Wiggy Wendy Williams wowing her fans

NEW YORK - Wendy Williams minces onto the set in a shrink-wrap, leopard-skin-patterned dress. She twirls around, to the lusty approval of the studio audience.

First topic: her pesky eczema scabs. Then she moves on to a discussion of Kim Kardashian's rumored breakup with Reggie Bush.

That's Williams in a nutty nutshell: TMI and TMZ in one big, busty, brazen package.

"The beauty of Wendy is she's not afraid to let everything hang out," says executive producer Rob Dauber. "She comes out every day and really shares her authentic self with the viewers."

People clearly enjoy her zany candor. The Wendy Williams Show, a mix of salty girl-talk and celebrity gossip, is on twice a day on Fox 29 (10 a.m. and 1 p.m.) and twice on BET (8 a.m. and midnight).

"I've always been a little askew," she says after the show, shot live on tape. "What do I have to lose by sharing?"

Backstage in her dressing room, Williams answers questions while abstractedly stroking strands of her lustrous blond wig.

"This is my 36" model, she says contentedly. "All my wigs are pretty big. You know us Jersey girls: We love our big hair." The Asbury Park native then erupts into a gale of giggles.

Since a thyroid condition thinned her hair, Williams, 45, wears a sample from her extensive collection of wigs everywhere, even to the gym.

"No one sees me without it," she says. "Except the UPS man and the FedEx man."

Because she won't allow monitors or mirrors on the set, Williams will sometimes adjust her hairpiece while peering intently at her reflection in the camera lens. That can be disconcerting for viewers. When she leans in, it looks like she's checking you for cataracts.

On the show and on the street, her fans almost always preface their remarks to her with an imitation of her trademark phrase, "How you doin'?"

Williams has numerous ways of delivering the line. At its most extravagant, she sounds like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz after a few too many tequilas. It's accompanied by a flip of the hands, as if submitting her lacquered nails for inspection.

She developed her signature salutation while exiled in Philadelphia back when she still earned her living on the radio.

"I wasn't a DJ," she clarifies. "I was a personality."

She had been dropped by Hot 97, Manhattan's WPLJ, in 1998 after a heated conflict with another staffer. In her tell-all memoir, The Wendy Williams Experience: Queen of Radio, she implies that her departure was hastened by hip-hop impresario Puff Daddy because he didn't like the way she dished details about his private life.

Williams spent the next three years at Philly's Power 99 (WUSL). "I had a couple of [on-air] partners," she says. "One was Dee Lee, who used to play a gay character, Chantay.

"When Chantay would start talking I would say, 'How you doin'?', trying to sound like a drag queen. That's me being fabulous."

The husky tone, she explains, is the sound of "a woman trying to be a man trying to be a woman."

A cursory glance around her set, a riot of orange and heliotrope fabrics, with disco balls hanging from the ceiling, reveals an audience made up of younger women along with a smattering of gay males.

"The gay community has always been extremely supportive of me," she says. "I realized the attraction: Misfits know misfits."

Williams attained her outsider status growing up in Ocean Township, N.J.

"I never felt like I belonged. I was very often the only black, always the tallest girl, and generally the chubby one," she says.

"I always knew going to college was the key, and not to Rutgers. I wanted to go away where I could make my own life and really be me."

At Northeastern University in Boston, she DJed on the campus radio station (as Golden Girl) and interned at a Top 40 station.

Her first job after graduating was at a station in the U.S. Virgin Islands. "I made $3.25 an hour and worked a four-hour shift. You do the math," she says. "I made no money but every cent I made I spent on stamps" to mail out audition tapes.

She began the itinerant life of a broadcaster climbing the ladder from market to market, finally reaching the top rung in 2002 at WBLS in New York, where she gained a national following.

Then the TV syndicators came calling. And not a moment too soon. "I've been waiting for this all my life," she says.

As much as she loves the spotlight, Williams also savors her home life with her husband and their 9-year-old son, Kevin, in North Jersey.

"You might think I'm out having glamorous lunches with my girlfriends on weekends but I'm home in my crafting room watching Lifetime on TV," she says.

With The Wendy Williams Show recently renewed for a second season, its host has settled into a comfortable routine: diva all day, real housewife of New Jersey all night.

"We laugh; we cry," she says of her workday. "We wipe our teeth; we tilt our wigs. And then we go home."