Stern’s driving insecurities

last updated 8 January 2015

Howard Stern is a great big, tangled ball of neuroses, said Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone. The shock jock, 57, says he owes his massive success to his obsessive need to please his mother. “The ability to interview people and read my subject comes from my mother being very demanding of me with one thing: that I should be able to read her mood and know what she wanted. I could look into my mother’s eyes and know everything. When she was sad, when she was angry.”

That relationship, he says, left him with a deeply neurotic need to please his audience. “There is a side of me that needs this connection desperately, and needs this acclaim and needs millions of people listening to me.’’ Success and praise just make it worse. “My OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] kicks in and my neuroses, and I go, ‘Oh my God, these people think I’m so good, and I’m going to have to get on the air Monday, and I’m not going to be able to do that for them again. And they’re going to hate me.’”

Away from an audience, he’s withdrawn and guarded. “I barely know how to socialize,” he says. “I have a hard time having a conversation with anybody. I definitely want to connect, but I don’t want to connect fully. I can only get so messy with people.”