COVER AND INSIDE: STYLING, WILLIAM E. PHOENIX; GROOMING, JASON MCGLOTHIN; SWEATER, SHIRT, AND SHOES, TOM FORD; JEANS, KITON. COVER PHOTOGRAPHED ON LOCATION AT THE LONDON NYC


believe him because, at 57, Steve Harvey has already achieved enough success for several life- times. “I’m living proof you can reinvent your- self,” says the former stand-up comic, who has won two Emmys (for his syndicated talk show, Steve Harvey, which recently started its third sea- son, 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.”


here 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 run- ning joke—he used to tell me, ‘Son, why are you asking me? You’re not even supposed to be here.’ ” The family moved 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 prob- lem 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 your- self 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


8 | OCTOBER 5, 2014 © PARADE Publications 2014. All rights reserved


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 Proj- ect, a yearlong program encouraging working students to enroll and stay in college by offering coaching and other assistance. “The Strayer proj- ect 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.”


hen he was 28, he quit a job sell- ing insurance after winning the $50 first prize at a comedy club’s amateur night. Harvey then


spent nearly a decade doing stand-up before hit- ting it big;in the late 1980s, when he and Marcia were separated, he endured three years of home- lessness 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,Me and the Boys (1994–95) and The Steve Harvey Show (1996–2002). But his defin- ing 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 Orig- inal Kings of Comedy. On radio, however, Harvey came into his own, offering listeners hard-won lessons from his life along with relationship ad- vice, political commen-


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