Mr. Emcee

Inside, Atlanta’s elite had assembled for a black-tie fundraiser. “It was all the usual suspects,” he recalled one morning over coffee at Starbucks. A few people recognized him, and one or two asked to pose with him for a picture. “My ex-wife used to say, ‘People always recognize you when you look like Bill Tush,’” he quipped.

He grabbed a bottle of water and stood around a few minutes. He had wondered how it would feel to revisit the world he had left behind — the galas, balls, dinner parties, auctions — the landmarks on Atlanta’s social map.

He felt nothing, so he headed to catch the bus home.

“I was there 20 minutes,” he said. “It took me longer than that to put on my tuxedo.”

The ambivalence is understandable.

For nearly two decades, Tush was the face of CNN’s Showbiz franchise, and before that he was Ted Turner’s funny man on WTCG in Atlanta, where he spoofed the news. At CNN, Tush preened with stars on Hollywood’s red carpets, and was a regular at the Cannes film festival on the French Riviera.

Five fat scrapbooks chronicle his once-glamorous life. Meticulously compiled, the scrapbooks give order and intention to a career that had neither.

There is Tush with Bette Davis; Tush standing and chatting with Paul Newman; Tush smiling with Bette Midler; Tush mugging for the camera with Dolly Parton.

And there are dozens of photos of Tush posing with the unknown but obviously wealthy at charity balls, dinners and other assorted fund raisers. His smiles seem completely genuine. There are the slightly too formal letters and notes from Ted Turner and personal notes from co-workers, including one from Christie Brinkley.

Tush, who lives alone, keeps the scrapbooks in his apartment. He never opens them.


2
Tush, Turner and Rex
In 1974, Bill Tush was cruising Atlanta's Downtown Connector when he noticed the gigantic broadcast tower that rose between 10th and 14th Streets. He was a 25-year-old disc jockey from Pittsburgh who had come to check out Hotlanta at the suggestion of a girlfriend.

Tush saw the tower before he saw the skyline. At its base was WTCG, a small station with big ideas.

Four years earlier, Ted Turner bought a tiny UHF station that had captured his imagination and changed the call letters of Channel 17 to WTCG — for Turner Communications Group, his newly minted media company.

“Television,” Turner said then, “has led us in the last 25 years down the path of destruction. I intend to turn it around before it’s too late.”

Relying heavily on old movies — which he occasionally hosted as R.E. Turner — the station found an audience. Before long, people thought the call letters meant Watch This Channel Grow.

Small operators like Turner were priced out of the national market. To deliver their products to national audiences, the networks paid a fortune to use AT&T to transmit over long distance lines or microwave towers.

Turner changed all that. He bypassed AT&T and used new satellite technology to connect cable systems, creating the first cable network.

By the time Tush saw the WTCG tower, Turner’s Channel 17 was well on its way to becoming a superstation.

Tush wanted to be somebody for as long as he could remember. He was an only child growing up in a working-class district called Lawrenceville on the edges of Pittsburgh. Life outside his small row house on Willow Street ranged from serious to grim: Men labored in the steel mills; kids went to school, got out, and joined the blue-collar ranks.

Billy Tush couldn’t see himself in that movie.

Radio and television provided a glimpse of a world beyond the steel mills — a place where you could make a living by talking — even by being silly. As a kid he gazed at the black-and-white antics of “The Little Rascals.” At night, he tuned in to CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario, or the powerhouse WABC Radio from faraway New York City.

He wanted to live in the world conjured by hypnotic, sonorous voices. “They came alive to me,” he recalls 50 years later. “I was much more comfortable with them than I was the people in my real life.”

In his attic, Billy created a make-believe radio station, where he announced records that he solicited from the big labels. He practiced his news voice by reading the newspaper to his parents.

Sometimes he’d take a bus to the Chamber of Commerce building in Pittsburgh. Behind a large picture window, the DJs at KQV radio — the call sign stood for King of Quaker Valley — were on the air at the “Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk.”

Billy gazed through the windows and studied the DJs as they worked — spinning Top 40 records and making impossibly hip chatter. He dreamed of being transported through that magic window.

His break came in 1964 when a station in nearby Latrobe, Pa., hired him to replace an announcer on his way to Vietnam. He did a little announcing, played the taped crop reports and even hosted the midmorning polka show. He was 16 years old.

Carrying his reel-to-reel demo tape 10 years later, he walked into WTCG and asked if they needed any announcers. In fact, they did.

At first he taped announcements, but then evolved into an all-purpose, on-air handyman. He did the commercials. He hosted the Saturday and Sunday morning movies. He moderated the public affairs talk show. Sometimes he pushed a camera or drove to the post office to pick up the mail.

Tush worked at Channel 17 for a few weeks before he heard this strange drawling voice down the hall. “Who in the heck is that?” he asked a co-worker.

“Ted Turner. He owns the station.”

They had never been formally introduced, but Turner stopped him in the hallway one day. “You’re doin’ a good job,” he said. “Smile more.”

When Turner decided to offer programming 24 hours a day, the all-purpose Tush was assigned to be a newsman. Turner didn’t think much of TV news back then, and he complied by scheduling the news breaks during his all-night movies. At first, Tush read the news from the UPI wire. He was bored stiff.

One night, Tush began to interact on air with the crew in the studio. Deadpan, he’d straighten his tie in response to an off-camera comment. One night someone threw a balled up piece of paper that bounced on Tush’s head as he was reading.

Soon, the silliness became intentional.

Tush introduced Rex the news dog, a German shepherd who appeared as co-anchor in shirt and tie. Rex read the news with his mouth full of peanut butter. Later, Tush was joined by the Unknown Newsman who wore a paper sack on his head. His team covered invented stories, like phony holiday parades and a rocket launch that was nothing more than a paper airplane set on fire.

In 1979, Tush knew he had become a minor celebrity: Fans in Valdez, Alaska, invited him to be the grand marshal of their winter festival parade.

One day, Turner returned from lunch with a brainstorm. “We’re gonna start a variety show,” Turner told Tush. “We’re gonna have everything: comedy, singin’, maybe even wrasslin’. You’re gonna host it!”

Premiering in January 1980, “Tush” was an inventive sketch-comedy hour with a troupe including a young comedienne from Decatur named Jan Hooks who went on to “Saturday Night Live” and “3rd Rock from the Sun.” It also featured Bonnie and Terry Turner (no relation to Ted) who later created “That ’70s Show.”

The show ran 22 episodes. Turner apparently didn’t like it. Tush later hosted “Atlantic City Live,” a variety show in the mold of the old “Ed Sullivan Show.” Tush acknowledges that it was one of the worst shows on television. It died quickly.

As Turner was planning CNN, which ultimately launched June 1, 1980, he told Tush he couldn't continue parodying the news. Soon, Tush was sent off to Los Angeles to produce feature stories for CNN — which he pretty much hated. After a year and a half, he was back in Atlanta.


3
Life in the Big Apple
In 1983, Tush moved to New York to help launch CNN's "Showbiz Today." No one loved a city any more than Tush loved New York.

CNN’s national reach practically made Tush a household name.

Visiting his parents in Pittsburgh once, he was sitting with his dad in the living room when a Showbiz segment came on the air. “Pauline, Billy’s on TV,” his dad yelled to his mom in the kitchen.

“Dad, I’m sitting right here,” Tush said.

In January 1998, he returned to Atlanta to give a speech to the Fayette County Chamber of Commerce. In the audience was Lisa Martin, a pretty young Atlanta woman who had been a fan from the Channel 17 days. During the reception, she approached Tush to tell him how much she liked his speech. They were married the following September in Palm Springs. It was Tush’s third trip to the altar.

“I thought the heavens opened up for him,” recalls Laurin Sydney, his longtime CNN colleague. “I among everybody thought that this was it.”

Soon after moving to New York, Lisa lobbied to move from Tush’s downtown Manhattan apartment with her two daughters to a bigger place in the country. Tush never had a better personal life. He loved his wife, her girls and their suburban house on eight acres near Woodstock, N.Y.

He didn’t even mind the two-hour commute.

Even so, things were changing at CNN. The network was being gobbled up in the Time Warner/AOL mega merger, which sidelined Turner, his longtime benefactor.

Many in the newsroom wondered about the value of the Showbiz franchise — and Tush’s brand of silliness — at a network eager to set the standard for hard news.

“I was never going to be Tom Brokaw,” he recalls dryly. Getting a talking dog to do the news? That was Bill Tush’s thing.

On a slow news day on a Friday in September 2001, Michael Jackson was in New York for a pair of major concerts at Madison Square Garden. The concerts, Jackson’s first in the continental United States since 1989, attracted the stars — Liza Minnelli, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Tucker, Elizabeth Taylor, and the slightly crazed fans.

It was a moment made for Bill Tush.

Tush interviewed a Michael Jackson impersonator and probed ordinary and slightly embarrassed fans about the seemingly absurd ticket prices.

Tush to woman on the street: “You paid how much for those tickets?”

Woman on the street: “I won’t divulge it.”

Tush: “Six hundred and eighty bucks is what they paid. I divulged it. And she dragged poor old John here. He doesn’t even want to be here tonight, right?”

Man with woman on the street: “Correct.”

Later he found a man from France.

“I’ll speak in your native tongue: You don’t have ze ticket, huh?”

From in the studio, anchor Laurin Sydney bantered with Tush in intentionally mangled French. Then she promised viewers more: “OK, in our next Showbiz Report, we will head back to the Garden. And guess what? More with Bill Tush!”

That night, on his commute home, Tush experienced a satisfaction he hadn’t felt in a while. He had his dream job, a nice salary, a beautiful wife and an office in New York City — a lifelong fantasy. And it had been a very good day — a triumph in his CNN career, which was never fully turbulent, but rarely totally harmonious either.

But on that Friday, Tush carried the ball. It was the last real day of his career.


4
9/11 ends a career
The following Tuesday, Tush boarded Amtrak for his long commute into Manhattan. His cellphone was dead.

As the train rolled toward Penn Station, a passenger nearby paused while talking on his cellphone.

“A plane has hit the World Trade Center,” he said.

Then someone said the Pentagon had been hit. A war, it seemed, was breaking out.

Silly or not, Tush thought to himself, he worked at CNN, the planet’s pre-eminent news source. They might need him.

As he hurried along 8th Avenue, Tush was reminded of a scene in an old Godzilla movie. People on the street were stricken with terror. Many were covered in pale dust.

In CNN’s New York bureau, the staff stared at the TV monitors in disbelief and jolted into high gear. It was the story of the century, made for what CNN hoped to be.

But the crisis left the Showbiz unit with little purpose or relevance. The new normal had little room for zaniness.

For weeks, Tush continued commuting to the office. He watched TV and read the newspapers. Then he’d head out for a long lunch, including drinks and a few laughs at Twins Pub on 9th Avenue. He’d return from lunch and watch more TV, mill around to kill time and then head home.

But he didn’t complain. The paychecks came on time, and he had his pretty wife, the stepdaughters and an idyllic life in Woodstock — a perfect storyline for a ’60s sitcom.

Tush was not one to think much about his future. In 2001, he had pretty much the same resume he had at WTCG three decades earlier. “Bill was used to letting the cosmic forces work things out on his behalf,” Adam Kluger, a former producer, said.

The idle weeks turned into months. Tush seemed content to wait on the cosmic forces. Lisa, not so much. She pushed to decamp to Atlanta, where his chances of finding new work might be better.

“Will you still love me if I’m not in TV anymore?” he asked her in a phone call.

He resigned from CNN at the end of the year. He was just 53.


5
Hard landing in Atlanta
In 2002, the Tushes moved into a gated community near McDonough. Lisa decorated the big house with zeal and seemed to thrive. Tush felt isolated. "You die and get to heaven, then God tells you that you're going back," Tush wrote a few years later. "To make it worse, He's sending you to McDonough."

Whatever iconic status Tush once had in Atlanta, it had evaporated 20 years after he left town. His name opened few doors and merited fewer returned phone calls. He handled his diminished status poorly.

Tush hated the black-tie charitable events that defined the Atlanta social scene and animated his wife.

Over time, Tush’s cynicism toward Lisa’s Atlanta circle deepened. “Somebody asked me once what it took to become a member of the exclusive Friars Club,” Tush observed a few years later. “I responded that it took writing a big check. Same thing in Atlanta.”

At the seemingly endless swirl of events, Tush occupied himself by drinking. He was beginning to drink more during the day as well. “I had nothing to do,” he recalls. “I was stuck going to all these social events — in a social world that she loved so much. I’d drink.”

While Lisa says she saw a change in Tush, he says that he was the same; people were just seeing him differently. “Funny how when things go bad, that sense of humor translates into mean,” he says.

The strain on their marriage worsened as the economy collapsed in 2008 and consumed Tush’s savings.

Tush also had health problems and had a heart scare that landed him in intensive care. “He almost died,” Lisa recalls. “He must have faced his own mortality. He became someone else. He became cruel.”

In the spring of 2010, Lisa went with him to an appointment with his cardiologist. Tush was puzzled by her decision to come along. The doctor raised the subject of his drinking, and Lisa began to cry. By that afternoon, Tush was in rehab at Ridgeview Institute on South Cobb Drive.

“To this day I still think it was a set-up and I just got the ‘Go to Jail’ card,” he wrote in an account of his recovery called “One Year Sober.” Even though he hadn’t had a drink in 12-14 hours, a Breathalyzer showed he was still legally drunk. “Now that was a shocker,” he wrote.

After five days, Tush decided he couldn’t afford the treatment and demanded to be sent home. “So, home I went,” he wrote. “And my wife went too — right out the door.”

He attended AA meetings and met with a psychiatrist, which he considered a waste of time.

He laughs at it all now.

"Alcohol played a big role in my professional life, but those were different times," he says. "As someone said, if I were to say to Ted Turner, "Look Ted, I'm sober now." He would probably say, "You mean you were drunk when you did all that?"


6
Life lessons over coffee
On a recent morning, Tush met me for a coffee at a Starbucks near his apartment. He is polite to a fault, but a tough interview because every question triggers a story, which inevitably leads to a punch line. You recognize the old Tush, but he shows the years. He is thin; his forehead seems a bit rounder, and there's no sign of his once trademark mustache. His second wife, Wendi, describes him as looking "world weary." He turns 65 this month.

Mostly, Tush is bored. He can’t find much work and spends his time working out, watching TV and going to movies. (In 2009, he traveled to Nigeria to be a consultant on a millionaire’s dream to start a 24-hour radio station. “Where’s the dog?” the man asked him.)

Tush has become an avid Facebook commenter. The other day, he posted that he was looking for a job at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. “A friend of mine there said he can pull a few strings.”

He seems somewhere between hurt and bitter that no one returns his calls. A few weeks ago, his dog died and he grieved. He and Lisa have a friendly relationship, but don’t seem to be friends.

He occasionally makes it to New York, where he stays in a friend’s apartment and takes the subway.

A couple of weeks ago he had lunch there with his second wife, Wendi. They remain close. She wishes he could catch a break. “What should be happening to him is that the people he launched along the way should be helping,” she says. “He jokes about, ‘I’m an emcee, Mr. Game Show.’ That’s what he thought of himself. He didn’t realize how amazing he was.”

Tush doesn’t like to dwell on things, but he does acknowledge in the essay he wrote about his sobriety that he counted too much on the cosmic forces.

“I have no regrets,” he writes. “The only thing I would do over is my career. Oh! Now there is a small part of my life. It was an easy fun ride, but I should have really taken it more seriously and made different decisions.

“Again, that would be another whole story.”

Tush scoffs at the idea that he’s living a sad, lonely life. But he does admit that the years as a celebrity took something from him. “I’d been on radio and TV for so long, that that was more who I am,” he said as he finished his coffee. “I’ve never known who I was, and I still don’t.”

HOW WE GOT THE STORY
In the 1970s, Bill Tush made me an insomniac. I remember staying up until the middle of the night just to see what he was up to. It was silly, but I was young. Over time, Tush became one of those personalities who make television so companionable – a familiar voice and face that provides comfort no matter where you are. I had nearly forgotten Bill, until I ran into him at party in Buckhead a few years ago. He had a story to tell, and I am honored that he agreed to let me tell it.

Bert Roughton Jr.
Managing Editor
personaljourneys@ajc.com

About the reporter

Bert Roughton Jr., managing editor and senior editorial director, has spent most of his 32-year career at the AJC as a reporter. In the 1990s, he covered Atlanta's bid for the 1996 Olympics and led the newspaper's reporting team that followed the city's preparations. He also was London correspondent for Cox Newspapers, covering the violence in Northern Ireland, the war in Kosovo and the AIDS epidemic in Africa. In 2000, he received a National Headliner Award for stories about the plight of AIDs orphans in Africa. His Personal Journey of Dante Stephensen was published April 21.

About the photographer

Curtis Compton joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a photo editor in 1993. He later returned to the field as a staff photographer. Previously he worked for the Gwinnett Daily News, United Press International and the Marietta Daily Journal. In 1984 he won a World Hunger Award for covering a famine in Sudan. He has covered 27 Masters Tournaments and traveled to Iraq four times. His photographs have appeared frequently in Personal Journeys.