Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One

by Zev Chafets

  There are also some surprises on the wall. I had no idea Tennessee Williams was from Missouri. I was struck by the absence of Bob Gibson, the greatest pitcher in Cardinals history, and of Chuck Berry, a son of St. Louis whose cultural contribution makes him at least the equal of Marlin Perkins, host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, or Rose O’Neill, creator of the Kewpie Doll.

  The Cape jury may be guilty of lapses but not of hometown favoritism. There are just three locals on the wall: astronaut Linda Godwin, who grew up in nearby Jackson; Marie Watkins Oliver, who designed the state flag; and Rush Limbaugh. Although he visits his family in Cape regularly, he hasn’t seen the Wall of Fame. Perhaps he would be disconcerted to find himself, or even a depiction of himself, stuck in downtown Cape Girardeau in perpetuity.

  If David Limbaugh weren’t Rush’s little brother he might be on the Wall of Fame himself. Certainly he is the most famous current resident of Cape. He has written three best-selling polemical attacks on secular liberalism and produces a nationally syndicated column. Cape has finally got a satellite hook-up, which means that he has recently been able to appear on talk shows without schlepping all the way to St. Louis. And he has a day job as a senior partner in the family law firm.

  When Rusty announced that he was quitting college and setting out on a radio career, Big Rush called him in for one last talk. Leaving school, he said, would cost the boy his social standing, force him to settle for intellectually inferior friends, and price him out of the market for a decent bride. It went without saying that it would also deprive him of his birth-right, partnership in the Limbaugh law office. But Rusty wasn’t swayed by these dire predictions. His mind was made up, and for once he was prepared to stand up to his father.

  That left David. He went to SEMO for a year, transferred to the University of Missouri in Columbia, got a B.A. in political science, went to law school, and made law review. Then he came home. His grandfather was still titular head of the firm, and his uncle Steve and cousin Steve Jr.—both future federal judges—were there, too. Big Rush, who suffered from diabetes and obesity, worked intermittently, and having David there gave him a boost. “My dad was really excited to have me back,” he says, “and he gave me a lot to do.”

  David Limbaugh was a devoted brother, but not even a saint could have completely escaped a feeling of resentment. Rusty was out in the world chasing a dream; David was stuck behind a desk. But there were compensations for suddenly becoming Number One Son. “I’ve never been jealous of Rush,” he told me, “probably because I was successful before he was. Does that make sense to you?”

  My visit to Cape Girardeau was not the highlight of David Limbaugh’s Christmas season. He had received permission from Rush to talk to me, but he couldn’t quite shake the idea that I was the enemy, an agent of the hated mainstream media. I was from New York. I had a beard and wire-rim glasses. I wore jeans. “The sixties culture has tried to demonize the unique American culture,” he said pointedly at our first meeting.

  Yet, despite his suspicions, David proved to be a voluble and gracious guide. His conversational style is a mixture of candor and self-effacing (but sincere) paranoia. Driving around town one afternoon in his Cadillac Escalade he recalled how Rush, even at the age of three or four, knew every make and model of automobile on the road. “He was amazing, like he was reincarnated or something,” David said. “The family wanted to get him on The Ed Sullivan Show.” He shot me a sideways glance. “You’re probably going to try to make me sound like an idiot, aren’t you?”

  When Rush hit it big he turned to his younger brother for legal counsel. It was a display of sibling intimacy and trust—there were far more experienced show business attorneys in California and New York—and David, who calls himself “a country lawyer,” did just fine. Over the years he has helped his brother negotiate a series of ever more complex and lucrative deals and, in the process, has attracted some of Rush’s acolytes, including FOX News’ Sean Hannity and best-selling author and talk-show host Mark Levin.

  “Rush is the ideal client,” David told me. “He’s patient and he knows what he wants. And hey, he knows more about his industry than I do. That makes it easy.” David isn’t as rich as his brother but he appears to be doing very well. He lives with his wife and five kids in a splendid white-pillared mansion on a hill in horse country.

  The Limbaugh brothers don’t sound alike—David has kept the reedy Missouri twang that Rush saw as a professional impediment and worked hard to lose—but they think alike when it comes to politics. David described Barack Obama, whose inauguration was a month away, as a “Stalinist liberal,” and his supporters in the media and academia as “dictatorial Stalinist aristocrats.” The harsh words were softened by an amiable tone; David lacks his brother’s emotional velocity, primarily because, unlike Rush, he is not an entertainer. “When Rush gets behind the mike, it’s not that he’s a different person, he’s the same person, but he gets more animated,” David explained. “I’ve heard that Johnny Carson was the same way. A lot of performers are. Do you agree?”

  We drove together to pick up one of David’s kids at the Christian parochial school he attends. Such schools were not in fashion when the Limbaugh boys were young. They attended public school and confined their religious education to Sunday School instruction at Centenary United Methodist Church. As a young man, David was not what you would describe as pious, but he has lately become a fervent, born-again evangelical. One of his recent books is Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christians.

  I asked David what his brother thought of his religiosity. “I’d say Rush is a Christian,” he replied. “But he doesn’t go to church and I don’t know if I’d say he’s born-again. It’s something we really don’t discuss. I don’t try to push religion on people. You’re probably going to make me sound like a religious fanatic, aren’t you?”

  Later, when I mentioned David’s observation to his brother, Rush confirmed that he doesn’t go to church regularly. “I never enjoyed going when I was a kid. It seemed false to me somehow, just people saying words, going through the motions. On Sundays, some of the local ministers would come into the station to give sermons on the radio, and I’d tell them, ‘Hey, I know I should be in church today,’ just to see their reaction. You know what? They couldn’t have cared less. They were happy I was working.” Limbaugh says he does have “a private relationship with Jesus” and speaks to God many times a day. He didn’t say who initiates the conversations.

  It had been snowing in Cape, and the roads were slick, but David braved the elements to give me a personalized tour of Rush’s boyhood. When Big Rush came back from World War II, he, like many veterans, bought a modest cottage—David thinks he paid eleven thousand dollars. As the boys reached their teens, the family upgraded to a brick ranch house with a wraparound porch, big windows, marble floors, and, of course, the downstairs rumpus room. There had been happy times there. David hadn’t shared Rush’s burning desire to escape, and he pointed out the scenes of their boyhood with what seemed like fondness.

  Rush was due home for Christmas in a few days, and David was both happy and sad. He finds it painful that his brother has no children. “He comes every year, flying in with a plane full of presents like Santa Claus. My kids are crazy about him. I don’t talk to him very much about how wonderful it is to be a father, because I don’t want to cause him any hurt. But I wish he could know the joy of it. I think he’d make a great father.”

  “David idolized Big Rush and now he idolizes Rush,” a high school friend told me. I mentioned this to David and he didn’t disagree. “Rush is like a general of a huge army. He’s the leader of a movement,” he said. “Whatever success I’ve had with my books and columns, that’s not much really when you compare it to him. I guess a lot of people think I ride on his coattails.” He gave me one of his sideways looks. “Maybe you think that, too.”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “Everybody does,” he said glumly. “I wouldn’t be
surprised if you did, too.”

  Unlike a lot of small Midwestern cities, Cape Girardeau hadn’t been hurt too badly by the economic dislocations of the past two generations. In fact, except for some down-at-the-heels stretches of Broadway and a few other commercial streets, things appeared to be booming. The economy is anchored by the university and two large regional hospitals, and it is a commercial center for agricultural products. A Proctor & Gamble factory provides steady work. Retail in Cape ranges from high-end antique galleries and a shining island of national chain stores and restaurants not far from Limbaugh’s office to places like Nearly Perfect Shoes (“Actually they are perfect,” a saleslady told me, “it’s just that they didn’t sell, so we get them”). I also spotted The Aggressive Mortgage Company, which soon went under, a victim, presumably, of its own hawkish business philosophy.

  I was glad to find the Varsity Barber Shop, Rush’s first employer, still open for business. The chair where he once shined shoes is still there; in fact, the entire place looks like it hasn’t been so much as painted since the 1960s. I dropped by on a Tuesday morning, about eleven o’clock. The barber, a large man in late middle age dressed in a flannel shirt and droopy jeans, was just finishing up a trim. Otherwise the shop was empty and silent. The barber, whose name was Fred, subjected me to a not-especially-veiled inspection. Clearly the Varsity doesn’t get much drop-in business.

  “Just came by to get my haircut,” I said.

  “Sorry,” said Fred. “All the slots are taken.”

  Vacant chairs lined the wall. The unmanned shoe station stood in a corner. Not even a radio was playing. “There’s nobody here,” I said.

  Fred nodded. That was a fact, but not a relevant fact. “Around Christmastime, people come in for a haircut. They make appointments,” he said. “You didn’t make an appointment.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m from out of town. Can’t you just squeeze me in?”

  “Nope.”

  “When can I make an appointment?”

  “After Christmas,” he said. “Before Christmas folks come from forty miles to get a haircut.”

  Christmas was ten days away. “Did Rush Limbaugh really work here?” I asked.

  “That’s what they say. Never met him.”

  “Ever hear any good stories about him when he was working here?”

  “Nope. Can’t say I have.”

  We looked at one another for a long moment and then I thanked him for his time and left. If there’s one thing I have learned in a long career it is that when you can’t get a haircut in an empty barbershop at eleven in the morning, you’ve been in town long enough.

  Which is, I think, more or less the way Rusty Limbaugh felt in February 1971 when he left Cape at the wheel of his ’69 Pontiac Le Mans.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FROM RUSTY TO CHRISTIE TO RUSH

  In McKeesport, Pennsylvania, twelve miles from Pittsburgh, at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers, Rush Limbaugh shed his alter ego, Rusty Sharpe, and was reborn as “Bachelor Jeff ” Christie, morning drive-time disc jockey on station WIXZ-AM. McKeesport was smaller than Cape but it was in the Pittsburgh listening area, and for Rush it was a large step up, proof that he could get a serious radio gig outside the orbit of the Limbaugh family influence. Except for the six-week engineering course in Dallas, which had been closely supervised, long-distance, by his mother, this was his first venture into the adult world. He was on his own, earning a living, discovering a new part of the country, and, best of all, permanently paroled from academia.

  At WIXZ he hosted the Solid Rockin’ Gold Show. Here and there on the Internet you can find snippets of these shows. Even at a remove of more than thirty years, the timbre and timing of his voice is instantly recognizable. His job was to play music and deliver traffic reports, but he couldn’t repress the urge to make his audience laugh.

  “Seven minutes after six in the morning . . . As you know I am a bachelor, I live in a dinky little apartment, and all I have is a lamp and a TV set, but I’m going to play a little joke on the electrical department.” Rush dialed the phone and an unsuspecting employee of the electric company answered.

  “I just moved here from Florida,” said Rush. “I have a thing for palm trees and I have a big backyard, so I thought I might start a palm tree orchard.”

  “A palm tree orchard?”

  “I need heat lamps for that,” Rush said. “About fifteen or twenty thousand heat lamps. And I was wondering what it would cost me.”

  “How many watts?”

  Rush said, “About six hundred watts apiece, twenty hours a day. What will that run me?”

  The electric company clerk took a minute to calculate. “That would cost you three thousand, six hundred and forty-eight dollars a day,” he said.

  Rush feigned shock. “A day! I could move back to Florida cheaper than that!”

  Bits like this were an echo of the crank calls and fake pizza orders from Flo’s Taxi, and they signaled that Jeff Christie aspired to something bigger than record spinning. Like all beginning comics, he used the materials he had garnered from his own experience. “The Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the Air,” for example, leaned on his contempt for the radio preachers he had met at the studio on Sunday mornings in Cape, as well as showcased Limbaugh’s gift for mimicry.

  “Before the show I had the divine joy of talking with the Almighty,” Shuck intoned in a fruity Southern accent. “It was in my garage and I got right straight through to Him and I got talking about some real heavy subjects. He told me that there are those of you out there with afflictions and terrible troubles. He said there’s a lady out there who believes her daughter is in terrible trouble. I don’t know if it’s you. Do you believe that your daughter’s in trouble? Don’t despair, the Almighty told me it could be taken care of. Simply send a hundred dollars. Now if you don’t have a hundred dollars, hawk something or borrow it and send it. Get it and send it to Friar Shuck!”

  Sometimes Bachelor Jeff gave out faux advice. “Bunch of requests for the Christie quickie DJ course,” he said one morning. “Had a letter from a girl who desired to become a radio pronouncer, and she thought it would be a drawback because she’s a girl. Not so. You really just have to master two techniques, and I’m going to explain them right now. Number one, the use of the microphone. To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on position and talk into it. The second, which is the biggie, is cuing up the record. Get the record you want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck, slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle, place it on the outside edge of the record, then turn the record until you hear the beginning of the record, back it up a quarter of a turn, and when you get through talking the record will start.” He paused, gave it two beats. “After you have mastered those two techniques, girls, change your sex.”

  Limbaugh’s bosses saw that he was talented and popular, but they worried that his humor was stretching the top-40 drive-time format. “They used to send him memos, telling him ‘Shut up and play the records,’ ” says Bill Figenshu, who worked at the station as “Bill Steele” and shared a two-hundred-dollar-a-month flat with Rush in nearby Irwin, Pennsylvania. “It was supposedly a garden apartment but it was in the basement, so there was no garden. We were both very young, ambitious, hard-working guys. He went in at four in the morning. I worked nights, so we didn’t see each other that much. We were friendly, we had a decent time, but we weren’t best buds or anything like that. Mostly we did the wash together on Saturdays and ate pizza. Rush had a good personality but he wasn’t particularly funny. He was a quiet kid, and so was I. When radio is your life, you’re a geek. Especially if you were doing AM, which was becoming uncool at that point. We didn’t smoke dope, we did air-checks. Vietnam was going on, all sorts of changes, but I can’t remember him talking about politics. We talked about radio and the careers we wanted to have.”

  According to Figenshu, who went on to become the head of Viacom’s radio broadcasting di
vision, the flat they shared was a model of bachelor domesticity, with a ratty green shag carpet, furniture pulled together from forgotten sources, and cold pizza crusting on the kitchen counter. Limbaugh, who is an extremely fastidious housekeeper, is offended by the description. He also denies that the apartment was, as has been reported, the scene of his first sexual conquest. “I have no memory of THAT,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “I don’t remember where [I lost my virginity]. Honestly I don’t. All I know is that there was NO ONE else there. That I am certain of.”

  In Cape, Rusty Sharpe had been a minor celebrity. In McKeesport, Jeff Christie surpassed Rusty: He did Toys for Tots charity gigs with players of the Pittsburgh Condors, an ABA basketball team that averaged less than a thousand fans a game and whose star, John Brisker, was the dirtiest player in the history of pro basketball. Bachelor Jeff made appearances for the Variety Club and other civic organizations, and showed up on request to schmooze with sponsors at station events.