January 29–February 5, 1998

cover story

Wally Kennedy

Sidebar: Philly's Gift To The World

 

Wally's World

Quintessential morning man Wally Kennedy makes a go at midnight madness. How the nicest guy on Philly TV survives—and even thrives—in a Hard Copy universe.

By Jennifer Darr

It's 8:30 on a Tuesday night. In the roundhouse-style '60s-era Channel 6 studio, Wally Kennedy's on the set getting ready to tape the 36th Philly After Midnight. He sits in his perfect-sized black armchair, one that's not too fluffy and comfy, but not altogether uneasy, and says, "Have you heard about the Pamela and Tommy Lee videotape? C'mon. You have. Pamela and Tommy having sex at home, on their boat, in their car. It's been available on the Internet, but now they are sharing in the profits." He leans right into the camera, squints his bespectacled eyes and asks: "How'd the tape go public?"

It doesn't matter what he thinks. He won't tell you. He's got a firm commitment to the question mark.

And right now he's asking the right questions. Pamela and Tommy Lee aside, the allegations that President Clinton boinked a 21-year-old have given Wally Kennedy his greatest opportunity since the O.J. Simpson case, to which his former show AM Live dedicated about 100 programs. Like Pamela and Tommy Lee, the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is the kind of news people just can't get enough of. It's just the kind of smut his late-night audience stays up for.

It's just the kind of smut, in other words, that Philly After Midnight needs.

Despite Wally's triumphs in the ratings-driven and low-job-security world of TV—giving giants like Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O'Donnell a good fight; managing to bob while other local programs such as People are Talking sunk; interviewing women who murder in malls, mob-connected DJs, hothead mayors, presidential paramours, local legends and everyone and anyone who knew anything about O.J. Simpson; and maintaining a 23-year marriage and raising three cute kids—his AM Live was canned in October. Canceled to make room for Barbara Walters' talk show The View.

Walters' show, which was originally created for a morning slot, had dwelled quietly in the 1:35 a.m. slot since August. Her ratings in Philadelphia, the fourth largest market, were less than satisfactory, and that affected national ad revenues. The solution: ABC pushed The Rosie O'Donnell Show from 11 a.m. to 10 a.m., nestled The View in at 11, and sent Wally's 19-year-old show AM Live, the fourth most popular morning talk show in Philly, to 12:35 a.m.

But Wally's not angry. He doesn't hate Barbara.

"We were the odd man out in a game of TV musical chairs," he says.

Now, with a late-night air time, not only must he and his staff pump out racier programming to fit the new demographic, they must also butt heads with Conan and Tom Snyder, while keeping in mind that at that time of night people are getting sleepy.

They've got a punchy logo. They've got neon-heavy shots of Pat's and Geno's. Correspondent Karen Rogers takes her mike out to hotspots like Martini's Lounge. Wally's even got new glasses.

And, according to Wally, there's no topic they won't cover.

Can he do it? Can the affable, wide-eyed morning man keep the audiences awake at 12:35 a.m.? Can Wally, the quintessential nice guy, hold his own in the chair-flinging, knuckle-sandwich-eating, bad joke world of late-night TV?

Walter John Michael Kennedy was born to the son and daughter of Irish immigrants in the Rogers Park section of Chicago. "Rogers Park was like something out of a movie," Wally reminisces. Crime was something that happened in other neighborhoods. It was a place where kids played baseball in 5-foot-wide alleys. He attended St. Ignatius grammar school, where, according to then-Principal Sister Mary Henry O'Connell, who is now 87, retired and living in Rosemont, PA, he didn't stir up much trouble. When he was 10 his family moved to Wilmette, a northern suburb of Chicago. "They just kept having kids; we ran out of room."

At Loyola Catholic High School he wasn't a star student, but he was the second guy in his class to be made an altar boy. "Unfortunately, the first guy to be made an altar boy 10 years ago killed himself.

"Life doesn't always have a lot of happy endings," Wally says, "but [Wilmette] was very idyllic."

In the late '60s, while he studied broadcasting at Chicago's Columbia College (Pat Sajak's alma mater), he got his first job in broadcasting. He worked as a page on WGN-TV's Bozo's Circus, a children's program that included live animal acts and other circus-like curiosities. Every day after class he'd take the bus to the studio. Before the program began, the 180-person audience, which comprised fidgety kids and their even fidgetier parents, was asked to please pee before the show began, to avoid on-camera distractions. If you absolutely had to go while the cameras were rolling, the kids were told, raise your hand. As soon as a hand would go up, that was the cue for blue-suited pages like Wally. Their job was to quietly climb over the packed bleachers, pluck the squirming kid from his seat, take him to the bathroom, and bring him back—without being seen on camera.

It wasn't exactly the glamorous broadcasting job he'd dreamed of, and for a long time he always kept in mind that there were other career alternatives. His maternal grandfather, Walter Shanahan, after whom he was named, recommended government work; he'd lost his own company during the Depression and had ultimately landed a job in customs.

"He used to tell me to his dying day, 'Walt, you can never go wrong working for the government.' Which is one of the reasons I guess I kept my nose relatively clean during college. I thought: When this idea about radio falls through, I'll just go work for the customs service. Fortunately it didn't fall through."

Wally got his start in radio in the early '70s doing late-night talk. One of his first jobs was at WTRX-AM in Flint, MI. He joined the station as a DJ spinning the nightly 7 to midnight shift. "I knew I had no future in DJing. After one week I was tired of records. And I was tired of always being snappy—you know how DJs have to be between songs."

So he came up with his "Man on the Street" segment: one hour a week he would take his microphone outside and get people's opinions about current events and controversial issues, such as the Vietnam war, Watergate, Roe v. Wade and satanic possession.

"He was quite ahead of his time," says Dave Barber, who worked with Wally at the station. "He was doing talk radio when Rush Limbaugh was in high school. He would go out on the street and ask people topical questions. I remember there was some controversial issue at the time, maybe it was The Exorcist or something; he'd go out and ask people what they thought about it."

Wally started doing Man on the Street one hour a night. Then five hours a night. His music show became a talk show.

He would invite gynecologists on the air to talk about sexual dysfunction and toxic shock syndrome, says Barber. At that time, this was still considered delicate subject matter. "The doctors would use aliases—that's how racy it was considered," Barber adds.

Wally must have been doing something right—he even earned his own stalker.

She was a listener, and she wouldn't stop calling the station. The calls were only the beginning. She launched a full-on letter-writing campaign and showed up at every public appearance he made. At the time he was dating his future wife, Glendia (pronounced Glenda; the "i" in her name was a typo on her birth certificate).

Though he declines to discuss details ("talk show hosts are sensitive about that issue—you never know who is reading this"), he did say, "When Glendia and I were getting married, when the priest said, 'Is there anybody who can show just cause why these two people should not be married'—I half expected her to come walking down the aisle."

Sometimes the nuts were his guests.

Kennedy got a phone call one night from Flint police who said that one of his regular guests, 20-something psychic Ron Diamond, had holed himself up in his house. The police continued: He has a gun and he is threatening to blow his own head off. Maybe you can talk him out of it, they implored.

Diamond had appeared on Wally's program on many occasions—sometimes with a bag over his head and speaking in tongues, says Barber, other times revealing precise details about callers' pasts (like who a guy had an affair with three years ago and what color her glasses were). Wally, who believed in psychics as much as he believed in three-dollar bills, had even learned to respect him. For one, a psychic makes for good radio (the phone company, according to Wally, once logged 28,000 busy signals to the station in a three-hour period when Diamond was a guest—callers even blew out exchanges trying to get through). Secondly, Diamond, who claimed to channel people, just had a way of making you believe in him. "He said to me, 'You had a tough time in sixth grade.' Okay, now that's a pretty general statement. But he would follow it up with, 'Your father had a bad neck.'

"My father had spastic torticollis. His neck was always slightly bent to the left. On bad days it was almost touching his shoulder. My father never complained about it. There's no way Ron could have known that.

"He just made you believe."

Wally called Diamond and said, "Aww, just put the damn gun away. Come over to my house and Glendia will make us some dinner."

The psychic refused.

And the police gave up coaxing the distraught man.

The next day, Wally got another phone call from police. Diamond had blown his head off. He'd left a suicide note on audiotape: in it he said being on the show enabled him to see into the minds of too many people. "'I can walk into a room and all I see is heartbreak,' he said, 'like through a magnifying glass. I can't cope with it.'

"Fortunately, he had the class to stop the tape before he pulled the trigger," says Wally.

"I was one of only three people at the funeral," he adds plaintively. "It was pathetic—and sad.

"It made me have second thoughts. What if I had never put this guy on the air?"

It's 8 p.m., half an hour before taping. Wally is sitting around a conference room table warming up tonight's local guests, Inquirer reporter Jennifer Weiner, Dr. Pepper Schwartz and comedian Jimmy Carroll.

They are talking about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's recent foray into cinema and a recent study conducted by the University of Chicago that said the more educated you are the less sex you get.

"Did you hear about the deer urine?" says Schwartz, who looks like she could be Barbra Streisand's cousin. "Supposedly, hunters use it to attract bucks. But now they have to put warning labels on the bottles—labels that say 'do not drink or wear.'"

"Anyone that has to be told not to drink or wear deer urine should not be allowed to carry a firearm," quips Carroll.

Wally's warming them up for tonight's Philly After Midnight, which is all about sex.

"How about that study?" Wally asks Schwartz. "It says you get it more if you listen to jazz music, own a gun and are dissatisfied with the president.

"The Limbaugh crowd is doing the horizontal mambo as we speak," Wally chuckles.

"I don't agree with that study," says Schwartz, who's there to promote her new book, The Great Sex Weekend: A 48-Hour Guide to Rekindling Sparks for Bold, Busy and Bored Lovers.

"It goes against all our research."

"Tell me that when we're out there," he says, pointing to the door that leads to the studio.

In 1976, Wally moved on up: from Flint, the 52nd largest market, to Atlanta, the 12th—to WSB-AM. A few years later he switched to WRNG-AM. In 1980, he produced and hosted a weekly news feature for WAGA-TV and was occasionally seen as host on WTBS-TV.

In 1981, he moved North, to Philadelphia's WCAU-AM, to host The Wally Kennedy Show.

At WCAU, he had another run-in with a caller. "Someone threatened my life on the air for suggesting Steve Carlton was a prima donna. Now there's a threat that makes sense," he laughs. "That was back when he was winning 20 games. I suggested he was a prima donna not because he wouldn't talk to the press, but because he wouldn't talk to anybody."

The caller promised Wally: You keep talking like that and you'll get killed.

"I thought, 'If this is what it takes to get a threat in Philadelphia…'"

Less than a year later, he was co-host with Lizabeth Starr of AM/Philadelphia, a morning "Ken and Barbie"-style talk show.

They chatted, they did cooking demonstrations, they did makeovers, just like every other morning talk show that invaded local television in the early '80s. Always hosted by a guy-and-gal team who would start every show with "How was your weekend?" or "What'd ya have for dinner?" Only occasionally would they discuss "serious" issues.

"When I came in [AM/Philadelphia] was like that," he says. "My background in radio was always either controversy or talk. I spent the first year or so wondering, 'Is this really what I want to do? Makeovers, cooking demos?' I died doing cooking demonstrations.

"If I heard Chef Tell one more time… he would lift a leek and say, 'You take a leek…' Ha ha ha," Wally sighs.

Talking about arugula wasn't his only challenge; making the transition from radio to TV is not easy.

"The first year I felt that virtually every day was an embarrassment. I felt powerless. When I got into TV I thought it was all about physical appearance. I spent all my time running and working out like a fool—doing everything I could possibly do to make my physical appearance attractive."

Then he had an epiphany.

"I realized, Ted Koppel is not necessarily the best-looking guy on the block. He's not bad-looking, but it is what he does that people react to.

"Once I got to that point I thought, Okay, you have to be presentable. But, more importantly, I asked myself, how comfortable are you in your own skin?"

To his delight, in 1986 AM/Philadelphia dropped the personal hygiene stories and started covering more controversial issues.

It's three minutes till taping. Wally's in his black chair, in front of the camera, skimming his outline of questions, straightening his tie, sipping lemon-flavored Crystal Light. His brown hair is neatly combed to the side, his shirt is crisp. Though Philly After Midnight isn't live, he exudes all the nervous energy of a live talk show host.

On the TV monitor in front is New York entertainment reporter Lisa Stanley, a sassy, lip-linered blond. He's telling her which questions he will ask. To his left, on another monitor, is Seth Warshavsky, via satellite from Seattle. Warshavsky, the distributor of the Pamela and Tommy Lee tape, is jittery; he's not as seasoned as Stanley. Wally's giving him pointers.

"When you are talking just look straight into the camera, okay?"

The local guests won't be going on for another 10 minutes. Weiner, who's on the other side of the studio at the Action News anchor desk, looks at herself in a hand-held mirror. Schwartz paces around behind the cameras, oblivious to the tangle of cords on the floor and the four cameramen who are shifting chairs and cameras and wiring mikesCarroll sits quietly in a chair, in front of a large magnetic map of the United States.

"Prompter ready?" Wally calls out, adjusting his earpiece.

Silence.

"Prompter ready?" he raises his voice a decibel.

"Stand by," mutters the daydreaming cameraman from behind a set panel. "I haven't fallen asleep yet."

A little more fidgeting and the "On Air" lights go on.

On screen, before the cameras focus on Wally in his black chair, we see snippets of the video: Pamela and Tommy on the boat, Pamela and Tommy in their car. Lots of cleavage.

Cut away to Wally.

"Would you rather be smart, or… have a lot of sex?" he says into the camera, smiling, almost blushing.

"A new study seems to indicate that the smarter you are the less sex you get."

He cuts away to Rogers, who's at Martini's Lounge. "What do you guys think?"

The crowd shouts "No!"

Back in the studio Wally sits in his chair, legs crossed, occasionally with two fingers resting on his cheeks, and asks Lisa Stanley: "Without getting overly graphic, there are certain shots that… her arms would have had to be five feet long. Don't ya think there was a third party involved?"

On AM/Philadelphia there were some subjects they usually tried to avoid: abortion—"Viewers don't care. There's nobody out there who is in the middle of the road," Wally explains. "Either they are pro-choice or they are pro-life. There's literally nobody that you can put on who's gonna change anybody's mind, or educate them."

And politics.

That's because politics is boring.

Except, of course, for Frank Rizzo.

On Wednesday, March 27, 1991, the guests slated for the program were the three contenders in the Republican primary for mayor: Rizzo, Sam Katz and Ron Castille. March 27 was also the deadline for candidates to decide whether they were going to run at all (Katz was having second thoughts). Wally had come up with the idea the Friday before and pitched it to station management. Their answer: It is all three candidates or nothing.

Katz and Castille had already agreed to do the show, Wally says. When Wally asked Rizzo, the "larger-than-life" politician pointed his "baseball-glove thumb" toward the linoleum.

"He was mad at me from the last time he was on my show," he explains. "All the calls that got through were critical of him."

Wally leans over to illustrate his point. He cocks his eyebrows, wrinkles his brow and says in a throaty Rizzo impersonation: "He told me, 'You stacked the deck Wally, you stacked the deck.'

"But the truth is, negative calls were the only thing coming in that day."

Rizzo agreed to do the show anyway.

Katz was the last to show up. That morning the Inquirer reported that he had dropped out of the race. The only chair left was between Rizzo and Castille, who had been at each other's throats throughout the campaign.

"Katz didn't want to sit in the middle of those two because he knew they'd be jumping across the chairs," Wally smiles. "But there was no way I was going to put those two next to each other."

Katz took his assigned seat.

The show was dominated by Castille and Rizzo, who avoided questions about what they would do about this issue and that issue, opting instead to personally attack each other.

"At one point," says Wally, "Rizzo reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a piece of paper." During the campaign, Rizzo had been telling the media that Castille was a gun-wielding drunk who was not capable of running the city. He said he had sworn testimony as proof, though he had never produced it till that morning on City Line Avenue. (The affidavit later proved ?

"Rizzo could get real dangerous real fast," admits Wally. And that's why he liked him so much as a guest. "He made for good television."

In between the banter, Katz found the opportunity to address the issues seriously—and to salvage his image.

"Katz came off as the most cool, calm and collected. He was the least angry. I think he decided on that show that he was going to run," Wally says.

"It was not my job to make them look good," he adds. "I am not in the saving business. If Castille wanted to be mayor, it was his responsibility to make himself look good."

In her book The Media and The Mayor's Race, author Phyllis Kaniss, assistant dean at the Annenberg School for Communication, writes that AM/Philadelphia wasn't just an "innocuous little talk show." Though "on any given day [AM/Philadelphia] was as likely to run exclusive interviews with convicted murderers or shows about medical students working their way through school by stripping, it was also the only television program in Philadelphia where a relatively unfettered debate could take place between political candidates."

Wally turns to the monitor to question Warshavsky, still squirming in Seattle. "Do you think there was a third party involved?"

As the distributor fumbles for words, a cell phone rings. The guests who haven't come on camera yet look around, each one wondering if it is their own.

"Hey, Seth, that cell phone," jokes Wally. "That's Tommy Lee. He's changed his mind."

"Sorry," he apologizes. "Should I turn it off?"

"Yes, it's really annoying," Wally snips.

"Okay, let's say the tape was stolen from their home, and they, just the two of them, made this for their own pleasure…"

He squints his eyes. "What business do you have distributing it?"

Warshavsky counters that they are celebrities, and were it an unknown couple, it would be different.

Wally's next guest is Neville Chambers, a filmmaker from New York who specializes in homemade "private" porn.

"Have you ever been all set up and ready to go, cameras rolling, and the guy just has a performance problem?" Wally asks.

That's for them to work out, says Chambers.

"Just give 'em a glass of wine," suggests Stanley, the entertainment reporter in New York.

"Or some uplifting conversation," says Wally, almost blushing again.

He didn't blush when Paula Jones talked about President Clinton's penis on live TV.

To his knowledge, he scored the first TV interview with Jones. That was in April 1994, when her lawyer's specialty was real estate law, and before her makeover, when she wore barrettes in her hair.

"She was pretty credible. When someone is lying they usually look down," Wally says.

"She looked dead into the camera and said someone told her the governor wants to see her. She went to his hotel room and he had his pants down.

"He told her—this is what she said he said—to kiss it.

"I said to Paula, 'What is It?'"

"You know, his pay-nis," she said, in her big Little Rock accent.

There's one show he doesn't laugh about.

"We did a program about Jamaican gangs and interviewed a guy who said he was a higher-up. Obviously there is no Jamaican gang registry, so we called people we know at the police department. One of the cops said, 'Yes, he's in a gang but he's a minor player.'"

For the gang member's safety, they put him in silhouette, and rather than airing live, this segment was taped.

When it was announced they were doing the show, a threat came in to the station.

"Police were all over the station, in the parking lot, and everyone had to show ID to get in," Wally says.

"I had to send my wife and kids away for a few days."

Threats, though, have sometimes worked to his advantage.

In late June 1995, the New Jersey Commission of Investigation released a report quoting mob informant Phil Leonetti saying that Jerry Blavat (aka The Geator with The Heater) asked Nicodemo Scarfo to rub out Hy Lit in 1984.

A week later, the two DJs sat face to face, on live television, with Wally as moderator.

Geator denied it. "He said, 'Where'd this stuff come from—that I was associated with the mob?'"

Wally says a light bulb went off in his head at that moment—his self-described "BS detector."

"No, no, I thought, I'm not gonna let this guy get away with this. Whether he was in the mob or not, his associations with mob figures have been documented. That was the point."

So he leaned over to Blavat and, in his trademark wide-eyed but confrontational style, asked, "You think?"

According to Wally, that was the first time the two DJs had come together since the report was released.

"That was a good TV show."

Good, in this sense, does not mean virtuous or wholesome. It means titillating, chafing, thrilling. Most importantly, it means ratings, the driving force behind every TV program.

Beginning on Feb. 22, 1995, and running through June, AM/Philadelphia did nothing but O.J. shows. Wally talked about domestic violence—and had a lawyer representing defense's point of view and a lawyer representing the prosecution's point of view. Wally talked about double murder—and had a lawyer representing defense's point of view and a lawyer representing the prosecution's point of view. Wally talked about jury members profiting from the case—and had a lawyer representing defense's point of view and a lawyer representing the prosecution's point of view. At final tally, according to Wally, they used over 40 lawyers for more than 100 shows.

"Those 40 lawyers made my job so much easier," he admits.

It's 8:30 on another night, in the same studio. He's in his black armchair, with his legs crossed, and he's reading his outline of questions.

This is his second show dedicated to the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. He's encouraged by the ratings for Philly After Midnight in the period just prior to the White House scandal: according to the station, Midnight beat NBC's Conan, CBS' Tom Snyder and Fox's Cops in December and the first weeks of January. Now, with the presidential scandal so prominent, Wally's looking forward to even more viewers tuning in for a Midnight dessert.

He'll cover the story as long as it's on the lips of everyone—from the respected Dan Rather to the just-plain-annoying Jay Leno. For the next few weeks (at least) Nightline will tell us about the depositions and describe the alleged encounters between the prez and the young brunette in tasteful, sterile, "serious" news fashion. The local news will do sidebars on how to talk to your kids about the president allegedly exploring the "Birds and the Bees" (their terminology) with a woman other than Hillary. But Wally, he doesn't want to tell you what's going on. His opinion doesn't count. It's the opinions of wiseass federal prosecutors, silhouetted former interns and sex addiction specialists that matter.

He leans over to the camera, scrunches up his forehead and says: "Is Bill Clinton a sexual he-man?"