television talk show host
Personal Information
Born Montel B. Williams, c. 1956, in Baltimore, MD; son of Herman (Baltimore commissioner of transportation) and Marjorie Williams; married second wife, Grace Moerhle (an actress), June 13, 1992; children: (first marriage) Maressa and Ashley.
Education: U.S. Naval Academy, B.S., 1980.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Navy, 1974-88; became lieutenant commander.
Career
Talk show host, producer, and motivational speaker. Worked at McDonald's and played in the band Front Row while in high school. Founder of Reach for the American Dream foundation, 1988; motivational speaker, 1988--; made local television appearances; host of The Fourth R--Kids Rap About Racism, Denver, CO, 1990; delivered introduction to the film Glory; host and producer of the Montel Williams Show, 1991--, and television special Mountain! Get Out of My Way; co-owner of Out of My Way Productions.
Life's Work
In the fall of 1991 Montel Williams joined the ranks of America's daytime talk show hosts with his own program, the Montel Williams Show. Though he had great success in the past as a motivational speaker, few people believed that this former U.S. Navy intelligence officer would be ranked in the company of talk show celebrities Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and Sally Jessy Raphael. Yet, after only one year, his show was being broadcast to 80 percent of the television sets in America and in certain markets was getting a higher rating than Donahue.
"Williams doesn't fit the typical mold," Patrick Cole wrote in Emerge not long after Montel's emergence onto the talk show scene. "Instead of coming up through the broadcasting world's school of hard knocks, he honed his skills in the military." Though Williams admits that he didn't learn his craft by taking the traditional broadcasting route, he argues that he faced his own school of hard knocks. "I've traveled all over this country speaking," he told Michael Hill of the Baltimore Sun. "I know what it's like to wake up in the Quality Inn, the five-star hotel in some towns. I've talked to people in those little towns in Texas and Tennessee. I know what they want to know, what questions they want answered. Phil [Donahue], Oprah [Winfrey], Geraldo [Rivera] and Sally [Jessy Raphael] haven't done that."
Williams's physical charisma also separates him from his peers. At 6'2" and 210 pounds, he towers above most of his guests and audience members. His shaved head has become a trademark to his many viewers. Yet, most people agree that there is still something very different about Montel Williams. "The other principal difference is Williams," Carolyn Ramsay commented in the Los Angeles Times. "Maybe it's because he shaves his head. Maybe it's his disciplined posture. Or maybe it's just his palpable confidence."
Montel gained confidence growing up in the Cherry Hill section of Baltimore, "one of the largest black ghettos of the era," he told Simi Horwitz of the Washington Post. "We lived three blocks from the dump. My parents were poor, but they worked very hard to give us the appearance of a lower-middle class lifestyle." While his parents did their part to give Montel a better life--his father worked three jobs and his mother two for most of his childhood--he didn't disappoint them.
As a high school student, Montel spent his summers working at the local McDonald's during the day and playing in a band at night. During his senior year at the predominantly white Andover High School in Linthicum, Maryland, Montel was voted class president. Yet politics was not the career he wanted to pursue when he graduated from high school in 1974. "I was going to be a rock star," he told Hill. The quick money that his band, Front Row, earned playing clubs around town, seemed more important to him than furthering his education. "I applied to some colleges but I didn't follow it up. Then two members of our band got busted and that ended that."
Montel found himself with two options when his band suddenly dissolved: he could go to a vocation technical school and learn a trade or he could do what many other black males at the time were doing--join the military. Montel's decision to enlist in the Navy proved to be the right one. Within the first six months, he received two meritorious promotions and was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy Preparatory School right after boot camp.
As the first black man to be accepted into the academy's prep school, Montel was determined to succeed. As one of forty Marines to enter the school in 1976, he was one of only four to actually graduate. Williams continued on at the U.S. Naval Academy and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering with minors in international security affairs and Mandarin Chinese in 1980.
As a special intelligence officer, Williams traveled the world doing top-secret communications work for the military. His ability to speak fluent Chinese and Russian, which he mastered at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, helped him climb the ladder of success. During his 15-year stint in the military, Williams was decorated nine times, including two Meritorious Service Medals. "I was shooting to be an admiral," he told Horwitz.
Yet, Williams's career aspirations changed direction when he started recruiting minorities for officer training in the Navy. While stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, he was asked by a friend to speak at a black leadership conference in Kansas. "That presentation garnered 12 requests for me to speak at high schools," Williams recalled to Horwitz. Williams was so taken by the response he received from students that he mounted a one-man campaign to lecture kids on the importance of education and the evils of drug abuse.
The number of requests for Williams to speak amassed quickly, especially after he was featured on the Today Show and NBC Nightly News in 1988. Soon after, he formed the Denver-based, non-profit Reach the American Dream foundation, which provides everything from personal counseling to college scholarships for underprivileged teens.
Though he had reached the rank of lieutenant commander in the Navy, Williams knew that he could not continue to travel the country rapping with kids about everything from drugs to suicide to acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) at his current pace and be an effective naval commander. So with only nine years left until his retirement and without a steady income, Williams resigned from active duty. He told Wallace Terry of Parade that it was the hardest and easiest decision of his life. "Since kids are listening to me," he explained, "I know this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Maybe I won't win the war, but I'll liberate a lot of prisoners."
Montel began a grueling motivational speaking tour, working 26 days out of every month. With a hectic travel schedule, it didn't take long before Williams "carried his message to more than 700 schools and two million students," according to Marian Dozer of the Detroit Free Press. Yet kids were not the only ones coming out to hear him speak. The message that Montel was carrying to students--a person can move mountains by practicing the "three R's": responsibility, restraint, and respect--was also aimed at parents. "He told his audience," Margaret Friedrich wrote in the Baltimore Sun after seeing Williams at Howard Community College, "that each parent should follow his 'three R's'--taking the responsibility to show children how to use restraint and delay gratification, to assume responsibility for the future of the community and to show self-respect and respect for others."
Montel's first significant television appearance came during one of his many speaking engagements. A Jacksonville, Florida, school district wanted to televise his talk on a local station, WTLV, owned by the Gannett Company. After Williams added a talk show to the end of his speech, the message he had been delivering to students around the country proved to have a greater impact. In fact, at the end of the year the program was so successful that it was honored with a Best of Gannett Award.
Other television appearances to explain his motivational speeches and special broadcasts of his speeches, including ones in Washington, D.C., and Detroit, followed. In 1990 he hosted a program in Denver called The 4th R--Kids Rap About Racism that won a local Emmy Award. And when Pepsico, which had helped fund some of Williams's speeches, was looking for someone to narrate an introduction to a special version of the 1991 film Glory --a chronicle of a troop of black soldiers in the Civil War--to be used as an educational tool in schools, Williams was given the job.
It didn't take long for Williams to attract the attention of entertainment executives in Hollywood. According to Ramsay, "When Freddie Fields, who produced Glory, saw the one minute intro, he thought Williams was a star." At first, Fields and his associates wanted to develop a dramatic series that centered around Williams. "But after watching a talk show special for which he won a local Emmy in Denver," Ramsay continued, "they decided talk was the proper vehicle."
In the summer of 1991 the Montel Williams Show was launched on nine stations throughout the country. Though the program--produced and taped in Los Angeles by Out of My Way Productions, of which Williams owns 50 percent--was only seen in a few cities in the United States, they were some of the biggest, including New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. The Montel Williams Show, Steve McClellan wrote in Broadcasting, "got off to a shaky start, both critically and in the ratings." It didn't take long, however, before the ratings began to improve and the number of stations carrying the show increased.
Part of the reason the show began to do so well was its informal town hall-meeting approach. The one-hour program was designed to follow the traditional talk-show format by sticking to one topic, usually of a serious nature. Though the range of topics covered on the program--rape, child molestation, drug abuse, transsexualism, suicide, etc.--are considered by many to be sensationalistic, Williams maintained that his approach was different. "If we are talking about rape, for example, and have a panel of rape survivors, we don't belabor what actually happened during the rape,"he pointed out to Horwitz. "Other shows will spend three or four segments going over every gory detail. Our aim is to find out how the survivors are handling the experience."
During the summer of 1992 the Montel Williams Show moved to New York City to remain competitive with the other talk shows, something that the three-hour time difference between coasts had prohibited. Though the decision brought him closer to his competition, it also instilled in Williams the need to make his program even more unique by focusing on topics not normally covered on daytime talk shows.
For one particular program Williams and his crew spent nearly 24 hours traveling through Manhattan interviewing homeless people and their advocates at soup kitchens, shelters, and subway stations. Scott Williams of the Baltimore Sun questioned Williams's decision to devote an entire program to the plight of the homeless. "That's part of the reason we are so different," the talk show host responded. "You'd think this is something you'd see in another type of show, but in the way we format our field pieces, there's time for conversation, time for discussion, time for questions. I think our viewing audience wants to see a little difference."
While Williams found a new audience with his talk show, he never abandoned the crusade that brought him to the television screen. In 1992 he hosted Mountain! Get Out of My Way, a prime time television special that addressed the issues of AIDS, addiction, crime, and suicide as experienced by children. "Most of Mountain! takes place outside the talk-show format," Susan Stewart noted in the Detroit Free Press. "There's a fine line between exploring this painful stage in life and exploiting it; Williams walks the line well. Three stars."
The Montel Williams Show has clearly become Williams's first priority, but he has intimated that he would like to pursue acting endeavors at some point. As the talk show genre is faced with increased competition, many critics fear that the shows will go to extremes to increase ratings. "It's a TV show, and we know that we have to entertain, and we will do that," Williams admitted to Hill. "But you don't have to get down in the sleaze like the other talk shows. I think it's time we have one that doesn't just titillate the libido, but that titillates the intellect."
Awards
Best of Gannett Award; local Emmy Award for The Fourth R--Kids Rap About Racism.
Further Reading
Sources
- Baltimore Sun, February 27, 1991; July 3, 1991; July 25, 1991; August 28, 1991; June 8, 1992.
- Broadcasting, October 14, 1991; January 21, 1992.
- Detroit Free Press, October 26, 1988; February 20, 1991; December 4, 1991; August 31, 1992.
- Detroit News, April 8, 1992; August 25, 1992.
- Emerge, May 1992.
- Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1991.
- Parade, January 12, 1992.
- Times (Tampa, FL), May 16, 1992.
- USA Today, June 17, 1992; August 27, 1992.
- USA Weekend, July 3-5, 1992.
- Variety, April 22, 1991; October 28, 1991.
- Washington Post, August 30, 1992.
— Joe Kuskowski
