Marty Faye, 35, is a short, brash Chicago pitchman who believes that the surest way to make good in TV is to get the people to hate you. In his two months as proprietor of Marty's Morgue, a local interview show over Chicago's station WBKB. he has cheerfully managed to provoke daily threats of violence; in addition, he has brought down around his balding head the wrath of the town's teenagers, who bombard him with up to 1,00 letters a week for butchering their sacred cows on the air.
Faye begins his late-hour (11:30 p.m.), Sunday through Thursday inquisition by pointing to a pasteboard morgue and sneering adenoidally: "This is where I bury the people I don't like." As Chicagoans look on with mixed fascination and disgust, he proceeds to poke at the privacy and the professional talents of well-known figures in the popular-music industry, whether they are guests on the show or not. Some typical Faye autopsies: Eddie Fisher "sings with as much animation as a dead fish"; Elvis Presley is "a bouncing orangutan, a musical degenerate"; Tab Hunter's "squeak is a travesty, a horror." Of his own sister. Cafe Singer Frances Faye, he cracked: "She's really not my sister; she's my father."
Despite his crudities. Faye has eight TV sponsors, because he can assure them of a good-sized audience. His mail is chiefly the poison-pen type: "Die! Die! Die!" urged one letter writer last week. Said another: "You are a splendid example of the fact that in order to have free speech we must tolerate its abuse by idiots." In a recent charity appearance before 62,500 people at Soldier Field, Faye fans pelted him with coins, ice cream, paper cups and jeers. Grabbing a microphone, he bellowed: "I want you to know that whatever you think of me I think of you."