The Word Jockey

Paul Gibson, 50, a breezy, blond-mustached one-man show, sings no songs, spins no disks, reads no news, conducts no interviews, but manages somehow to keep 23 sponsors happily shelling out for his 13 mellifluous hours a week over Chicago's WBBM. A self-styled "word jockey," Gibson just talks, about anything from sex to Sputniks. After 16 glib years on radio, he is now also talking on TV. "Don't bother to look at me," he assures fans on his 45-minute daily early-morning show. "I'll tell you if something is on-camera that you must see. Go ahead, take a shower, change the baby's diaper."

Stones & Ecstasy. Last week, in his deep, sleepy, Godfrey-like voice, Gibson scattered pearls of wisdom from Seneca to Shaw, philosophized about unreasonable husbands, holes in pants pockets, in-laws, self-improvement, reformers and movie censorship ("Upon what kind of filth do these our censors feed, that they have become so pure?"). Though he draws on a subject file of 6,000 cross-indexed listings for his conversational ploys, Gibson never uses a script, a Teleprompter or an "idiot card," even ad-libs his commercials. He makes it a jaunty habit to breeze into the radio studio scant seconds before air time, hits his chair talking.

The word jockey's favorite topic: women. Baiting them--as shrewish, lazy, selfish--is his technique for keeping them tuned in and writing 1,500 letters a week. An expert on the subject after five marriages, Gibson says: "Women are really happiest when they are being abused. It's impossible to keep a woman comfortable and happy at the same time. I've lost more wives that way. I throw the verbal stones and the women lick their wounds and lie back in ecstasy." Sample stone: "Nothing makes a woman look more like a bag than wearing a sack."

As his single concession to TV, the chatter is usually preceded by a Gibson-wrought gimmick: Gibson sliding onto the set in a Mercedes-Benz, riding a horse across stage, standing in a snowstorm outside flinging snowballs, or giving heli copter lessons from a whirlybird hovering above the station parking lot.

Up the Cliff. Born the son of a diet-faddist physician on a ranch near Palm Springs, Calif., Gibson grew up haunted with "recurrent dreams about clawing my way up the face of a cliff." At 18 he clawed his way onto the old Los Angeles Record because "at the time I was under the misapprehension that being on an afternoon paper meant that you worked only in the afternoon." Ever since, through numberless odd jobs on newspapers and in radio, he has been getting up "at the crack of dawn and hating every morning of it."

From the top of the cliff, Gibson claims to have "the most profitable participating radio show in the U.S.," with gross billings of about $1,000,000 a year. For his erratic ramblings--some bright, some boring--he draws about $150,000 a year, a sizable chunk of which goes to his five ex-wives. "I have to take 800 bucks a week right off the top for the gals before I start paying for anything else." Nonetheless, Gibson is still an avid gallant. Says he: "I love women; it's only wives I have trouble with. But I always advise other people against divorce--if you get one, you might as well put up with her; the next one is likely to be worse."

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