Wendy Williams sat on a plush red sofa facing a trio of L.E.D. screens, each of which showed a man who was vying to enter her tumultuous, open-book life. It was a February episode of her syndicated talk show, and the segment, “Date Wendy,” was the culmination of a monthlong search. Williams had on a tousled blond wig, yellow sneakers, and a stretchy patterned dress. “My hands are sweaty,” she had confided earlier, during the daily monologue that she calls “Hot Topics.” Met with reassuring applause, she suddenly teared up, and, as a stagehand proffered a Wonder Woman tissue box, she confessed, “No, I’m teary because I can’t believe I have a show.”
“The Wendy Williams Show,” taped live in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, is in its twelfth season, an eternity in daytime years. It averages more than a million live viewers a day, with hundreds of thousands more catching up online. Its audience—“Wendy watchers,” in the show’s parlance—regards the fifty-six-year-old hostess as an ultra-fabulous, in-the-know gal pal. Williams came to prominence as a radio jock, and she has a talent for talking to millions of people (her viewership is mostly female, but she also has a big gay following) and making them feel like they’re on a dishy phone call with a friend. “Traditionally, for women at home, watching a daytime-TV show is ‘me time,’ ” Alexandra Jewett, a programming executive at Debmar-Mercury, the show’s production company, told me. “It’s a very intimate experience.”
For “Date Wendy,” hundreds of suitors had been narrowed down to three. On the air, Williams addressed Bachelor No. 1, a jazz musician named Julian: “What do you do in your down time?” “I like to make sure this body—this temple—is up to par, so I love to work out,” he said, earning a smile from the hostess. Bachelor No. 2 was Mike, a contractor from Maryland with a bald head and a glass of white wine. “What’s your idea of a fun date with me?” Williams asked. Mike suggested ringside seats at a Lamar Odom celebrity boxing match. Bachelor No. 3, Tyrone, was a sultry-eyed security guard nearly twenty years younger than Williams. “Age really don’t mean anything to me,” he assured her. “If our vibes can connect, we can connect.” The studio audience—usually a hundred and forty screaming fans but, these days, a dozen socially distanced staffers—oohed.
Watching from the wings, a handler asked me which guy I thought Williams would choose. I said Julian, who seemed age-appropriate and sincere. Tyrone was sexy but too young, and Mike had some slimy lines that smelled like trouble. (“If you’re feeling the fever, I’ve got the prescription.”) After a commercial break, Williams called for a drumroll and announced her choice: Surprise! It was Mike, who danced around pumping his fists. She said that she would call him later that night.
Williams is an anomaly on daytime television. Unlike her competitor Ellen DeGeneres, she’s not a standup comedian, and, unlike Kelly Ripa or the women of “The View,” she doesn’t have co-hosts. She’s her own sounding board, capable of filling endless time with off-the-cuff, bawdy talk, delivered in a Jersey accent. Her rambling spontaneity is an antidote to the cheery polish of the “Today” show; she’ll interrupt a celebrity tidbit to tell a story about her weekend, then lose her place. She barely uses a teleprompter and won’t wear an earpiece. Although her show features such daytime staples as interviews, shopping segments (“Trendy@Wendy”), and advice (“Ask Wendy”), its core is “Hot Topics,” ostensibly a gossip roundup but really a kind of free-associative performance art, in which Williams riffs on celebrity divorces, pop-star feuds, and “Real Housewives” antics. “Her talent is being Wendy,” the CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has guest-hosted the show, told me. “She has this degree of comfort on television, like she’s sitting in your living room talking to you.” The audience acts as her confidantes and her Greek chorus—or, in the case of “Date Wendy,” her wingmen. You don’t have to know the people she’s discussing to be engrossed by her chatty, opinionated commentary, which converts even operatic gossip into relatable mini-dramas. Assessing the news that Kim Kardashian was keeping a sixty-million-dollar mansion after her divorce from Kanye West, Williams shrugged and concluded, “It’s best for the kids. The kids know the house.”
Williams’s style, in contrast to her casual tone, is glam bordering on camp. Where other daytime shows favor beige couches and houseplants, her set is hues of lavender and champagne. She is five feet ten, and her outfits are drag-queen bold. She rotates through about a dozen wigs, since a thyroid condition stemming from Graves’ disease has thinned her hair. It also causes her already large eyes to pop, as if in mid-epiphany. In the past few years, her personal life has been supersized as well. Last year, she finalized her divorce from Kevin Hunter, her second husband and her manager, after he had a baby with a longtime mistress, capping off a series of dramas—stints in rehab, unplanned hiatuses—that spilled into the tabloids and, inevitably, onto her show. In January, Williams released a pair of autobiographical TV movies on Lifetime, one a dramatization and one a documentary, which recast her travails as a journey of self-empowerment. In “Wendy Williams: The Movie,” she was played by Ciera Payton; in “Wendy Williams: What a Mess!,” the real Williams lay on a daybed in her apartment, sobbing as she narrated the same events, with the viewer in the role of best friend. Together, the movies represented a brazen act of pop solipsism, with the raw fury of a breakup album.
When I asked Williams if, as the documentary title suggests, she considers herself a mess, she smirked and said, “Yes, but a well-put-together mess.” It was after the “Date Wendy” episode, and she was in her backstage office in a street wig, sitting on a leopard-print couch beneath a bedazzled swordfish that was made by a fan. (“They’re real Swarovski crystals!” she said.) The dating contest, she insisted, was not a stunt. “I studied the guys very closely,” she said, peeling off her false eyelashes. “I said, ‘I want to date for the potential of this becoming my boyfriend.’ ” She explained that her final choice was practical: Tyrone was too young, and Julian, the jazz man, would be on the road all the time. “How do I know that he’s in Turkey with a one-month residency and not screwing around?” she said. Mike runs his own successful business, “so we can both sit in first class, and we both know what fine dining is.” She added, “But that’s not what I want all the time. I like the cheesesteak from around the corner as well, and I like to eat it in bed.”
We took a black S.U.V. to her apartment, in the financial district: sleek black walls and crystal chandeliers, accented with colorful glass figurines, animal prints, and antique urns. “Chaka Khan did that for me for my fiftieth birthday,” she said, pointing to a painting depicting her and her ex-husband as a mermaid and a merman. Last spring, after her studio shut down because of the pandemic, Williams hosted “Wendy @ Home,” an abridged edition of her show, from her dining-room table, introducing viewers to her cats, Chitchat and Myway, and to her life-size Betty Boop statue with painted-on black skin. The results were so lo-fi absurd that John Oliver devoted a segment to the show on “Last Week Tonight,” calling it “an oasis of truth in a world full of lies.” He delighted in the “weirdly dominant manner” in which Williams ate a lamb chop. Nevertheless, Williams pulled the plug on the home edition after seven weeks, citing fatigue from Graves’ disease. But she told me that the experience had felt intrusive, even unsafe: “Anybody could be watching to case the joint.”
As we talked, she laid out supplies for a craft project: a tube of Krazy Glue, a glass case that was left over from a flower delivery, and four crystal cabinet knobs, souvenirs from the New Jersey house that she used to share with Hunter and their college-age son, Kevin, Jr. She wanted to attach the knobs to the bottom of the case as legs, place inside it a Supreme-branded wrench that her son had bought her, and display it as a design object. She took off her shoes and stuck out a bare foot, which, owing to lymphedema, had become swollen and gray, “like an elephant.” (She no longer wears heels, and her walk is a tentative shuffle.) She talked non-stop—about pandemic dating, about fans who make her hold their babies—in what felt like a seamless extension of her show. After a while, she returned to her Krazy Glue, which had hardened in the tube. “I’m not doing this tonight. I’m tired! ” she said. “How dare you, Krazy Glue?” Exasperated, she held up her half-finished objet d’art and said, “But you see where I’m going with this?”
Weeks later, Williams was in her makeup chair at 8 A.M., wearing a turban and a black robe. A television tuned to local news mumbled overhead, and her makeup artist, Merrell Hollis, dabbed at her cheeks. “Me and Jones had such a good time this weekend,” Williams said, recounting a girls’ day out with a former radio colleague (and onetime rival) known as Miss Jones. “Some people remember that we weren’t getting along, but we weren’t getting along because Kevin was, like, ‘Fuck her.’ When I opened the door, we had our masks on, but we hugged.”
Hollis mm-hmmed as Williams explained that they had gone to two different steak houses: first to Peter Luger, in Brooklyn, then to the Strip House, in Manhattan. “That was the spot,” she said. “The men were everyplace. The ladies looked really beautiful. But we were definitely outnumbered. And all you smelled was garlic and money.” She assured Hollis that her salad, which she had Instagrammed, wasn’t only lettuce: “There was seafood, extra crumbles of blue cheese. We had so much food that we had bags and bags to take home—only for me to ask for the check and find out some man paid already.”
“Aw, ‘Sex and the City’!” Hollis cooed.
“My boobs looked really good,” Williams continued. “And we were home in time for the eleven-o’clock news.”
Hollis touched up some shiny spots. “What else happened over the weekend?” Williams asked herself, then gasped. “Nicki Minaj’s mother is suing!” It was a classic “Hot Topics” segue. On TV, Williams re-creates the laid-back rapport of a woman talking to her makeup artist. Watching her in the mirror, I realized that she was trying out material on Hollis, honing anecdotes and sharpening opinions.
“Mike is coming to town on Wednesday,” she said, as Hollis applied eyebrow pencil. It had been four weeks since “Date Wendy,” and she and Bachelor No. 2 were becoming an item. “Dr. Oz invited me for dinner, and so I text him back, ‘Can I bring a friend?’ So Thursday night is dinner at the Ozes, with all the kids running around. It’s a really beautiful scene. Plants. Servants. Not even housekeepers—servants, you know, with the clothes on. But all with a smile. And I didn’t tell Mike where we’re going.”
When Williams was done in makeup, she consulted with the rest of her glam squad, Jazmin Kelly (wigs) and Willie Sinclair III (wardrobe). Sinclair had pulled a pleated Kenzo dress and white Stan Smiths, an ensemble that he described as “very simple, very spring, very light.” Kelly, whom Williams called “an evil-brilliant wigologist,” had paired it with an “effortless” wavy do, dark with golden highlights. She told me that each day she imagined Williams’s look as that of a different character. Today’s was “a woman who shops at Bergdorf’s,” Kelly said. “She doesn’t have a job, and she’s fab. It’s the lady that lunches, dahling.”
Out on the set, three producers gathered for the daily “Hot Topics” briefing. “Boss is walking,” someone said, as Williams approached. She sat on a tufted purple chair, from which she presides each morning. “So, weekend talk,” a producer named Jennifer Brookman began. “I know you were with Miss Jones.”
“And that wasn’t just a salad full of lettuce,” Williams interjected. “That was a monstrosity.” David Perler, the showrunner, had new pictures of Mike to display. “The paparazzi was outside my house again today,” Williams said.
“They’re waiting for Mike to show up,” Brookman said, then moved on to “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” “The only thing that stood out to us was this new woman—LaToya—fighting with what’s-her-name,” she said, referring to an incident in which a housewife insulted the hostess of a Halloween party. The producers played Williams a clip of the hostess ranting. “Do we think she was disrespected?” Perler asked.
“Yes,” Williams boomed, with an implied “duh.”
Next: “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” “This is good,” Brookman said. “Scott said he broke up with Sofia because she gave him an ultimatum.” Williams watched a clip and considered her take. “That’s the immaturity of dealing with a young girl,” she said. “He’s a thirty-seven-year-old father of three, lives a very complicated life. Find an age-appropriate man and stop trying to be grown. You’re not.” Case closed.
In the early seasons of the show, a “Hot Topics” segment lasted for around ten minutes, and the producers experimented with traditional talk-show fare: comedy skits, panel discussions. “What we found was that people so enjoyed her giving her opinion on ‘Hot Topics’—that’s really what drove the show,” Perler told me. The segment now lasts as long as twenty-five minutes. But letting Williams riff unfiltered has its pitfalls. She once questioned the concept of historically Black colleges (“I would be really offended if there was a school that was known as a historically white college”); after fans threatened to boycott the show and Chevrolet dropped its sponsorship, she apologized. And she’s been hit with occasional defamation lawsuits, most recently from a man who was taking pictures near Hilary Duff’s son in a public park, which Williams called “creepy.” To ward off legal challenges, Perler watches from the control room, consulting (over Zoom) with the show’s lawyer. Whenever Williams wades into dicey territory, the lawyer alerts him, and he hits a button that makes the word “allegedly” flash on the teleprompter in big yellow letters.
“A lot of the time, it comes up two or three seconds too late, so Wendy says ‘allegedly’ to something that wasn’t really the thing that we needed her to say ‘allegedly’ about,” Perler said. Williams openly complains about this on the air—“Lawyer lady hit the button!”—as if being zapped by an electrode.
At the “Hot Topics” meeting, the producers ran through the rest of the day’s stories: the public breakup of the rappers Saweetie and Quavo (“Take it off social media,” Williams ruled), a fan who broke into Pete Davidson’s house (“Remind me who Pete Davidson is? The white guy, right?”), a man who sneaked his toddler into the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. “This is another corona thing,” Williams said. “It’s making everybody do things that they wouldn’t do.”
Williams returned to her dressing room to put on her show wig. Before each episode, she prays at a makeshift chapel, to a drawing of God that her son made when he was little. At ten o’clock, she burst through the double doors, greeted the sparse audience with her kittenish catchphrase (“How you doi-i-i-in’?”), and sat on her tufted throne. “My friend Jonesy came to town to see me,” she began, as an Instagram photo flashed behind her. “We went out to two different steak houses. . . .”
Among the thousands of people who have sat in Williams’s studio audience is Tanisha Ford, a history professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. “Wendy does what she calls ‘kitchen-table talk,’ a phrase that comes straight out of Black American and Black diasporic culture,” Ford told me. “The kitchen table was a place where the Black women, the elders in your family, would sit around and talk about all the gossip, dish all the dirt, tell how they felt about Pastor So-and-So. As children, we would try to be in earshot of the kitchen table, so we could hear all the grown folks talk. So she’s bringing that kind of Black vernacular to mainstream television.”
Williams was born in 1964, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Thomas and Shirley Williams, both educators. She had an early instinct for asking nosy questions. “I’d come in the kitchen and say, ‘Aunt Marilyn, is that new hair? Are you wearing a wig?’ ” she recalled. “And Aunt Marilyn would say, ‘Yeah, Wendy, as a matter of fact I am.’ ‘Well, push it up a little. It’s too far down on your forehead.’ ” In an attempt to rein her in, her parents developed a code: T.L. (too loud), T.F. (too fast), and T.M. (too much). “Whenever she looked at a person and was quiet, we knew something was coming up,” her father told me. “She’d tilt her head to the side and ask a question, whatever came to her mind. We’d say, ‘Wendy, be quiet. Don’t ask!’ ”
The summer of the 1970 race riots in Asbury Park, the Williamses moved to Wayside, a mostly white suburb in Ocean Township. Thomas and Shirley taught their three children to present “a good package,” but Williams vacillated between projecting middle-class respectability and saying the unsayable. She felt like an outcast in her family; her older sister, Wanda, was the overachiever (she became a lawyer), and her little brother, Tommy, was the boy, “so he could do no wrong,” she said. In elementary school, she gained weight, and her parents put her on a strict diet of tuna and mustard, with a side of grapes. The dieting instilled a body-image insecurity that outlived (and drove) her later embrace of plastic surgery. “Once it’s put in your head that you have a weight problem—and once you see it yourself in the mirror—that’s a lifelong thing,” she told me.
As an adolescent, Williams developed her flamboyant sense of style, ripping up T-shirts, studding her jackets with rhinestones. She was one of four Black graduates in her high-school class, but the only interest they had in common, she says, was smoking weed. Because of her honking accent, they called her the “white girl,” and her white classmates were comfortable enough around her to use the N-word, adding, “Not you, Wendy.” “I never went to the prom, because that was before you could ask a Black girl to the prom—but I saw the boys looking,” she recalled. “I would say, ‘I can’t wait to get out of this one-horse town. And I’m coming back to our first reunion and I’m going to give it to ’em good.’ ”
Her grades were abysmal, but her “good package” got her into Northeastern University, in Boston, where she joined the campus radio station. In her mind, the d.j.s she grew up listening to, like WBLS’s Frankie Crocker, occupied a glamorous world of parties and champagne—although the women were mostly sidekicks, “and I knew that I did not want to be a sidekick.” One of the exceptions was Carol Ford, on New York’s 98.7 KISS-FM. “Carol got hired when I was in college, and sometimes I would come home for the day and sit in Penn Station with my Aiwa, because it had a recorder,” Williams said.
During college, she got an internship at Boston’s KISS 108, where the morning host was Matty Siegel. “Wendy wanted to be on the air,” Siegel told me. “I look at interns as people who are going to bring me my coffee. But she, from Day One, went, ‘O.K., which microphone do I use?’ ” Williams would paint her nails bright colors to get noticed when handing over paperwork, and she parlayed her charisma into a weekly segment recapping “Dynasty,” the “Real Housewives” of its day. Her parents, who thought that she might become a nurse (“Wendy liked bandaging wounds and what have you,” her father said), were skeptical, especially when she moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands to accept a radio gig in St. Croix.
Scheming to crack the New York market, Williams took a job at an oldies station in Washington, D.C. Her time there was marked by two misfortunes. She developed a cocaine habit, and, she has said, an R. & B. artist she interviewed on air invited her to a party one night and then raped her in his hotel room. It was the height of the AIDS crisis, and Williams got tested every month. Her paranoia morphed into a devil-may-care hedonism that drove her further into cocaine. She would spend days in a coke stupor, and she lost almost fifty pounds.
In 1988, she got her shot at a New York station, hosting the graveyard shift at HOT 103. Radio was largely segregated between the white “general market” stations, which played dance music and rock, and the Black “urban” stations, which played R. & B. and, increasingly, hip-hop. Williams recalls being the only Black staffer at HOT 103 (which became HOT 97), but she knew from her Wayside days how to make it work. In her 2003 memoir, “Wendy’s Got the Heat,” she wrote, “I was just black enough to represent black without being a real ‘sistah’ to them. I was black but I didn’t threaten the pH balance of the Debbie Gibsons and the Pretty Poisons and Paula Abduls.” By then, she was snorting or smoking two grams of coke a day, four days a week. During her shift, she would play an extended track of Noel’s “Silent Morning,” which gave her just enough time to sneak into the bathroom and get high. One night, she took a hit so hard that it knocked her unconscious, and, when she came to, the air had been dead for more than three minutes. Fortunately, her bosses weren’t listening.
She was fired not long afterward. “What am I going to do now?” she asked a boss, through tears. “Go get married and have some babies,” he advised her. Instead, she sent audition tapes all over town and wound up at 98.7 KISS-FM—an urban station—where she filled in for her idol, Carol Ford, for the afternoon drive. Vinny Brown, then the music director, recalls, “She was strong enough to hold the room.” When he was promoted to program manager, he put her on the morning show, “The Wake-Up Club,” to “give some female perspective.” Along with the traffic reports (and Nutrisystem promotional spots, to get extra airtime), Williams did a gossip segment called “Dish the Dirt.” “She made it her own—and made it the most popular feature on the radio station,” Brown told me. “Dish the Dirt,” he said, featured stories about “the artists that we played on the radio, who probably did not get the same attention in mainstream media.”
The blowback was immediate. Brown said that he had to deal with record executives who “called up and said, ‘Hey, your girl is talking about my artist!’ ” He went on, “I can’t tell you the amount of times that people like Bill Cosby, Puffy, Russell Simmons called me directly, and I just had to let them go off about something that Wendy said. And I’d be smiling without them knowing.” Occasionally, he added, “I had to tell her that these things that she is reporting are ‘allegedly.’ ” KISS was influential enough to be able to rebuff artists who demanded that Williams be fired, and Brown moved her to a solo shift. As her popularity increased, she got tips not just from the gossip pages but from listeners she met at parties, where she arrived with a two-person entourage that she called Skeletor and Bulge. In 1993, Billboard named her Best On-Air Radio Personality.
Her rise followed that of Howard Stern, who had turned “shock jock” into a new genus of celebrity. It also coincided with the nineties hip-hop explosion. Williams exemplified the genre’s blinged-out style and braggadocio (her Eagle Talon had “WNDY” vanity plates), with a rap diva’s flair for shit-stirring. “So much of the way that YouTubers frame their gossip segments is based on Wendy Williams,” Tanisha Ford, the CUNY historian, said. “Wendy created the model for how you spill tea. And she was doing this in the nineties, before social media.”
During a photo shoot at the Roxy, a lesbian photographer showed Williams a hip-hop magazine with an item about a gay rapper, and she read it on air. Innuendo about who was (allegedly!) on the “down low” became one of her specialties. Few topics were more taboo in the hip-hop world, and the backlash came hard. She spread a rumor that Tupac Shakur had been raped in prison. He denied it, and hit back, in “Why U Turn on Me,” released posthumously: “Anybody ever seen Wendy Williams’s fat ass? Why you always wearin’ Spandex, you fat bitch?” Williams was unfazed. “I love anytime somebody mentions me,” she told me. “Thank you, Tupac.”
Williams met Kevin Hunter in 1994, at a dance party at a roller rink in Union, New Jersey. She was coming off a five-month marriage that ended when the guy (allegedly!) spit in her face. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) Hunter, who owned a beauty parlor in Brooklyn, attracted Williams because she was looking for a “thug,” she wrote. “He was the one who protected her,” Vinny Brown recalled. “She had threats on her life. People were sending dead fish wrapped in newspaper to the radio station.” When Williams trash-talked the girl group Total on air, and its members staked out the station to confront her, Hunter pulled up and shooed them away. The relationship also motivated her to quit cocaine, which, she says in her memoir, she swapped for the fulfillment of romance. But Hunter’s role in her life—as husband, manager, and bulldog—wasn’t completely benign. “It was as if she was addicted to Kevin, in a weird way,” a former colleague of Williams’s told me. “She sort of dropped the drugs and picked up him, and he was just as bad for her.”
By the mid-nineties, Williams was back at HOT 97, which by then was a major hip-hop station. Her bosses shielded her from the music power brokers she blabbed about—until she crossed the wrong people. Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, ran the label Bad Boy Records, and he and his artists were getting a lot of airplay. After Williams refused to tamp down her gossip about them, the station sidelined her. She also got into a shoving match with a co-worker, Angie Martinez, after hinting on her Web site that Martinez’s rapper boyfriend was gay. In 1997, after weeks off the air, she sued to get out of her contract and reached a settlement.
She was barred from taking another New York radio job for eight months, so she moved her act to Philadelphia’s Power 99. Don Lemon, who was then a local NBC correspondent, recalled Williams outing him after he was spotted at the gay bars on Twelfth Street. “Listen, was it uncomfortable? Yes,” he told me. “Was I in the closet? Not really. I just didn’t talk about it. Was it something where I was, like, ‘I wish this woman would shut up and stop talking about me’? Yeah.” Williams’s penchant for outing hasn’t aged well, but her gay fans seem to have forgiven her. “Black queer folks create a sense of community through throwing shade, through spilling the tea,” Tanisha Ford said. “Wendy is coming out of that communal tradition of joy and healing. There is something restorative in revelling in all of your imperfections. Wendy has become a voice for the weirdos, the outcasts, the people who say, O.K., you don’t want me? Well, I want me.”
When I asked Williams if she still considered people’s sexuality fair game, she said, “Well, I have a different career now, on TV.” In recent years, her snide remarks about Caitlyn Jenner and androgynous fashion have drawn charges of transphobia, and in one case Williams responded with a teary apology video, saying, “I never do the show in a place of malice.”
Along with scandals, Williams broadcast details about her personal life, deepening her relationship with her audience. During her Philly years, she talked openly about her past drug abuse and her multiple miscarriages. When she became pregnant again, her doctors advised bed rest, so she did her show from home. Two months after Kevin, Jr., was born, in 2000, Williams caught Hunter on the phone with a lover; she later disclosed the infidelity in her memoir. She was also open about her plastic surgery—liposuction, tummy tuck, breast implants—which gave her the bombshell figure she’d always wanted. (Ford points out that many Black women view their cosmetic surgery as “a thing that we were raised to keep private. But Wendy Williams says, ‘Hey, I’m gonna own it.’ ”) In 2001, having boosted Power 99’s listenership, she returned to New York to reclaim her throne as the queen of radio, doing weekday afternoons at WBLS. Hunter was now a vexing presence in her professional life. “He was banned from the station a couple of times,” Tony Gray, who had hired Williams at KISS and later consulted for WBLS, recalled. “He would get into these shouting matches with people, using a lot of profanity.” (Hunter did not respond to requests for comment, but he did call his characterization in the Lifetime documentary “inaccurate” and “false.” Last week, he shared a meme on Instagram that said, “Once you mature, you realize that silence is more powerful than proving a point.”)
In early 2003, Whitney Houston’s label approached WBLS about interviewing the singer to promote her new album. But Houston’s handlers reneged when they learned that Williams would conduct the interview; Houston had recently made her disastrous “crack is whack” appearance with Diane Sawyer, and Williams hadn’t held back in discussing Houston’s strung-out demeanor. “I thought the issue was dead,” Vinny Brown, the station manager, recalled. “The next thing I know, Wendy is running down the hallway, telling me, ‘Boss, you ain’t going to believe what I got on tape!’ ” Houston had called the station directly, and she and Williams had got into a heated twenty-three-minute off-air conversation. Williams had recorded it—which was legal, since Houston had willingly called a radio station—and Brown gave her permission to air it. (Sample: “You are very defensive, Whitney.” Houston: “I have to be, Wendy. You talk about me every fucking day!”) “That was the shot heard around the world,” he recalled. “Wendy called me and said, ‘You ain’t gonna believe it. “Access Hollywood,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “Inside Edition”—everybody’s in the hallway wanting an interview.’ ” Brown instructed her not to share the tape. “It was a way that they’d never heard Whitney Houston before,” he said. When Houston died, in 2012, Williams gave an emotional eulogy on her show, and it was clear that her antagonism toward Houston had come out of deep identification. “Whitney and I—same age,” she said, in a trembling voice. “And both plagued with the demon of substance abuse.”
Williams had shot various TV pilots during her radio years, but none had been picked up. “She’d come back discouraged and tell me, ‘Ah, I’m going to give up. I’m just going to be a radio girl,’ ” Brown recalled. She wanted to flaunt her outrageous style, but the TV people usually asked her to wear flat-front khakis and to limit her wigs to three. “I’m, like, No! There’s a wig for every occasion,” Williams said. When Debmar-Mercury approached her, in 2008, she recalls, “they were the first people who actually wanted me to just be me.”
Any notion that Williams might adopt a softer, Oprah-like image for television evaporated during her six-week trial run, broadcast in four test cities, when Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, of “The Apprentice,” came on to promote her book. “I will not be disrespected,” Manigault-Stallworth said, about some perceived slight, as she sat on the couch. Williams circled a finger in Manigault-Stallworth’s face and warned, “This is not the time for you to look for your moment.” She did broaden her range of content, mixing in names like Brad and Angelina with hip-hop gossip, and the reality-TV boom gave her a colorful new cast of characters to dissect. Williams studied herself on camera—how she walked, how certain angles looked—and made adjustments. “That would involve slower talk, pregnant pauses, and direct eye contact with the camera,” she told me. “Not looking around or wringing my hands. But I love the camera, and I know exactly where to look when the red light is on.”
Williams and Hunter were living in Livingston, New Jersey, projecting a “good package” of suburban family life. But their professional dynamic was fraught. “A lot of times, he wanted her to wear something that made her look sexy, maybe a little risqué,” David Perler recalled. “My bosses would text me and say, ‘Why was she wearing that on air? That’s not daytime-friendly.’ ” When she tried to socialize with the crew, Williams says, Hunter would wave her back into her office. A former staffer describes Hunter as a “horrific force” who would disrupt meetings and berate people. “Everyone knew about his girlfriend, and it was hard for people who were closer to Wendy to keep that from her,” the former staffer said. “I think she didn’t have any life outside of him, and he controlled her completely.”
Eventually, Williams hired a private investigator, who confirmed that Hunter had a girlfriend. They even had a house together, just nine miles from the house he shared with Williams. In a rage, she went there, glued the lovers’ mailbox shut, and spray-painted “Kevin + Wendy 4ever” on the garage door. She refrained from divorce proceedings until their son went to college. In the meantime, Hunter kept an office at the show, even as the details of their disintegrating marriage trickled into the tabloids.
On Halloween, 2017, Williams was dressed as the Statue of Liberty for an on-air costume contest. Mid-sentence, she stumbled and passed out on the floor. After an emergency commercial break, she was back on camera, explaining that she had been overheated under her robe. “I was in the process of the early stages of my divorce,” she told me. “My son was going to college, so I was now free to pack up the house, to fight.”
She was also drinking wine more frequently, although she insists that she didn’t have a problem. “If you were in love, and you were going through what I was going through, why wouldn’t you come home and drink wine?” she said. In 2018, she recalled, Hunter told her that they were going to a resort in Florida, and she flew there by private plane. When she arrived, her cell phone was confiscated, and she discovered that it was a high-end recovery facility. “See, he needed someplace to shelter me, so I wouldn’t hire P.I.s, read magazines, talk on the phone, and catch him in the act,” she told me. She charmed the staff, offering to peel potatoes, until someone sneaked her a phone. “I called him up and said, ‘Look, get me back to New York and get me someplace to stay, because I’m not coming home to you.’ ”
At the start of 2019, “The Wendy Williams Show” went on an extended hiatus, owing to Williams’s Graves’ disease. She changed her medical team, so that Hunter couldn’t have contact with the doctors. The tabloids speculated that her drug problem had returned, and her staff worried that the show might be over. When Williams came back, after three months, she revealed on the air that she was living at a sober house. She now says that her thirty-day stay at the house, in Queens, had been a compromise with Hunter, who, she claims, convinced her family (falsely) that she was in dire condition. At the same time, Hunter’s mistress (Williams calls her “the girl”) gave birth to a daughter. Hunter (allegedly!) had the phone lines in Williams’s office cut—her cell phone was still confiscated—to prevent her from getting help.
She continued hosting the show, even as her life came to resemble the celebrity meltdowns she had made a career out of rehashing. “Unlike other hosts, she didn’t keep a lot of it secret,” Perler said. “She would talk about it. And, all of a sudden, she became the hottest topic.” When I asked Williams if being the subject of salacious gossip had changed her perspective on talking about other people, she said no. “And you know why? Because this is what I do,” she told me. Her “don’t dish it out if you can’t take it” ethos is ultimately her world view: People talk, so why not do it in the open?
In September, 2019, Williams began her eleventh season, her first without Hunter. In her Lifetime movies, this is a feel-good ending: Wendy unshackled and in control. But the drama hasn’t faded entirely. One day last October, she giggled and paused in a strange, halting way during a “Hot Topics” segment, inviting speculation about her well-being. After her mother died, late last year, Williams and her brother publicly disputed whether or not Williams had attended the funeral. Asked if she had made peace with him, she said, “Who? Next!” For her viewers, the messiness only adds to her allure. “I think we’re all works in progress until we perish,” Williams told me. “If you don’t allow yourself to be a work in progress, you’ll always be stuck on stupid. And one thing I’m not is stupid.”
Last Monday morning, Williams came through the double doors of her set and said, “I’m feeling overwhelmed.” It was a big day: a year ago, she had been one of the last celebrities before the shutdown to sit for a Madame Tussauds wax figure. For eight hours, artisans had scrutinized such particulars as her teeth, her hair color, and the width of her nail beds. “They measured how far apart my eyeballs are,” she told me. The replica was constructed in London, with a head made of beeswax and Japan wax cast from a plaster mold, and human hair, inserted one strand at a time; it was dressed in a papaya-colored jumpsuit and Gucci sneakers from Williams’s own closet. The figure had crossed the Atlantic in a cargo ship and was about to be revealed on air.
“Drumroll, please!” Williams said, and a red curtain parted to reveal Wax Wendy, smiling wide, on her own “Hot Topics” chair, an arm flung over the back. “My gosh,” Williams said. “They got copies of all my bracelets!” She peered at her doppelgänger and said, “You’ve got the rounds of my breasts!”
After the show, Wax Wendy took a van to the wax museum in Times Square, while Real Wendy followed in a car. Lurching through traffic, she said that the honor had been “worth every moment: my career climb, even being misunderstood. Worth every single second, because that’ll live in infamy. They’re catching me at the height of my beauty, as far as I’m concerned: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside.” Grinning, she added, “Now I can make Kevin’s life miserable forever, because I’ll be at Madame Tussauds in New York, or, if he goes out to L.A., he’ll see me on the Walk of Fame.” (Things with Mike had fizzled. “She deserves to be with someone who may have more time,” he told Page Six.)
Her son, who had come home from college for the occasion, was in the back seat, in a hoodie and jeans. “I thought it was her when I first saw it,” he said, of Wax Wendy. “I was, like, ‘Why is she just sitting there smiling?’ ”
At the museum, Wax Wendy had been set up for a press unveiling in an ersatz Oval Office, facing a gallery of world leaders that included Wax Pope Francis, Wax Richard Nixon, and Wax Golda Meir. (Wax Wendy’s home would be a room down the hall, across from Wax Don Draper holding a Scotch.) Amid a flock of photographers, the “Good Day New York” anchor Rosanna Scotto introduced Real Wendy, who was wheeled out on a chaise by two shirtless men. “You may have better placement than the Holy Father,” Scotto said.
“He’s supposed to look over all of us, so his placement should not be important,” Williams declared. A reporter asked what advice she had for aspiring Wendys, and she said, “It’s a climb that you have to do alone.”
Wax Wendy had only one inconsistency, on her left hand. Since modelling for the figure, Williams had enlarged the diamond flower ring that she wears on the show for luck. “It’s a marigold,” she had told me. “A marigold is one of the most resilient flowers that you can plant, because they’re the ones that the rabbits and squirrels don’t like. They don’t mess with the marigold.” ♦
