'I AM ADDICTED TO PRESCRIPTION PAIN MEDICATION'

True Confessions: Limbaugh Built an Army of Admirers With His Hard-Right
Rants. but Off-Air, He Was a Lonely Man Who May Have Broken the Law to Feed
His Addiction.

The Real Rush.

Rush Limbaugh has always had far more followers than friends.

Bombastic and clowning on air, shy and bumptious off it, Limbaugh
could count on 20 million "Dittoheads" and talk-radio fans to tune in
five days a week. But it's hard to find many people who really know
him. He was a lonely object of mass adulation, socially ill at ease,
at least occasionally depressed and, for the past several years,
living in a private hell of pain and compulsion.

IN THE END, he was betrayed by his own housekeeper. Law-enforcement
sources tell NEWSWEEK that Limbaugh's exposure as a pain-pill addict
began when Wilma Cline, 42, who had worked at Limbaugh's $30 million
Florida estate from 1997 to July 2001, showed up at the Palm Beach
County state attorney's office late last year eager to sic the cops on
her former boss. Her motive remained murky, but her story--how she had
met Limbaugh in parking lots to exchange sandwich bags filled with
"baby blues" (OxyContin pills) for a cigar box stuffed with cash--was
luridly damning.

Between July 2001 and June 2002, Cline delivered enough pills to
Limbaugh "to kill an elephant," she told the National Enquirer, the
supermarket tabloid that broke (and paid for) Cline's story.

She gave e-mails and ledgers to the cops showing that Limbaugh had
purchased more than 30,000 hydrocodone, Lorcet and OxyContin pills,
the Enquirer reported.

Law-enforcement sources confirmed the basic facts of the Enquirer
story to NEWSWEEK. Limbaugh protested that the stories contained
"inaccuracies and distortions," but last Friday, his vast listening
audience heard that resonant, righteous, morally certain voice admit
that he had become an addict and was entering rehab.

Limbaugh clung to the ideology of self-reliance to the last. "I'm not going
to portray myself as a victim," he said. Millions of pain sufferers who use
powerful medications could sympathize. But the mockery was instantaneous.
Liberal mouth Al Franken (author of "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot") hit
the airwaves to relish Limbaugh's greatest hits of hypocrisy and his sneers
at celebrity dopers like baseball player Darryl Strawberry and rocker Kurt
Cobain, and virtually every newspaper dredged up this 1995 quote from Rush:
"Too many whites are getting away with drug use. The answer is to ... find
the ones who are getting away with it, convict them, and send them up the
river." The penalty for illegally buying large quantities of prescription
painkillers in Florida can be five years in jail, and contrary to some
published reports, prosecutors do go after users as well as
pushers--especially if they want to make an example of a celebrity.

The fall of a moralist is always a great American spectacle.

The Elmer Gantry story--the righteous preacher who turns out to be a
letch and a boozer--has a special resonance in a nation that postures
as morally superior but enjoys sin. Nothing entertains (or instructs
in the essentials of human nature) like hypocrisy on a grand scale.

When Bill Bennett, best-selling author of "The Book of Virtues," was
outed as a compulsive gambler, and evangelist Jim Bakker was caught
embezzling from his Praise the Lord empire, the lamentations of the
true believers were drowned out by the snickers of the knowing.

But Limbaugh's story owes more to the "Wizard of Oz" than "The Scarlet
Letter." The man behind the curtain is not the God of Family Values
but a childless, twice-divorced, thrice-married schlub whose idea of a
good time is to lie on his couch and watch football endlessly.

When Rush Limbaugh declared to his radio audience that he was "your
epitome of morality of virtue, a man you could totally trust with your
wife, your daughter, and even your son in a Motel 6 overnight," he was
acting.

He "regards himself as an entertainer who is very pleased that people
pay attention to his political views," says Wall Street editorial
writer John Fund, who collaborated with Limbaugh on one of the radio
host's books ("The Way Things Ought to Be").

Granted, Limbaugh's act has won over, or fooled, a lot of
people.

With his heartland pieties and scorn for "feminazis" and
"commie-symps" like "West Wing" president Martin Sheen ("Martin
Sheenski" to Limbaugh), he is the darling of Red State, Fly-Over
America. Former president George H.W. Bush, always eager to cover his
right flank, personally carried Limbaugh's bags into the White House
when Limbaugh stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom in 1992. After the
Republicans won control of the House in 1994 for only the second time
in 50 years, lawmakers called to personally thank Limbaugh and made
him an honorary member of Congress.

But Limbaugh rarely shows up in Washington and counts few political
heavyweights as his friends.

One exception is Bill Bennett, whose book, "The Moral Compass,"
Limbaugh touted on radio.

Bennett knew nothing of Limbaugh's pill popping. "He's a very private
man," Bennett told NEWSWEEK. "He takes problems into himself."
Journalists who have spent time with Limbaugh have been struck by the
contrast between Rush the Radio Know-It-All and the private,
ill-at-ease Limbaugh. "It was almost as if every step away from the
studio, he grew smaller and less confident, shrinking with each step
into the real-life Rush Limbaugh," Randall Bloomquist, an editor at
Radio & Records newspaper, told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. New
York Times columnist Maureen Dowd spent a revealing dinner date with
Limbaugh in 1993. "What I do in my off time has nothing to do with
what I am," he told Dowd. "I don't go to movies.

I've been to a couple of plays.

I basically work. I don't watch television. I watch the news and the
N.F.L.; that's it." Dowd recounted this mournful snippet of
conversation:

" 'What's your idea of an ideal day?' 'I don't have an ideal day,' he
replied, glumly. 'Well, what if a good friend came into town one
Saturday, what would you do?' 'When I have someone coming into town
for the weekend, I get stressed out on Tuesday thinking about it'."
Limbaugh went on to say that he hates walking, hates window-shopping
and likes New York mainly because you can order in.

Limbaugh's own mother remarked on his somewhat passive-aggressive
reticence as a child.

Little Rush was "very quiet," his mother, Millie, told the Southeast
Missourian, a newspaper.

At Halloween, "he really didn't care much for trick or
treating.

He would rather stay at home. I found he was upstairs and he'd have
water balloons.

Sometimes when the little children would leave, he would drop them
down." Limbaugh's best friend in high school, Craig Valle, told Peter
Boyer for a May 1992 Vanity Fair article, "You would find him in his
dark bedroom playing with his tape recorder and radio."

A chubby kid who made the football team as a placekicker, Limbaugh
regarded high school as "prison." Radio gave him an escape.

He began as a
DJ at 16, but was disappointed when he didn't win popularity. His parents
were after him to become a lawyer, like his father, grandfather and various
uncles and cousins, prosperous and respected men about town. "The Limbaughs
in Cape Girardeau are royalty," says Jay B. Knudtson, the mayor of
Limbaugh's hometown on the Mississippi River. In a December 1993 Playboy
interview, Limbaugh spoke reverently of his grandfather, "a man who never
cursed, never smoked, never drank, never lied, never cheated," and lived to
be 104. His father was crankier; Rush learned to rant at the Eastern elite
by watching his dad yell at Walter Cronkite on the evening news.

Limbaugh lasted only a year in college.

He jokes that he flunked Public Speaking. Actually, he got a "D," his
speaking teacher, Dr. Bill Stacy, told NEWSWEEK. Limbaugh's father
maneuvered him into the communications class, hoping his son would
like it enough to stay in college and eventually become a lawyer.

Limbaugh was more interested in riffing off the top of his head. "You
need to make an outline.

You need some data to support your assertions," Stacy told young
Limbaugh. "Frankly, he wouldn't do those things."

He was not much of a success as a disc jockey, either.

Fired twice (and briefly on the dole, a detail Limbaugh overlooks when
he rants against welfare), Limbaugh finally scored when he replaced
Morton Downey Jr., an angry right-wing talk-radio host, on a
Sacramento station.

Limbaugh had a lighter, more satiric touch, though his gibes at the
helpless could be a little crude. (He once suggested staging a
"Homeless Olympics" with events like "the 10-meter shopping-cart
relay, the Dumpster dig and the hop, skip and trip.")

He quickly became the patron saint of conservative talk radio and has
stayed on top of the charts for more than a decade. (His most recent
contract, signed in 2001 for eight years, was for $285 million.) But
his personal life left something to be desired.

Despite his fervent moralizing, he smoked a little pot and watched a
little porn (as he has publicly admitted). His first two marriages
failed.

His second wife, Michelle, told Vanity Fair that Limbaugh's father
never quite approved of his career path, and that Rush would be
depressed and deflated every time he got off the phone with his dad.
He struggled with his weight, which ballooned to as high as 320 pounds
(he now weighs between 250 and 275 pounds).

His self-absorption made dating difficult.

Two women who dated Limbaugh told conservative activist (and Limbaugh
friend) Paul Weyrich that they couldn't seem to get his attention.
"They both said, 'I'll never go on a date with him again'," Weyrich
told NEWSWEEK. "They did not have a good time. He talked about himself
and didn't seem interested in them at all."