Marty's Morgue

Marty Faye, 35, is a short, brash Chicago pitchman who believes that the surest way to make good in TV is to get the people to hate you. In his two months as proprietor of Marty's Morgue, a local interview show over Chicago's station WBKB. he has cheerfully managed to provoke daily threats of violence; in addition, he has brought down around his balding head the wrath of the town's teenagers, who bombard him with up to 1,00 letters a week for butchering their sacred cows on the air.

Faye begins his late-hour (11:30 p.m.), Sunday through Thursday inquisition by pointing to a pasteboard morgue and sneering adenoidally: "This is where I bury the people I don't like." As Chicagoans look on with mixed fascination and disgust, he proceeds to poke at the privacy and the professional talents of well-known figures in the popular-music industry, whether they are guests on the show or not. Some typical Faye autopsies: Eddie Fisher "sings with as much animation as a dead fish"; Elvis Presley is "a bouncing orangutan, a musical degenerate"; Tab Hunter's "squeak is a travesty, a horror." Of his own sister. Cafe Singer Frances Faye, he cracked: "She's really not my sister; she's my father."

Despite his crudities. Faye has eight TV sponsors, because he can assure them of a good-sized audience. His mail is chiefly the poison-pen type: "Die! Die! Die!" urged one letter writer last week. Said another: "You are a splendid example of the fact that in order to have free speech we must tolerate its abuse by idiots." In a recent charity appearance before 62,500 people at Soldier Field, Faye fans pelted him with coins, ice cream, paper cups and jeers. Grabbing a microphone, he bellowed: "I want you to know that whatever you think of me I think of you."

Faye's archenemy and competitor, Howard Miller of Station WIND (TIME, April 29), a disk jockey, says: "Marty's like a vulture, living off the bones of the defenseless." Some of the victims face Faye on the air. He astonished Duke Ellington by asking him if he took dope (The Duke's reply: "No, I never felt the need of it. I never smoked anything that didn't have printing on it" ), brought Singer Jody Sands to tears by telling her she had dirty fingernails and needed a new dress. Explained Faye: "She needed wounding. I did it to help her." When Bandleader Russ Carlyle appeared recently, Faye snatched off Carlyle's toupee. As Carlyle awkwardly rearranged it and stormed out of the studio looking like an enraged Ish Kabibble, Faye taunted:"Put it back on straight." When viewers call in to complain, Faye will leer at the camera and snicker: "You're sick. You better go to bed." Off-camera he oozes a rare brand of sincerity: "Things are bound to happen that are distasteful. The only way to do a successful show is to do it honestly. Be natural. I'm not on TV; I'm in my living room, talking with friends--or enemies. I can't stand sham." Born in Brooklyn, Faye entered TV as a pitchman for kitchen gadgets after eleven years of peddling by patter at such places as the Atlantic City Boardwalk and Macy's basement. "This TV business with all its phonies doesn't faze me," he says. "I have met too many con merchants in my life." After four years as a merchandising record-spinner on WAAF, he was spotted by WBKB as a TV personality. "Now I am the greatest. I am the greatest on the air when it comes to selling products. There ain't nobody who can touch me."

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