She calls herself Dr. Laura. But, according to the California Board of Behavioral Science Examiners, Nobody is allowed to use 'Doctor' unless they are a medical doctor or...a professor in the psychological field with a clinical license.
Five hundred years ago, she would have been called "a common scold." More recently, she has been called "dictatorial," "rude," "overemotional," "a pain in the ass," "a fraud," "Laura the Hen," "A Psychological Bag Lady," and "Our National Mommy."
"I pretty much preach, teach, and nag," she told a reporter from the Washington Post. "It's not pop psychology at all. If anything, it's a new genre..." she said.
She can be heard three hours a day in almost every corner of America. They tell us that her audience exceeds 18,000,000, on 450 radio stations, and over 50% of her listeners are men. 50,000 or more people try to call in each day. Her syndicated show recently sold for $71,500,000.
Her themes are protect the child, practice family unity, use sexual restraint, stop making excuses, and don't interrupt me. "Tell me what you think, not what you feel," she says. "Everything I say is true," she says.
She grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. She was a loner in high school and college, but no one could miss her intensity. She was fascinated with science, and got her PhD at Columbia University.
In the midst of her divorce in 1975, she moved to Los Angeles, and tuned in to Bill Ballance and his radio talk-show. She called up during a program about divorce, and they spoke, on the air, for twenty minutes, and then he arranged to meet her, using the oldest of old wheeze come-hither lines, "Someday you're going to be an international radio star."
The radio gods must have been smiling down on her, because Ballance was the originator of a new, and rather daring, on-the-air confessional program. Before, call-ins had been people discussing their fishing trips and their kids and cats and politics of the non-confrontational variety. Now it was suddenly love, lust, and passion. Ballance, according to those who knew his show, "talked about sex incessantly."
Dr Norton Kristy, another on-the-air radio shrink, said the program evolved into an invitation being extended to women to talk about their most intimate fears and hopes and issues in their lives. Bill did that. He was the first in America to do it, and within three years, he was widely copied in America and around the world.
If Doctor Laura was seeking to become famous, she picked the right guy. If she was looking for someone who would keep her deepest secrets, she shoulda stood in bed. Over the years, Ballance seems to have lost whatever little affection he had for his old squeeze. His uncensored memories of their time together have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and several other newspapers and magazines. They are uniformly obnoxious, highly personal, and hilarious.
For instance, there's the matter of pet names. He called Laura his little plum, she called him her "Pillow Plumsicles." She wrote notes to him signed, "Your Tottle Bug." We used to thrash around like a couple of crazed weasels, he told Vanity Fair. He dubbed her "Ku Klux." Why? Because she is a wizard in the sheets.
He didn't limit his comments to their love affair. "We were sitting in the Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Blvd. one day and I said, 'You're scratching your head and a cloud of dandruff is floating over into my consomm.'
"Talk about gnashing your teeth; it was an actual snarl. She said, 'Don't you ever tell anyone I have psoriasis.' I said to Laura, 'If it weren't for your psoriasis you wouldn't have any character at all.'
Even at that tender age, however, Laura was showing another passion --- one for upward mobility. Ballance says that she wanted to get into his "la-di-da" hotel in Palm Springs: "I pulled more strings than a cross-eyed harp tuner to get her in..." But with her burgeoning ambition came a burgeoning captiousness. No sooner was she in than she resigned.
And, now, many years after the fact, the coup de grace. A year or so ago, Ballance sold off some fairly expensive photographs he took of her. In the buff. These went for a pretty penny ($50,000 is the figure mentioned) to the Internet Entertainment Group. Like every other lurid thing you could possibly want --- or have nightmares about --- they are now on-line, listed as "Dr. Laura's Dirty Dozen." In the interests of professional journalism, I tried to call them up, but the entry fee at IEG was a bit steep. For some reason, this magazine --- the original corporate cheapskate --- refused to spring for the tariff.
http://www.ralphmag.org/dr-lauraZA.html#top
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Dr. Laura The Unauthorized Biography
Vickie L. Bane
THE BOOKS OF 2005
(St Martins)
Airbrushing as fast as she can
Vickie L. Bane
THE BOOKS OF 2005
(St Martins)
Airbrushing as fast as she can
. .
‘Dr. Laura’ asks for privacy while son is probed over lurid MySpace page
This is from a man in the "Armpit, Los Angeles California" who could be a little to the right of the Ayatollah. He assumes Deryk Schlessinger's lurid MySpace is typical "talking like a well trained marine or army soldier." He doesn't mention the guns in mouth shots or the highly disturbing pedophile cartoons. Also the threats were not just to the enemy.
