Wendy is Ready for Her Close-Up, America

It’s no secret that Wendy Williams wears a wig. Oh no, honey, she talks about it all the time on her radio show, four hours of daily gab and gossip broadcast nationally from New York. Of course there is little about the statuesque Wendy that is under wraps; there is even a taxonomy to her hairpieces. “Ones that might be thinning a bit because they’re older, I wear those if I’m outside washing my car in the driveway,” she said. “Then you have a gym wig — a gym wig and a Target wig are the same thing — and the ones I wear to the mall on the weekend with my family.”

There is what she calls an “airport-schlepping wig” and a shorter one she reserves for days out with her son, Kevin, 8. “You can’t be flinging long fake hair around at a birthday party,” she said with a deep laugh. Most important, lately, are her show wigs: the piles of blond upon blond — “they weigh three times as much as a regular wig” — that she will wear on her televised, hourlong talk show, which is set to begin July 13.

Broadcast live in New York and syndicated nationally, “The Wendy Williams Show” is a chance for Wendy, who will turn 45 this month, to expand her reach and her brand — without, she hopes, sacrificing her persona. “People that I’ve talked to regarding the TV show, they’re asking: Who are your guests going to be? Am I nervous to go out there? What do you think America’s going to say?” Wendy said in a recent interview in the pink-and-purple offices above her pink-and-purple television studio. “I’m not overconfident. It’s just that I’m not caught up in that. What will be, will be. The die is cast. I can’t be anybody but me.”

That persona — down to earth yet over the top, a self-proclaimed real housewife of New Jersey who has been open about her plastic surgeries, her cocaine habit and her husband’s infidelities, as well as her disdain for similarly indulgent celebrity behavior — is also, essentially, her platform. Her success depends on tireless oversharing of everything from details of her personal life to her unvarnished opinions about pop culture. “Who am I kidding? I don’t really cook,” she said when introducing a cooking segment with the chef Rocco DiSpirito. About Jennifer Aniston she said, “In my head I’ve been telling you forever that you’re such a bore and nobody wants you.”

Reviewing the show when it was shown during a six-week trial run last summer, Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New York Times, “She has a bawdy and arch side, but she can be startlingly mean-spirited.” Oprah, Ellen, even Tyra Wendy is not, though it’s also no secret that she aspires to one-name status.

“I like to say that Wendy has a brashness, a sassiness to her, that she’s loud in a very good way, in look and point of view,” said Lonnie Burstein, the executive vice president of programming at Debmar-Mercury, the production company behind the TV show. (It also counts Wendy and her husband and manager, Kevin Hunter, as executive producers.) “Whether she’s talking or you’re looking at her, you have to notice her.”

Radio audiences have long been paying attention. “The Wendy Williams Experience,” the eight-year-old radio show that Wendy will continue to host each afternoon from WBLS, 107.5 in New York, where she frequently dominates that time slot, drawing about 12 million listeners nationwide.

Wendy has been courted by TV before. Her last foray, a bawdy late-night show for VH1 in 2006, lasted a handful of episodes. The new show, following the trial run last summer that was broadcast in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Detroit, will distill much of the same material she has honed over her two-decade career in radio: a frothy gossip segment called Hot Topics, celebrity interviews, fashion and cooking tips, and an Ask Wendy finale.

On her five-inch heels in size 11 shoes, Wendy roams the studio offering advice — though, as she freely declares, she has no therapeutic, medical or legal expertise. But she sure knows how to wield a mike and a catchphrase. Delivered with a lilting, drag-queeny leer, hers is “How you doin’?” (She’s not Martha, either.)

“She is willing to let it all hang out,” said Rob Dauber, an executive producer of the show and a veteran of the Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O’Donnell shows. On the first of last summer’s episodes Wendy pulled a Post-it note from underneath the lip of her wig. On another, congratulating a cameraman on the birth of a daughter, she said, “Kenny, you don’t mind if I say your sperm was frozen?” (“Uh, no,” Kenny replied.)

Wendy’s distinctive voice may be her strength, wrote Steve Sternberg, the executive vice president for audience analysis at the media-buying group Magna Global Entertainment, in an e-mail message. Ratings for syndicated talk shows, including Ms. Winfrey’s, have fallen in the last several years, so there is some room in the daytime market, he wrote. “Ordinarily clones do not work, but original, strong personalities can break through (see Ricki Lake, Rosie, Dr. Phil).” And of the 14 syndicated daytime talk shows now on television, 10 have an audience whose median age is 50 or above, he wrote, so someone who skews younger could be appealing.

For Wendy being on TV is a natural progression in her life and career. She watches talk above all else and has already conquered another medium, print, with autobiographies and a novel series about a “diva deluxe” D.J., Ritz Harper. (In the latest, “Ritz Harper Goes to Hollywood!,” the character tries to get her own — what else — talk show.)

She has been called the black Howard Stern but hates it. (“There’s only one big-breasted woman on this show, and that’s me,” she said.) Though she famously took Whitney Houston to task in a profanity-laced 2003 call-in interview on her radio show, and though she squared off with Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, the biting reality star, in an episode last summer, Wendy also doesn’t like being called controversial. “I think I’ve gotten that word attached to my name more than I really live up to it,” she said. “Controversy: O.K., that’s like calling me a D.J.,” another term she hates, along with “shock jock.” “It’s limiting,” she said.

Talking on TV is no different from talking on the radio, she said, except that she has to be more aware of her appearance. Watching last summer’s episodes she learned to be mindful of her posture and what she called her “eye pop.” (She has a thyroid condition related to Graves’ disease that can make her gaze a little intense.) To keep her self-consciousness at bay she limits the use of monitors on the set. “I can get caught up in angles,” she said, “whether it’s a fat angle or” — she made a shocked face — “that expression is so great, but if I saw myself do it, my eyes buckle, and I get a double chin, so I wouldn’t do it.”

Being TV-ready is a daily battle. “You know, I just started going to the gym. I let a lot fall” — she jiggled her upper arm — “before I started to take care of myself.”

That’s the kind of just-us-girls confession that makes her appealing, Mr. Dauber said. He counseled her to acknowledge her flaws and admit her ignorance. “If you’re not sure what camera to be looking at, say it,” he said. And she does.

Part of the allure of the TV show is that others, including her husband, can have control. “I know I get this together every day,” she said, gesturing to her body, gladly giving her measurements (40-30-40), “get out there, do it, turn the world on with my smile, give some reasonable advice, and move along. And he takes the ball when I get off, and he moves it to the masses. I’ve given him a great product.” (Their relationship drew attention last year when Kevin was accused of sexual harassment in a lawsuit by a female employee on the radio show; it was settled out of court. He declined to be interviewed.)

He hangs out backstage when she’s doing the show, but she considers the audience members her co-hosts; they are miked during Hot Topics, though she often talks over them.

“The responsibility that I ultimately feel to the audience is to entertain, maybe enlighten, and help you take your mind off messy things,” Wendy said. “We all have things that are messy going on in our life, that we would rather forget for a moment. I do, you do, we all do. And truthfully, being out in front of the people for those six weeks was just, ah, my God, such a Calgon bath. And then I’d go back home and deal with the mess. And that’s what I want people to do.”

Sitting at a hot-pink conference table in her office, with her name spelled out in giant block letters on one wall, pulling a to-do list out of her Louis Vuitton organizer, fingers covered in stacks of diamonds, she didn’t seem very messy, honestly. Wendy gave a look: oh no, honey. “That means you’re messier than me,” she said.


Originally published in the New York Times.
Photo: Fred R. Conrad