Rush Limbaugh, whose wife Kathryn confirmed on Wednesday that he died at 70 after a yearlong and very public battle against lung cancer, was a college dropout when he began his combustible radio career, repeatedly losing gigs as a deejay and news-talk host; he spent much of 1974 jobless and living in his parents’ basement in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Almost five decades later, Limbaugh kept a fleet of black luxury sedans in his garage, including a $450,000 Maybach 57S, traveled on his private Gulfstream 550 jet, and owned a fabulous oceanfront Palm Beach estate befitting America’s biggest and most politically influential AM radio star—and surely among the richest—who ever mastered the medium.
Limbaugh struggled through personal adversity, including obesity, four rocky marriages, and an addiction to opioid painkillers that earned him humiliating publicity and a criminal charge (later dropped after the completion of court-ordered therapy) of felony prescription fraud. Yet in his final two decades of life, he managed to dominate conservative talk radio even after near-total deafness—somewhat remediated by a cochlear implant—required him to hire a former court reporter to sit in his Palm Beach control room and instantly transcribe listener phone calls so he could converse in real time on the air.
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Originally published at https://www.thedailybeast.com/rush-limbaugh-the-human-megaphone-who-hijacked-the-gop-is-dead-at-70?source=articles&via=rss on .
