They Call Me Baba Booey Read online

  They Call Me Baba Booey is a work of nonfiction.

  Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2010 by Gary Dell’Abate

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Photo Credits can be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dell’Abate, Gary.

  They call me Baba Booey / Gary Dell’Abate with Chad Millman.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60443-3

  1. Dell’Abate, Gary. Radio producers and directors—United States—Biography.

  I. Millman, Chad. II. Title.

  PN1991.4.D46A3 2010

  791.4402′33092—dc22 2010035302

  [B]

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  v3.1

  To my beautiful wife, Mary:

  I couldn’t do it without you.

  Thanks for your love and support.

  To Jackson and Lucas:

  You are not just my kids, you are my best friends.

  To Mom and Dad:

  I wouldn’t be who I am without you.

  God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.

  —BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “BRILLIANT DISGUISE”

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Becoming Baba Booey: The Cure for What Ails Me, 1997

  Chapter 1: War Heroes, Psych Wards, Mental Breakdowns … and My Mom

  Chapter 2: Blind Rages and Bedwetting

  Chapter 3: Throwing Shoes, Swinging Shrubs, and the Shock of My Life

  Chapter 4: My Hippie Brother, My Gay Brother, and Me

  Chapter 5: Casey Kasem, Countdowns, and Columbia House

  GREATEST AM RADIO SINGLES OF THE ’70S

  Becoming Baba Booey: A Day That Will Live in Infamy, 1990

  GREATEST ALL-TIME BABA BOOEY SHOUT-OUTS

  Chapter 6: There Is Such a Thing as Being Overprotective

  Becoming Baba Booey: My Caps, 1988

  Chapter 7: The Mott Street Gambler Goes Broke

  Chapter 8: These Are My Guys

  Becoming Baba Booey: The Nancy Chronicles, 1984-88

  Chapter 9: Conspiracies, Roy Rogers, Tampons, and Finding My Calling

  Chapter 10: The Coolest Radio Station Ever and Sticking It to Rick Cerone (Go Mets!)

  BABA BOOEY’S TOP 7 CONCERTS

  Chapter 11: I Own Nassau Coliseum

  Chapter 12: Champale and Intimate Companions

  Becoming Baba Booey: My Brother Steven, 1991

  Chapter 13: My Fellow Music Nerds

  RECORD WORLD PLAYLIST, CIRCA 1982-83

  Chapter 14: I Am a Clemo Winner, Dammit!

  Becoming Baba Booey: The Videotape, 1988/1999

  Chapter 15: Fridays and Sally Foo

  GREATEST BAD STORYTELLING SONGS OF THE ’70S

  Chapter 16: The Birthday Pact

  Becoming Baba Booey: Marrying Mary, 1992

  Chapter 17: Roz Makes WNBC Feel Just Like Home

  Chapter 18: Piloting the “N” Car

  GARY’S REVERSE BUCKET LIST

  Chapter 19: Dial-a-Date Is a Serious Turn-on

  Chapter 20: Boy Gary, Tassels, and a Snow Bunny

  Becoming Baba Booey: The Pitch, 2009

  Chapter 21: 6:54:30 … The Long Walk Back to Howard’s Office

  Chapter 22: Things Were Better When They Were Bad

  Photo Insert

  REJECTED BOOK TITLES

  BABA BOOEY’S DESERT ISLAND DISCS

  BABA BOOEY’S MUST-HAVE JUKEBOX SONGS

  STUMP THE BOOEY: THE HOME VERSION

  Acknowledgments, Part 1

  Acknowledgments, Part 2

  Photo Credits

  About the Authors

  1997

  “Why are you talking to me like this?”

  Oh shit, I thought. I had just cracked open the back door of my house one afternoon in early March 1997 and heard my wife, Mary, asking that question. She sounded pissed and confused. She never sounded pissed and confused.

  Mary is blond, kind, demure, and quiet. She is steady. I liked her when we first met because we didn’t argue; we had conversations. I didn’t do that with anyone else I knew. Ever. My entire life, from the time I was born to the first and only professional job I’ve ever had, producing The Howard Stern Show, has been built around chaos and confrontation. But Mary’s world was full of happy, respectful people who treated her well. It had never occurred to her to ask, “Why are you talking to me like this?” because no one ever did. (I never asked because that’s all anyone did.) Someone on the phone was yelling at her. And she was confused. Genuinely very confused, as if she didn’t know the person on the other end of the line.

  The truth was, she didn’t, at least not really. But I did.

  I knew who Mary was talking to the second I opened the door. It was my mom. My beautiful, warm, fierce, absolutely 100 percent certifiably crazy mom, Ellen.

  You know that movie Misery with Kathy Bates, where she plays the nut job who kidnaps James Caan and breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer? There is a scene where it is raining and Kathy Bates’s character looks uncommonly sad. “Sometimes when it rains I get really blue,” she says. Well, blue was my mom’s favorite word when I was growing up. Feeling blue. Having the blues. Bad weather, an argument with one of her six brothers and sisters, or a perceived slight from a neighbor could trigger it. When she felt fine she could gab all day long in a voice that sounded like Mary Tyler Moore with a Brooklyn accent. But if I asked her a question and her answers were short and curt or just a simple yes or no, that meant trouble. I knew a storm was brewing. It would lead to days and days of feeling blue, causing her to sleep in all morning because she had spent most of the night pacing. Or screaming. Or both.

  She was clinically depressed, only no one knew to call it that at the time.

  Early on, when Mary and I started dating and then got married, I did a good job of hiding my mom’s instability. It wasn’t too hard. She could be as tender as she was unhinged. When I was growing up she’d buy random gifts to keep around the house and pass out to my friends when the mood struck her. But those friends had also seen her end phone calls she didn’t like by slamming the receiver down five or six times—Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!—and then walk into her room, throw the door closed, and let out a holy, ear-piercing scream. They all understood how hot and cold she could run. In high school my friend Frank said to me, “You know your mom’s crazy, right?” I said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “But she’s your mom.” He knew what the score was. My dad was an ice cream salesman, normal as can be. My mom was … not exactly normal. Frank and I laughed about it. I just shrugged my shoulders, as if I were raised in a ’70s sitcom.

  After Mary and I were married and then especially after we had our first son, Jackson, shielding her from my mom became pretty much impossible. Sometimes I would take the phone in my room and hide so Mary wouldn’t hear me talking my mom down. It started to create a little trouble between us, in a way that wasn’t at all like living in a sitcom.

  And it came to a head that day in March, nearly five years after we were married. As Mom yelled at Mary for God knows what, I knew there was no more hiding it. That call was followed by one from my older brother Anthony, which ended in the two of us having a fight. And then came a call from my dad, which also ended in a fight. And finally there was one more call from my mom, which, yep, ended in a fight.

  When the calls finally s
topped, Mary looked at me and said, “Your head is so fucked up over your mom. You have to go see someone.”

  Mary was the one pushing me to see a shrink, and that really meant something to me. I don’t think she has ever really believed in therapy, but I do. With a family like mine, I thought about therapy a lot, and it didn’t frighten me at all. Everyone needs help at times. Howard and Robin talked about their own experiences in therapy plenty of times on the Stern show. Plus, I had lived in New York for a long time—almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist or went to a support group. My close friend Patty had always told me that seeing a shrink was a fantastic experience because you can get someone’s complete attention for fifty minutes and they put your thoughts into perspective. I always liked the way she described it.

  But Mary telling me to go get help was the push I needed. That’s not to say it didn’t freak me out—if my skeptical wife wants me to go, I must be really acting crazy.

  First, I had to find someone. I had heard through the grapevine about Alan, a therapist that a good friend of mine and some people I knew in the music business had seen. The lead singer for a band I liked went to Alan, too. I felt like he was the shrink to the industry. That was cool. And when I called him to make the appointment he sounded like a regular guy, not someone playing Freud in the movies. I felt as though I could talk to him and he would be straight with me.

  As soon as I made the appointment I thought to myself, Now it’s on, the adventure begins. I was a little bit nervous. But mostly I had been so distraught I welcomed the change. I can only describe it as how I feel when I am sick and I make a doctor’s appointment and I know that after I see the doctor I will feel better. I saw this as the antidote to what ailed me. If this went well I was going to be feeling better. I was excited.

  Two weeks later, March 24, 1997, I had my first appointment.

  That morning I was in my office at K-Rock at 5:35, as I am every morning. As the show’s producer, I need to be in early and I need to know everything that happened in the world between when I went to bed and when I got to my desk. I checked emails and typed up a list of what was on the show that day. Howard showed up at 5:45, read the paper, and had some breakfast, then we chatted for about five minutes, a day like any other. I didn’t mention that I was seeing a shrink that afternoon. Not a chance. I hadn’t told my mother, my father, or my brother. I was not ready to share news like this on the show.

  At 6:01 Howard went on the air. And at 6:05 he called me into the studio. “What are you doing to your hair?” he asked me. “It looks like you got caught in the rain.”

  “I put gel in my hair,” I said.

  Whenever you do something different, someone on the show will call you on it. The exhausting part is not knowing what “different” actually is. Do something radical and you know you will get killed. I once shaved my mustache and immediately everyone told me I looked terrible and that I should grow it back. I kind of expected that. But if I had any thought that putting gel in my hair that morning would warrant discussion on the air, I wouldn’t have done it. In fact, I was wishing I hadn’t.

  “You put way too much gel in,” Howard said.

  “They put gel in my hair on the Fox After Breakfast show and I liked it, so I wanted to try it,” I said.

  We had done the Fox show to promote the movie Private Parts, which was based on Howard’s book and had come out just two weeks earlier. It had debuted at No. 1. Being in the movie was a very happy thing for me. I went to the premiere with my parents, wife, brother, and sister-in-law. Mary and I walked the red carpet—heady stuff for a radio producer.

  “It looks like it’s lying on your wet hair,” Howard said. “It makes your teeth look bigger.”

  “I think it looks okay,” I said. “I’ll go back to my regular hair tomorrow.”

  Then I left. And this is the flip side of working at the show. Was Howard just breaking my balls or was he doing me a favor? Was it good radio or was it the truth? Sometimes hurtful things were said and I’d talk to Howard during the break. He’d say, “I was just doing a bit.” I still wouldn’t know if what was said on the air was the truth or if what was said on the break was a lie. It’s a labyrinth.

  But it’s not why I needed to see a shrink.

  My appointment was late in the day. I allowed plenty of time to get downtown. I knew that if you’re late to see a psychologist the whole appointment becomes about why you’re late. K-Rock was on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street and Alan’s office was in Greenwich Village, near New York University. I gave myself ninety minutes to get there, because I wasn’t sure if I’d find a parking spot. I was ready for the appointment and had been looking forward to it for two weeks. I was already convinced that peace of mind was just a handful of fifty-minute sessions away. But I’d be lying if I said my parking obsession wasn’t just another part of the neurosis that was sending me to Alan.

  I am always early. I don’t like to be in a rush when going anywhere. I need to know where all the doors are, as they say, wherever I am. I like to scope out a scene. Surprises are not my thing. I grew up with lots of surprises, some of them nasty, every day. So the things I can control, I tend to try and control. I crave predictability. For instance, my drive to work is full of checkpoints that keep me comfortable. I pull out of my garage in Connecticut at 4:50 every morning. At 5 A.M., as I get on Interstate 95, I turn on 1010 WINS. If I hear the sports at 5:15 and I’m not on the Bruckner Expressway, I know I’m behind schedule. At 5:20 I turn on some music and no later than 5:30 I pull into the garage at the Sirius XM offices. I am at my desk by 5:35.

  As I drove down Fifth Avenue to see Alan, I obsessed about the appointment. Who was this guy? What was he going to do? Was he going to ask me to lie on a couch with a piece of tissue under my head so I wouldn’t get gel on the pillow? Would I click with him? What if I hated him? My friends who were in therapy told me I might have to see a few psychologists before I found one I clicked with. If that was true, then I’d have to talk to them again to find a new guy. Where was I going to park?

  I pulled up to the address. I was glad it was a residential building instead of a crowded office tower. It was white and old and had a flight of marble steps leading up to a door with white pillars on either side. I drove around the block looking for a place to park and found a spot right away, which was a huge relief. Except then I had twenty minutes to kill. I sat in my car, listened to the radio, and thought about the appointment. I wondered who else might be in the waiting room. Would their something be more fucked up than my something?

  When I finally entered the building, it was eerily quiet. There was no doorman, no one walking around. Just an elevator. When I got to the waiting room, there wasn’t a receptionist, just some worn-looking furniture and framed posters of flowers on the walls. Across the room was a closed door, a mystery door leading to someplace else. I was alone, the only one with a fucked-up anything in the whole place.

  And that’s when I started wondering: What the hell are we going to talk about? I mean, I knew why I was there, but to get to that we were going to have to talk about a lot of other stuff.

  Just then Alan walked through the mystery door into the waiting room. My first thought was, Hey, it’s Judd Hirsch as the shrink in Ordinary People. He was in his mid-fifties, wore glasses and comfortable shoes, and had a thick New York accent. The guy just looked like New York to me. He reached out his hand. “Gary?”

  I was the only one in the room, so I stood up.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  I followed him through the mystery door. We walked down a long, dark hallway with offices lining both sides. Each door had a sound machine in front of it running on static, so no one could hear what was happening on the other side. Alan’s was the office at the end of the hall. My stomach buzzed with nerves, the good kind. I just couldn’t help thinking that if the appointment went well, I was going to leave there feeling better.

  “Right in here,” he said, poin
ting to his office.

  It was less luxurious than I expected, maybe even a little bit shabby. There was no oak library, no couch to lie down on, just a love seat, opposite a leather chair that Alan plopped himself into.

  Then he leaned forward, rubbed his hands together like he was warming them up, and said, “So, why are we here?”

  “Well,” I answered. “Many people must sit on this love seat and tell you that their mother is crazy.” I paused. “I have documentation.”

  He laughed and said, “Okay.”

  For the next hour I told Alan my deepest, darkest secrets, things I had never shared during a life spent oversharing on the show. In fact no one—not Howard, Robin, Fred, none of the Stern regulars—truly knows how crazy my life was growing up.

  Let me tell you, becoming Baba Booey wasn’t easy.

  I STOOD ON THE AVOCADO GREEN CARPET of my living room in Uniondale, Long Island. My mom, Ellen, walked out of her bedroom, carrying an overnight bag she had just packed. Our house was a one-story ranch, and I watched her as she inched down the hall toward the living room.

  She stopped just a few steps from me and bent down, practically kneeling on the carpet in her dress. She always cared about how she looked, no matter where she was going. “Come here,” she told me. I was five years old and she wanted to tell me something face-to-face. I walked closer. She hugged me and said, “Mommy isn’t feeling very well. I have to go away for a couple of days.”

  I knew she cried a lot. I knew she screamed a lot. And I knew people didn’t do those things unless something was wrong. I thought she was physically sick and going to a hospital to get better.

  My older brothers, Anthony, who was thirteen, and Steven, who was eleven, stood next to her. They knew what was really happening. So did my aunt Maryann, who had come over to watch us that afternoon.

  When my mom let go of me she stood up, smoothed down her dress, picked up her bag, and followed my dad, Sal, out the front door. They were headed for the psych ward at Syosset Hospital.

  My parents met in 1947 at Webster Hall, a dance place in Manhattan. He was twenty-two from Little Italy; she was twenty and from Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn. “He walked up to me and asked me to dance,” my mom once told me. “I told him, ‘I heard about all you fellas from Manhattan. You’re all a bunch of gangsters.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I checked my gun at the bar.’ I thought, how sarcastic. That intrigued me.