NEW YORK--Most television gossips are perky messengers of misfortune. As if to offset the malice of their trade, hosts like Mary Hart of “Entertainment Tonight” and Lara Spencer of “The Insider” are pageant-pretty, cheerful and unshakably sweet.
Wendy Williams, a radio D.J., who, the other week, began a four-city tryout as the host of her own daytime talk-show on Fox, is a real-life scandalmonger, the kind of beauty-salon savant who wishes famous people the worst.
She has a bawdy and arch side, but she can be startlingly mean-spirited.
If “The Wendy Williams Show” goes national, it could mark a turning point in television etiquette.
Usually it is left to standup comics like Kathy Griffin or Mario Cantone mercilessly to mock celebrities who end up in rehab or jail.
Nationally syndicated talk-show hosts follow the Oprah Winfrey model and wrap their celebrity klatches in a solicitous, redemptive tone.
Montel Williams, whose long-running show was canceled last May, began his career as a motivational speaker.
Miss Williams made hers as a trash talker.
She received a lot of attention in 2003 when Whitney Houston went haywire during a telephone interview on New York radio station WBLS--using a lot of bleeped language--after Miss Williams asked her, insistently, about her drug and spending habits.
Last Friday on the TV show, in a gossip segment she calls “Hot Topics,” Miss Williams cited reports that Miss Houston is taking voice lessons to repair her voice for a comeback album and suggested that the two hold a rematch.
“Let’s talk, let’s mend,” she urged, adding flatly, “but I don’t really see vocal cords coming back, even after vocal lessons, after that amount of damage and her age.”
Two young Whitney Houston fans in the studio audience rose to plead for more positivism and compassion, but Miss Williams set them straight.
“A lot of us are pulling for Whitney,” she replied briskly, “but I’ve got to tell you something as somebody who is part of the music industry: I’m hearing nothing right now, and I wish that I heard more.
“I’m not hearing positive, I’m not hearing negative. I’m hearing nothing. And like they say, ‘No press is bad press.’ ”
Miss Williams, who has been verbose about her own cocaine addiction, cosmetic surgeries and baroque love life, lives by that creed.
She has a commanding and, at times, sassily comic stage presence, but, so far, her show is less a talk-show than an alpha-female showcase, and Miss Williams is careful to place herself on an equal footing with even her most famous guests.
Disco’s Donna Summer, who was announced as a guest on last Friday’s show, for some reason stayed away from the studio and limited her participation to a phone-in chat.
“You are legendary, I just love you,” Miss Williams told her before noting that she looks a little like Miss Summer, though she phrased it in a more self-aggrandizing way. “Do you also know that people have said for years that we favor one another?,” she asked Miss Summer.
She had a point.
On the other hand Miss Williams, who is statuesque, deep-voiced, high-cheek-boned and usually coiffed in blond, flowing Rapunzel wigs, also favors Ru Paul.
Miss Williams is a tough cookie, but she met her match on Monday, when Omarosa Manigault Stallworth, the bad girl of “The Apprentice,” went on the show to promote her new book, “The Bitch Switch: Knowing How to Turn It On and Off.”
Omarosa, who goes by one name, like Cher or Stalin, had her switch turned on high.
Miss Williams took her to task.
“Omarosa, while you and I both have demanding ways, I’ve found that you show the honey, and it works a little better.”
“You didn’t get here by being sweet,” Omarosa retorted, noting that Miss Williams’ radio career was built on, as she put it, “talking smack” about people.
“I feel like, in many ways, you are the stereotype of the angry Black woman,” Miss Williams, visibly irked, said.
“I’d rather be an ABW than a buffoon,” Omarosa replied.
The last straw, however, was about bouffants.
Miss Williams slyly worked in a mention of her guest’s recent breast augmentation surgery.
Omarosa retaliated by asking Miss Williams if she had had her nose fixed. Miss Williams, who said she has only used Botox, suggested that Omarosa plump up her lines with Restylane.
“I would suggest a wig that doesn’t stuff my head three inches,” Omarosa snapped back.
At long last a breakthrough in daytime programming: the backtalk show.
