Dr. Laura'S Crusade

By being outraged and outrageous, Dr. Laura Schlessinger thinks she can teach Americans how to live. Now she's got the 10 Commandments at her side.

Los Angeles LAURA SCHLESSINGER, AKA Dr. Laura, wastes little time in sharing with a reporter her distaste for journalists. They are guilty (at least in their dealings with her) of breaking at least two of the 10 Commandments she has recently taken to extolling as an all-purpose societal balm: bearing false witness and worshiping false gods. "It's another form of murder," she declares. "In some ways it's even worse, because the person (who has been written about) has to exist afterward like Job, with constant humiliation. It's a kind of idol worship, whereby instead of putting God and Truth first, you aggrandize your own career without any thought to another person's reputation or life.

"But you're from a religious publication," she confides, "so I am going to presume a little more character." "That may not be entirely appropriate," I inform her, startled at her assumption that an Israeli publication must be "religious" and hence would extend her automatic slack on the basis of tribal kinship, and disturbed by the rage that impels her to frame our encounter in such starkly binary terms. After all, I am neither her protector nor her character assassin. But then, Laura Schlessinger's universe is not the same fuzzy, shades-of-gray, many-sides-to-the-coin realm I prefer to inhabit. "The Dr. Laura Schlessinger Program," which she describes as a combination of "teaching, preaching and nagging," is broadcast daily on 430 stations in the U.S. and Canada. It now threatens to overtake Rush Limbaugh, having long since left "King-of-All-Media" Howard Stern sputtering scatology in the dust. Each day some 50,000 people try to call in to the three-hour show, hopeful of being granted three minutes to describe their personal predicaments and benefit from Dr. Laura's analysis (and abuse), which tends to focus on the ethical aspects of their problems rather than the psychological. "My show," she says, "is not about mental health - it's about moral health."

As the scourge and scold of North American radio, the 51-year-old physiologist and family therapist has no patience with moral relativism. And as the co-author, with Conservative Rabbi Stewart Vogel, of "The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life," she has even less tolerance for those who do not lament society's straying from the religious and moral compass Moses carried down from Sinai. Actually, Schlessinger's perspective seems more Manichean than Jewish. And as the top-rated female radio personality in America, and an increasingly influential and aggressive voice for conservative values, Dr. Laura has become a lightning rod.

Although lauded for her plain-spokenness, wit and energy, she is reviled by liberals, feminists and separation-of-church-and-state advocates. There are many more, as she never tires of pointing out, who may be jealous of her achievements. And there are those who may simply be put off by her stridency, her bullying and the faint whiff of hypocrisy attending her that, in a year of increasingly embarrassing revelations about her past, now threatens to become a veritable stench. Some of the material that has emerged about her, I think, would surely have driven less hardy souls to a breakdown - or worse. Most recently, she filed for and received a temporary court injunction forcing a company that had posted nude photos of her - taken by a lover with whom she was having an affair more than two decades ago, during her first marriage - to remove them from its Website. A long, well-documented, and unusually caustic piece in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, I am told, made her apoplectic. It charged her with betraying nearly everyone who'd ever called her a colleague or friend, and with a shocking streak of nasti-ness, among other things. Schlessinger's inability to acknowledge her own fallibility could be the crux of her troubled relationship with the press and others. Although possessed of a keen ability to home in on the heart of people's problems, she is also quick to judge, quicker to anger, and brazenly intolerant of those who question her ideas or methods. It doesn't help, moreover, that she is a bully and a name-caller. A press release of Dr. Laura's says she is "the only woman among the top five national radio personalities recognized by over half of all Americans." And with some 18 million loyal listeners yipping at her designer heels, I find myself imagining her parlaying her following into a stint as, say, president, moving from her posh, gated community in the west San Fernando Valley into the even more secure White House, where she launches a crusade to restrict abortion, curtail divorce, mandate parental training and throw adulterers, deadbeat dads, journalists, whiners and other social miscreants into the public stocks. And yet I have to admit that, despite recent revelations of past indiscretions (for the likes of which she has dismissed others as "sluts," "bums" and "bimbos"), there is something in Dr. Laura's demand for personal accountability and moral rectitude that I am beginning, in my own dotage, to find appealing. It doesn't matter that Dr. Laura herself may have committed adultery or posed for naughty pictures; that she, too, fled a bad marriage, fouled up relationships with close family members, regularly badmouthed rivals, took on enemies with a figurative shiv to the kidneys, ate pork or once took the most extreme measures to avoid having children yet now refers to herself professionally as "my son's mother." Prophets, after all, are not the kind of folks you want in your kitchen or living room. They're noisy, they don't bathe nearly often enough (though this happens not to be the case with the always immaculately and expensively groomed Dr. Laura), and we all know they wouldn't have gotten into the business in the first place if they themselves hadn't rubbed up pretty intimately, at some point, against the Dark Side. Their job, I've imagined, is to rub contemporary noses in their own perfidies. If Jeremiah could have had access to a microphone, he, too, might have been able to sell the rights to his show for the $ 71.5 million Schlessinger got last year from Jacor Communications (7-figure salary not included). The fact that she'd prefer to have her own nose left alone is beside the point. That's why God made room on the Ark for journalists.

Still, do we really need our latter-day prophets to hype the Ten Commandments? "Unfortunately," says Schlessinger, speaking to The Report at her Sherman Oaks studio, "the Talmud is not an everyday book people can pick up (in order to) read about Cybersex, which is an issue of adultery today." (Never mind that the Ten Commandments make their appearance in the Bible, not the Talmud.)

In and of themselves, Schlessinger says, those Commandments that pertain to social behavior are no big deal. "As intellect and common sense for how to get along with a group of people," she tells me, "they would have worked fine. There's nothing revelatory in them. What's different is that when you put the first three in - that 'I am the Lord your God,' that 'You will have no other gods before me,' and that 'You will not swear falsely by my name' - they become obligation.

"We are not angels. We have to fight our ugly, evil, negative impulses, as well as mood and circumstance and our uncanny ability to rationalize bad behavior. I find sometimes where I say to myself, I don't want to do that, for this, that and the other reason. But God said I do." So without God, the Commandments are strictly Emily Post? What if I don't believe in God, but do want to be a mentsh? "In the absence of an ultimate authority," she says, "each individual will make up their own standard of values, based upon what they want to do, what they think they can get away with, what they think will aggrandize them (or) move them ahead. While we can rationally come up with a set of rules, something needs to obligate us to (obey) them in spite of our own pettiness and evilness and indigestion." THERE REALLY IS A CERTAIN Biblical resonance to the fact that Laura Schlessinger, of all people, has warmed to the task of helping make God's will be known. She grew up in Brooklyn, and later on Long Island, the troubled but brilliant daughter of, by all accounts, an emotionally withholding Jewish engineer and the hapless Italian war-bride his family cruelly shunned for the sin of being Catholic. Religion, however, did not otherwise figure prominently in either of their lives (the couple ultimately divorced), and would not for Laura until much later in her own life. A rationalist by nature (a factor, perhaps, in her eventual decision to choose Judaism over her mother's more mystical Catholicism), Schlessinger first pursued a career in science. She earned a BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, two graduate degrees, one in science, the other in philosophy, and a PhD in physiology from Columbia University Medical School. After moving to California in the mid-70s (but not, apparently, before engaging in a number of illicit flings), Schlessinger ended an unhappy marriage she had entered into in her 20s. Schlessinger began to lecture on psychology and sexuality at the University of Southern California and at Pepperdine University, in Malibu, and in 1979 began studying at USC for a certificate as child, marriage and family therapist. She drifted into broadcasting during her relationship with radio host Bill Ballance, which she has described in terms of his "mentoring," but which he now likens to the thrashings of "crazed weasels." In the late 70s, Ballance invited her onto his radio talk show for a shmooze, and within 20 minutes, a star (or as he would later put it, "an ogre") was born.

At USC, Schlessinger met married-plus-three neurophysiologist Lew Bishop, an Episcopalian who would eventually divorce his own wife and (after close to a decade of living out of wedlock with Schlessinger) marry her, father their child and follow her on her path toward a Jewish life. Schles-singer blames the 60s for her indulgences, which included a tubal ligation she endured for the sake of a high-powered academic career. Clearly, she had become everything she now loathes. But this is very much in keeping with her message, which is that people can change, but only if they take charge and become the architects of their own change. Schlessinger switched gears in her 30s, and more recently, did so again when she decided she, her husband and their son, Deryk (who carries his mother's last name, rather than his father's), would return to her Judaic roots. "I have always identified Jewishly," she told The Report, "although I don't have a clue why. One rabbi I've studied with told me I have a Jewish soul, and that I am only now getting acquainted with it." But Schlessinger also credits television for her "volte face," notably a Discovery Channel series on the Bible, which she says led her to conclude God's Covenant was real, and according to an article in Ethnic Newswatch, caused her to announce to her husband, "Lew, I'm a priest, and my mission is to help God perfect the world." Another critical moment had occurred when Deryk, now 13, was 6. They were watching a PBS series on the Holocaust, which impelled her son to ask who these people were who were so badly treated, and she told him they were his people and hers. Schlessinger embarked upon a course of conversion studies with a Conservative rabbi, but she, Lewis and Deryk all recently reconverted under Orthodox auspices.

Schlessinger has been characteristically outspoken about her own spiritual pro-gress, mostly, she says, to the delight of religious Christians, and to the discomfort of many Jews who fear her advocacy of Jewish values and ethics may provoke an anti-Semitic response. "When I first began citing God as the principal authority for ethical behavior, I found myself immediately embraced up one side and down the other by priests, pastors, nuns and ministers. But it took me a year and a half before I heard from a rabbi. "The Jewish people are a little nervous about a Jew being religious. A Spielberg is OK, because he's not doing religion. But to have a Jew being blatantly religious, I hear from the rabbis, makes the community uncomfortable." So, too, however, do her occasional lapses into prima donna behaviors. An appearance last year before the women's division of the Dallas Jewish Federation generated press reports that Schlessinger had behaved arrogantly to her hosts, rudely to fans, and was hell on wheels, despite her $ 30,000 speaking fee, to accommodate logistically. "I don't think there was anyone in the room she didn't offend," said one woman who attended. It's one thing to berate people who've called in for that express purpose, and quite another to abuse admirers who've plunked down $ 500 a plate for the privilege of spending an evening with you. Later, claiming illness and fatigue, she backed out of a promise to appear as Queen Esther in a Purim parade in Atlanta. These episodes created a minor backlash, which Schlessinger first sought to defang by attacking her critics, who, she alleged, ambushed her because she was a convert. Later, she broke down in tears during one of her shows, admitting to a "personal and spiritual crisis."

Schlessinger ultimately contributed her speaking fee to charity, and later demonstrated characteristic pluck during a fundraising dinner in L.A. for the Jewish outreach group Aish Hatorah, when the mike she used to smooze via closed-circuit TV with TV talk-show host Larry King kept breaking down. She is not an Aish adherent, she says, but finds herself charmed by the organization's attentions, and was planning a trip to Israel with them shortly after our interview. "They're always sending me tchotchkes and jewelry," she says. "Like for Passover, I got this really great bag of plagues!" An appropriate gift, it would seem, for a female Moses who is daring to bring the word of God to a world trudging aimlessly through a moral wilderness.