The death of a talk host
I was on Berg’s radio show three or four times. I listened to him as I drove down from Boulder to Denver. He was chewing out some hapless housewife whose brain was a reservoir of prejudices against anyone who was the slightest bit different from her. Berg was telling her that no one in his right mind would want to be anything like her at all.
“Why were you so hard on that lady?” I asked him, when we were on the air.
She was asking for it,” Berg said. “Why would she call up and feed me all those straight lines if she didn’t want me to tell her how stupid she was?”
Anath White wrote saying she was writing a book on the life and death of Berg. She wondered f I had any off-the air contact with him. Answer: No. By way of explanation, she attached an article she wrote about her experiences with him and with Oliver Stone when he was making “Talk Radio” (1988), starring Eric Bogosian as a character based on Berg. I immediately wanted to post it online.