What is he doing here, an intelligent and thoughtful man, giving airtime to a
family of white supremacists, or refereeing two violent midgets as they slug
it out over a woman, or nodding sympathetically as a bride-to-be breaks the
news to her fiancé on their wedding night that she is pregnant by her
brother? Jerry Springer, who in the back of his mind was going to become
president one day, somehow got sidetracked on to these shows, not really
forcibly but not entirely willingly either.
“These are jobs that were given to me and I don’t mind doing them but it’s not
ever anything I pursued,” he says, jaded, affable, as casual as a man can be
in a suit. We’re at the Dorchester: me; a press officer; a photographer; Bob
the UK bodyguard – a hangover from when Springer was filming his show here,
in case an aggrieved member of the studio audience pounced – and a producer
who wishes that Jerry would just get to the point and start promoting his
new programme. But Springer exhibits no particular urge to do that.
“I was assigned to do The Jerry Springer Show. ‘You’re going to host the
show’. I did it. I never had any great desire to be a talk-show host. It’s
fun to do, it’s not a passion. I always say I never watch the show but I
realise people do.”
He sounds faintly depressed. How did a man fascinated with politics since
childhood end up, if I’ve understood rightly, coasting? When you see him on
TV, he seems lightly detached. He’ll go so far as to wind up every show with
a soliloquy, what-can-we-learn-from-this stuff. But you won’t catch him
barking “You’re a whore!” at his pregnant teenage guests, as did Jeremy
Kyle. Or, at the other extreme, high on personal growth like Oprah. Jerry is
not involved. He likes to think of himself as one of life’s bystanders –
innocent – while, night after night, a maelstrom of Sodom and Gomorrah
breaks out all around him.
A typical Jerry summation: “So, your cousin comes to you in need of a place to
stay and you refuse to take her in unless she allows you to hide under the
bed when she is having sex with her lesbian lover?”
A typical guest’s reply: “Yup.”
Is there inside this man’s 63-year-old body a fixer? Does he want to make the
world a better place? I’m glad I asked because finally he sparks into life:
“That,” he says vehemently, “is where television crosses the line. Where you
get a TV personality who says what you ought to do and pretend that you are
taking this person and fixing their life. How arrogant to believe that a
one-hour television show can fix a person. I’m not advising them, I’m not
qualified to do that. I’m a TV guy, a lawyer, I’m not a psychiatrist or a
psychologist and I think it is wrong for television to pretend.”
Perhaps it’s also wrong, or disingenuous, to pretend as a TV presenter that
the medium in which you operate has nothing to do with you. That’s the
impression you get with Springer. As if television happened to him, like a
bad dream or an unexpected downpour. Lest he should forget, this cloud has a
$4 million (£2 million) a year silver lining. Peanuts compared with Oprah’s
$250 million annual earnings, but still.
When the show started in the early 1990s it was common for high-mind-ed people
in the media to condemn it as sleazy, vulgar and exploitative. What they
meant was that the people on the show were vulgar, and they were being
exploited by Springer, who they considered sleazy, and this he considers the
height of snobbery and hypocrisy: “Television is a mirror of society. It’s
just that I was raised in an era when television was exclusively upper
middle-class and white. You look at popular shows like Friends or Seinfeld.
Some people live like that. But most people have to work for a living and
are not standing around their living rooms in their beautiful apartments
making jokes. So what was new about our show is not that the public was
shocked that people like that exist – all you have to do is walk down any
street and you see it. It’s that we’d never see them on TV before.”
He doesn’t think that guests on talk shows are victims because “I don’t think
people walk the streets at night thinking ‘I can’t sleep at night, I’ve been
exploited’. You could get philosophical and say if people get the chance to
get something off their chest it’s probably the only time in years anyone’s
listened to them.” Then he interrupts himself and says: “But this is getting
way too deep. It’s only television.”
I tell him what I found most striking about the show was just how much rage
these confrontations between mother and son; man and wife; she-man and pimp,
provoke. The guests are ready to kill each other, and if they’re not kept
away from each other afterwards they will. In 2002 a man killed his ex-wife
after they both appeared on the show. Springer, ever the champion of the
working class, says: “I think as a general rule people of a lower income are
more authentic than people who are wealthy because in our education and
socialisation process we learn how to hide, we learn to be not authentic, we
learn how to be polite even when we think the person we are talking to is a
son of a bitch.” Springer, presumably then one of the “inauthentic”, lost
his temper only once. You can watch it on YouTube, how an antiSemitic
preacher tells Springer, who is Jewish, that he’s dumped Springer’s mother’s
body in the boot of his car and that he can’t seem to get hold of those
lampshades they made during the Holocaust. Springer gets very angry. Why
then?
“I shouldn’t have lost my temper,” he says. “But when somebody goes after your
mother . . .” The mother is significant. Earlier he has let slip: “Oh I
wouldn’t be doing the show if my mom was alive.”
He would have found it embarrassing? “Sure.”
Why, because it’s trashy? “No, that’s the wrong word to use because it assumes
people are trash. Hitler was trash. They may not be rich, they may not live
in the best neighbourhoods, they may be angry, they may use an f-word but
that’s not trash. They hurt like everybody else.”
So why be embarrassed? “Oh, because my mom was very proper and I just know my
reaction in front of my mom. There are things you don’t say in front of your
mother, there are things . . . I’m old-fashioned in that way. So I just know
I never would have started the show. I would have said, oh, I can’t do that
if Mom is watching.”
It’s all very vague, this. Can he be more specific? Was it the lewdness? The
swear words?
“No. After you live through the Holocaust what the hell is a TV show? I’m just
saying you behave in a certain way when you’re in front of your parents, you
behave in a certain way when you go to your church or temple. In other words
you act differently when you are in a nightclub with your friends.”
I don’t think what Springer is saying is that his world has become a nightclub
since he got into the media business. What he seems to be talking about is
the clash between his parents’ vicarious aspirations and how his life
actually has panned out. “I think they assumed I was going to be either a
doctor or a lawyer.” Springer did become a lawyer. He became a politician
and a news anchor too, but his mother didn’t live to see his next
incarnation.
We talk a little about his upbringing. Margot and Richard Springer were Jewish
refugees from Germany. They moved to London, where he was born, and, when he
was 5, to Queens in New York. He has clear and fond memories of childhood:
“Always at dinner, every night, my sister and I would have to talk about one
thing we had read in the paper that day. And, of course, I was a little boy,
so I would talk about sports most of the time but they would encourage me to
pick another story and then I became very interested in presidential
elections and things like that.
“I didn’t view that as an assignment; it was kind of fun,” but it
may have left a mark, a feeling that he should have made it in politics.
Hence his claim that television just happened to him. Could there be an
element of shame there?
Back to the air of sleaze that clings to Springer. We can trace his own moral
fall, and his rise in TV, back to 1974 – four years after running for
Congress – when he was forced to resign from Cincinnati City Council after
admitting that he’d hired a prostitute. The crucial evidence appeared in the
form of a cheque found by police during a raid on a brothel. It had been
signed by Springer.
“That’s 35 years ago,” he says, displeased with the choice of subject matter.
Did it affect his career?
“No.” But I think it has affected his career. Indeed, the cheque is pivotal.
Springer decided to admit everything and the voters admired his honesty. A
year later he won back his seat. A not dissimilar incident occurred in 1998.
It was rumoured that his wife, Micki, left him after he slept with a US porn
star the day before she appeared on his show to discuss her forthcoming
attempt to beat the world sex marathon record. It is a redtop news story
that he will neither confirm nor deny, although Springer is now separated
from his wife. The great irony is that when, five years later [in 2003],
Springer backed out of running for the Senate, he did so not because of the
cheque or the porn star or anything to do with his life behind closed doors,
but because of negative associations with The Jerry Springer Show. Politics,
he says, is “honestly what I spend more time doing each day than anything
else. I raise money and give political speeches. That’s my passion. I’m not
into television.” Well, maybe. At the time of our interview he was busy
wading through Robert Novak’s biography. So if it’s true that all his life
he’s wanted to throw himself whole-heartedly into politics, why can’t Jerry
Springer, a man who majored in political science at university, went on to
become Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign aide, then messed it all up with a lie,
subsequently staged a successful comeback, a man who is passionate about
politics and is supposedly indifferent to his day job, a man whose political
career depends on his giving up that day job, why can’t this man give up
television?
“It has to be the proper convergence of stars,” he replies unconvincingly. “It
has to be an office you want to run for. There’s no driving issue right
now.” He sounds like a teenage drifter making excuses for not finding a job.
It’s true he’s fascinated by what’s going on in America. He’s appalled by
the yawning wealth gap, the idea that “this is the first generation in
America where parents cannot look at the their kids and say, ‘Son, you’re
going to have a better life than I had’ ”. But I suspect that he needs TV as
an outlet for his twinkly cynicism. It suits his character. What is so
approachable about Springer is precisely this twinkle, the feeling that he
wouldn’t go berserk if you lit up a cigarette in a no-smoking area. One
doesn’t imagine he’s a man too fond of rules. Or of po-faced serious-ness. I
heard you met the Pope, I say. “Yes,” Springer says. “Boy, was he excited.”
The cheque hasn’t done his television career any harm. In fact it gave him
Trust-me-I’ve-Been-There credibility. Alongside the JSS he’s been presenting
America’s Got Talent. His new programme in the UK, the show his producer
wants him to plug, is called Nothing But the Truth: in which contestants are
asked various probing questions while attached to a lie-detector. In part
because of that cheque, Springer is the ideal presenter.
On the subject of morality, I found him revealing. “What are the big moral
questions?” he asked no one in particular. “Immorality is usually defined as
‘those things we would never do’. And those things we ‘kind of do’ are OK
and we rationalise them. So someone who never slept with a person outside
marriage would consider sex the basis of morality, and yet that same person
could go into business and try and screw the other person, try to pay a
working-class person as little as possible. It’s interesting what people get
upset about. Usually they get upset about things they would never do, so
they can feel better about themselves.”
Is he talking about himself: the person who has gone outside marriage but
remains the champion of the little guy? Or is he talking about all those
potential voters who couldn’t take him seriously as a heavyweight political
candidate because he presents shows in which the guests seem to exist in a
morality-free zone?
“If I was hired to do a show about death row, everyone I would be talking to
is a murderer. Does that mean we endorse murder? Does that mean murder is
good for society? No, the show is about murder. So if the show is about
outrageousness, of course the people on the show are going to be
outrageous.” Unfortunately for Springer, there’s a large section of the
American public that doesn’t see it that way.
He’s not given up his political ambitions but don’t hold your breath. There’s
no sign as yet that he’s going to be able to wean himself off that show. Now
63, “the living is good,” he says in that affable way of his, “I have
decided I’m not going to be an astronaut”. For a moment he allows himself to
ruminate on religion. He goes to synagogue regularly now: “My daughter’s
just gotten married. I think as you get older you think how all this makes
sense, if it does. Why are we here and what is this about?” Again he
interrupts himself, before it all gets too deep, presumably. “Hey, who am I
kidding – we can’t pretend to figure all this out.”
Nothing But the Truth starts on October 28 at 9pm on Sky One
