Mixed-Up Man

"I'm just a shaggy cool breeze in broadcasting," says Don Sherwood. "I got that way hating people. I also hate children, flowers, dogs and housewives." Don is a mad, messy, high-pressure San Francisco disk jockey who boasts that he ran through five schools, four wives and seven radio jobs in 17 years. He is also the highest-paid record spinner on the West Coast and the electronic darling of the Bay area. Though he has yet to realize his life's ambition--floating to Hawaii in a Martini shaker--gangling, horse-faced Don Sherwood, 32, last week signed a contract that will boost his yearly take past the $100,000 mark. All he is required to do is ventilate his ego on radio three hours a day (6 to 9 a.m. P.D.T.) six days a week and one hour Saturday night on TV.

Because he has set records for absenteeism, the station has a taxicab deliver him to the studio daily. There he carries on offbeat chitchat with a puddle-jumping ex-marine who buzzes the Bay area to report on the weather until Don recalls him with: "O mighty balding eagle, with your wings spread against the sky and glistening in the sun--and probably hung over, come home!"

Sherwood's range of 14 characters includes Bart Hercules, "a musical monster with a Liberace voice, who teaches weight control to women and peddles yoghurt from goats that care enough to give the very best," and Fidel Trueheart, M.D., a gowned physician who lectures on "The Human Body; Its Care and Prevention." Sherwood may also take all the parts in Just Plain Rosita, a soap opera which "asks a question--Can a woman after 35?", or play records he hates at the wrong speeds, like My Geiger-Counter Heart ("I've had radiation sickness since my fallout with you").

Yellow Shoes. Although 14 advertisers waited in line last week to buy what little of his morning shows they could get, Sherwood cudgels his commercials. A Vienna cheesecake is "as Viennese as the beautiful music of Schwartz." And of an auto showroom: "Don't pay any attention to the salesmen's yellow shoes, their flowered ties and tiny little mustaches . . ." He is just as flip with callers. ("Sorry. Mrs. Galli, no news about the man who rescued your little girl from the duck pond, but we've had three calls from men who claimed they pushed her in.")

Not too far behind the slick, irreverent patter and the frontal assault on authority is the gloomy surveyor of a checkered career. "I've been trying to find myself for 32 years," says Don. "I haven't been fitting in. It's hard for an egomaniac to change." Sherwood thinks he got lost at seven, when a strep infection laid him low for two years. "The space between the end of the bed and the wall became a deep river, the window ledge a great mountain ... I was Tarzan, Tom Swift, Winnie the Pooh. All this shaped the talent and ruined everything else."

An enlisted man in the Canadian Tank Corps at 15, he later spent six months in the U.S. Navy, was booted out on a physical. Encouraged by the sound of his resonant voice, he became "the world's worst announcer" for San Francisco's Mutual outlet, moved on from station to station ("Whenever I got a new job I got married to celebrate"). Before his first year on TV was out, hard-drinking Don had missed more than 30 telecasts, but no one seemed to care. He latched onto two shows, Where's Sherwood? and Why Sherwood?, hit the West like a sonic boom.

Bad Boy. As Don's star rose in the West, he picked up a manager, secretaries, a red Thunderbird, a nightclub, a pet puma and a passion for yoga and Zen. He became the hottest gossip item in town, made front-page headlines when he smashed into a police captain's sister, was dubbed "TV's Bad Boy" by the columnists. Wrote one: "Don is taking a Rorschach inkblot test at Stanford to find out why he's so clever, amusing, successful and miserable." His own psychiatrist told him: "If I told you what's wrong with you, you would never come back to me." Columnist Herb Caen, the Boswell of the Bay, says: "They all say the same thing about him--'If only he'd settle down, he'd be wonderful'--but he wouldn't be. He's the typical mixed-up man of the century. He hasn't got a peaceful mind, and that's why he's one of the freshest and most unpredictable talents on the air today. I hope he never learns to do things 'the right way.' Because that'll be the wrong way for Sherwood."

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