“I love and value them,” says Wendy Williams of her audience, as she takes a bite of a small, leafy grilled chicken salad. We are having lunch in her sizable dressing room-cumoffice that’s decorated as one would expect of a self-proclaimed, gaudy Jersey Shore girl: explosions of pink, a smattering of leopard prints, knick-knack nods to her past and a curiously framed photo of actor Shia LaBeouf (her hall pass crush) all adorn her studio sanctuary. She has just finished a Monday morning taping and she is still talking. But not about the day’s ‘Hot Topic’ Lindsay Lohan or any of the other celebrities she dishes about regularly on her popular show (this season’s ratings have increased by 29 percent in the coveted 18 to 49 female demo). She’s gushing over her “co– hosts,” instead. “You cannot turn on another talk show and find an audience where everyone looks as good or has as much energy as mine,” boasts Williams. And she’s right. Soccer moms straight from the carpool and millennials decked out in their fast-fashion best are among the collection of fans who flock to her studio in New York City’s Chelsea nabe. Walking onto the set just before the show, I was startled by the deafeningly loud house music blaring from the speakers. The almost ear-splitting booms triggered flashbacks of my summer in Ibiza. No wonder the audience is always so hyped by the time the red on-air light flashes. “It’s a mistake to say that my show is solely a woman’s show, a gay man’s show or a black show,” Williams insists, while shaking low-calorie red wine vinegar dressing on her salad (her meal makes sense: weighing in at 165 pounds, she beams that she’s thinner now than she was back in high school). “This show just happens to be hosted by a heterosexual, black woman who is married and almost 50 years old. In my mind, I am a fun but responsible woman.”
Truth is, Wendy has been fun, but more importantly, responsible for decades. Her work ethic is impressive. After graduating from Boston’s Northeastern University, she snagged a job at a radio station in the U.S. Virgin Islands and then a position with Washington, D.C.’s WOL, owned by Cathy Hughes (now TV One’s founder). While working at WOL, she moved closer to her dream of being a top New York DJ by securing a weekend gig at New York’s Hot 103.5, in Queens, and drove back and forth from D.C. and New York for months, sleeping in the Subaru her parents gifted her. When she was ready to leave WOL, she tried to give two week’s notice, but says she was fired by the station program director Dyana Williams, and Hughes cosigned. Not long after landing in Gotham, her compelling talk and uniquely brash humor immediately caught on with New York’s urban set and, in 1989, the fresh-faced upstart DJ joined WRKS (KISS-FM), and the city became her playground. “I was in my early 20s, making $60,000 a year, with no student loans or car note,” she says with the same verge she probably felt at that time in her life. “That was rich! I was running around Manhattan, doing my thing.” In 1992, she appeared on an episode of Martin and Billboard magazine, the radio bible, named her “Best On-Air Radio Personality” in 1993. A year later, Emmis Communications purchased WRKS and shuttled their burgeoning radio star over to their other station, the now venerable Hot 97. Her mix of potty mouth comments, open discussion of her personal life (she was one of the first black public figures to admit to having plastic surgery—liposuction and breast implants—in 1994) and her refusal to extol celebrities, choosing to almost joyfully eviscerate their carefully-crafted PR facades instead, vaulted her to the top of the ratings heap in the nation’s biggest radio market. Wendy Williams was on fire.
In fact, as a graduate student at NYU in the late ’90s, I remember Williams hosting a party I attended in the West Village. She stormed in, tsunami-like, wearing a tiara and hoisting a scepter, while draped in a floor-length mink coat. She owned the room in full, unapologetic, hip-hop pageantry. “I am so glad that I can still be that girl, but on TV,” she says, after laughing out loud at my recollection. But, hold up. Wendy, are you still that girl? “Yes! Who I am right now is exactly who I was on radio. The difference is, now I am 49 years old. There are certain things that I had beaten to death. I had to move on. These other little girls in radio can now imitate me. I am not going to sit in that purple chair and act like I am MediaTakeOut.com! I invented MediaTakeOut.com. I was doing that long before it existed. But, I was not raised like that.”
Back in the ’90s and 2000s, the media referred to Williams as the “female Howard Stern,” because of her willingness to say anything and for her sometimes uncomfortable, confrontational interview style. One memorable example is her 2003 sparring match, via telephone, with the late Whitney Houston, during which Williams questioned the troubled star about her rumored drug addiction. The heated exchange grabbed major headlines, catapulting Williams into the national arena. (Ironically, Williams was scheduled to grace the cover of Ebony’s April 2012 issue, but was bumped by Houston’s untimely death.)
Williams’ now innocent and disarming tag line, “How You Doin’?” was originally created as a code phrase for a man who might be gay. Her McCarthy-esque witch hunt in the latter end of the ’90s for a popular rapper rumored to be gay had listeners glued to the dial and in on the search. People would fax (yes, fax) Williams intel that she would vet and share onair depending on its degree of juiciness. The sexual steeplechase swirled the city into a feverish tizzy. Puff Daddy (as Diddy was known then and has, according to recent reports, re-appropriated) dominated the radio waves and, with his Bad Boy Records brigade of groups and seemingly endless parade of hits, was hip-hop’s reigning emperor. And still, despite Hot 97’s heavy dependence on his supply, even he wasn’t off-limits in Williams’ daily gossip bombs and sticky innuendos. Then, in 1998, Hot 97 unceremoniously fired her.
“I regret nothing in my radio career, nothing,” says Williams, who also struggled with substance abuse during those times. She’s publicly stated that she stopped using drugs in the late ’90s because she wanted better for herself, which included being a wife and a mother. “I had to be that person back then to be the person I am today. The person who was on the radio then was authentically me. We all have our sloppy, greasy side. My original Wendy listeners, here in New York, they grew up with me. They come up to me all the time and say, ‘Oh, I have been listening to you since I was 12.’ I feel proud. I am glad that I have been able to evolve.”
Wendy Joan Williams was born July 18, 1964, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Thomas and Shirley Williams, who also have an older daughter and younger son. Sam Cooke’s classic “Good Times” was a hit song of the moment and the Williams family could certainly share in the sentiment. Mr. and Mrs. Williams, both educators, moved their growing clan to Ocean Township in Monmouth County, and although middle class, the family lived amongst affluence. “There were not a lot of black people around, but it was a great place to grow up,” Williams says. “Kids got nose jobs at 16 (she vehemently denies having one), families employed housekeepers. It was Acapulco for spring break. People lived very opulent lives.” Despite their existence in Caucasia, Tom, a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, and Shirley, an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, made sure their children also experienced an upstanding black social circle.
“Our dentist, Dr. Parker, was black. My piano teacher, Mrs. Scott and her husband, black. A lot of my parents’ friends were engineers, doctors and lawyers,” she remembers. It sounds very much like a Cosby Show existence, I say. “Yes! And I was Lisa Bonet. But, you see how that turned out.”
Bonet’s character Denise Huxtable was a bit of a firebrand, and parents Heathcliff and Clair both worried about her future: so yes, Williams is correct in comparison. Tom and Shirley were especially concerned during their daughter’s tumultuous tenure at Hot 97. “My parents were very embarrassed by the way I conducted myself on the radio and I know that,” she admits. “They would fake happy, meanwhile their friends would say, ‘That Wendy is something else.’ But I was getting popularity from being that ‘something else.’ But I don’t think that was what my parents had in mind when they thought of my career. My older sister is an attorney and my younger brother is a schoolteacher. No, I wasn’t out there doing full splits in Playboy magazine, but it is still not what my parents would have wanted me to gravitate to.”
Kevin Hunter, Wendy’s second husband (after a quickie marriage when younger), was another surprise for Wendy’s parents. “I first met Kevin almost 21 years ago. He was a good person, raised in not so good conditions. While his type was not what I was raised to bring home, I really liked him. Maybe the Martin Luther King, Barack Obama type isn’t for everybody.”
Hunter swept the 5-foot-11 Williams off her feet after they met at a skate party she was hosting. He, a hair salon owner and party promoter, was there to check out DJ Mister Cee, whom he was interesting in booking. Since marrying in 1998, their relationship has withstood miscarriages, infidelity (she admitted in her 2001 book, Wendy’s Got The Heat, that Hunter cheated on her and she found out a month after their son was born), a sexual harassment suit against her husband filed by a former employee (they both deny it) and job changes (after exiting Hot 97, the two moved to Philly, where Williams worked tirelessly in the less glamorous radio market reestablishing her brand, eventually returning to New York to even greater success).
“He is my manager, co-executive producer of the show and my biggest productive cheerleader. I love him.” On January 20, 2014, while on-air, Williams broke out in tears, sobbing that her son, Kevin, Jr., 13, does not like her. Despite that emotional episode, she says she is not envious of her son’s strong relationship with his father; in fact, it makes her proud. “I love that he has his father. It’s a great thing, a black boy and his black father,” she says before tearing up. Is raising a teenage black son scary in light of the fates of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis? “Yes, it is. But we teach him he is public enemy number one and his job is to dispel that.” She starts to cry. While reaching for a tissue, she whispers, “Sometimes, I will stand at our front door and watch Little Kev and his father drive off until I see the last puff of smoke from the car’s exhaust. Then, I say to myself, ‘It’s good.’” “Hot Topics” is her show’s most popular segment and she doesn’t shy away from hotbutton issues such as Martin’s death or the polarizing topic of racism. In fact, she confronts them head on.
“It makes me so proud that my black mother and my black father can sit in my audience and the camera can zoom in on them and, without them saying a word, the world sees: ‘Oh my God, there is a full black family!’ And my parents have been married for a hundred years! And, when my black husband and my black behind can pull up to my black son’s school for a parent-teacher night and they see a full black family, that is really important. We need to discuss race not necessarily because I am being followed in the mall because someone knows that I am Wendy Williams, but because I am a black woman in the mall at 2 o’clock in the afternoon.”
Despite her growing multi-million dollar empire—that includes books, a wig line, products hawked on QVC, plus a new production company producing reality shows, game shows, movies and her talk show that’s guaranteed through the 2017 season—she’s well aware that she is not immune to the effects of racism. She also refuses to take anything for granted. She’s fallen into the abyss before and does not plan to repeat it. “I am looking at the wind-down years, not the windup years. I will not have a chance to make this back. I am not going to screw it up.”
And would you have a nemesis from your past, such as Puff Daddy, on your show now? “If I had a problem with you in the past, chances are I have moved on. I have a good life,” she says. Her eyes begin to water again. “My parents have seen me go from a loser to a winner. Most people don’t have the luxury of their parents seeing them come full circle. I feel sexy and I feel very accomplished. I have my family. I am grateful. And if Puffy did come on my show, he would have to remove those damn sunglasses.”
Credits: Styling: Memsor Kamarake ; Makeup: Merrell Hollis ;Hair: Antwon Jackson ;Manicurist: Tiana Hardy