Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

by Dana Milbank

  “You know,” he went on, still struggling for his voice, “America, we’ve been at a party that we weren’t supposed to be at.” He likened the nation to a kid going home past curfew and knowing “you’re going to get your butt kicked.” The thought of this, too, choked up Beck. He spoke about America forced “to stay home on a Saturday night because we’re financially grounded.” This proved so overwhelming that Beck struggled for nearly eleven seconds before completing his next thought.

  “America, I apologize,” he said. “I’m an emotional guy.”

  But not always when you expect him to be. On March 22, 2010, the day after health-care reform finally cleared Congress, Beck surprised his viewers. “I saw all kinds of Tweets today: ‘Oh, Glenn Beck’s goin’ to cry.’ No, I left that for the Kennedy clan. I’m not crying. Today I’m actually feeling thankful … I’m thankful that the Progressive Party has stepped out of the shadow and showed Americans who they really are.”

  A dry-eyed Beck? Must have run out of menthol.

  CHAPTER 2

  GOD SMILES ON A “RECOVERING

  DIRTBAG”

  The mayor of Glenn Beck’s hometown of Mount Vernon, Washington, decided that the hamlet would have a “Glenn Beck Day” to honor its most famous son. And a Glenn Beck Day is exactly what the town got: thousands of riled up, angry people shouting at each other, and fears of violence.

  Mayor Bud Norris invited Beck to receive the key to the city on September 26, 2009, the same day he was giving a speech in nearby Seattle. Beck accepted, and, according to local reports, brought with him a whole lot of trouble:

  A petition signed by sixteen thousand people was delivered to officials in the town of thirty-one thousand demanding they call off the event. City officials were swamped with three thousand e-mails and several phone calls, including a couple of threatening messages.

  A plane flew overhead with a banner proposing an answer to giving Beck the key to the city: “Change the Locks.” Lining the streets were eight hundred pro- and anti-Beck demonstrators—the largest disturbance Mount Vernon had ever seen—carrying signs and a giant effigy of the Fox News host portraying him as the tea (party) brewing “Mad Hater.” At least one demonstrator was arrested.

  Six of the seven members of the city council declined Norris’s offer of tickets to the event, and the council passed a resolution declaring that it was “in no way sponsoring the mayor’s event.”

  The city got a bill for the event for $17,748.85—mostly for a security detail that included men in black on roofs with binoculars—that blew a hole in the town’s budget. The townsfolk who paid $25 a ticket to see Beck didn’t come close to covering the cost.

  A few years earlier, Beck had mocked his hometown in a book titled The Real America. “Mount Vernon, Washington, couldn’t have been farther from where I wanted to be,” he wrote. “It’s a little community in Skagit Valley that, by the way, is the largest tulip producer outside of Holland. Whoopee!”

  But on Glenn Beck Day, he ordered up some tears as he recalled going to the theater in town with his mother. “Now, I would give my right arm to live in a town like Mount Vernon,” said Beck, who had grown from a lanky teen to a soft and pudgy six-foot-three. “And I discovered today that there are a ton of people ready to cut it off. It doesn’t bother me, because I have the key to their house now.”

  As Beck was about to receive the key, the sound system malfunctioned in the hall. “It’s a left-wing conspiracy!” one woman shouted, according to an account in the Seattle Times.

  Beck, eschewing politics, recalled his Mount Vernon antics, which included the theft of chewing gum. He spoke fondly about the “magical place” of his youth, part of a “Norman Rockwell’s America” that he still believes could prevail—if only people would stop “tearing each other apart.”

  Beck’s idealized portrait of his hometown—and his wish that people would stop the sort of tearing apart that is his own trademark—captured a central Beckian contradiction. His personal narrative—overcoming his mother’s suicide and years of drug and alcohol addiction to find God and love—is compelling and uplifting. Yet the message he broadcasts to millions is angry and apocalyptic.

  Beck, born in 1964, had the makings of a happy childhood in Mount Vernon. His parents ran the bakery in town, which operated under the names Sweet Tooth Pastry and City Bakery. Of his early childhood, he told the Deseret News of Salt Lake City: “I’m a schmo. My family never made more than $25,000 a year. We’re all bakers for generations.” His parents sometimes dressed him and his sister up in Colonial garb to give the town a patriotic feel that might appeal to tourists. Young Beck, who attended a Catholic primary school, would also dress up in a tux and perform magic tricks.

  “When I was eight years old my mom gave me an album called ‘The Golden Years of Radio,’ ” he wrote. “I became mesmerized.” He wanted to be a broadcaster, and got his first gig at the tender age of thirteen after winning a local station’s contest to host an hour on air. While in high school, he was working as a professional DJ at Mount Vernon’s KBRC, drinking Coca-Cola on the set. By eighteen, he had a highly successful morning show in the area.

  But Beck’s childhood was also full of pain and tragedy. His parents gave up on the bakery when downtown was decimated by the malls. His mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict, by Beck’s account, and he lived with her after his parents divorced in 1977.

  “My mother committed suicide when I was thirteen years old,” Beck frequently says. He describes this as the source of both his pain and his strength: “My mom was a drug addict who committed suicide when I was thirteen. While that was a horrible and tragic event in my life, one that took me years to get beyond, in many ways it has ended up helping me become the person I am today. I am stronger because of it. I am wiser because of it.”

  This isn’t exactly true. He was fifteen years old when Mary Beck drowned in 1979. And the authorities at the time were not convinced it was a suicide rather than a mere accident. After the online publication Salon recently raised questions about the incident, the News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, looked into it further.

  Forty-one-year-old Mary Beck’s body was found in Puget Sound, as well as that of a man who had taken her fishing on his small boat. An empty pint of Gordon’s vodka was found on the abandoned boat. The Tacoma police report said Mary Beck “appeared to be a classic drowning victim,” although the Coast Guard speculated that she could have jumped overboard, which would mean the other victim drowned trying to save her. In 2000, when he was working in Tampa, the St. Petersburg Times published a profile of Beck that reported that he “never told his first wife that his mother killed herself when he was a teenager. She found out when Beck told his radio listeners.” In any event, fifteen-year-old Beck was brought to the Pierce County morgue, where a family friend identified his mother’s body. Beck and an older sister then went to live with his father.

  In truth, the details don’t really matter. It’s not a whole lot better to lose your mother to an accident when you are fifteen than to suicide when you are thirteen. In a novel loosely based on his childhood, The Christmas Sweater, Beck has the protagonist’s mother die in a car accident when she falls asleep at the wheel. In a note accompanying that 2008 novel, Beck wrote that his mother “died when I was thirteen.”

  Still, the suicide became a key part of Beck’s narrative. He told the Deseret News that a brother—a stepbrother by most accounts—later committed suicide, too, and another died young from a heart attack. Beck wrote in 2003 that he had contemplated taking his own life when he was working in Kentucky in his twenties. “There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it,” he wrote. “Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at seventy mph into that bridge abutment … I have those stories to tell my kids and say, ‘Look, insanity runs in the family like a pack of wild elephants. Don’t turn out like Grandma. Don’t turn out like me.’ ”

  Beck talks easily on air about his trou
bled family—“I have two suicides in my family” and “I come from a dysfunctional family”—but he has relatively little to say about his father, William Beck, who is still living. “My dad and I weren’t very close to each other when I was growing up, because he was working all the time,” Beck writes. “He and I were never close until later in life, when I sobered up,” he writes elsewhere, saying his father has since become “the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  By contrast, his late maternal grandfather, Edward Lee Janssen, is a regular fixture in Beck’s monologues, a symbol of hard work and frugality. He mentions how his grandfather got his family through the Depression, how he’d watch The Lawrence Welk Show with his grandparents on Saturday nights, and how his grandfather used the same handmade tool box for fifty years. “He never wanted a new one,” Beck recalls with approval.

  Railing against some form of government handout, Beck says people like his grandparents “would punch us in the face for needing something like this.” They would have him “in the snow barefoot for a month cutting wood.” He says his late grandparents, though Democrats, would join him in his dislike for modern Democrats. “The Democratic Party … left my grandparents, left my parents,” he reports. “It is anti–everything my grandparents believed, and they were Democrats.”

  Beck also remembers his grandfather, a Boeing machinist and an auctioneer who didn’t go past the fourth grade, as a great storyteller, a trait even Beck’s detractors would say he has inherited. Edward Lee Janssen taught young Beck that there are three types of characters in good stories: “There’s heroes, there’s villains, and then there is the character that is there but for the grace of God go I.” Beck has employed each of these archetypes to great effect. It took him “a long time before I realized my grandfather was just making these stories up.” Beck has apparently acquired this skill, too. He restored the chair his grandfather used when he told the stories and brought it on the Fox set to show his viewers.

  By Beck’s own account, he spent the fourteen-year period between 1980 and 1994 drunk and high. “I was taking drugs every day of my life since I was sixteen years old,” he boasted to the Deseret News. At one point he was drinking a gallon of Jack Daniel’s each week. By the age of twenty-four, he said, “I was making about $300,000 a year”—he had skipped college and gone straight into broadcasting—“and most of it went directly up my nose.”

  “If I hadn’t been such a cheapskate, cocaine would have killed me,” Beck writes. “I remember looking into the mirror one day and seeing crusted blood all over my face, from all the cocaine I had snorted the day before … I found other recreational drugs, like alcohol, to get into that were much more cost-effective and didn’t make my nose bleed.”

  By the time he quit abusing substances in 1994, Beck reports, “The doctor gave me six months to live.”

  The addictions were destroying his career. Now he often mentions the young producer he fired for giving him a ballpoint pen rather than a Sharpie for autograph signing. “I don’t even remember his name,” Beck recalled for one audience, tearfully, his chin quivering.

  The writer Alexander Zaitchik, in Salon, uncovered various similar anecdotes that Beck has been less eager to share in public. There was the time in Phoenix when Beck, on the air, called the wife of a rival a couple of days after she had a miscarriage—and joked about how his rival couldn’t have a baby. In Kentucky, he routinely made fun of an obese woman who hosted a show on another station, using Godzilla sound effects and claiming that at her wedding “instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn.”

  In New Haven, Connecticut, Beck’s last stop before he sobered up, he insulted on air yet another broadcaster at a sister station. The man, a retired hockey player, was so infuriated that he struck Beck in the head in the parking lot, the Hartford Advocate reported. The paper quoted a colleague as saying the man who assaulted Beck was “hailed as a hero” at both stations.

  That’s consistent with Beck’s own description of himself from the time: “I was a monster,” “I was a scumbag,” “I’m a recovering dirtbag.”

  Beck’s on-air performance deteriorated as the drugs and alcohol took hold, causing him to bounce around from town to town—Houston, Baltimore, Washington, Corpus Christi, Provo, Louisville, Phoenix—finally winding up at KC101 in New Haven. “There’s nothing like being eighteen years old in the fifth largest market in America, and then spending the next dozen years dropping ninety-seven spots,” Beck writes.

  The depressing confines of KC101 were located on a suburban road in Hamden, Connecticut. The site includes a corrugated metal building sitting behind a drab red-brick building in a weedy field across from an elementary school. The radio towers spring from the weeds. Here, the addicted Beck found himself doing such dignified things as dressing in a plush banana costume for a radio promo.

  It was around then that Beck, living in a nineteenth-century farmhouse in the next town, Cheshire, divorced his first wife. He says he blacked out while telling his girls a bedtime story and couldn’t remember it the next morning. He spent time with his “good friend and physician for many years: Dr. Jack Daniel’s.” His motto, he said, was “I hate people.”

  “I’d lost everything,” Beck recounted later. “I’d lost my money. I’d lost my fancy car. And I was about to lose my family.”

  Beck says he became a “dry drunk”—he quit drinking, went through the DTs, but continued the behavior of an alcoholic even as he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in a church basement in Cheshire. This went on for a few years, until he was rescued—by his future wife, Tania, and by the prophet Moroni.

  Beck met Tania in the parking lot of the radio station; she had come to pick up a Walkman she had won in a contest. At about this time, Beck was heading back to the bottle. “I couldn’t hold my alcoholism,” he said in tearful testimony to an audience of Mormons. He prayed to God that by “this Thursday, if you don’t put a roadblock in my way, I’m going to drink. I cannot walk alone anymore.” Beck described how he went to the bar, ordered a Jack and Coke, and “I pick it up and I’m about to drink it and I turn around … there across the room is Tania.” They left the bar—for coffee.

  About a year later, the two were considering marriage, but Tania, a Catholic, told him, “We don’t have a faith—I can’t marry you.” Tania, Beck, and his two daughters went on a church tour, ending up (reluctantly, in Beck’s telling) at a Mormon church to appease a longtime Mormon friend and colleague. His decision was clinched when his daughter Mary told him, “I want to go back there.” They were baptized in 1999 and married three months later.

  “The guy firing people because of the Sharpie was dead and buried,” Beck proclaimed. “Where I was only focused on money, booze, business, and cars, I now only wanted to focus on family and people.”

  Well, maybe not “only” family and people. His conversion gave a big boost to his business—a development Beck describes as miraculous. In Beck’s tearful retelling of the moment cited earlier, he was called “out of the blue” by an agent the day after he was baptized. The agent had just told Beck that he should speak to Gabe Hobbs, a Mormon executive with Clear Channel radio—when Hobbs himself called on the other line. Hobbs got him an afternoon talk show in Tampa—a big boost in his visibility and a change in format from music to talk that would launch him to stardom.

  An account Beck gave Forbes magazine, however, tells a less miraculous tale that has nothing to do with the baptism. In this version, Beck already had the offer from Tampa: “In the late 1990s [Beck is fuzzy on dates], while filling in as a talk-radio host at WABC in New York City, Beck got a lucky call from media agent George Hiltzik, who had been tipped off by the program director. Beck told him he had an offer to do talk radio in Tampa.”

  As for Beck’s “focus on family,” he moved to Tampa and left his kids behind in Connecticut with their mother. When callers to his show criticized him for leaving eleven-year-old Mary (his daughter who has cerebral
palsy) and eight-year-old Hannah, he pronounced that criticism “over the line.” Beck told the St. Petersburg Times at the time that “I beat myself up enough for that.”

  He wondered on air if he’d made a mistake leaving his children, but he evidently decided he had not. Seven years later, he said he was still trying to “visit them regularly.” In the meantime, he had two more children with Tania: a daughter, Cheyenne, and an adopted son named Raphe.

  Beck admired the inner peace of the Mormons. “I want to be like that,” he said. Yet the Mormons weren’t entirely sure they wanted him. According to the Deseret News: “When Beck was to be ordained into the LDS priesthood, his name was presented to the congregation for a sustaining vote, as is customary in the church. In a highly unusual occurrence, one man opposed the ordination, later telling local leaders, ‘Have you heard his show?’ ”

  “I agreed with him,” Beck admitted in one of his more candid moments. He worried that his on-air antics would make people “think that’s the way Mormons are.” Added Beck: “I do stuff on the show every day that I regret or question. My language is loose. I’m just different. Every day I get off the air, I think, ‘Lord, help me be better. How do I balance this and be a good reflection of you?’ I don’t think I hit it very often.”

  But what he does do very often is employ the story of his redemption and his family to make a point on television and radio.

  At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he proposed a twelve-step program for Republicans: “I’m a recovering alcoholic. I screwed up my life six ways to Sunday and I believe in redemption. But the first step to getting redemption is you’ve got to admit you’ve got a problem … ‘Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I’ve got a problem. I’m addicted to spending and big government.’ ”