No Apologies From a Survivor Like Jones

NEW YORK —  Somebody doesn’t get it.

Maybe it’s Jenny Jones, maybe it’s her critics.

But the message doesn’t seem to be getting across in either direction.

You can tell because there’s a look that both the 51-year-old host of “The Jenny Jones Show” and some of her interviewers--whether it’s NBC’s Jane Pauley on “Dateline” or, on this particular day, a TV critic from Connecticut--wear when the going gets rough.

A look best described as incredulous.

And Jones, who has been out promoting her autobiography, “Jenny Jones: My Story,” wears it well.

Sitting in her Manhattan hotel room, two public relations representatives at her side, Jones is as pleasant as she is unapologetic.

She knows her Chicago-based, syndicated talk show, now in its seventh season, has long been a favored target of critics, part of the much-bemoaned trash TV trend where family feuds, make-overs and hours with titles such as “Girl, I Hate to Be Rude . . . You Look Like a Dude!” dominate daytime.

Three years ago, one of Jones’ guests, Jonathan Schmitz, killed homosexual admirer Scott Amedure after Amedure revealed his feelings for Schmitz on a “Jenny Jones” show (never broadcast) about same-sex, secret crushes. Schmitz, who was convicted of the murder, said he felt he had been humiliated on national television.

“It’s unfortunate that this happened,” Jones says now. “It was unfortunate that we were blamed in some way. But I will survive it. I’ve survived a lot of stuff--a lot of professional setbacks as well as personal.”

It’s true. Jones has a story and a half.

Her life, painfully detailed in her biography, would make her a perfect guest for her own show or one of the many others like it.

At age 11, the Canadian-born Jones ran away from home. She dropped out of high school. She’s been arrested four times. She underwent breast implant surgery five times for cosmetic reasons with disastrous physical consequences. Her father was abusive, her mother was alcoholic. Jones battled with the bottle as well. Two marriages failed.

But Jones was also the first woman to win on “Star Search,” taking home $100,000 in prize money. She played drums and did stand-up, developing her for-women-only “Girls’ Night Out” act, which led to her syndicated talk show.

“I didn’t realize how much of a survivor I was until I actually put it all on paper,” says Jones. “I’ve been asked, really, for years to do the book. My boyfriend kind of convinced me. Year after year, he’d say, ‘But it really is a good story.’ I never really saw that, being too close to it.”

But because Jones wanted “a chance to set the record straight about the Schmitz situation,” the book came now. (Jones is donating all of her proceeds from the book to breast cancer research.)

As Jones writes (with Patsi Bale Cox) of the March 1995 show that preceded the killing, “It was a fun show, it really was. Secret-crush shows are always fun. . . . I loved the ‘same-sex’ angle and I’m always looking for ways to include gay people in our shows.”

But after the murder, Jones was upset to find that, “We were not merely being associated with a murder, we were being blamed for it--and I knew we hadn’t done anything wrong.”

That’s a reasonable argument to make, particularly for someone who is still facing a civil suit (hence the extra publicist in the room).

The idea that Schmitz was somehow emotionally ambushed by her show is simply untrue, she says.

“There was no surprise, OK?” says Jones, in a rare moment of agitation. “It is a big lie. Jonathan knew that his crush could be a man. We have sworn testimony.”

Many people also don’t know, she says, that “Jonathan, the murderer, asked Scott to change his flight so he could fly back with him--the [man who] just humiliated him on national TV.”

As for her testimony at 1996’s trial, in which Jones appeared to know little about the way her own show was run: “Everything that came out of my mouth was used against me. It really was misinterpreted.”

She says her detractors never want to write about how the show--and she personally--helps many people.

“Helping gang members move,” she says, ticking off a list of for-instances, “helping them get tattoos removed--which is very difficult; putting battered women into shelters; buying a woman a car so she could get away from her husband; hospitalizing anorexics, getting surgeries. We just sent some troubled kids to camp. We’re constantly doing stuff like that. . . . I’ve given scholarships to kids [off camera] that were headed where I was headed when I was 11 or 12.”

Where critics go slack-jawed, however, is Jones’ conclusion about the secret-crush show, a show she would have preferred be broadcast for clarity’s sake.

“I do think it was a good topic, and I think it would be a good show to do again,” she says.

And, as a result, she sees no reason to do anything differently.

“Obviously, we took time to examine our systems and how we book and how we screen,” she says, “and we feel there was nothing to change. I don’t know why that’s so shocking when we didn’t do anything wrong in the first place.”

Jones is often dismissed by critics, she says, because they take an elitist view of her show.

She is not exploiting her guests, she says, nor does she look down on them.

“They’re the same people I run into when I go shop at Kmart, which I do,” she says, adding that the people who appear on her show do so of their own free will and “are representative of a lot of other people in the country and their problems.”

So, critics be damned.

If they don’t get it, Jenny says, she does.

“I think that’s what makes the show work . . . is that I sort of come from where the guests come from, so we relate to each other.”