On Stern’s Side Known For Her High Spirits As Talk Jock Howard Stern’s Partner, Robin Quivers Tells A Shocking Story About Her Life ‘

‘Quivers: A Life,” By Robin Quivers (Harper Collins, $22)

Her boss has racked up $1.67 million in fines with his toilet mouth. He has infuriated Mexicans, blacks, gays, feminists, Filipinos, immigrants, the entire country of France. He has inspired protests, ignited boycotts.

Through it all, shock jock sidekick Robin Quivers, the first lady of talk radio and aide de camp to Howard Stern, has remained free of most controversy, her image untarnished by 14 years of Stern wars.

Until now.

Quivers, in a just-released biography, graphically details a personal life at total odds with her professional success: brutally beaten by her mother at age 4, sexually abused by her father at age 11, rootless and drifting through her 20s, suicidal by her 30s.

“It’s amazing to me how much I kept secret,” Quivers says now. “You don’t realize it when you go through it - how closeted you are, how closed down you are.”

The closet doors are open now. Her story emerges over 341 pages of “Quivers: A Life,” often with shocking details: a West Coast trip during which a pimp tries to land her as a hooker; a brief flirtation with the porno industry; an admission to enjoying sex in public places.

It was all accompanied by disabling bouts of depression that worsened as her career boomed; she bottomed out while on a top-rated show in the nation’s largest media market, a success by any definition but her own.

The series of revelations confused even Stern, her on-air partner and off-air friend.

“It’s a great book,” Stern said on a recent broadcast. “I don’t know whose life it is… . It’s Roseanne’s.”

Quivers, speaking in a Manhattan hotel suite, is adamant that it’s hers. It’s a tribute to her emotional facade that Stern and other friends were blind to her personal turmoil, Quivers says.

“I think I acted my entire life,” says Quivers, 42 and single. “I wasn’t just acting for the radio. I thought this was what people expected me to be.”

Expectations are shattered in this book. The same person who appeared relentlessly upbeat and giggly for 20 hours a week with Stern would spend entire weekends in bed, trying to beat her depression.

“I always used to get these things: ‘You’re the sane one. You’re the well-adjusted one,”’ Quivers says before unleashing the laugh that ordinarily follows a Stern riposte. “This dispels the mythology that surrounds ‘Queen Robin.”’

Quivers was born and grew up in Baltimore, attending the University of Maryland and earning a nursing degree before a brief stop in the Air Force. After bouncing around the country and several different careers, she wound up starting her radio career at a tiny AM station in Carlisle, Pa.

Fame, fortune and frustration followed quickly for Quivers, whose radio partner says there’s an upside to all the revelations in this autobiography.

“Her next book is going to be a book denying everything in this book,” Stern said recently.

While plugging the book is her main concern, Quivers addresses any and all questions about Stern and the show. Her cackle - instantly familiar to any of Stern’s 3 million daily listeners - winds in and out of the conversation.

Quivers is particularly annoyed by the idea that she’s on the show as a token, a black woman who gives Stern license to bash blacks and feminists.

“If you hate the show, hate me, too, because I’m a part of it,” she says. “I’m not a token. You are devaluing my participation and making a hasty generalization that I couldn’t participate based on your own assumption of what a woman could do.”

Some other pointed Quivers’ opinions:

On Stern: “I find him fascinating. I don’t just find him funny. I love the way his mind works.”

On Stern’s oft-repeated promise to quit radio this November: “I think Howard loves radio, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

On O.J. Simpson: “Guilty. Who the hell else did it?”

On her fan mail: “Oh God! The prisoners? … They tell me what good shape they’re in, and that they’re innocent, and that it’s a crazy world and a black man can’t get a break. Lots of prisoners.”

On the future: “I walked into the studio after Howard had just done a whole string of fart humor, and I said, ‘Can we still do this at 50?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, why not?”’