As a college junior in the early 1990s Steven Grillo dreamed about landing an internship on Howard Stern’s radio show.
But once he did the dream quickly became a nightmare — with him being egged into humiliating himself, but giving him an irresistible taste of fame.
Grillo says he never wanted to be on the air and took the job with the intention of working behind the scenes. However, he says Stern unexpectedly prayed on him, despite being a dyslexic college kid.
“The place was a snake-pit; you never knew when you were going to be set up,” Grillo told The Post.
“I was always a nervous wreck and it got worse when they brought me on the show.
“I’d have Robin [Quivers, co-host] cackling in my ear; somebody would be throwing balls of paper in my face … Then I would have Howard staring at me, with his piercing blue eyes darting all over the place, trying to make me look worse than I already did.”
Shock jock Stern was a different person back when Grillo, now 58, worked for him in the 90s on New York’s WXRK station.
Pre-woke, decades before he did softball interviews with Joe Biden, Stern’s politics leaned Republican.
“He definitely got George Pataki elected Governor [of New York in 1995] and he was a big [Rudy] Giuliani supporter,” said Grillo. “It’s gross to see what he’s turned into. I think it’s quite pathetic, to be honest.”
Grillo is referring to Stern’s 180 in terms of his political standing, “At some point, his brain flipped,” he said. “I think it has to do with the people he associates with. He’s in the [left wing] herd, and he doesn’t want to upset them. Now he’s friends with all these A-listers, people like Jimmy Kimmel. If he goes up against them, he’s going to get kicked out of the club. He used to make fun of all those celebrities,” who Grillo counts as fair game due to their public profiles.
Ironically, one person Stern did not mind going up against was Donald Trump. “Trump and Howard were friends, they talked all the time,” said Grillo. “Then Howard turned on his friend.”
Grillo – nicknamed Gorilla by Stern, which he hated – knows how that feels, describing how off the air, his boss was a really nice person who “hated” confrontation.
But once they were on the air, “he continually broke my balls. I was always getting yelled at for not preparing his baked potato properly, failing to get him his hot water when he needed it.
“He made me wear a turban and an Indian outfit that looked like a diaper when I went to get his hot water [from a nearby coffee shop]. It was embarrassing.”
Grillo’s disillusionment grew as Stern pit him against his 11-year-old daughter in a spelling bee, which he lost, and humiliated him, calling him “stupid.”
Still living with his parents at the time, his father didn’t like what he heard and screamed at him over allowing himself to be treated that way.
Stern’s show in the 90s was no place for faint-of-heart listeners with a seemingly endless parade of strippers and porn stars through the studio. Stern regularly offended and berated guests, co-hosts, or anyone at hand.
His biggest controversies included offending the Hispanic community by playing gunshots over singer Selena’s music after she was shot dead by a fan and describing pleasuring himself while looking at the picture of Aunt Jemima on a bottle of maple syrup.
Still, the pull of quasi-fame was strong and Grillo endured, once even saving Stern’s life. Among his responsibilities were to meet his boss in his limo when he arrived at the radio station at 5:00 a.m. and walk him into the building.
On one of those mornings in 1995, said Grillo, “I noticed a car parked in front of 600 Madison Avenue, where the radio station was. A guy was standing on the corner”
Grillo told Stern’s driver to bring the radio star to the rear of the building. The driver complied and the guy somehow got close enough for Grillo to hear him shouting, “Howard Stern, you motherf—er, I’m going to kill you.”
As Grillo remembers it, “I pushed Howard into the building before the guy could do anything. Security came out and the police were called. The guy was put into handcuffs. I saw his shotgun with 12 shells on top of the car,” thankfully no-one was hurt.
While Stern gave an on-air thanks — “It was a throw-away thanks,” insists Grillo — one thing he didn’t do, which he really could have used, was throw him a few dollars.
Grillo – who this week self-published a memoir “Gorilla Parts,” written with Jason Huza – says he was hired as an intern during his junior year of college and worked for six of eight years on the show as an unpaid intern, before finally making minimum wage.
He made ends meet through bartending and personal appearances related to the show, but things came to a head after he privately asked Stern for a pay rise and received a dressing down on air.
He was offered a 30-cent per hour raise but quit soon after.
Grillo’s post-Stern life included a stretch working as Robert Iler’s stand-in on “The Sopranos” where he scored a little bit of HBO airtime, and he works as a stagehand and grip. He also has little regard for the former boss who made him famous for all the wrong reasons. “How about this?” Grillo said. “I didn’t even put Howard in the acknowledgements of the book.”
