“All I’m Thinking Is, ‘I’m Going to Die'”: Howard Stern Reveals Cancer Scare, Trump Regrets, and Details of a Dishy New Book.
Following a health crisis that left him “scared? s***less,” the $90 million radio star discusses retirement, Trump, and his personal and professional transformation: “I’d feel really f***ing s***ty if I hadn’t evolved.”
For the first time in recollection, Howard Stern abruptly cancelled his show on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. His listeners, a notoriously devoted portion of SiriusXM’s 36 million customers who have made the boundary-pushing “shock jock” a part of their lives since his rise to stardom in the 1980s, were understandably frightened. Reddit erupted with conspiracy ideas, and a few tenacious reporters tracked down the host’s elderly parents to check on him.
By Monday, the self-proclaimed king of all media had returned to the airwaves, mocking the uproar, as many had expected. It was only the flu, he said to his audience: “Why is it such a big deal that I took a fucking day off?”
It turns out he was lying through his teeth.
Stern wasn’t at home with a fever or a runny nose that morning; he was being taken to surgery. For the most part of the previous year, he had been bouncing between appointments as physicians monitored a low white blood cell count noticed during a regular checkup and later discovered a tumour on his kidney. The chances of it becoming malignant were 90%.
For a man who spends his life on public, disclosing personal facts like his first wife’s miscarriage and his supposedly small penis, he’d been rather quiet about his latest battle. In truth, he only notified his close circle, which included his second wife, Beth, his three daughters, his therapist, and his on-air foil of nearly four decades, Robin Quivers, who is also a cancer survivor. Until all of this, Stern had thought himself invincible; at 65, his 6-foot-5 physique was still enviably svelte, and his head was adorned with a thick mop of curls. He ate properly and exercised regularly. Cancer was a foolish notion.
After a few hours and seven abdominal incisions, he emerged from surgery to discover that all had been a misunderstanding. A small, innocuous cyst. The news should have been comforting. But for the first time in his adult life, Stern had confronted his own mortality, and there was no turning back.
In the 24 months since, he’s found himself wondering often if he’s done it all wrong. Despite amassing fame and fortune unrivaled in his medium, Stern says he’s a mountain of regret. He beats himself up over the father he couldn’t be to those three girls, now grown and living elsewhere; and the husband he never was to their mother, Alison, who finally left him in 1999. He can’t read his first two best-selling books, Private Parts (1993) and Miss America (’95), without cringing at his own narcissism, and he insists nearly every one of the interviews he conducted during his pre-satellite radio days makes him sick.
“I was so completely fucked up back then,” he says, his head shaking with disgust on this morning in early April. “I didn’t know what was up and what was down, and there was no room for anybody else on the planet.” His more recent metamorphosis, the result of age, a healthy marriage and intensive therapy, has revealed sensitivities he didn’t know he had. It’s also sharpened his skills as an interviewer.
Dressed now like an aging rocker with a pair of dark jeans, boots and his signature shades perched just above his brows, Stern is sprawled out on the charcoal-gray couch usually reserved for guests in his midtown Manhattan studio. He’s explaining how his brush with cancer is a key reason he agreed to write his first book in two decades, Howard Stern Comes Again, a curated collection of edited transcripts from his favorite interviews — with everyone from Billy Joel to Donald Trump (more on him later) — wrapped in his own memories and candid self-reflection. There’s considerably more in the book on his health scare, too, along with his musings on fame, sex and spirituality. “It’s as much his autobiography in conversation as it is a tour through American pop culture over the last 20 years,” says Jonathan Karp, publisher of Simon & Schuster, which will release the book May 14. That brush is also the reason Stern’s been having real discussions about what’s next once his contract with SiriusXM, which reportedly pays him $90 million a year, expires at the end of 2020.