In the summer of 2009, my family life was better than I could have ever imagined, but I still felt off about my career. Like I had more in me that I wanted to do. I just didn’t have a place to do it. Katherine and I were in sync, crazy in love and about six months away from becoming parents. We were having the time of our lives and would spend most of our evenings laughing until I cried and she peed. We were a wild and free army of two, soon to be three.
Also, I was about to sign my first multi-year deal with ET Canada. The show had gone through some major changes, but so had I. I wasn’t being asked to be shitty in interviews anymore, so that was good. There were no more invasive and gross questions and no more lying just to get me in the room. And we, as a show, moved on from obsessing over, or running pictures of, celebrities dropping their kids off at daycare. But I was asked to flirt. They loved a flirty interview. I’d be assigned to interview every young female star in hopes there’d be some kind of connection that played out in the four minutes we had together. That kind of shit didn’t often happen naturally, so I’d have to force it most of the time. When it worked, it worked.
“That was gold!” they’d tell me, or, “She really loved you!”
When it didn’t work, it really fucking didn’t, but they’d always cut around it in editing and the worst bits would never see the light of day. I didn’t know it then, but years later, those would be the interviews that would come back to haunt me, not the ones where I was digging too deep, or getting shut down or walked out on.
Other than those interviews, I was having fun. Patrick Swayze showed me how to air hump while teaching me the dance from Dirty Dancing. I rode a camel through the Egyptian desert, then crawled down to the tombs beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza. I’ve done high leg kicks with Liza Minnelli, hugged Carrie Fisher, and witnessed Alec Baldwin verbally destroy an assistant over the phone, spitting venom and profanities at a volume I didn’t think was possible, while I sat quietly waiting for him in the next room. I watched the Super Bowl in Rome, made Al Pacino laugh, and discovered Steve Carell is one of the nicest people you’ll ever talk to and Adam Levine is not. I got to interview every single action hero and rock star I idolized as a kid. For most people in the business, this was a dream job, but I needed more. As wonderful as ET Canada was for me, I felt constricted. I still spent most of my day wearing clothes that weren’t mine while standing in front of a teleprompter speaking words I didn’t write.
On June 25, I’d taken the day off and was with Katherine at a doctor’s appointment when I got a call telling me to be on standby to come in because Farrah Fawcett had just died. This one hit hard. She was an icon, and I cherished my Farrah poster when I was a kid, the one where she’s in the red bathing suit, which hung right next to my Loni Anderson poster, also in a red bathing suit. I told work that I needed a couple of hours but would be free if they needed me after that. Then, four hours later, my phone exploded; I’d stepped away for thirty minutes and I had twenty-six missed calls. The first email I checked was an open-ended ticket to Los Angeles and the flight was leaving in less than three hours. Michael Jackson was dead.
I always kept a carry-on bag half-packed and ready to go. It had a toothbrush, hairdryer, makeup bag, pair of shoes, three pair of socks, and four pair of underpants stuffed in there. There was never any scrambling on flight day. I’d grab my passport, a couple shirts, and a suit, then kiss my girl and I was out the door. I was at the airport less than thirty minutes after getting that email, and it’s a twenty-minute drive.
When you travel as much as I did, people just assume you love it. I lived every weekend like I had just scored the grand prize on The Price Is Right—“You’ve just won an all-expenses paid trip to Hollywood, California, staying at the luxurious Four Seasons hotel in beautiful Beverly Hills, where you’ll attend a red-hot red-carpet movie premiere, rub shoulders with the rich and famous, and dine at world-renowned five-star restaurants. We’ll also throw in seventy-five dollars a day to go on that shopping spree you’ve always dreamed of!”
This was my life almost every week, and I can not stress enough how much I had grown to hate it. Not to mention the fact that seventy-five bucks wouldn’t even cover breakfast at the Four Seasons. I just hated everything about travelling. I hated being away, I hated being alone, and I hated flying. I’m not afraid of flying; I just don’t fit on airplanes. Over the years I had spent as much time building contacts and making friends with key people at all the major airports as I did on my actual job.
The goal was to always get upgraded to first class. As soon as work sent me my ticket, I’d start working my contacts. For anyone who’s never flown first class, let me break it down for you. The difference between first and coach goes way beyond the bigger seat, free wine, and warm cookies. If you manage to get yourself on the other side of that curtain, you’ll discover that first class isn’t about the in-flight service, it’s about how you’re treated as a person.
If the seatbelt light is on and you get up to go pee during mild turbulence in the back of the plane, a flight attendant will literally put their thumb in the middle of your forehead to push you back down in your seat. If that same thing happens in the front of the plane, one of them will take you by the hand while the first-class cabin crew lock arms and form a human chain to make sure you get to the bathroom safely. That’s the difference. You’re a first-class person.
Gabby was my contact in Toronto, and as soon as I got to the airport that day, I started texting her. She’d worked for the airline for twenty-five years and knew all the tricks. If she couldn’t find me a seat, she would always hack the system and try to bump someone else out. The airport was madness that day, and the customs line snaked all the way back through security. Gabby texted back asking where I was and telling me to hurry. She couldn’t get me upgraded on my flight, but there was another flight leaving for L.A. in twenty minutes that she could get me on.
“I’ll do my best, but I can’t make this line go any faster,” I texted back. There were at least two hundred people ahead of me. I wasn’t going to make this flight.
All anyone could talk about in line was Michael Jackson dying, and the people who recognized me from the show knew exactly where I was headed. “Michael Jackson?” one woman asked. “Yup. Michael Jackson,” I replied without looking up from my phone, still furiously texting Gabby.
“Thanks, Gabby. But I’m not going to make it. I appreciate you trying,” I wrote.
“Stay where you are! Don’t move!” she texted back. “I’m coming to get you!”
Skipping the line at customs and immigration is impossible. We all know that. If you’re late, you miss your fight. That’s the rule. That’s on you. Being my height made flying brutal, but it did allow me to look clear over the heads of most people. I could see all the way to the back of the terminal, and as I scanned the crowd for any sign of Gabby, I finally saw it. A flag. And not just any flag—a bright orange flag on the end of an eight-foot pole. An eight-foot pole that was attached to the back of a fucking wheelchair that Gabby was pushing through the mob towards me.
“Get in,” she mouthed to me. Gabby had big hair but she couldn’t have been any taller than five two, so I leaned way down and whispered, “There is no fucking way I can get in that thing.”
“If you want to get on this flight,” she whispered back, “get in. It’s the only way I can get you to the front of the line.”
“I’ve been standing with these same people, in this same line, for forty minutes. I can’t just suddenly need a wheelchair. I just took a picture with a fan!”
Gabby reached up and pulled me in close by the back of my neck, the same way a mom does when she wants to give you shit for acting out in public. “If you’re not going to sit, then you’re going to have to limp,” she told me. “Can you limp?”
Yeah, I thought. I can limp.
Gabby put my luggage on the seat of that wheelchair and my hand on her shoulder, and I limped my ass to the front of that line and all the way to first class.
When I landed in L.A., it was a boots-on-the-ground and all-hands-on-deck type situation. I met my producer and cameraman at the airport, and we worked through the night building stories. At sunrise, we made our way to the L.A. County coroner’s office to grab a good spot for the press conference that was going to start in a few hours. That’s when my phone started blowing up again. But nobody had died this time. These were all messages from people I’d worked with over the years but didn’t really talk to anymore, and all of their emails and texts had the same message: KiSS FM needs a morning show!
Years earlier, when my dad was in his last few months, when I was out of work and my marriage was ending, I took a job at KiSS 92.5 FM—a Top 40 radio station in Toronto that blew up riding the wave of boy bands, Britney and Christina, and those early seasons of American Idol. The program director and my boss was Julie Adam, a maverick, hell-raising, and rule-breaking executive who hired me to produce her morning show. On my first day, and right after I told her my dad was dying so I’d need a couple weeks off soon, she handed me a printed-out five-point list of rules. Her rules for radio. I don’t remember what the other three were, but I can tell you that points one and five were both Have fun! In a lot of ways, Julie and her Have fun or fuck off attitude saved me, and I never forgot that. She was exactly what I needed at the exact right time.
And here she was again.
It was ninety degrees in L.A. that day and I was standing, for hours, on Mission Road at the end of the drive-thru at the Jack in the Box across from the coroner’s office interviewing people, who were eating in their cars, about Michael Jackson. That’s when I got to work on my pitch letter to Julie. In between every interview, around every on-camera intro and throw, and while I sat for hours in Los Angeles traffic. Through all that, I was on my phone writing, trying to come up with a shred of an argument to convince Julie that I was the right choice for that new show. I needed that show.
I started with facts and the hard truth. No, I’d never done this before. I’d never hosted a radio show before. But fuck it. I’d never been a DJ, or ever introduced a song, or run a contest live on the air. I’d never done the weather, and I had zero clue how all the commercials and music worked. But fuck that also. I told her I knew she had hundreds of tapes and resumés from qualified and professional hosts because an opportunity like this was the Holy Grail of radio, but she needed to take a chance on me: I was different. I was going to sound different. And I wasn’t going to play by the rules because I didn’t know the rules. I was an out-of-tune voice in an autotuned world, but I understood an audience.
I wrote the first draft of that email over two days surrounded by grieving Michael Jackson fans, while getting an up-close look at the connection an entertainer can have with an audience. Not that I thought there was ever a chance I’d achieve that level of fame, but it was clear how incredible that relationship can be. An audience isn’t something to take for granted, and unlike so many other people I’d worked for in radio over the years, I knew I’d never do that. I’d always put the audience first, I explained. Then I hammered home the most important point—I already had a full-time job with ET Canada, so if it all went to hell, she wouldn’t have to feel bad about firing my ass.
I knew I could do this. I promised her I’d be the most open, most relatable, and best storyteller she’d ever hired. I had no clue if I could pull any of this off, but I knew in my head and my heart that I had to try. I finally had something to say, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t afraid to fail.
By the time I flew back home to Katherine, Julie had offered me the job.
I wrote my new boss at ET Canada, Tamara Simoneau, and told her we needed to talk, but assured her I was not quitting. Nobody likes getting the we need to talk email without context or explanation. She wrote back saying, “Good. I need to talk to you too. And no, you’re not getting fired.” Love that woman.
Tamara is as tough as she is smart, and she always brought out the best in me. She’s Australian and only ever called me Rozzicle, which I didn’t mind, because we’d built a great relationship over the years and her accent always made it sound sort of sweet.
So we met on a patio on a sunny Toronto day and both agreed that we needed at least one drink in us before we started talking about anything serious. As soon as round two arrived I went first.
“I’ve been offered a job to host and build my own morning radio show.” I explained all this hiding my tics behind a pint glass and dark sunglasses. “But I want to do both shows, the radio show and ET Canada,” I continued, even though these were two full-time jobs for two massive and competing networks. “I think we can make it work. I can do both if you let me,” I said.
This was a shit ton for her to take in. A bonkers and way-out-of-left-field proposition.
“Okay, now you go,” I told her and pounded back what was left of my second drink.
We ordered round three.
“I want you to move to Los Angeles.”
Fuck.
“You’d be our L.A. correspondent but still working for ET Canada. You can do all the freelance work you want down there, we’ll pay for your move, give you your current salary in U.S. dollars plus 20 percent, and help Katherine to get a visa after she has the baby so she can work too.”
Fuck Fuck Fuck. The idea of me and Katherine, who hates winter more than any human I’ve ever met, in L.A. with an American baby raised on the beach with sun-kissed asscheeks and waves nipping at her heels was more than appealing. How the hell do I say no to that?
I didn’t have to. Katherine did. And it wasn’t even close.
“L.A. isn’t what you want,” she told me. “You’re going to be doing the same job you already do just in a different city, and for what? Do you even like L.A.? You need to do the radio show, Roz. That’s where you’re going to make a difference. That’s where your heart is.”
She knew.
Now it was a matter of finding a co-host for the radio show, and convincing two massive companies, which didn’t have a great history of playing nice, to share me. But that’s what lawyers are for, and mine was great!
If I can offer some advice here. If anyone ever hands you something that has been touched by a lawyer, grab it with your thumb and pinky like you would a bag of hot shit and hand it directly to your lawyer. Don’t try to understand it, make sense of it, or negotiate it yourself. You hand it off and let lawyers do what lawyers do. My lawyer, Domenic Romano, has spent years getting me maximum money, freedom, and protection in all my contracts. I explained, “I want to do what nobody else has ever done in this country. I want to work two full-time jobs, on two massive shows, for two different networks. I want to wake up at 4 a.m. and work until 6 p.m., and do it all. I don’t know if anyone has ever successfully pulled this off.”
“Maybe not,” Dom replied. “But you’ll be the first, Roz. Leave it with me.”
He’s the best.
While hardcore negotiations were happening and lawyers were doing lawyer things, I spent weeks going through cassette tapes, MP3s, and CDs of people who had applied to be my co-host.
I’d never done a radio show before, and all my insecurities and fears were raging from the moment I woke up to when my head hit the pillow at the end of the day. Every tape I listened to, I felt worse about myself. I was shitting my pants because I was looking for someone who was all the things I wasn’t: I needed a quarterback who could run the show, but also someone who was an improv master and would never let me fall, no matter how much I rambled. I needed a comedy partner and someone to do the heavy lifting at live events because I knew my anxiety in front of crowds would be too much for me to handle.
I listened to dozens and dozens of audition tapes. They were all the same, and I would have failed with every single one of those people.
Then I heard Mocha.
He was crazy but he was no-bullshit. He was a master at what he did and was already hired by the station to do another shift. He was perfect. He was all the things I wasn’t—he was everything. We put champagne on ice (but not really) and offered him the job. Aaaaaaand—
He said no.
I was beyond crushed, but I wouldn’t give up. It took me three weeks to convince him to build this with me, to take a chance on ourselves and create something great. He finally came around, but I understood his hesitation. I wouldn’t have wanted to wake up at 3 a.m. to do a show with me either.
I had been listening to a ton of punk during all this. Punk wasn’t perfect and neither was I. Most of those bands could hardly play their instruments, and the ones that could never bothered to tune them. These guys never wanted to be the most popular or best anything, but they made noise and they made a point. They built something great long before anyone would have considered them ready, or even competent. They shook up the industry because they had something to say. Three chords and the truth type shit. That was me. I was a little too rough, a little too loud, and I hated rules. I had to make this work.
After a few months, and more than a few thousand dollars in legal fees, the deals were finally done. My lawyer managed to pull off two new contracts for two shows and a bridge deal between the two companies to share me.
“There’s a few things that worked out in your favour,” Domenic told me. “The first is that I got the sense from both lawyers that neither company thinks you’ll be able to sustain this schedule.”
Yes, I can, I thought.
“That it’ll be too hard on your body.”
They have no clue what my body can handle.
“That after a few months you’ll have to pick one or the other, and they both think it’ll be them.”
No, I won’t.
And I didn’t.[*1]
*1 Anyone who’s ever written a book has that one friend who’s going to skim through the entire thing looking for their own name. Maurie Sherman, this is for you.