I get a hug?”