By Michael Letterlough, Jr.

Wendy Williams has no idea who I am when I call for our interview. “Was I supposed to call you?” she asks on her way home from the studio in New York, where both her nationally syndicated radio show on WBLS-FM 107.5 and the Wendy Williams Experience on VH1 are done.

I quickly ramble off some blurred explanation about publicists and e-mails I’m not even sure makes sense to myself. “It’s okay,” she says, “I don’t always remember who I have call me on my cell. But it makes life easy for me and just gives me less to think about.”

Wendy likes to keep things for herself relatively simple. On the air, she’s known to most as the entertainment gossip guru; blunt and bold, with a knack for being able to ask those sensitive questions that often ruffle peoples shirts. She can be intimidatingly brash and tough, with an unapologetic honesty that makes even the biggest celebrities wince when walking into her studio. But off the airwaves and behind the cameras, she’s a slightly different Wendy ( I said slightly). For instance, she doesn’t make a big hoopla about being chauffeured because, except on this rare occasion, she usually likes to drive herself home after work.

“It just so happens I got some scar revision on my bunion,” she says openly. “But I do like the privacy of driving myself.”

Unlike most public figures, Wendy doesn’t hide behind a camera-ready facade of unhuman-like perfection. Rather, everything she says and does is completely up-front, uncut and real. It’s part of the reason why Alizé asked Wendy to be their official spokesperson to celebrate their 20th anniversary in combination with her 20th year in radio.

“Well, apparently the sales of Alizé have fallen—not through the floor—but they aren’t what they were when Tupac and Biggie were alive, which was just simply giving them free publicity by rhyming about them in songs,” she says. “But over the years people have changed to champagne and other spirits, so I guess they felt the pinch, and they wanted to tie in something that’s original, something with the urban community–whose always been the biggest purchasers of Alizé—and a female, because the core audience is women, with a certain youthful spirit but with sophisticated taste.” And who better than Wendy? “Right.”

There was also the five city Alizé Live tour which just recently concluded last month with guests Keyshia Cole and comedian TK Kirkland. The tour consisted basically of a series of parties, featuring the Wendy Williams Experience, and day events at area liquor stores. Wendy even features a new drink called, unsurprisingly, The Experience, which is made with Red Passion and Champagne. And naturally, free Alizé for everyone was aplenty.

“We stayed in a mild haze,” she says.

In the meantime, while Wendy was touring, original Wu Tang member Method Man was creating a concoction of his own. Apparently, Meth reported in a slew of sudden interviews (to just about anyone who had a tape recorder and some time), that Wendy Williams revealed on air his wife’s private battle with cancer that they hadn’t told anyone about.

While Wendy might be famous for providing us all with the seemingly unauthorized dish on celebrities, she says “I never said Method Man’s wife had cancer. It wasn’t even in any medical report that she had cancer. The medical report said that Method Man’s wife is sick, she’s in the hospital, but it didn’t say anything about her having cancer. Two: that was a medical person violating privacy, which, unfortunately happens, and I always feel dirty when it happens, like ‘God, this could happen to anybody,’ but all I said was something to the affect of ‘sorry to hear about your wife, so on and so forth’.

“He sat on that information and his opinion on that for seven months, until it was the right time when his album came out [in October],” she says. “It was easily seven months ago...virtually a year ago now. That story came out of nowhere, and his vicious attack of getting people on MySpace to email me, and mentioning it in every interview he’s done. It’s basically been the publicity platform for his album. What kind of husband slash publicity monger is he to use cancer and his wife being sick as a way to promote his album? I addressed it once (on her radio show The Wendy Williams Experience) and I didn’t address it anymore because I didn’t want to give him anymore of what he wanted, which was to feed into it and go back and forth, thereby burying me, making me look like a heartless ass, and him like the poor victim. I can look like a heartless ass on my own. I certainly don’t need the help of Method Man.”

See, there you have it, Wendy’s not the bad guy after all (and by the way, this was officially the last time Wendy says she’ll address that issue).

But at the end of the day, Wendy says, anything she’s said is strictly her opinion, so she doesn’t have any trouble sleeping with herself at night, because she knows there’s nothing that she’s doing wrong.

“I’m not doing anything more than being Wendy, and it’s what I do,” she says in a very matter-of-fact way. “As far as the darts people want to throw at me saying I’m dead wrong, I am consistent; you know what you’re getting when you turn me on. You’re getting a bit of advise, you’re getting laughter, you’re getting opinions, and some days you might be getting tears; you might be getting a soft, pink Wendy, or a hard, black Wendy; you could be getting the grown Wendy, or the sixteen-year-old sophomoric Wendy, but you know what it is.”

Aside from it all, Wendy has her new book, Drama Is Her Middle Name (which will follow with the book Is the Bitch Dead?), and a two-page column in the recently launched magazine by ex-Source magazine owner Benzino called Hip Hop Weekly.

“I actually have a little percentage in the magazine,” she says. “It’s going to be a weekly magazine done in the same fashion as the National Inquirer. I was one of the first people they came to when they thought about doing this magazine. It’s starting out biweekly and I think they expect by February it will be ready for the weekly, so that’s great.”

Additionally, this is all along with her column in Life and Style magazine, as well as her VH1 show The Wendy Williams Experience, which was originally picked up for six episodes and then increased to eight.

“All the big-wigs are very impressed with the current numbers that it’s doing,” she says. “(VH1) is really cooperating and it really is a true partnership.” As a matter of fact, she’s rushing home right now to catch the new episode of her show featuring rapper/producer Ice Cube and Andrew Dice Clay.

“It’s a little capsulized version of the radio show, and this is my in-a-perfect-world show,” she explains. “I am not built for a five day a week show like Tyra or Oprah. But a talk show is just the natural thing you think about people doing.” There was even a time when the concept of a Ricky-Oprah-Tyra-esque show was being piloted for Wendy. But over the years she’s learned that money isn’t everything and radio is where she truly wants to be.

“At the end of the day these TV shows come and go, but you cannot f*** with the track record of radio,” she says passionately. “Radio is my first love, absolutely my first love. Publishing is fun, TV is cute, but radio is the sh**. It is the most joyful time to come in every day. I wear what I want, I love doing afternoons, I don’t want to do mornings. My quality of life is great.”

So great, that Wendy has the time to stuff envelopes in the morning at her son’s elementary school and be lunchtime monitor all before heading off to work. Or, she might enjoy a nice morning breakfast with her manager-husband, Kevin, who she explains helps steer her career exactly the way she wants it to be.

“My Kevin has got my vision, we work as a team, he’s the wind beneath the wings of my career, and I am the product,” she says, also mentioning how she relinquished some of her control-freak tendencies for him when she realized he was “the one.” “It is my job to keep the product hot and it is his job to get out there and push the product.”

It’s after 8 p.m., and she’s just pulling onto her street, where home she says is the one place she prefers over anywhere else in the world. As she continues talking about the great relationship between she and Kevin, and her driver accidentally pulls onto her grass, she reflects that her career wouldn’t be possible without her faithful listeners on the radio.

“At the end of the day I don’t have to have all the money and I don’t have to have all the fame. All I have to have is authentic happiness on my terms, and this is it. I love it!”