Sad News: Howard Stern Show have let go of another co-presenter by Name…Read More

Don Buchwald, a talent agent who further elevated the radio personality Howard Stern into the stratosphere of fame and wealth by negotiating a half-billion-dollar deal that sent him from terrestrial to satellite radio nearly two decades ago, died on July 22 at his home in North Egremont, Mass. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Julia Buchwald.

“Everyone should have a Don Buchwald in their life,” Mr. Stern told The New York Times in a profile of Mr. Buchwald in 2018. “I’d never want to be without him, and I don’t need anyone but him. It sounds like a love song, but it is.”

Mr. Stern was Mr. Buchwald’s most famous client in a career in which he had represented actors like Ed Asner, Tony Curtis and Kim Novak.

In 1984, Mr. Stern was a shock jock in a rocky relationship with his bosses at WNBC-AM in New York and in need of more career help than his lawyers could provide. He called three agents. Only Mr. Buchwald was interested, and they agreed to meet.

“He turned to me and said, ‘You know, your career could be as big as Johnny Carson’s,’” Mr. Stern recalled. “I thought this guy might be a little bit nuts.”

Through a spokeswoman for his show, Mr. Stern said, “Don means so much more to me than I can possibly express in a brief statement. I will save all my words for my show.”

But Mr. Buchwald was prescient about his new client’s future.

In late 1985, after WNBC fired Mr. Stern, Mr. Buchwald negotiated his move to WXRK-FM, known as K-Rock. Over the next 20 years, Mr. Stern’s popularity — and notoriety — swelled, and his show was syndicated to stations nationwide. He christened himself the “King of All Media,” and in 1993 appeared on a Time magazine cover that depicted him and Rush Limbaugh breathing fire into a microphone. “Voice of America?” the headline asked.

But it was Mr. Buchwald’s negotiations in 2004 that led to a groundbreaking five-year, $500-million contract with Sirius Satellite Radio. It introduced Mr. Stern to the freedom of satellite radio, where he could say anything he wanted, compared with traditional radio, where his sexual and scatological references led to fines by the Federal Communications Commission against stations that carried his show.

The Sirius deal included 34.4 million shares of the company’s stock, which were worth $219 million to Mr. Stern and Mr. Buchwald when the show made its satellite debut in early 2006.

In the years afterward, Mr. Buchwald continued to negotiate new deals for Mr. Stern to stay with Sirius, which changed its name to SiriusXM Radio after its merger with XM Satellite Radio in 2008. In 2011, Mr. Stern and Mr. Buchwald sued SiriusXM for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in stock awards that they said they had been promised if certain subscription goals were met. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2012.

Donald Henry Buchwald was born on May 13, 1936, in Brooklyn, the youngest of five children of Solomon and Nellie (Miller) Buchwald. His mother was a high school history teacher, and his father owned a textiles business.

“We had the kind of household where we could say, ‘Mother, this is the worst pasta I’ve ever tasted,’” he told The Times. “And she would say, ‘Oh, go on.’”

He enrolled at Brooklyn College at 16, but his education was interrupted when he enlisted in the Army and served in Korea and Japan. After his discharge, he returned to the campus, where he acted in numerous plays at its George Gershwin Theater and received a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1959. (His philanthropy led the college to rename the theater for Mr. Buchwald in 2019.)

After graduating, he acted in regional theater productions, then found his footing as a business manager at the Robin Hood Theater (now the Candlelight Theater) in Ardentown, Del., and the North Shore Music Theater in Beverly, Mass. He also worked as a travel agent specializing in honeymoons.

Mr. Buchwald eventually realized that he had a gift for negotiating and started representing voice-over artists and actors as an agent. And, in 1977, he opened Don Buchwald & Associates (now the Buchwald agency).

He recalled promising Mr. Stern that he would not take his 10 percent fee until he had done something for him.

“I’m going to get NBC to rip up your contract and start again,” he told The Times. Mr. Stern was skeptical, because his raunchy humor had caused problems for the station. But its top officials nonetheless renegotiated his deal in 1985 — two months before firing him.

After the firing, Mr. Buchwald “strolled into the office with a cold bottle of Champagne singing ‘Happy Days Are Here Again,’” Mr. Stern wrote in his best-selling autobiography, “Private Parts” (1993). Mr. Buchwald, he added, was thrilled because “he was certain we’d be back on the air shortly, making a lot more money.”

Mr. Buchwald’s agency continues to represent actors like George Takei, Ralph Macchio, Debbie Allen, Kathleen Turner, Wayne Knight, Susie Essman and Djimon Hounsou. Mr. Stern’s longtime broadcast sidekick, Robin Quivers, is also a client.

Past clients included as well the actors James Whitmore, Robert Lansing and Tammy Grimes and local New York radio talent like Dan Ingram and William B. Williams.

In addition to his daughter Julia, the president of the agency’s West Coast office, Mr. Buchwald is survived by his wife, Maggie (Chow) Buchwald; another daughter, Laura Buchwald, a novelist; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Buchwald was a bit of a mysterious figure on Mr. Stern’s show, where he was referred to as “superagent Don Buchwald” yet rarely heard on the air. But Mr. Buchwald played a second role in Mr. Stern’s universe, as his publicist. His comments occasionally demonstrated the silliness of representing a personality as wild as Mr. Stern.

In 1995, Mr. Buchwald rejected a suggestion that the slow-to-adapt film version of “Private Parts” might fail.

“To suggest that he is afraid of anything is pretty peculiar for a guy who bares his ass on national television,” he told Newsday. He was referring to Mr. Stern’s appearance in 1992 at the MTV Video Music Awards as the fictional superhero Fartman (a character that originated in The National Lampoon magazine), in which he wore a costume with his buttocks exposed.

“It’s very very simple,” he added. “He’s not going to do any movie until there’s a script that he finds acceptable, so that’s it.”

The movie, which was released in 1997, grossed $41 million.