Calling Dr. Laura -- She Slaps Listeners In The Face With Reality, And They Keep Coming Back For More

Dr. Laura Schlessinger's computer monitor showed that the fellow calling her radio advice show had a problem: He was too impatient.

Two and a half hours later, she says, she took his call.

"I came on with him and said, `Sir, it says on my screen you have a problem with impatience. Do you know you've been holding for 2 1/2 hours?' He said yeah.

"So I said, `What's the problem, really?' "

The anecdote illustrates a laserlike directness that listeners love and even the callers usually appreciate.

Southern Californians have been telling their troubles to Dr. Laura, as she likes to call herself, for a long time. But suddenly, the wiry, energetic psychologist is one of the hottest things going in radio.

Just 10 months after taking her show national, Schlessinger has a weekly audience of 10 million people on 150 stations, from Florida to the Yukon.

Up to 9,000 callers jam the switchboard each day to talk about relationships or kids or crossroads in their lives. Her no-nonsense book, "Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives," is a long-term bestseller.

And although the world of self-help is usually skewed toward women, a lot of her readers and listeners are men.

Better than Rush

"I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh, but this is a lot more entertaining," says Tal Finley, a salesman from Arlington, Texas, who spends much of the afternoon in his car. "Sometimes I've got to stdp and go inside and see my account, but I just sit there and listen to Dr. Laura."

The world already has Dear Abby and Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Frasier. What's the attraction?

"It's real-life stories," says Lea Ann Finley, Tal's wife. "And sometimes people are just stupid. Well, she tells them, `You're just stupid.' "

"I needed her 25 years ago before I made a tonsof mistakes," says Lorriane Carroll of Coppell, Texas. "She has a good way of holding the mirror up and making you quit making excuses. All you have to do now to give advice to your friends is quote Dr. Laura and they think you're profound."

Kristin Ray, a young Carrollton, Texas, woman with a 6-month-old son, called the show for days before she finally got on the air to ask for help in dealing with her father. A couple of months later, she's still thrilled.

"I was a depressed person," she says. "I didn't realize I was responsible for my own happiness. Dr. Laura really changed my attitude toward parenting and moral behavior. She really opened my eyes. She really changed my life."

Can a few minutes on the phone really change your life?

"I haven't changed their lives," Schlessinger says. "I nagged, pinched and pulled a little. They changed their lives."

Still, Schlessinger says she constantly receives thanks and testimonials - on the phone, at personal appearances, in the stacks of mail and faxes that arrive each day. She's gratified but not amazed, and not at all humbled.

"I see the impact I have on people, and I'm very comfortable with it," she says. As for becoming an overnight success at age 48 after 15 years in broadcasting, "I think I deserve it and I earned it. I've worked very hard."

Long road to success

She has been through a lot to get here, including a less-than-idyllic childhood in Brooklyn and an early divorce. She earned a doctorate in physiology at Columbia University before heading for Los Angeles.

One day in 1979 she heard a radio talkmeister ask his daily question: Would you rather be a divorcee or a widow?

"I faked a name and called in," she says. "He kept me on for two breaks, which you just don't do. I guess he thought he heard something in my voice, because later he came over to my house and said, `I have never done this in 35 years in radio, but I think you're going to be a big radio star.' "

Soon she was a weekly guest. That led to a weekly show of her own, which led to a nightly show, which led to an afternoon show. She also found time to do post-graduate work in psychology, open a private practice as a marriage and family counselor, teach at two universities and earn a black belt in karate.

"When you're single with no kids, you can stay up all night and do everything," she says.

That changed a decade ago, when she married Lewis Bishop, a college professor. When their son Deryk was born, Mom gave it all up to spend three years at home. She came back on the air in 1990, but not, she says, as a radio psychologist.

"This is not a shrink show," she says. "I'm not doing ongoing psychotherapeutic change. I'm getting people to face realities."

Sometimes it means irreverence, anecdotes, even self-deprecating humor. More often it means tough questions, for which "I don't know" is never an answer. The result can be agonizing seconds of on-air silence or intense encounters as a caller struggles through tears.

Hard-nosed truth

"I'm real dramatically direct," Schlessinger says. "Basically, psychology is to ask them how they feel and not challenge their actions. Well, I challenge their actions."

She also filters them through a prism of hard-nosed truths: If you put up with a jerk, you're a jerk, too. Stop whining and take responsibility. Get off your duff and get to work on yourself.

Behind that is a set of unabashedly old-fashioned morals. She's dead-set against sex without commitment, cohabitation without marriage, or having children without two parents. She thinks a lot of us ought to be ashamed of ourselves, but that doesn't seem to happen much anymore.

"I think it's a novel idea to be talking about ethics and values and responsibility," she says. "These haven't just declined, they've disappeared. . . . I think the '60s tore down the fabric of our country, and I don't think we ever recovered. A generation on dope and free sex is probably loath to teach their children to abstain from immediate gratification and work for the long-term plan."

Family values

Is Dan Quayle right? Is the Christian Coalition right?

"Well, Dan Quayle's speech writer was right," she says.

Schlessinger doesn't think a lot of the former vice president, who gave that famous family values speech several years ago.

And, she says, you don't have to agree with the Christian fundamentalist political agenda to adopt its moral message.

"I get a ton of mail from religious leaders and teachers and nuns thanking me to the nth degree," she says. "I got a call from the president of a Bible college to thank me for espousing these values because I'm not discounted like Christian groups would be if they said the same thing."

She stops for a trademark giggle. "He said, `To have a nice little Jewish girl doing this is a godsend.' "

Alan Fuller, president of the company that syndicates the show, says Schlessinger reminds him of the movie "Moonstruck," in which Cher slaps around a lethargic, self-deluding Nicolas Cage and yells, "Snap out of it!"

That characterization is just fine with her. Does she shake people up?

"I hope so," she says. "That's my intent. One of the reasons they're in problems is that they're hanging on to their belief systems or their fears tenaciously. I try to take them out of that to a realm where they think and question and look at things in a different way."

Not everybody finds this radio tough-love so appealing. John Herndon of the Austin American-Statesman wrote that Schlessinger "seems to lie in wait to pounce on callers who violate her tightly formulated code of conduct. And she employs ruthless sarcasm against people who sound pretty fragile."

Nonsense, she says. Her callers aren't looking for a warm fuzzy shoulder to cry on.

"People may be troubled, but they're not stupid," she says. "I don't think they call me for coddling, because they know they're not going to get that. They can get that from their friends."

"Equity" feminism

Some feminists have gripes with the show as well. They don't like her belief that young children are better off with Mom at home and fear that a heal-yourself philosophy can also mean you're blaming the victim.

Not feminists, Schlessinger corrects. Radical feminists.

"I'm an equity feminist," she says. "That means it's very important to me that the laws be equal for men and women. After that we're on our own.

"I think the radical feminists have an anti-male agenda, and I certainly don't. One of the reasons I have such a big male audience is I don't have a slanted point of view - if it's woman, it's right; if it's man, it's evil; if it's woman, it's a victim."

Besides, she says, how's this for a feminist role model? "I'm highly educated, I'm highly accomplished, I'm happily married and I'm a great mommy."

Bishop, who has quit teaching and now manages his wife's career, couldn't be prouder of the Dr. Laura phenomenon, which, by the way, soon will include a book on character and a "Ten Stupid Things" sequel for men.

"I've always known she had this," he says. "I can't tell you how many frustrating years there were when you're saying, `Why doesn't anybody recognize it?'

"But everything has two sides, the intensity of it and the demands on her . . ."

Dr. Laura politely interrupts.

"I can control the demands on me," she says.

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In the Seattle area, the "Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show" airs from noon to 3 weekdays on KIRO-FM, 100.7.