Hurricane ‘Mort’--the Bully of N.Y. Talk

The Dirty Harry of Talk TV broke open the day’s fourth pack of cigarettes. He took a sip of his Stolli and cranberry juice and reminisced about his favorite death threats.

“My life was threatened 33 times in radio, but I’ve only had two death threats since I went on TV, so that makes it 35 overall,” said Morton Downey, 55, ringmaster of the patently outrageous “Morton Downey Jr. Show,” which originates here weeknights on the WWOR-TV superstation.

Downey makes it a habit of recalling such details. He remembers the precise day--Aug. 31--when he was arrested as a protester at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Downey can rattle off the starting lineup of the 1967 New Orleans Buccaneers, an American Basketball Assn. franchise that he says he helped found.

And he says that when the owner of a Bakersfield motel stiffed him with a $4,000 rubber check--Downey was fronting a country band in the motel lounge--he retaliated by trashing his hotel room, causing $10,500 worth of damage.

But back to deadly threats: “I don’t take them too seriously,” he said, firing up another Merit Ultra Lite. “If someone’s going to kill you, they’re not going to call you and tell you.

“When I was doing a radio show in Sacramento, I had a guy send me a chess set. He enclosed a note, saying that I had to make a move each day and announce it over the air. Then he’d send back notes with his moves. And he made it very clear--he said that the day after he checkmated me, I’d die.”

Downey flashed his trademark wolfish grin, displaying a set of abnormally large and strikingly white teeth. “So I gave the guy my moves on the air each day and guess what? I checkmated him!”

Downey banged his glass on the table. “And I never heard from that loony again!”

Loony is one of Mort’s favorite buzzwords, usually reserved for guests who vehemently dispute his wisdom. (It seems unduly formal to call him anything but Mort--his cabdriver and bartender fans are just as familiar. In return he greets everyone with a fraternal, “Hey, pal!”)

If Mort tires of a particular line of argument, he’ll bellow: “Zip it!”

Other popular put-downs include “Twerp!,” “Bozo!,” “Slime!,” “Wimp!” and--perhaps most inspired of all--”Pablum Puker!,” which has become such a beloved Downeyism that his flagship station, New York’s WWOR-TV, has manufactured thousands of key-chains emblazoned with the slogan.

His detractors say he’s the one who deserves the loony moniker. But if there’s anyone who loves a looney, it’s the East Coast media, which have kept a close watch on Mort’s antics since he became airborne in October.

Critics have been outraged--but not speechless. People magazine called Mort “the most visible crank in the country.” The Washington Post dubbed him “a storm trooper for the New Right.”

Even the New York Post, which assiduously courts Mort’s bridge-and-tunnel constituency, complained that his program is “beneath the surface, simply a show about bullies.”

Is the rest of America ready for New York’s neighborhood bully? We’ll find out starting Monday, when Mort’s show makes its debut in syndication around the country (it will run weeknights at midnight, beginning June 13, on KABC-TV Channel 7). Bob Pittman, whose Quantum Media produces “Mort,” said the show will be broadcast in eight of 10 major markets, and available in 65% of the country.

Normally, local stations get late-night shows for free--the syndicator simply gets a share of the commercial revenues. However, Pittman said, “Mort” is so hot that local stations are paying “substantial fees--at least by late-night standards,” to MCA TV Enterprises for a 15-week trial run. “They can drop it after that, but we’re betting that it’s going to be a hit.”

Pittman said the show’s “Tabloid TV” label is unfair. “It’s issue TV, but issues discussed with passion and emotion; 95% of Mort’s topics are the same ones you’d see on ‘Nightline.’ Mort isn’t a reprehensible Wally George-type right winger. He’s a populist. I don’t think he’s irresponsible at all--if he were, we wouldn’t air the show.

“Let’s put it this way. If every show on TV was like Mort, then I’d be worried. But most TV is so obscenely tidy and polite that it’s refreshing to see people argue and get excited. That’s just real life, isn’t it?”

Orlando. Cleveland. Sacramento. Denver. Chicago. Mort has bounced from one local radio talk show to the next--honing his pit bull-in-a-china-shop act, getting fired and moving on. For years his major claim to fame was being the son of popular Irish crooner Morton Downey Sr., a ‘40s radio personality.

A darling of conservatives, abortion foes and male-rights activists, Mort had never done TV before he landed at WWOR. But he’s hit the jackpot. His show is Video Grand Guignol, where issues are debated amid a firestorm of arguments and insults.

Pacing around his stage, sipping coffee from a plastic cup and idly blowing smoke rings from his cigarette, Mort seems positively demure--at least compared to his bloodthirsty brigade of 150 predominately male fans who are his audience.

Incited by Mort’s pre-show pep talk (“I want to see you guys kick some (butt)!”), they shout obscenities, stamp their feet, heckle guests and generally act as if it’s free beer night at Shea Stadium.

Critics dismiss the show as Shock TV or Tabloid TV. But its incendiary formula is unique--it’s as if you staged “The McLaughlin Report” as a tag-team wrestling match. As Rolling Stone magazine put it, the program is “part TV talk show, part public lynching.”

A man who said he was “gentle” with a transsexual guest because “I didn’t want to pick on a guy in a dress with male-pattern baldness,” Mort has the acidic, belligerent air of a Manhattan cabbie lecturing tourists about the city’s decaying bridges and unruly ethnic mob.

He’s TV’s hard-boiled hero. If the marketing experts hadn’t insisted on using Mort’s name as the show’s title, the perfect moniker would’ve been “I the Jury.”

Exaggerating?

Early on, Mort had movie porno queen Seka as a guest. Infuriated by his cross-examination, she stalked out in a snit. Mort complained: “Well, what do you expect from a scum bucket?”

In a heated discussion about divorce, Mort claimed that after his ex-wife read “The Women’s Room” by Marilyn French, “she went on to become a used-car salesman and slept with every used-car salesman in town.”

During a debate over capital punishment for juvenile offenders, Mort had a guest show a photo of a nude girl who had been raped, murdered and attacked with a wooden stick.

Is it any wonder that Vanity Fair took aim on Mort, sniping: “He’s a one-man SWAT unit. Where Donahue is Mr. Empathy, striving to understand, Downey is the Equalizer, packing a closed mind and a rapacious mouth.”

Sitting down for a post-show dinner in a nearby hotel dining room, Mort offered no regrets. “Hey, when I get carried away on the show, I apologize. All I’m doing is making people think--and if they start thinking, maybe they can take my ideas and improve on them.”

You get the impression Mort relishes the heat. After all, he has received the ultimate accolade--he has been parodied on “Late Night With David Letterman.” Made up as Mort--right down to the prominent moles on his cheeks--writer Chris Elliot comes out and harangues the audience, heaping abuse on anyone within firing range.

Don’t think Mort isn’t appreciative. At dinner, he did Elliot’s act from memory, particularly relishing the finale, where Elliot rips several huge moles off his cheek and hurls them into the audience.

Mort boasts that his following includes such loyal fans as Robin Williams and Woody Allen--in fact he says he shares a table with Allen at Elaine’s, a chic New York celeb watering hole. “We sit at the Table 5 back from the kitchen,” Mort said.”Norman Mailer’s always there too. Woody’s always telling me how much he likes the show.”

What a delicious image--Woody Allen, the liberal mensch of Manhattan literary society, sharing Elaine’s fettuccine with Mort Downey, the yahoo messiah from Secaucus, N.J.!

Actually, if you press Mort long enough, the image turns out to be a bit illusory. “I’m not saying we actually sit together,” he said. “We just get the table, either me or him, depending on who’s there that night.”

Still, Mort’s point is well-taken. He has arrived.

In fact, the critics’ complaints may have only aroused viewers’ curiosity. During his seven-month run on WWOR, Mort’s ratings have steadily climbed to a recent 5.2 peak, by far the best numbers WWOR has ever had during its 9-10 p.m. time-slot.

WWOR was so overwhelmed by ticket requests earlier this year that the producers finally shut down the phones after the waiting list reached eight months. When fans were told that only mail requests would be taken, the station was inundated with 50,000 pieces of mail--which were promptly damaged by a flood.

Well, that’s the official version.

“What really happened was that some boneheads in the mail room couldn’t figure out what to do with all the mail, so they threw it away!” Mort hissed conspiratorially, relishing the notion of all this fan mail being dumped into the Hudson River. “We had to put out a story that they were damaged by a flood in the station basement. Everyone had to phone the requests in again.”

Mort blew some more smoke rings, a gesture which makes him seem especially thoughtful. “Hey, we had to fire two guys because they were bootlegging tickets to the show for $50 apiece!”

Critics have cautioned that Mort’s high-voltage appeal may ebb considerably, either as viewers tire of his antics or as prospective guests grow wary of being abused.

Bill Boggs, Mort’s executive producer and an ex-talk show host himself (New York’s “Midday” show), acknowledged that one of his key roles is to give Mort’s program “some enduring components.”

“My job is to take it from being a meteor and make it a fixture on the landscape,” he said. “I’ve heard the same concern about guests, but I think everyone forgets what an incredible appeal TV has for most people. People love it when their parents see them on TV, when their friends see them--even when waiters come up to them in restaurants and say they saw them. These days, everyone wants to be on TV.”

Mort does have one closely guarded secret. Take him away from the studio, put him in front of a rare prime rib at a nearby restaurant and he undergoes a startling transformation--into Mr. Nice Guy.

Maybe it’s an act. But it’s a good one, at least as good--and certainly more disarming--than his act on camera. Mercifully free of the self-dramatizing show-biz slickness of rival talk tycoons like Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera, Mort has the low-rent elegance of a pony-player who’s on a hot streak at the track.

He refers to booze as “sauce,” gladly admits his teeth are capped and is prone to all sorts of outlandish claims--it’s somehow hard to believe he really wrote John Kennedy’s U.S. Senate campaign theme song and served as a honor guard at Bobby Kennedy’s funeral.

But for the most part he is earnest, affable, refreshingly self-critical and--armed with a head full of statistics--eager to do battle on any issue.

Maybe what makes him such a sympathetic character is that he has failed so many times before he became a hit.

Mort was divorced twice before marrying Kim, his 31-year-old wife whom he calls “Mommy.” He organized the World Boxing League, which he admits “was a total failure--we got off one match and then it went down the tubes.”

He was a flop at politics, a disaster running his own lobbying firm (“I went completely belly-up”) and made barely a ripple as a singer, though he claims he made as much as $7,500 a week playing Reno and Las Vegas before abandoning that career for an unsuccessful stint as a political lobbyist.

In fairness, not all of Mort’s tales are such tall ones. He claims to have been the only white artist on Stax Records, a leading R&B; label. Mort said he recorded an album produced by Al Bell, whom he called “one of the greatest guys who ever lived.”

Now head of Motown Records, Bell confirmed the relationship: “Sure I knew him--we go way, way back. We made a record, I produced the tracks on him. He’s a great guy.”

Still, Mort kicked around for years, never sure of what he wanted to do. He places part of the blame on his family, especially his dad.

“I think my whole confusion began when I was a kid and I wanted to get into show business, but my family didn’t want me in it,” Mort said. “I think I ended up going from one crazy thing to another because I didn’t really like doing any of them.”

Even once Mort established a singing career, he couldn’t stick to it. “Everyone kept telling me what a great singer my father was, and while they meant it as a compliment, I looked at it as just meaning I was trying to follow in my father’s footsteps. There I was, already in my 40s, and I still hadn’t found my niche.”

Mort started blowing smoke rings again. “Maybe I just have a short attention span. When I told my wife about this show, I said I was excited about it, but I couldn’t see myself sticking with it for more than five years. I always seem to find another mountain to climb.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean Mort is ready to leave show business. One of the perks of his show’s affiliation with Quantum Media is the firm’s record industry connections--Mort is finishing up an album, due out later this year.

“I’ve already recorded my first song. Let’s go over to the limo and I’ll play it for you,” Mort said, already on the move again. “I cut it in Nashville. It’s called ‘We Shall Rise Above It All.’ ”

Mort beamed. “The great thing is that it can really cross over in every direction--it’s an ‘80s civil rights song!”

As Mort has often noted, he began his political life as a die-hard liberal, working for John and Robert Kennedy and getting himself arrested--so he says--seven times during the civil rights movement. “I was pretty radical left,” he admitted, saying his shift rightward began with the abortion-rights movement in the mid-’70s.

It’s hard to top Mort when it comes to political labels. “I’m a radical centrist,” he boasted. “I’m the same Kennedy liberal I was 20 years ago. In fact, if John Kennedy were alive today, he’d be a conservative. He’d be the first to recognize that the liberals have saddled us with 40 years of ideas that haven’t worked.”

Some of those failed ideas, according to Mort, include the feminist ideal of comparative worth. “Totally opposed to it,” he said. “We’d have a $600-billion deficit with that.”

Welfare? “Get rid of it! It costs $161 billion each year and what it’s done is cause economic enslavement.”

A woman vice president? “Sure, especially with the boobs running already. But not a Pat Schroeder type, who’s gonna break down and cry at the drop of a hat. I’d go for a tough cookie, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick.”

His vices? “I smoke heavy, I drink a little and I’ve tried an occasional joint. But I don’t fool around on my wife. She’s tough--she’d sew me up in a clean sheet and beat me to death.”

The only topic that made Mort a bit defensive was his ideological soul brother in Anaheim, KDOC-TV Channel 56 talk show host Wally George. As soon as he was introduced to a West Coast reporter, Mort slyly slipped in a quick punch, as if worried that George might have launched a preemptive attack. “That guy from L.A.,” he said derisively, as if he couldn’t even remember George’s name. “All he does is shout. And stutter. He’s the Mel Tillis of TV. I can’t believe anyone let him on the air!”

Later, when George’s name came up again, Mort revealed that he has known George for 25 years--and has been on his show three times. Apparently they are sometime-pals, sometime-foes.

“He’s a sweetheart of a guy and my family’s known him forever,” Mort said. “But bless him, it’s not that Wally’s audience has no intellect--it’s Wally that has no intellect. The show is a charade. When I was on last, we set up the bit where the guards were gonna drag me out--but I went out too fast!”

Mort roared with laughter. “Wally had to plead with me to come back because he didn’t have any other guests!”

(George responded in kind: “Mort Downey is a complete idiot. And he’s no conservative--he’s a warmed-over Democrat. This guy is a so-called friend who came down and copied my show’s whole format, down to virtually every gesture and mannerism I use. Johnny Carson had lots of impersonators and they all ended up in the garbage can. And that’s where Downey is going, ‘cause he does a lousy Wally George impression!”)

Wherever he went in his radio career, Mort managed to find a fight:

In Orlando, in 1983, a UPI correspondent reported that Mort, who did restaurant reviews on his talk show, got into a heated argument on the air with the head waiter of a big hotel, after Mort called the waiter a “twerp” on the air. He added, “The best tip I could give you would be to get a job at Wendy’s!”

Mort was later fired for cursing and throwing a punch at an abortion-rights activist.

In Sacramento, he was canned from KFBK-AM after browbeating Tom Chinn, a member of the City Council, who had phoned the station to complain about a Chinese ethnic joke that Mort had told on the air.

In Chicago, Mort had a talk show on WMAQ-AM, where he made news by repeatedly calling Mayor Harold Washington a communist.

Mort noted these incidents with a wave of dismissal. “The media likes to blow these things out of proportion,” he said. “It’s OK with me. I’m a six-pack entertainer. You got to watch my shows with a six-pack of brew. So what if people get angry with me--I doubt if I’ll ever run out of people to get angry at.”

As if on cue, Mort decided to blow off some steam. The issue: airline regulations banning smoking on flights of less than two hours. Guess who’s against it.

“First off, it’s so dumb because it’s the longer flights that are supposed to do the most damage, right?” he said, fishing in his pockets for--of course--a fresh pack of cigarettes.

Mort was reminded of a recent incident when a man was arrested when his flight landed because he’d lit up in a nonsmoking section. “Here’s what I’d do,” he said, warming to the topic. “First off, if it’s one of these under-two-hour flights, you don’t wait until the plane’s already in the air. You get on the plane right away, sit down and light up before they take off.

“Then if they try to hustle you off the plane, you show them your ticket and sock ‘em with a breach of contract suit! And if they so much as touch you when you’re getting off the plane, you get them for that too!”

Mort blew a triumphant smoke ring. “And that, “ he said with the satisfaction of someone who has tackled the system and wrestled it to the ground, “would be the end of that!”