BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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BOOK REVIEW
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RINGMASTER
By Jerry Springer and Laura Morton
St. Martin's Press; $23.95; 270 pages.
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Don't you hate dichotomies?
Take Jerry Springer, the guy. Bright. Thoughtful. Witty. Classy. Fun.
Take Jerry Springer, the TV show. Stupid. Thoughtless. Witless. Classless. About as much fun as a trailer park in a tornado.
And now his book. Ringmaster, due on the streets Tuesday,makes the dichotomy more perplexing.
Ringmaster is a crash course in Mr. Springer, from his childhood in London after his parents fled the Holocaust, their move to New York, college at Tulane, law school at Northwestern, legal work at the Cincinnati firm of Frost and Jacobs, winning a city council seat, resigning, returning as mayor, landing at a TV anchor desk.
Whew. And that's only to page 80.
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BOOK SIGNING
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Jerry Springer will meet fans and sign Ringmaster at 8 p.m. Nov. 23 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Rookwood Pavilion.
Line numbers will be handed out with purchase of the book starting Tuesday. Call 396-8970 for information.
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The remaining pages are his life as Ringmaster of a three-ring circus disguised as a TV show: A behind-the-scenes look at show planning and digging for guests; interaction with guests; interaction among guests and staff in little sections written by staff members; thoughts about his most bizarre guests; repeated and fevered assurances that guests really are real, really do the things they say and, yeah, we really check them out.
Fine. But there's still not much here. Billed as "a backstage pass to America's most talked about talk show," Ringmaster is a quick read, with its oversized type and widely spaced lines. It's well written enough, breezy, chatty, occasionally funny and sometimes insightful.
It's also whiny, defensive and preachy.
There he is on page 104, complaining about his show's most vocal critic, arch-conservative William Bennett: "So I might not like what certain guests say on our show; I might not like their manners, or their lifestyles, or their politics . . . but i would fight, and fight hard, to see that the guests on my show have as much right to be on television as anyone else in our country. William Bennett doesn't get it . . . it's easier to call people trash than to honor the principle of free speech . . . "
There he is again on page 141, complaining about the news media: "Let's face it, news seriously exploits and hurts people every day -- not The Jerry Springer Show."
And again on page 214, complaining about the media's handling of the 1997 debacle about him doing commentaries on Chicago's WMAQ: "Even if they're (news media) being honest, they're not necessarily telling the truth. What I mean is, maybe they're not lying, but often they're not smart enough to ask the right questions or maybe the person they're interviewing doesn't have it right or maybe they can't get around their own bias."
Oh.
But wait. It's not all hopeless.
Buried in the pontificating we get a glimpse of Springer the man, as opposed to TV icon. That part's fun and vintage Springer: Such as when he turns his devastatingly sharp wit on himself: Big nose, wild hair, scrawny bod, short legs. No GQ kind of guy, this.
Or when he gets around to admitting that Jerry Springer is "the silliest show on TV" and that some of his guests are, well, genuinely whacko.
Or the guy who lived -- as man and wife mind you -- with Pixel, his horse: "We've been under a lot of pressure lately to cut back the fighting on our show, so . . . we decided to do a real love story -- Jerry Springer style, of course."
Oh yeah, the fights. That's chapter 10, a 15-page section where he and his security force recount the best of them and assure us they're all real. So real, he says, that they never seat elderly audience members down front because they can't get out of the way quickly enough.
What's absent here is a personal side. True, we get a bio at the beginning, and true, we get a bit about The Check Incident (that would be the time he supposedly paid off a working lady with a personal check), but a current view is missing.
Courtship of wife Micki and birth of daughter Katie take two pages. That's because he says he hates talking publicly about things private: "In my thirty years in public life, I've always refused to talk about my private life (otherwise, of course, it would no longer be private)."
Yeah, but people want to know.
They want to know a lot about the guy, as much as they do the show. Even silly things: What's he do for fun? What time does he go to work? Go home? What kind of people does he like to hang out with? Does he cook? What's his drink of choice?
And what about him living in Chicago and his wife and daughter living here? Is that a pain? What kind of travel does that involve? A few details, however trivial, would go a long way to rounding out the picture.
It doesn't happen in Ringmaster.
