Wendy Williams first gained notice as a boisterous, provocative voice on urban-contemporary radio stations in New York City in the 1990s. By 2004, three-quarters of a million listeners in the tri-state area tuned in every day at 2 p.m. to hear her weekday show on WBLS-FM, The Wendy Williams Experience. Her frank interviews with celebrities, which occasionally went off the rails, turned Williams from radio DJ to gossipmonger, and she parlayed some of that notoriety into a daytime television show in 2009. "I'm just a woman from New Jersey, which will always be my platform," she told Dan Schawbel, a journalist for Forbes. "In a million years I would've never imagined me being on television with a talk show. It's a dream come true! I do it everyday with a full heart and my own version of honesty."

Williams speaks often of her New Jersey roots. Born in 1964, the middle of three children, she raised first in Neptune Township, near Asbury Park, and then in Ocean Township. Her parents were both teachers and classic overachiever-types; at one point in his career Williams' father Tom was a middle-school principal and had a second job teaching college-level English courses. Williams, by contrast, struggled all through school, especially in the 1970s when she was one of just four African-American students in her class. "My mom and dad are very, very smart," she told Marisa Guthrie of the Hollywood Reporter, and Williams also credited them for her own interviewing skills as a broadcast journalist. "Writing and conversation were musts when I was growing up. There was no TV in the kitchen; you had to come with intelligent talk about something. They didn't want to hear any stupid foolishness."

Squeaked into College

Williams has also spoken of the miracle of her college education, which came when Northeastern University in Boston admitted her despite the fact that she graduated 360th out of the 363 students in her class of 1982 at Ocean Township High School. Despite her academic struggles in her teens, Williams knew she was a gifted entertainer and potential broadcast voice once she discovered the public-address system at her younger brother's baseball games. At Northeastern she majored in communications and conducted her first celebrity interview with LL Cool J on campus radio station WRBB.

Williams made the most of a college internship she landed at WXKS, a Boston-area Top 40 radio station. Undaunted by the dreaded morning slot she was assigned or by the station's local-legend morning drive-time host Matt "Matty in the Morning" Siegel, Williams worked diligently to get some airtime for herself. "I didn't want to be like all the other interns," she told Billboard Radio Monitor writer Ivory M. Jones in 2005. "I wanted to be the queen of all interns. So, I'd get up at 3 a.m. so I could make it to the station before Matt's show got started at 5:30 a.m. I didn't even get college credit, and even missed some classes because of it." The determination...