Will she run for Congress? Who cares – it makes good radio for KMBZ 980’s conservative Darla Jaye
Darla Jaye doesn’t remember hanging up on my dad. But she doesn’t doubt that she did.
The spitfire host of KMBZ radio’s 980 Live … with Darla Jaye is sitting with me at a Panera Bread in south Johnson County just before Thanksgiving.
Here’s how my father tells the story: During last year’s presidential campaign, Jaye was talking on-air about how Barack Obama probably wouldn’t be able to get a security clearance because of his associations with Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“He says he called to ‘get in your ass,'” I tell her. “He gets on the air and says, ‘Of course Obama has security clearance because he’s a senator. All senators have it.’ You disagreed.”
Jaye laughs.
“So,” I continue, “my dad got mad. He says, ‘[Obama’s] not going to be a terrorist, but even if he were, he’d be better than the guy we have in there now.'”
“And I hung up on him?” Jaye asks.
“Yeah.”
“That’s such a good point to end a call!” she says, unleashing another laugh, a full-throated rat-a-tat that served her well for a decade on morning-zoo radio shows in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, San Francisco and Detroit. “If I’m coming up on a break, a call like that is a great place to stop. Everybody’s going to remember that when we come back. They’ll be all fired up and call in to comment on it.”
I’m not surprised that hanging up on a caller who’s trying to argue a point is a good example of radio craft. But it surprised my dad.
“He seemed to think that you would be persuaded by his line of thinking,” I told Jaye, a short, middle-aged woman with a wicked smile and gold rings the size of lug nuts. “I said to him, ‘Of course she hung up on you. The format of the show is that she’s the expert.'”
Jaye nods. “If I were constantly saying ‘Oh, you’re right,’ I wouldn’t last. And if I don’t make listeners laugh or get pissed or something, they’re not going to be entertained.”
Lately, being an entertainer with convictions has brought her an unanticipated honor. After Jaye promoted and appeared at local tea-party protests, grassroots conservatives began courting her to make a run for Kansas Democrat Dennis Moore‘s 3rd Congressional District seat.
Jaye genuinely sounded touched by their efforts when she announced the “draft Darla” drive on the air in October. She promised to seriously consider a run if 2,000 supporters joined the Facebook page dedicated to the cause. So far, 1,200 have.
For a professional talker, pissing off a Democrat like my father is just part of the job. After years of radio stunts such as “Wine Tastings for Winos” and “How Much Would You Pay to Have Sex With Darla?” she swallowed a $75,000 pay cut to switch from morning comedy to conservative talk in the 118th largest market in America: Huntsville, Alabama, at WVNN 770, the same station that gave Sean Hannity his big break. During her first week, the station ran a “Keep Darla/Broom Darla” poll on its Web site.
“At night, I’d go back to the hotel and vote keep her, keep her,” Jaye says. “I called my mom, all of my friends, and told them to vote, too. By the third day, I said to my boss, ‘Wow, a lot of people are voting to keep me.’
“He said, ‘You don’t want everybody to love you. Half are going to love you, and the half that hate you are going to keep listening and calling.’ So after that, I would vote love, love, hate. Love, love, hate.”
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Angering half the audience might be good radio, but it doesn’t work in politics. Further complicating matters is that Jaye claims to be afflicted with “Minnesota nice,” a Midwestern politeness from her Minneapolis upbringing.
After the interview, out in the parking lot, she asks, “Your dad — I didn’t upset him, did I?”
The new Entercom building at Shawnee Mission Parkway and Metcalf houses eight radio stations. The KMBZ studio, surrounded by the likes of 98.9 (the Rock), 96.5 (the Buzz), 106.5 (the Wolf), and 610 Sports Radio, is a spacious glassed-in booth overlooking Shawnee Mission Parkway.
As he’s leaving, afternoon-show co-host Mike Shanin suggests that Jaye wipe down the microphone before going on. Speaking in his diction-class baritone, just as he does on the radio, he says he might have a sinus infection.
Jaye thanks him and whirls into the studio. She spreads dozens of printouts around her mic, opens Web sites, and positions two cans of La Croix raspberry water. Instead of wiping down the mic, she just squeezes her foam windball over it. The windball is black except for a smeared pinkish circle where her mouth sometimes hits it. Lipstick.
Hygiene matters at Entercom. Three bottles of hand sanitizer sit on this studio’s sizable table, along with some disinfectant wipes and — because cleanliness goes deeper than the flesh — a King James Bible.
In the booth, an engineer goes over some show notes: Slim4Life promo at 6:20 p.m., Mizzou “Tiger Talk” at 7. Among other things, the engineer — not her regular guy — screens the calls, typing up a quick explanation for each: “DAVID OLATHE THINKS YOU SHOULD RUN.” As her Letterman-style intro music begins, Jaye is still shuffling pages, highlighting text. She says out loud, “Please don’t screw up.”
Then she’s on.
“So I get up this morning and open my paper,” she says, suddenly talking faster, harder. “And what do I see? Dennis Moore is stepping down.”
This is a big day for Jaye. Since October, when fans started begging her to run for Moore’s seat, she’s been saying she’ll think about it. And she’s been fulminating about Moore’s unresponsiveness to his conservative constituents, interviewing every Republican in the race and then speculating about each one’s chances. Before Monday, November 23, those challengers’ hopes seemed slim.
Now, Jaye has some gloating to do.
“I promised you that Dennis Moore would not be going back to Washington, D.C.,” she says, leaning in but not quite making contact with her windball. “I made you that promise and that vow a couple of weeks ago, and it’s come true already. He’s not going back in 2011. Of course, everybody and his brother decided this morning that they were going to run. I have the list here.”
A crinkling of paper. The engineer types “I have to pee” on the call screen and vanishes from his booth. Jaye rattles off new contenders in Kansas’ 3rd District. Last year’s defeated Republican candidate, Nick Jordan, is in — Jaye had lunch with him earlier in the day, and he asked her whether she was running. New names in the strong “maybe” category: state Sens. Jeff Colyer and Karin Brownlee; attorney Greg Musil; former Johnson County Commission candidate Charlotte O’Hara.
“State Rep. Kevin Yoder — Kevin Yoder is the first out of the gate this morning, saying he’s forming an exploratory committee.” Jaye switches from her news-reading voice to her radio-personality voice, which is cutting and amused. “An exploratory committee? You’re not running for president, Kevin. You’re running for Congress! An exploratory committee? He says, ‘As our nation faces unprecedented challenges, we must have new energy and a fresh response.'”
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She waits a beat.
“That sounds like it came right from your heart, Kevin.”
She runs through the Democrats who are expected to run before she gets on with the show’s main event.
“My question to you, ladies and gentlemen, is now that I’ve gotten rid of Dennis Moore for you in 2011, is that enough? Or do I need to go further and continue to think about running for Congress” — her brashness softens, just a touch — “and giving up the job that I love more than life itself, which is this radio program?”
Jaye gives out the phone number, the e-mail address. The lines light up. Just minutes after she ridicules Yoder’s exploratory committee, Jaye’s own exploration becomes live-radio drama.
It’s just the kind of thing encouraged by a sign hanging to the left of the engineer’s booth: “PPM IS LISTENING NOW!!! Are you teasing effectively?!? Content is king!!! What are you doing to keep the listener’s interest? Why should the listener care? MUST LISTEN RADIO!!!!!!”
PPM is the “Portable People Meter,” a wearable device from Arbitron that can detect audio streams from radio and TV. It could revolutionize the way radio stations understand their audiences.
And right now, creating “MUST LISTEN RADIO” means that Jaye has to talk like a probable candidate.
At an impressionable age, Jaye saw Funny Girl and began to dream of Broadway. “I wanted to be Barbra Streisand with a better nose and — now that I know her — better politics.”
Jaye studied voice for years and some opera in college. She performed in academic and then professional productions in Minneapolis, where she specialized in the kind of divalike comedy roles often given to funny, busty gals.
Jaye made industrial films and a TV commercial for a radio station where she did pratfalls in a leotard. After a good improv run at Dudley Riggs’ Brave New Workshop, she suffered some setbacks and gave up, a decision that she discussed recently on the air. “My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t move to New York at 21 and starve,” she told her audience.
Instead of starving, Jaye tried radio. She enrolled in Minneapolis’ Brown Institute — “We can make you a star, if you give us $9,000,” she says — and soon landed her first radio gig: news and weather at a Lafayette, Indiana, station located in a cornfield.
Radio people seem to relish their harrowing stories of life in an industry that’s notorious for its revolving station owners and itinerant talent. Jaye remembers the program director who used to sneer just before she went on the air, “You’re going to fuck up this time.” Then there was the co-host so drunk that, during dinner with the top brass of a Cleveland station, he kept asking, “How could you let a legendary station like WMMS go down the toilet?” And the station, which switched to country, with the general manager who told her: “I’ve given a woman a chance, and it didn’t work out.”
“If you were a woman in music radio, you’re either a side chick or you did middays,” Jaye says. “If you were a rock slut, they might put you on at night and call it ‘Diva After Dark.'”
Station after station, market after market, Jaye found herself being a side chick to difficult morning jocks. After Detroit, she’d had enough. “I was up to here with working with insecure guys always asking me, ‘You didn’t laugh with me on that one. What wasn’t funny?’ You age out of the format, and I was exhausted.”
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Still, she had been at the top. “San Francisco was market four. Detroit was seven. And it wasn’t any better. There is something soul-sucking about always moving to a new city, always saying goodbye, always having a new job, a new program director, a new neighborhood, a new apartment.”
So she dared a format change of her own: conservative talk, which had taken off in the early ’90s just as morning zoos had in the mid-1980s. (Glenn Beck followed this trajectory, too.)
She talked for three years in Huntsville. Then, in 2005, Jaye moved up to Kansas City and KMBZ.
Here, she attacks the issues of the day — or the issues that conservative talkers say are the issues of the day — with a brassy style not unlike her stage roles. On national topics, she’s often in line with KMBZ’s syndicated lineup of Beck (9–11 a.m.), Rush Limbaugh (11 a.m.–2 p.m.) and Mark Levin (9–11 p.m.). She assails the Obama administration. She sticks up for the tea partiers; nothing makes her madder than when liberals such as Keith Olbermann call them racist.
On local topics, she’s less predictable. She likes Mayor Mark Funkhouser. She debates tonyskansascity.com blogger Tony Botello. Last month, after prosecutors charged Burrell Mohler Sr. and his four sons with dozens of counts of child abuse, her show became gripping, real-time therapy when people who had known the accused called in, all sounding somewhat stunned. One man said he had suspected something long ago and was now losing sleep because he hadn’t been able to stop it.
“You got them worked up tonight,” the engineer says during a break on the night of Dennis Moore’s announcement. Then he tells Jaye that John Rysavy, a Republican tea-party type who’s also in the race, is holding on line three.
Jaye: “What’s he want?”
Engineer: “I’ve talked to him three times today. He pissed off Scott [Parks] and Mike [Shanin].”
Jaye: “Did you put him through?”
Engineer: “Not when they’re interviewing his competitor.”
Jaye: “He thinks he’s [Nick] Jordan’s competitor.”
The line stops blinking.
Engineer: “Whatever. He’s gone now. He seems like a weirdo.”
According to Rysavy’s Web site, he is a “coach/lector/school council member/parent-teacher organization president.” A lector? Jaye interviewed Rysavy on the air in October. Before that, she says, he had tried calling, unannounced, while she was on the air. Her screener kept him off, and Rysavy — not a media pro — posted a complaint and his cell-phone number on Jaye’s public Facebook page.
Jaye improvises a Slim4Life spot and teases — just as that sign demands — that when she’s back, she’ll read an e-mail from Marty, who’s calling her arrogant. Several ads later, she does: “You couldn’t win dogcatcher,” Marty says. “And besides, you’d be chasing your own tail.”
Angelo from Lenexa says, “We called on you to save us from Dennis Moore and his socialists. Now we call on you to save us from these false leaders.”
Kyle in Olathe talks about the troubles between conservative and moderate Republicans in Kansas, spurring this from Jaye: “Here’s the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in Kansas. The Democrats might disagree on issues. Somebody might be pro-choice, pro-life, or whatever. But they will get together and win and fight out those issues after the election is won. On the Republican side in Kansas, so far they’ve been too damn stupid to figure that out.
“If a conservative’s running for office, the moderates get all pissy and claim that they’re Republicans, but still vote for a Democrat. I would love to see this for once, Kyle: If it’s a conservative, the moderates need to get in line. If it’s a moderate — this will kill me — the conservatives need to get in line. We need to stand behind the Republican candidate, all of us for once! That’s why the Democrats win in Kansas. It’s not because Dennis Moore’s so damn great.”
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This practical party-before-purity thinking is a break from tea-party protocol. Jaye describes herself as “pretty darn conservative,” but on hot-button social issues, she seems moderate.
While clearly pro-life, she’s troubled that a rape or incest victim would have to go through with a pregnancy. She has gay friends (not surprising for someone who got her start in the theater) and accepts the inevitability of gay marriage, even if “the people aren’t ready.”
But she’s not inclined to give those issues much airtime. “Abortion and gay marriage,” she tells me during a break from the show, “are those the most important things facing this country right now? Hell, no.”
She believes that Kris Kobach, recent Kansas Republican Party chair and current secretary-of-state candidate, scared off the moderates when he ran for Moore’s seat in ’04. But, like Kobach, Jaye can turn almost any question into an opportunity to hold forth on illegal immigration.
Tonight, Jaye loses an hour in the middle of her show for “Tiger Talk.” As she waits to get back to her show, I ask whether she believes that liberals, the longtime scourge of conservative talk, truly have nefarious intentions.
“Very few people are either conservative” — she flings her arm wide to the right — “or liberals” — same movement with the left arm.
Then she offers a familiar talk-radio speech about liberals promoting a national spirit of victimhood.
“If people met me personally, the independents and even some of the liberals, I think they would realize that they agree with some of my positions,” she says. “They might even vote for me.”
She considers this. “In a primary, you have to go to your base, but I couldn’t say something I don’t mean. I’m honest about my abortion beliefs. A lot of conservatives believe in no abortion for any reason at all. And a lot of people who are really conservative probably don’t know any gay people. So I’m going to be different.”
I wonder how different, so I ask: “Are we headed toward socialism?”
“If we sit back and continue to watch the government take over one industry after another, yes.”
“Are we headed toward fascism?”
She only has to think about it for a second: “No.”
It’s time to go back on the air. The next hour’s topic: an interview with Debbie Kandoll, founder of Military Working Dog Adoptions, an organization that matches retired military dogs with caring homes. Without Kandoll, many of those dogs — “soldiers,” Jaye calls them, and “heroes”— would be put down.
As radio, it’s not as MUST LISTEN as all the campaign talk, but it’s something we can all agree on.
At Panera, Jaye listens politely as I present her with my chief criticism of her show.
I tell her about a caller I heard a couple of months ago. On the air, he complained that America isn’t what it used to be, and she agreed. He said, “It doesn’t look like it used to,” and she agreed. He said he knew he was supposed to like all this diversity, but he didn’t.
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She could have seized the moment and made it into a real discussion, I tell her. “Instead, you just said, yeah, yeah, OK. That’s the kind of call that inspires liberals to call talk radio racist.”
Jaye says she heard the call differently. “Here’s a guy who was actually honest enough to tell people how he felt. Probably a lot of people feel like that. Do I agree that the country has changed and doesn’t look like it used to? Absolutely.”
But, I ask, what did she mean by “look like”?
“I have a real problem with illegal immigration. I went down to the border and actually watched people coming through the desert.”
Yes, Jaye broadcast live from the Minuteman border-patrol headquarters in 2007. But I doubt that’s what this caller meant by diversity.
“After Fort Hood, when the army general said that the most important thing was diversity, that pissed me off. Diversity is not the most important thing. The most important thing, in the military in particular, is cohesiveness. If one guy who’s Muslim reads the Koran and sees that he’s supposed to cut off your head and pour boiling oil down your throat, and another reads it and says it’s a religion of peace, who am I supposed to believe?”
(This is a common complaint of Jaye’s. On the day of the Fort Hood shooting, she posted a Twitter message saying: “He’s a Muslim convert. Allah must be so proud.”)
But I don’t think that’s what the caller meant, either.
“What did you hear in that call?” she asks.
“I heard that common longing for an American past that is somehow being violated,” I explain.
“I don’t think that’s racist.”
“I hear, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with this guy with this funny name in the White House.'”
“I was on the air in Alabama for three years, but I never got called a racist until I came to Kansas City. When I have an opinion about the murders in the inner city, I’m a racist. When I say [former Kansas City Manager] Wayne Cauthen should have been fired, I’m a racist. For me, the word has lost its true meaning because it’s thrown around so frequently. Yes, there are true racists out there who don’t like Obama because he’s black. But the vast majority of people who listen to my show don’t like him because of his policies or his associations, or because they feel he wasn’t qualified for the job. They don’t like him because he won by just saying hope and change, change and hope for a year.”
“Is the president a secret Muslim?”
Jaye pauses: “I don’t know.” What follows is talk of Indonesia, the Madras school, how the national media’s failure to thoroughly vet Obama during the campaign did him the disservice of leaving essential questions about his past unanswered. “You know how you put your expectations and hopes onto him? Other people that didn’t want him to be president because they didn’t believe he was qualified — well, they read something on the Internet and go, ‘That may be true.'”
“I love what I do,” Jaye says at Panera. She has worked hard to get where she is: three hours a night on an esteemed station in the country’s 32nd largest media market. Just three years into her time here, she speaks of Kansas City as home, of KMBZ as family. She says she can’t imagine heading off to New York now, like she dreamed of at 19.
But KMBZ won’t hold her show for her while she runs for office.
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“If I ran and I won, great. If I ran and I lost, that would mean either I’d have to find something in politics or I’ll have to move again. That’s a huge sacrifice for me, and I’ve made many.”
Jaye’s emotions run deeper than the outrage that creates MUST LISTEN RADIO. She has teared up three times in our interview, talking of her father who recently died and of her mother in Florida who catches her show online every night.
Jaye’s mother also calls in to cheer her on. A couple of days before our interview, Jaye devoted an hour on the air to whether she should talk to me.
Callers were split, some saying The Pitch was smutty and liberal, but others suggesting that a piece here might inspire “the young people” to try out conservatism. “I wouldn’t even use one of their papers to wipe my butt with,” wrote one of her Facebook friends. “Tell ’em politely to go pound sand.”
The last call she took was from her mother. “Momma Jaye” suggested she do it but to tape the interview, too, to check Jaye’s actual quotes against what The Pitch ends up printing.
“Double tape it?” Jaye asked. “That’s what I do with my strapless bras!”
Jaye brought a tape recorder to our interview, but turned it off after a half-hour or so. Afterward, when mine was finally off, too, she couldn’t resist showing off her advertiser-supplied ride: an ’09 Chevy Equinox with rearview camera and a rear door that whispers open like the hatch of a spaceship, courtesy of Molle Chevrolet in Blue Springs.
“Isn’t that cool?” she asks, laughing again. “How could I give up all this?”
