So you’re at home, in an unremarkable block of flats in Hampstead Garden
Suburb. How would you feel if Jerry Springer rang the bell? This was a few
years ago. Springer was over in the UK, doing a TV show. “And I said to some
of the people,” he remembers, “ ‘Hey! Let me show you where I was born!’ So
we went to Belvedere Court. Lyttelton Road. It’s still the same. Most places
in England are. And I said: ‘I think it’s apartment 45.’ So we knock on the
door, and they’re shocked. Of course they are. You’re not real happy if
Jerry Springer turns up on your doorstep. ‘I used to live here!’ After that,
they’re the nicest people. We sit down, have tea, something to eat. They’re
calling their relatives.”
Sweet story, I say. “Wait,” says Springer. “Cut to a year later. I’m back in
England. My sister is with me. And Evelyn, she says: ‘Let’s go and see the
old place.’ And I say: ‘Yeah, they’re the nicest people.’ So we go up the
stairs, and I go to knock on number 45, but she’s already knocking on 48.
I’d got it wrong.”
Still, same reaction. “And when we left,” Springer says, “I said to my sister:
‘This is crazy. They’re neighbours. They are going to talk, right? They’re
going to think that this is a scam. They’re going to think that Jerry
Springer goes to every house, and gets free tea. And a meal.’ ” Look out for
him. Jerry Springer is in London to play Billy Flynn in the stage show of Chicago.
In order to come and do a show called Chicago, he’s just left a show
in Chicago. That was The Jerry Springer Show. Once he’s finished Chicago,
in six weeks’ time, he’ll be going back to do it again. Although not in
Chicago, but in Connecticut. It’s all a bit confusing.
“Why am I doing this?” Springer says, leaning forward, as his minder Bob
watches me, nonchalantly, like a vast and scary cat. “Why not? I’m at a
point in life where it’s not like I have to do things to make a living. It’s
not a new direction. At 65, I have one direction, and it’s down. But it’s
the West End!” And he’d like to play Flynn on Broadway too, he reveals.
Sometimes, when he’s keen for you to get the point, Jerry Springer does that
Jewish-American thing of putting sentences the wrong way around. “Once in
your life you get a chance to be at the West End!” he says. Like Yoda.
I suppose he just had some time between Chicago and Connecticut, and decided
to fill it with Chicago. In London. Because London, as he explains,
is a city very close to his heart. He didn’t just live here for five years
as a child, he was also famously born here, down in a Tube station during
the Blitz. “I kept saying to people it was East Finchley,” he says,
frowning, “but of course that never made sense, because it’s outdoors. But
no, my sister told me it was Highgate. Of course, I don’t remember.” He
tells me he was there that very morning, doing a piece for ABC America.
“Weren’t we?” he says. Bob nods.
Until now, Springer has acted only once before, in a play in college. He
doesn’t remember the title exactly; something along the lines of Oh
God, Dad’s Dead, Mom’s Hungry in the Closet and I’m Feeling so Sad.
Not a comedy. He played a bellboy. “Obviously I’m used to being in front of
a camera,” he says, “but not in camera.” He thinks that producers were
attracted by his performance in the American Dancing with the Stars,
in which he was popular but dreadful, much in the manner of John Sergeant.
He came fifth.
It was only after he had been offered the Chicago role, he says, that
producers remembered to invite him along for an audition, to check that he
could sing. He went along to a big empty room in Cambridge Circus with five
chairs and a piano in it. “Very nervous,” he says. He sang an old country
song by Jim Reeves called She’ll Have to Go. They must have
liked it. After that, he got somebody to record the piano for his three
songs, and stuck it on his iPod. He’s been singing along since. “Micki, my
wife, says I’ll be sitting in a restaurant and my lips are moving. People
think I’m nuts.”
He’s an odd fish, Jerry Springer, taken as a whole package. Fun to talk to,
but strangely grave. He says that he loves his viewers and that they are
always friendly and nice, although he says this while sitting at the same
table as Bob, who keeps scanning the room for danger. He’s over here to plug
a West End musical, but he’s at his most animated and interesting on
American politics circa 1968. It’s like he’s one sort of man, living the
life of another.
Springer is best known, obviously, for The Jerry Springer Show.
“Jeh-rrrie! Jeh-rrrie!” My Ex-Husband Married a Horse, etc. Criticise the
show, and he’ll defend it. “Pure elitism. Celebrities go on television every
night, with the same stories. Britney was picked up for this, Lindsay Lohan.
We can’t get enough of it. If I looked through your newspaper, I could pick
20 stories, right now. So its disingenuous to say, Jerry, your show deals
with these people. We all deal with these people. Every day.” Not that he’d
appear on a similar show himself. “And nor would my friends.” He went on Dancing
with the Stars to learn to dance for his daughter’s wedding, but there
was no way, he says, that the cameras were following him to the big day.
“I’m a private person. I’m really good at it, and my family demand it. If
you mix your personal life with your professional life, you will ruin both.
Invariably.”
Springer’s parents were German Jews. Recording an episode of the genealogy
show Who Do You Think You Are?, he discovered that they had been
among the last hundred Jews to leave Germany only a few weeks before Hitler
invaded Poland. In his parents’ home the walls are covered with pictures of
the rest of their family, all of whom had died in the Holocaust. As a
result, the older Springers spoke German to each other but never to their
children. “Germany was the enemy,” Springer says. When his parents’
German-Jewish friends came around, he and his sister used to talk to each
other in gibberish to pretend that they had a foreign language of their own.
When Springer was 5 the family moved to Queens, New York, and embarked upon
what he calls “a full-blown programme called the Americanisation of Gerald.
Boy Scouts, the Little League, take guitar lessons. ‘Gerald, go to summer
camp!’ I was going to become an American.” Like any good Jewish boy, it was
always expected that he would become a doctor or a lawyer. As a teenager,
though, Springer was smitten by the civil rights struggle. “ I remember
watching little black children being hit over the head, trying to go to
school in Alabama,” he says. “Back then, it was just so clear who were the
good guys and who were the bad guys. Its like all these silly movies now,
where the Southern sheriff is always the bad guy. But that is what it was
like.”
He went to law school, and worked for Bobby Kennedy. “My idol,” he says. After
Kennedy’s assassination, he moved to Cincinnati, worked at a law firm, and
started running for office as an anti-war candidate. In 1970, at 26, he ran
for Congress. He didn’t make it, but got 45 per cent of the vote. By 1977 he
was the Mayor of Cincinnati. In 1982 he ran for the Democratic nomination
for Governor of Ohio. In part because of a mid-1970s run-in with a
prostitute (you can still find his confession on YouTube) he didn’t get it.
So he became a journalist. “I never wanted politics to become my
profession,” he says, “because the day that it does is the day you become
intellectually dishonest. If you have to win the next election to put food
on the table, you start compromising. You couch it, you start selling out. I
treat politics like I treat religion. I say what I really feel.”
For a while he was a news anchor, and a political commentator. He’s keen to
point out that in the US he still does a huge amount of political
commentary, largely on the radio. When The Jerry Springer Show began,
in 1991, it was a fairly political show. Over time, though, producers
realised that ratings success lay in looking downwards. “We don’t deal with
anything serious,” Springer says now. “You know, it’s dating. I’m not saying
people don’t get angry, but it’s not life-changing. It’s not serious stuff.
The emotions are real but we’re more of a circus.”
In recent years he has been a passionate supporter of Hillary Clinton. He
describes Barack Obama as “magical”. He and the new President haven’t met,
although Obama has been on his show. Sort of. “It was after the election,”
Springer explains. “Right before he got sworn in. In America our biggest
political programme is Meet the Press on Sunday morning. That week
they did it in Chicago, from my studio. I mean, they’ve put another sign
over the Jerry Springer sign, but it’s my studio. The dancing hole — for the
strippers? — it’s right to one side. And Obama is saying: ‘Finally! I made
the Springer show!’ ”
For all that, there’s a reticence. In part, I suspect, he knows that there’s a
new generation in charge and it makes him feel old. “I feel good that this
new generation is picking up our liberalism,” he says, and somehow we are
back into 1968.
“There has never been a year like it,” he says. “Obviously there was 9/11, but
that was just one event. Nineteen sixty-eight was an endless series of
events. The Tet Offensive! Lyndon Johnson is not going to run for election!
Four days later, Martin Luther King is assassinated! Riots! Two months
later, Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. More riots, at the Democratic
convention. And then, in a bitter piece of irony, Richard Nixon gets
elected! How the f*** did that happen?”
Politics. Not showbiz. That’s what you’ll get, when Jerry Springer turns up at
your house for tea. Well, that and Bob.
Jerry Springer appears in Chicago at the Cambridge Theatre from June 1. He
is a guest on The One Show at 7pm tonight on BBC One
