Queen of all She Surveys
From Radio DJ to Books, TV and Champagne, is Wendy Williams the next Media Mogul?
Words by Andre J Durall
Photography by Carol Freidman
Styled by Mario Wilson
Hair & Makeup by Steven Lindsay
What do we talk about when we talk about Wendy Williams? How much we love her. How much we hate her. How funny she is. How shallow she is.
How to-the-point she is. How on-point she is. How successful she is. How she talks about people. How people talk about her. And you know what? Wendy’s just fine with all that.
Wendy Williams, circa now, is more than just a radio DJ, a drive-time chit-chatter with celebrity guests, an advice hour and an infamous catch-phrase (“How You Doin?”—her way of insinuating homosexuality) that’s entered the urban lexicon. Wendy Williams has reached that highest rung of new-century American star status: She’s a brand. And that brand is growing by the second. Not only is she ruling the radio waves with her syndicated show, “The Wendy Williams Experience,” the self-proclaimed Queen of All Media is about to drop her third book (the first in a fiction series called The Ritz Harper Chronicles), return to VH1 for another season of her TV show (Wendy Williams Is on Fire), work as spokesperson for (and investor in) The House of Georges Vesselle Champagne and, with her husband and manager Kevin Hunter, shepherd a squad of models into the NYC party scene with the PPG Stallións—a company that reps the models who, to quote Wendy herself, “bring the sexy to the party.”
Of course, Wendy would be involved with something like that. After all, she herself “brings the sexy” to afternoon drive-time radio. Tune into “The Wendy Williams Experience” at any given moment and you’re likely to encounter Wendy gossiping on celebrity shenanigans or doling out her keep-it-real advice on everything from infidelity to plastic surgery to broken friendships. And people are listening. Janet Hill, Vice President of Doubleday/Harlem Moon, who’s publishing Wendy’s novel series, says, “We loved the idea of doing serial novels that chronicled the life of Wendy’s alter ego Ritz Harper because when Wendy talks, people listen.”
Ask Wendy why she thinks she’s qualified to offer anyone advice about anything, she’ll tell you point blank it’s because she’s knows her audience and she knows they trust her opinion. But more important, she says, it’s “because there are people who just want an answer or some guidance in the right direction and they don’t wanna ask peeps in their immediate circle. They’re like me, in that I’m a big proponent of leaving the family out of it. I’m my own best friend. I don’t go to my best friend or my big sister until I’ve digested whatever I have to figure out. You don’t take those ground zero emotions to people because grown people have their own lives.”
The day I hung out with Wendy in her studio at WBLS, she was experiencing some ground zero emotions of her own: Her life at the time was a crazy jumble of changed flights, unbooked rooms and many other dramas that can explode when you’re planning a trip to Puerto Rico— and inviting hundreds of your closest friends. Yup, Wendy Williams was about to host the jam of all jams in PR, full of parties, champagne sipping and fun. Even some of the Stallión girls were slated to be there, bringing the sexy and setting it all off for Wendy’s ever-growing fan base—an eclectic blend of urban, black working women, gay guys, teenagers who like to hear what grown folks talk about as well as white, Latino, Asian and urban black guys who know that Wendy knows all their games.
You almost have to ask yourself—given her varied base of fans—who exactly is it that finds Wendy offensive? At the end of the day, it seems the people who get turned off by Wendy’s ways are mainly the celebs and bold-faced names who don’t take to her honesty about them and the bubblicious world in which they travel.
It’s all about gossip, Wendy will tell you, which people love; but she knows that no one is completely immune. That’s why she’s as honest about her own life as she is about the lives of her subjects. “John Q Public,” she tells me, “has an insatiable appetite for gossip and you’ve gotta be able to pull your own card before they do. You gotta be honest ‘cause the public will hurt your feelings real quick.”
For all the success she’s experiencing these days, Wendy Williams didn’t exactly plan it this way. Growing up in New Jersey, she knew she had a gift for gab, but she didn’t think that gift would take her to the heights of radio stardom. After studying communications at Northeastern University in Boston, she took a series of radio jobs, moving up the ladder until she found herself working at Manhattan’s KISS-FM. “I caught glimpses of what I could be back in 1992 when I was doing nights at KISS,” she recalls. “I got accolades about the show that a lot of other shows didn’t get. From that, I thought things could be super-sized but I didn’t have the aspirations to kiss the asses of the people that you need to be a Frankie Crocker or someone like that. It was either that or your dad had to own the station or something.”
Part of the appeal of Wendy Williams is her love of things and her way of unabashedly sharing her thoughts about that love, but you’d be wrong if you thought that things are all that made this Queen a happy woman. When one suggests that the Wendy Williams show has changed over the years, she welcomes it. Of course the show has changed—Williams herself has changed. It was during her tenure in Philly from 1998-2001 (when she’d left NYC after a reported showdown with her old station and a famous performer) that she says she acquired the “fearlessness” that propels her forward. “I could have stayed here in New York, shopping and sitting around, but people forget about you when you’re not on the radio. Being in Philly was the best three years of my life, because I learned the strength to not change for other people. I was changing for myself. My life had changed, too, in terms of being a mother and a wife and having other concerns, like the carpet being cleaned or the roof being fixed. It was about just being myself rather than just about being famous and making a lot of money. Because money alone does not make for a rich life. Family does, the warmth that comes from family. Good health is priceless. But especially a love of yourself on your own terms. That love of self that comes with time and age—that ability to be fearless, when truly nobody is the boss of you.”
