Circus World

The New Times Interview

For reasons that still baffle the brainpan, Jerry Springer is the last man standing—and indeed still thriving—after 20 years in the TV tabloid-talk cycle, outlasting competition that has run the gamut from Geraldo Rivera to Jenny Jones to Sally Jessy Raphael to the late Morton Downey Jr. The self-deprecating host himself has admitted in interviews that his eponymously titled series is “silly,” an assessment that’s hard to argue. 

Yet The Jerry Springer Show (currently airing Mondays through Fridays, 1 p.m., on WNYS-Channel 43) remains a steady ratings performer, and the endearing host has a lot to do with its success, as he earnestly negotiates the weekday minefield of sleep-around spouses, squabbling strippers, unredeemable rednecks and other socially challenged flotsam. The show is formulaic yet always dependable dross, a guilty pleasure crammed with various outbursts of pixilated-for-the-boob-tube toplessness, ham-fisted studio brawls among the dentally impaired and venomous profanities to ensure a bleeping good time. 

Maybe Springer inherited that sense of survival from his parents, Jewish refugees who fled the Holocaust nightmare of Nazi Germany’s Berlin for safe haven in England during World War II. In one of London’s subway “tubes,” transformed into a makeshift bomb shelter during the blitz, Gerald Norman Springer was born in 1944 (he just turned 68 on Feb. 13); five years later his family embarked on the Queen Mary ocean liner for America’s greener pastures, where they resided in Queens and young Jerry would eventually graduate from the borough’s Forest Hills High School in 1961. College sheepskins followed, including a degree in political science from New Orleans’ Tulane University in 1965 and a law degree from Chicago’s Northwestern University in 1968. A career in politics seemed inevitable, starting with a position as a campaign aide for the soon-to-be-thwarted presidential bid of Democrat Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. 

Following RFK’s 1968 assassination, anti-war activist Springer worked at Cincinnati’s Frost & Jacobs law firm and also spearheaded a campaign to lower Ohio’s voting age to 19. He went on to a 1971 election victory as a city councilman, yet resigned the seat in 1974 during his second term following a bizarre sex scandal that almost seems like an unlikely segment straight out of his current talk show: Springer actually paid for a prostitute’s services with a personal check, which was later found during a police raid at a Kentucky massage parlor. (“I didn’t have the 10 bucks in cash,” he admitted years later in a 1998 New York magazine piece.) Undaunted, Springer publicly mea culpa-ed his sins to a forgiving electorate and successfully reclaimed his seat in 1975, followed by a one-year appointed term as Cincinnati’s mayor in 1977. Springer’s 1982 run as the Buckeye State’s governor didn’t get past the primary stage, however, even though he owned up to those previous peccadilloes in his campaign ads.

With the Ohio statehouse no longer in his sights, in 1984 Springer migrated to Cincinnati’s WLWT-TV for an Emmy Award-winning broadcasting stint that lasted nearly a decade, as he mixed anchor duties with nightly commentaries that were surely the forerunner to his “Final Thought” sermon that still climaxes every episode of The Jerry Springer Show. (The owlish Springer looked and sounded like a young Woody Allen during his Cincinnati TV days, as evidenced by several YouTube clips.) Since WLWT was then owned by Multimedia Entertainment, which was syndicating the gabfests of Sally Jessy Raphael and Phil Donahue, in 1991 Multimedia execs offered the bespectacled Springer a shot at his own series, perhaps to groom him as the next Donahue.

The initial years of the series were indeed Donahue-esque, a sober stab at the talk-show universe that featured serious guests such as Iran-Contra figure Oliver North as well as old-school favorites including surviving cast members Buddy Ebsen, Donna Douglas and Max Baer Jr. from The Beverly Hillbillies. The current cornucopia of confused cross-dressers and trailer-park harridans seemed light years away. Ho-hum ratings resulted, especially when contrasted to the more sensational approach mined by then-rivals such as Ricki Lake and Geraldo, so in 1994 the talking heads were out, knuckleheads moved in, and ratings for the refashioned Springer franchise soon went through the roof. 

Jerry-mania reached an apex of sorts in 1998 when his autobiography Ringmaster (St. Martin’s Press) was issued and its roman a clef movie adaptation hit multiplexes during Thanksgiving week, giving film critics the easy shot to lambaste the flick as a turkey. Meanwhile, the gonzo show went global in a number of international markets, with British composers Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee creating the mock musical Jerry Springer: The Opera (2003), which played to packed London houses for two years at the Cambridge Theatre. (Starsky and Hutch’s David Soul tackled the Springer role in London for several performances, and Method actor Harvey Keitel did it in a January 2008 Carnegie Hall two-nighter.) 

The real Springer even took a shot at a recording career with the 1995 country-western LP Dr. Talk. For several seasons on the Springer show, whenever a segment would fall flat because of uninteresting, non-fighting guests, the producers would humorously play Dr. Talk’s title track and the audience would take to the stage for some boot-scootin’ boogie.

The Jerry Springer Show’s current contract runs through 2014, thus ensuring more dysfunctional train wrecks to air their dirty laundry. (The series used to bill itself as “an hour of life you’ll never get back.”) Still, Springer’s unlikely transition from fringe pop-culture icon to Middle America mainstream darling took a long time, despite his frequent fundraisers for Democratic causes and his radio stint from 2005 to 2007 on the late, liberal-leaning Air America network. A big factor in altering the public’s perception of Springer came during his 2006 appearances on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, which he agreed to do in order to learn the waltz for the upcoming wedding of his daughter Katie, a young lady who surmounted such birth defects as being legally blind, partially deaf and born without nasal passages. Viewers voted him off the show after seven weeks, but the likable hoofer warmed their hearts in the process. 

Other gigs came his way, including hosting chores on NBC’s America’s Got Talent in 2007 and 2008, a job he had to leave when he was asked to play the role of sleazy lawyer Billy Flynn in the Kander-Ebb musical Chicago for a six-week 2009 London run at the Cambridge. Springer’s Chicago conquered the Broadway floorboards later that year, followed by some quick touring productions in Atlanta and Philadelphia. “I was only in one play my whole life,” he says. “Truthfully, I had no experience in it, so it was really new to me. But it worked out and I really enjoyed it. I mean, to be on Broadway and the West End of London, those two things were really exciting, I must admit.”

And now the shock-TV titan is hosting, of all things, a dating series titled Baggage on cable TV’s Game Show Network. The show, now in its third season with more than 300 episodes in the can, is being aired in a haphazard fashion, currently at 6 and 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, plus a 1:30 a.m. broadcast Mondays through Fridays. Although it might not be easy to channel-surf onto a Baggage installment, plenty of fans of Springer certainly showed up during a quick appearance last summer at the New York State Fair’s Science and Industry Building when Game Show Network was promoting the series. And the line was much longer than the one for Alec Baldwin’s stop at the nearby Center of Progress Building, although there were no chants for “Jer-ry! Jer-ry!”

Q: Tell me about Baggage.

A: I love this show! I wish I would have thought of it; a great idea. It’s your traditional dating show, you know, where a guy comes out and has to choose among three beautiful women which one he wants to take out, and they’re all saying, “Oh, choose me! Choose me!” 

But the twist is that during the course of the show each of the contestants has to reveal three items of “baggage,” small, medium and large, something in their life or in their personality which would make you think twice perhaps about going out with them. During the course of the show he eliminates {the other candidates} and finally chooses the one that he can handle her baggage. And once he chooses her and they’re jumping up and down, the audience is going wild and cheering, {saying} “Oh, isn’t that a beautiful couple.” But before the show ends, she gets to see what’s in his big bag. And so sometimes she’ll say, “Thank you very much for choosing me but, no thank you, you have too much baggage.” 

Q: It’s kind of like The Dating Game mixed with To Tell the Truth.

A: Yeah, exactly. So it’s a lot of fun and the audience really seems to get into it. What we’ve noticed in focus groups is that when you’re watching the show at home with a significant other or whatever, you invariably start talking during the show to each other about whether you could handle that baggage in your partner. Or she’ll turn to you and say, “Well, you think that’s bad? Look at what you’ve got!” So it becomes very interactive; you can’t help but respond to the baggage that you see {on the series}.  

Q: Are you using the luggage left over from Howie Mandel’s Deal or No Deal?

A: {Hearty laughter.}

Q: You’re juggling two shows. What’s the taping schedule like for Baggage?

A: When we’re shooting I do Baggage on Wednesdays through Saturdays in Los Angeles because I do my show on Mondays and Tuesdays in Stamford, Conn., which is right outside New York City. {The longtime Chicago-based series relocated to the Stamford Media Center in 2009, part of a cost-cutting move by bigwigs at NBC Universal, which also moved the syndicated yakfests of Steve Wilkos, the bald-pated bruiser who was Springer’s former director of security, and Maury Povich.}

Q: Are these marathon tapings?

A: Yeah, I do three shows a day when we’re taping and they get to be long days, but I guess I’m kind of used to it. And I also realize how lucky I am to be having two shows going at the same time. You will not hear me complaining.

Q: What are your personal favorite game shows?

A: When I was a kid I loved To Tell the Truth, Truth or Consequences, What’s My Line? Those were the shows I grew up with in the 1950s, watching them with my parents.

Q: Who were your favorite game show hosts?

A: I liked John Daly {What’s My Line?}, Bill Cullen {The Price is Right}, Gene Rayburn {The Match Game}. 

Q: How did you develop your on-camera style for The Jerry Springer Show and now Baggage? Because when I see your shows, sometimes I see traces of Jack Benny. 

A: I don’t know; I’m just me on camera. I probably subconsciously am influenced by Jack Benny. I loved him when I was a kid because he had reactive comedy; in other words, Jack Benny didn’t tell jokes, he just looked at the audience and you laughed. It was how he reacted to the craziness that was happening in front of him, and his exasperation. And I make my living reacting to the craziness in front of me. Maybe that’s it, but until you asked this question I never really thought about it. I think Benny did have an influence on me, and the same thing is true about Johnny Carson. I don’t go out there and tell a million jokes; it’s more that something happens, then I pause and then respond, sometimes with a quip.

Q: On a 1993 episode of Springer, you actually had the cast members of The Beverly Hillbillies; nowadays you have real hillbillies on the show. Is there a part of you that misses the old style of the Springer show?

A: No, I mean I don’t think about it. You know, I’m hired to do a show about outrageousness and those are the rules. When Universal bought us {in 1996}, they said we’re only allowed to do outrageous, we’re only allowed to do behavior that is outside the norm of acceptable behavior. So I know going in that each day they’re going to hand me people that are either over the top or involved in situations that are over the top. And that’s the job; I don’t think about it. I don’t talk about those things that are of interest to me. If I was hired to host a show about basketball, we’d have basketball on all the time. That wouldn’t mean that’s the only thing I’m interested in, but that’s what the job was, so that’s the way I look at this show. 

Q: A few seasons ago every episode had you coming down the fire pole like Dean Martin used to do, plus there were people spinning plates, limbless performers and other people associated with carnival shows. It was very Fellini-esque, like watching 8 1/2 every day. 

A: I still slide down the pole every show, and that I totally stole from Dean Martin because I loved watching his show and I said, “Gosh, one day I want to do that.” There’s no relevance to the show; it’s just a fun thing to do, particularly an old guy in a suit coming down the pole. There’s nothing hot or hunky about me.

Q: The show is so well-edited, how do you manage to sidestep the people when they start throwing fists at each other?

A: I sense when the hair-pulling is going to start so I move back into the audience. It’s an instinct: I’m like a dog knowing when a hurricane is coming. 

Q: Were you shocked by the first topless exposure on the show way back when?

A: I believe the first time it happened I was shocked; I mean, who wouldn’t be? But after a while you just become oblivious to it.

Q: You’ve had a certain identity after all the years on The Jerry Springer Show. Did your career really take a change after your appearances on America’s Got Talent and Dancing with the Stars? 

A: I think Dancing probably moved me in a different direction. I had no thought of it, I went on just because of my daughter for her wedding. and I wasn’t aware of it because I know what I’m like and my friends know what I’m like. But I guess for the rest of the country, the only thing people knew about me was my crazy show, so they made the assumption that, gee, that’s what I was like. So Dancing was the first time they got to see me as I really am: as a normal father or grandfather, a basic schlub. So I think that was surprisingly shocking {to the public} and based on the reaction to that show, yeah, I think people just saw me in a new light. And then I was offered America’s Got Talent and the Broadway musical Chicago and all of those other things happened when people realized, “Wait a second: This guy isn’t crazy, he’s normal like the rest of us.”

Q: You were born in London. Did you have an accent when you came to America as a young boy?

A: Well, I was 5 years old so I had a very British accent when I started in the first grade. During the course of the first several years {of school} I started to lose it. If I was older when I came over there still might be traces, but now there are not.

Q: You were on the Fox News Channel show Hannity last summer, chatting about the world, and it was amusing to watch you school these guys on Economics 101. Did you feel some sense of satisfaction when you were in enemy territory? 

A: Those shows are fun. I realize I’m more liberal than those people but also that’s what I’m schooled in, it’s really my background, so I enjoy going on those shows and pointing out where I think they’re wrong. And it’s kind of fun because they’re so used to talking to people who agree with them, that when you have someone who suddenly questions their original assumptions, all of a sudden it’s like “Whoa!” So yeah, that’s fun, I love that. 

Q: You’ve done about 3,000-plus Final Thoughts, bedrock stuff about love and trust, those sorts of things. But it seems like in every episode nobody listens to this sage advice.

A: Well, maybe someone at home does and therefore they don’t wind up being on the show, I hope. {Laughs.} And also it’s my only hope of getting into heaven. When Judgment Day comes and God looks at the show, I’ll always be able to say, “But God, remember those Final Thoughts!”