Before fame called, Ira Glass began a program for the old WBEZ show The Wild Room on this belligerent note: “I do not like the Chicago Tribune, the big daily newspaper where I live. They have a few good reporters, but overall it is a gutless, lifeless newspaper. They handle the serious news usually with the dull, stupid, unemotional tone of a junior high school civics textbook. Their feature stories have a sort of ‘gee whiz’ dunderheaded quality to them. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. So why, why, did I let them cut my hair?”
That happened back in 1995–only yesterday to the bit players in Johnson’s narrative. “When that article came out in the Tribune and I saw my name in there, and Gary’s, I got this weird pang in my heart,” says Lynda Barry. “It was so weird to see our names in there with this person who changed my belief in human nature. I went out with him. It was the worst thing I ever did. When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn’t enough in the moment for him, and it was over. I had to go around for a year saying, ‘Am I boring and shallow and not enough in the moment?’”
Glass says, “I was an idiot. I was in the wrong. About the breakup. About the haircut story. About so many things with her. Anything bad she says about me I can confirm.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But it wasn’t Barry who remembered that Glass, the alchemist of “public radio’s fastest growing program”–to quote Johnson–once snickered on the radio at Johnson’s paper. That old show was mentioned to me by Glass’s former friend, collaborator, and peer Gary Covino.
How big is Ira Glass today? He’s so big that www.suck.com, a reliable font of Internet rudeness, just awarded him an “evil genius grant”–or Suck EGG–to shut up for a year. “The only real work he seems to do anymore is give interviews to fawning journalists and fight off the attentions of love-struck soccer-mom groupies.” You’ve arrived at a certain point in your career when Suck rips you (other EGGs were thrown at Neve Campbell and Shelby Foote), but Glass is so big that the Suck scrivener immediately E-mailed him an apology. “Frankly, there is nothing nasty to say,” Glass read with astonishment. “Of course, you know that better than anyone. But I tried, and my editor egged me on.”
“Sometime in the late summer of 1995 I started to wake up to what was going on, and I felt very bad about it, very betrayed–you name it, I felt it. But by then it was beside the point. It clearly was happening. I was left with a choice. I could keep doing the The Wild Room by myself–and the big concession by ‘BEZ was that they’d been allocating $100 a week [in salaries] for the show Ira and I were doing, so now I could have the whole $100 a week. So I’m continuing to do a very ambitious show, and here’s another show that’s a knockoff of my show. And my show is worth $100, and that show is worth $300,000. And he has a staff to service his needs, and he has his own private studio, this publicity machine which is generating puff stories about him all over the place, a big fund-raising operation–and we’re doing the same thing!
“Every week on The Wild Room we came to the show with two independent sensibilities. I love Gary. I loved Gary. But I didn’t want to keep doing that show. I didn’t want to have to argue about it. He brought what he brought to The Wild Room, and I brought what I brought to The Wild Room–and the notion that everything I brought to The Wild Room I got from him I find completely infuriating. If he had produced any of the kind of vignette stories or David Sedaris that I was doing on The Wild Room, if he’d been involved with them at all–at all–then he’d have some kind of case. But he had nothing to do with them. We were partners in the project, and I didn’t want to go on. And it hurt his feelings. Some people by disposition see betrayal around them even when it doesn’t exist. I feel like if Gary had taken everything he’d been doing on The Wild Room and gone on to do a show without me, he would have my blessing. And if he wants to do that, why doesn’t he do that?
