Wendy Williams sits at a mirrored table in her office, taking off her false eyelashes. “After the show, the first thing I do is take off my makeup,” she says, wiping foundation from her face. She is wearing a low-cut, floor-length, champagne-colored evening gown, her bionic bosom — installed in 1994 — on flamboyant display. “I wear makeup and lashes every single day. This has been on since 8 o’clock this morning. And with every hour [the makeup artists] layer more.”
The white pads smeared with brown pile up on the table in the center of Williams’ office. “I didn’t appreciate nice skin until I got the show,” she says. She tugs the sides of her long blond wig and centers it on her scalp. Looking in a mirror, the 50-year-old approves. “Not bad skin for an old broad.”
Despite the eyelashes, the wigs, the boob job and the preponderance of glitter everywhere in her office (a pink-and-white bedazzled stingray, a gift from a friend, hangs on one wall; a pair of framed disco platform shoes occupy another), there are no illusions with Williams. No topic is off-limits, from her own cosmetic surgery (“Breast implants last about 10 years. Any day now I’m going to have to get them replaced.”) to the value of a good wig (“A thousand dollars and then another $500 to add hair into it, to thicken it up. Wigs are a lot more work than people think.”).
After six seasons on the air, she is a proud survivor of the syndicated talk-show wars, boldly succeeding where Queen Latifah, Nate Berkus, Jeff Probst and Anderson Cooper, among countless others, could not. Williams’ ascent has been steady — she’s now seen in 1.86 million homes daily.
“A lot of people get it wrong,” she says of the genre. “They make the concept of the talk show and then they drop the person in.”
Williams’ personality — brash and infectiously good-humored — dovetails perfectly with her show’s format, a mix of interviews and celebrity gossip. The woman knows how to get even the most media-trained celebrity to talk. When Jennifer Lopez came on, Williams had her dishing about all the rings she had to return when the men in her life were shown the door and confessing that she wished she hadn’t parted with a rare pink diamond given to her by ex-fiancé Ben Affleck. When Susan Sarandon was a guest, she admitted to having had some plastic surgery — and to having had sex on the Spanish Steps in Rome.
That’s Wendy. Even if you don’t know her, she makes you think you do.
“I kill them with kindness,” she says. “I’m such an imposing person that the last thing I need to be when I walk into a room is evil. I’m 5-foot-11. I put on my giant shoes — they’re 5 inches. So I’m towering.”
Kindness may win over the guests on her show, but what viewers really want from her is gossip. Her fearless predictions about the longevity of celebrity relationships is harmless fun. When they don’t come true, she is literally ready to eat crow, as she did in one hilarious segment, where she actually ate the bird on air after the marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West lasted longer than the 72 days Williams gave it.
“I’m a woman of my word, but [the crow] tasted like iron,” Williams says. “It was tough and it tasted very iron-y. Not just any metal.”
She called the recent breakups of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, and Britney Spears and Charlie Ebersol. “Charlie [was] only using her for publicity. [Actress] Susan Saint James is his mother — I talked through the TV to her and said, ‘We’re going to break this up.’ ”
Still, she was blindsided by the breakup of Sean Penn and Charlize Theron. “I didn’t see that at all,” she says in a hushed voice.
Though she won’t name “best” or “worst” guests, she does have high praise for singer Trey Songz, with whom she just taped a show: “He’s a real panty-dropper.”
Despite the celebrity deep dish, Williams insists the only place she really talks “badly” about stars is at her “kitchen table.” Like many talk-show hosts, she is intensely private, holing up at her New Jersey home with Kevin Hunter, her husband of 18 years and manager, and their son, Kevin Jr., 14. That’s her real world, and that is enough.
“I like to surround myself with my beautiful house,” she says. “It’s clean in there. The carpet is soft.” Ask her who her best girlfriend is, and the reply is blunt. “I don’t have one. I got a show,” she declares. “I can have a girlfriend anytime I want. The problem is, I don’t have time for that. I am my best girlfriend.”
Born and raised in New Jersey, Williams says she would never live in New York City. “There are certain basic things I need, like . . . a drive-through Wendy’s, drive-through bank, drive-through McDonald’s,” she says. “And I’m not going into that hole called the subway. I can’t. I can’t be Carrie Bradshaw and walk up all those steps.”
Despite her fondness for fast food, she is a domestic goddess, cooking on the weekends so that her son can “look at the Tupperware, grab a chicken leg and heat it” when she’s at the studio. Her home décor is glitter-free. “I decorate my office the way I can’t decorate my home,” she says. “I think that girls who collect stuffed animals and have a little too much girly stuff are very [unfair] to their men.”
She is also a closet crafts person. “I like acrylic paints. I like canvas.” She points to a large ottoman in her office and describes how she spruced it up with an animal-print motif. “I had a vision. I said, ‘I’m going to put on a nice movie, then I’m going to paint it cheetah.’ ”
She probably needs to close off the outside world because she’s in overdrive the minute she goes back to work. Her list of summer projects includes a stand-up comedy tour and a new series called “Death by Gossip,” a true crime series which will air on the Investigation Discovery channel.
“It’s a half-hour series about [small] towns and the crap that goes on,” she says. “The sheriff is messing around with the head nurse at the hospital. But the head nurse is married and so is the sheriff. Everybody’s talking and somebody ends up dead. And when do I [tape] them? Fridays, because I have off [from the talk show]. I’m there for eight hours, and I come home and I drop.”
The work ethic is paying off. Williams has received numerous honors, including a place in the National Radio Hall of Fame and her first Emmy nomination for Outstanding Talk-Show Host. (She lost to the duo of Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan in April.) Naturally, she’s honest enough to tell you it’s not an honor just to be nominated.
“I could have won,” she says. “I hate to be like that, but that’s how normal people feel. I was doing [stand-up] comedy so I wasn’t able to go to the Emmys. And it’s a good thing I didn’t because I don’t have a good game face.”
Wendy calls time on celeb duos
She called it: Jennifer Garner & Ben Affleck
During her June 23 interview with The Post, Wendy Williams predicted Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck would split. Exactly a week later (and the day after their 10th wedding anniversary), the two announced their divorce.
“I’ve been following that story for a long time. They celebrate their 10th anniversary on Monday [June 29]. My thought is that she’s waiting to pull the trigger until after the 10-year mark,” she says. “Because you get so much [alimony] after five years and so much after 10.
“The drumbeat was small with those two, but then it got louder and louder and louder. And then you can’t ignore it. He likes to gamble. She seems more like a homebody. Always with the three kids. And I hear that whenever he has to deal with the kids — I mean he loves his kids — he calls his mother. ‘Please, can you come help?’ Neither one of them will have a problem finding another, but I predict that that’s over.”
Next to split: Jennifer Aniston & Justin Theroux
So who does Wendy the fortune teller think is the next celeb couple circling the drain? Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux.
“I don’t think she will make it to the altar. He was with his old girlfriend [stylist Heidi Bivens] for 14 years and didn’t marry her,” Williams says.
Besides Theroux’s cold feet, the talk-show host blames Aniston’s age (46).
“She’s got three good eggs left if she wants to have children.”