HAS A DREAM FOR YOU
FROM OVERCOMING A STUTTER TO LIVING IN A MANSION AFTER ONCE BEING HOMELESS, THE TV TALK SHOW HOST HAS KNOCKED DOWN EVERY OBSTACLE THROWN HIS WAY. NOW HE WANTS EVERYONE TO HAVE A “NEW SHOT AT LIFE.”
STEVE HARVEY is sharing his vision board, pulling up a copy on his iPhone screen as he sits in a New York restaurant. Filled with images that inspire him to focus on specific personal and professional goals, it’s a strategy he uses to attain his dreams — and, in his new book, Act Like a Success,
Think Like a Success, he’s urging others to use it as well. “That’s my TV logo,” he notes, “and that’s the rating I want.” There are photos of a private jet, a parcel of land on the Tennessee- Georgia border, and a Rolls Royce Phantom Coupé, all of which he someday hopes to buy. He also points to a picture of youths in caps and gowns, because he and his wife want their Steve and Marjorie Harvey Foundation to provide college scholarships for 10,000 students. And there’s a map of Africa, where he intends to become involved in aid and development efforts. “Everything here is going to happen!” he says, tapping the table for emphasis. And you
believe him because, at 57, Steve Harvey has already achieved enough success for several lifetimes. “I’m living proof you can reinvent yourself,” says the former stand- up comic, who has won two Emmys ( for his syndicated talk show,
Steve Harvey, which recently started its third season, and for hosting the game show Family Feud), published two previous self- help best sellers ( Act
Like a Lady, Think Like a Man and Straight Talk, No Chaser), entertained 6 million listeners a week on his daily morning radio program, and launched clothing lines for both men and women.
A funnyman and a motivational powerhouse, Harvey is above all a storyteller, always looking to engage and instruct. His latest mission is to show people that they can screw up and face big hurdles, as he has repeatedly, and still move on to find happiness. “It’s never too late for success,” he declares. “And failure is a wonderful teacher; it teaches you what not to do the next time.”
There have been many unexpected turns in Broderick Stephen Harvey’s life, starting with his birth in 1957 in Welch, W. Va., the fifth and last child of Jesse “Slick” Harvey, a coal miner, and Eloise Vera Harvey, a homemaker. “I was a surprise,” he says. “My mother was 42 when she had me. My father, when I asked him stuff— this was our running joke— he used to tell me, ‘ Son, why are you asking me? You’re not even supposed to be here.’”
The familymoved to Cleveland when Harvey was 4 and his dad switched to construction. “My parents were very loving,” Harvey recalls. “They had no money, but my mother gave me faith and my father taught me a work ethic.”
As a boy, he had a serious stutter. His friends teasingly tagged him Va- Va- Va- Voom after he tripped on the letter v while trying to say volcano in class. The counterman at a neighborhood deli mocked him but helped him overcome the problem in junior high by promising that, if Steve spoke clearly, he’d be rewarded with candy. “He taught me before you say anything, say it to yourself three times. Take your time and speak on the exhale,” recalls Harvey, who got a five- cent Heath bar for his efforts. “He said, ‘ See what happens if you focus?’ ”
It took Harvey years to focus fully. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Kent
"IT'S NEVER TOO LATE FOR SUCCESS. AND FAILURE IS A WONDERFUL TEACHER; IT TEACHES YOU WHAT NOT TO DO THE NEXT TIME."
State, majoring in advertising. While there, he met fellow student Arsenio Hall, who impressed Harvey with his determination to make it big in Hollywood. But Harvey flunked out in his third year. “It really threw my life into a downward spiral, and I regret not getting that degree,” he says.( He and Marjorie, his third wife, have seven children in their blended family; the older kids are all in college or have graduated, and Harvey’s youngest son, Wynton, 17, says his dad has made it clear that he and stepsister Lori, also 17, are college- bound as well. “There’s no debate; that’s, like, 300 percent happening,” Wynton says. “He wants me to do all the positive things he didn’t.”)
Harvey’s lack of a degree is partly why he has partnered with Strayer University, an accredited school with 40,000 adult students at 79 campuses across the country and in online courses. He’s a paid ambassador for the university’s Success Project, a yearlong program encouraging working students to enroll and stay in college by offering coaching and other assistance. “The Strayer project is a great way for people to get an education and give themselves a new shot at life,” he says.“It fits my brand of teaching the principles of success.”
After flunking out, Harvey held various jobs, including toiling on an assembly line in a Ford auto plant and cleaning carpets. He also wed his first wife, Marcia, at age 24 and started a family. “I wasn’t ready when I got married the first time,” he admits. “I had some shortcomings as a man. The second time I got married [ in 1996, to Mary], it was just two wrong people. I was wrong a lot of times, and I take the blame for all the decisions I made.”
When he was 28, he quit a job selling insurance after winning the $ 50 first prize at a comedy club’s amateur night. Harvey then spent nearly a decade doing stand- up before hitting it big; in the late 1980s, when he and Marcia were separated, he endured three years of homelessness on the road, living largely out of his car. “Looking back, I see what God had in mind,” he says. “All of that shaped who I have become.”
His eventual success brought starring roles in two sitcoms, Meand the Boys ( 1994– 95) and The
Steve Harvey Show ( 1996– 2002). But his defining career move was deciding to focus on radio after his second series ended, which many in the industry viewed as a comedown. “It seemed like he was making a harsh turn,” says his friend Cedric Kyles, a. k. a. Cedric the Entertainer, who starred with Harvey on his eponymous sitcom and in the 2000 concert documentary The Original Kings of Comedy. On radio, however, Harvey came into his own, offering listeners hard- won lessons from his life along with relationship advice, political commen--
tary, and jokes. “I admire his tenacity to find the win when nobody else sees it,” says Cedric.
Harvey took that winning formula with him to Family
Feud in 2010, greatly expanding his reach beyond his core African-American fan base, and to his daytime talk show, which has succeeded where bigger names like Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper have stumbled. “I’m a champion for women,” Harvey says of his appeal, “and I say the truth no matter what it is, with a big splash of humor.”
His truth- telling ranges far and wide. Food segments on the show? “If you cook something and I don’t like it, I spit it out in a napkin,” he says. (“I appreciated his honesty,” insists “Hungry Girl” Lisa Lillien, who had that happen with her low- cal version of German chocolate cake, a Harvey favorite, and has returned to the show since with better results. “He set me up, though; as good as my German chocolate cake is, it can’t go up against his mother’s.”) Men’s bad behavior toward women? “All men can and will change,” Harvey proclaims, “but there’s only one woman we’re going to change for.” He gets serious when asked about the realities of raising African- American boys in a world where parents are left mourning dead adolescents like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown: “I sit my three sons down and say, ‘ Listen to me. When the police stop you, immediately comply. Don’t walk away, don’t smart- mouth; get your hands up and get down on
the ground.’ If you’re not black, you might not have to have that conversation, but I go over and over it with them because I don’t want that phone call.”
These days, Harvey is both busier and happier than ever. “My marriage to Marjorie is the most rewarding thing that ever happened to me. She gave me a life and a relationship that I didn’t know existed,” he says. Ditto for Marjorie, who says her husband of seven years ( the two first dated briefly more than 20 years ago, then reconnected in 2005) is “my soul mate and my best friend.” She does wish, however, that he wasn’t quite so messy. “It drives me crazy. We always say, if you’re looking for Dad, just follow the trail.”
They divide their time between an apartment in Chicago, where Harvey shoots his TV talk show, and Atlanta, where he tapes Family Feud during the summer. ( He does his radio show from wherever he happens to be.) The Atlanta home, a five- story mansion, includes a putting green in the basement “man cave,” where Harvey, an enthusiastic duffer with a 16 handicap, practices his stroke.
He has still more levels to reach, as his vision board demonstrates. Turning reflective, he says, “I’mnot one of those people who’s going to be on a yacht sailing the world [ in retirement]. My calling is to help people, to teach people, to share with people, until I die. I can never stop doing that. I can’t and I don’t want to.”