I quizzed Rayfield strenuously about this condition, but found it difficult to make an accurate diagnosis. Frustrated, I offered him an unscientific theory: Maybe he needed to numb part of his brain to be unpained by the disconnect between knowing one thing and paying a guy to say the opposite. The fact that he answered me politely told me more about his approach than his answers did.

“Listen, I don’t necessarily like all the music we play,” he said.

Rayfield’s ability to submerge his own ego in order to thrive in rooms full of even bigger and sometimes disagreeable ones is a strategy, an adaptation. Like that of fish species scientists still discover at the bottom of the sea that have little legs, or flashlights on their foreheads. I came to understand it not as a character flaw, not as a moral failing, but as the secret to Marc Rayfield’s success.

AT 47, RAYFIELD'S HAIR has gone almost fully gray. He wears it combed straight back and a little long. He’s quiet, but a gadfly. Though he’s 6-foot-2, he doesn’t instantly fill a room with his presence. He makes his impact by knowing everyone.

Rayfield is Senior Vice President and Philadelphia Market Manager for CBS Radio. Essentially, he’s the CEO of one of the city’s biggest media companies. His cluster includes KYW (the city’s biggest news station), WIP (the sports powerhouse), WPHT (tops in talk), and FM music stations WYSP and WOGL. As such, he’s ringmaster of perhaps the most bombastic super-team of personalities in the city—Smerconish at WPHT, Danny Bonaduce at WYSP, Angelo Cataldi and Howard Eskin at WIP—talented men who are paid to be the loudest, strongest and never-wrongest voices in the room. One might be tempted to try to tamp down the egos, show them who’s boss; Rayfield gets exactly what he wants in another way—by a sort of intrapersonal judo.

“I think one of the most important things in life is to sort of take on a chameleonlike approach to the way you treat people,” he says. “There’s a movie that I’ve made most of my employees over the years watch, and it describes who I think I am. It’s Woody Allen, before he became a complete dirtball.” He’s talking about Zelig, the one where a nebbish cipher changes his appearance to thrive in any scene.

“Danny Bonaduce is playful, and I’ll joust with him,” Rayfield says. “Michael Smerconish, he’s not playful. That’s just not the word. So my sarcasm is very minimal with him. He might say I’m too intense. Angelo is somewhere in between. Howard doesn’t really have a sense of humor. He doesn’t get jokes. So I do believe that I have to take on their characteristics. It’s a genuine response. It kind of is who I am.”

You can call it smart, or manipulative—but it’s working. Rayfield’s hung onto the city’s most popular radio personalities and the revenue they bring. His is the largest radio group in town, with about $100 million in revenue last year and the most listeners. He’s been able to wrap up essentially all live Philadelphia sports—Phillies,- Eagles, Flyers and 76ers games—despite the criticism of the teams on WIP. His ability to juggle it all led CBS Radio to name Philadelphia its 2010 market of the year.

RAYFIELD'S FIRST STINT at WIP was a flop. He arrived in 1990 as a rising star and, at age 26, the youngest radio sales manager in the city. But he lasted just 20 months in the tornado of clashing personalities at the station. In one partly mythologized encounter, Eskin may or may not have trashed Rayfield’s office. Rayfield downplays it; he says his papers and personal effects were strewn that Friday afternoon, and yes, the company did suspend Eskin without pay, but it was a semi-trashing at best.

“I told him I would give him a letter, and he thought I’d left for the weekend,” Rayfield explains. So Eskin went into Rayfield’s office and rifled through it, sending a stray folder- or writing pad to the floor like this—and Rayfield demonstrates at his current desk, knocking his own stuff onto the carpet.

In 1992, he escaped to Grown-Up Land at all-news KYW, and in a dozen years there advanced from local sales to station manager. Roy Shapiro, who hired Rayfield, says he was a gung-ho, often-impatient pusher of ideas, like a ratings-boosting “PC Thursdays” giveaway (austere KYW had never held a contest) that’s still going today. “He wasn’t ready, aim, fire,” Shapiro recalls. “He was fire, aim, ready.” But he says Rayfield matured. During Rayfield’s tenure, KYW brought in more money than any station in the region, and its sales regularly grew faster than those of the market’s other stations. Then KYW’s parent, CBS, bought WIP and in 2003 sent Rayfield back to manage the house of flying daggers at SportsRadio 610. “I thought I was being punished,” he says.

WIP was barely profitable. There was a defamation lawsuit against Eskin that Richard Sprague had filed on behalf of Allen Iverson. And on the morning he started, Rayfield had to call Cataldi into his office to suspend him. Cataldi had proclaimed on the air that the security staff at Eagles games “should wear swastikas” for preventing fans from bringing hoagies into the stadium.

“Imagine, at 10 a.m. I have to call Angelo,” Rayfield recalls. “‘Ange, I’m the new GM. You might remember me from when I worked here in 1990. I have to suspend you.’”

Cataldi went ballistic. F-bombs. He swore he’d never sign another contract with WIP. “I was livid. It’s eight years later, and I’m still not too happy,” he says. But Rayfield—no doubt in Zelig mode—talked him down, and Cataldi, whose morning show represents about half of WIP’s revenue, has signed two contracts with Rayfield since then. “He’s done the thing that I most need him to,” Cataldi says, “and that’s to let me do my job.”

By 2005, with the Eagles in the Super Bowl and WIP’s Wing Bowl drawing 20,000 people, the station posted record profits, and it was named CBS Radio’s station of the year.

Rayfield’s one big blip at WIP came in 2006, when host Mike Missanelli punched a producer during a broadcast from an Ardmore bar and Rayfield fired him. “I couldn’t condone it,” Rayfield says. “Does everybody get a free punch?” Turns out that the bad behavior Rayfield couldn’t accommodate came back to bite him. Missanelli is now at rival sports station 97.5 The Fanatic, which has surged since it began simulcasting on both AM and FM. He and Rayfield remain antagonistic—they ended up next to each other on a flight from spring training, and the encounter devolved into days of childish text messages between them. Missanelli says, “We were decent friends and probably would be friends now if we weren’t competitors. But I’m sure he would agree that he wasn’t much of a stand-up guy during that [firing] incident.”

The conflicts grind on, of course. If it’s not a flare-up with a superstar host, it’s his agent. Or union negotiations, which WIP shop steward Rob Charry says have turned from toxic to civil. Or keeping advertisers happy. Or a call from the Anti-Defamation League. Or the teams, which apparently believe they play in anti-defamation leagues.

Getting the local franchises to continue to renew their game-broadcast contracts, while WIP hosts label them Nazis or skinflints or chokers, is the dance that never stops. Eagles president Joe Banner, for example, is not a first-time caller to WIP’s executive office. “At various times along the way, the Eagles organization has been like, ‘Never again,’” Rayfield says. Last Halloween, Rayfield and his kids were in Banner’s Main Line neighborhood and decided to ring his doorbell. When Banner’s son answered, Rayfield said, “Tell your father his Nightmare on Elm Street is here.”

RAYFIELD LEARNED TO bear unbearable behavior—and how to get what he needed in prickly situations—at an early age. He was seven when his parents split up, an only child living in a Parkwood Manor rowhouse in far Northeast Philly. His father left his mother for her best friend. Rayfield remembers sitting in his father’s Plymouth Duster,- his dad chain-smoking and explaining: “Mommy and Daddy, it’s not working out.”

“I felt like I cried my entire childhood,” he says. “I was a very angry kid.” 

Joan Rayfield was on food stamps for a while. To get her son into a better school district, she moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Narberth, where Marc slept on a sofa bed from ninth grade until his freshman year of college. She was always chasing his father for alimony.

“He rarely provided,” Rayfield says, yet somehow he forgave his father. In his office are snapshots of them together, as adults, at ball games. A “dysfunctional love,” Rayfield calls it. You can understand how he might not get bent out of shape by a tantrum at a radio station. 

Rayfield’s father couldn’t hold a job, so Marc worked tenaciously. Through high school he rode his bike to wash dishes at Kip’s Diner in Wynnewood. He mostly put himself through undergrad at Temple (and then Penn, for a master’s degree).

Baseball was always gigantic for Rayfield. When he was 10, during a summer respite at an aunt’s in San Francisco, he met Joe DiMaggio, his father’s idol, and their series of meetings was emotional enough to Rayfield that he’s writing a memoir about it. The last time Rayfield cried, he says, was at the funeral for Phillies announcer Harry Kalas. Rayfield remains giddy about the connections he’s made with athletes and teams. And even now, he arrives at contract meetings with the Phillies carrying memorabilia.

“He pulls out this big old box,” says Dave Buck, the Phillies’s head of marketing. “And there were old Inquirers and Bulletins from 1980, and a card set from a local gas station … Larry Bowa, Terry Harmon.”

WPHT’S CONTRACT WITH the Phillies was due to expire at the end of last season, and Rayfield didn’t take for granted that the team would renew. The divisive politics leading into game broadcasts has never been a cozy fit. For the Phillies, Buck admits, “it was an issue.”

Rayfield pitched a change they could all believe in: making PHT more local. The station had been running a marathon of syndicated talkers following Smerconish every morning: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. But Beck and Hannity’s ratings were flat. Smerconish was wearying of rising at 3 a.m. for the early shift. Local advertisers prefer local shows.

So it was time for the double switch: Rayfield canned Beck and Hannity. Smerconish now does afternoons, still nationally but with dedicated Philly time, and local staple Dom Giordano went from evenings to the nine-to-noon slot. No major radio market had dropped Beck or Hannity. Rayfield says he ran into Beck outside Fox headquarters in New York just after the decision. As Rayfield tells it, Beck saw him, ducked his head under his hand and slinked away.

The move not only helped Rayfield re-sign the Phillies, but kept WPHT’s franchise player on the team. “We both got what we wanted,” Smerconish says. To fill the morning slot, Rayfield and program director Andy Bloom handed the ball to Chris Stigall, a former writer for David Letterman, who arrived in January and has been trying to become local as fast as he can.

“Marc told me, ‘I don’t agree with a lot of what you say, but I believe you’re the best guy for the job,’” Stigall says. Early returns on Stigall: His January audience share was 20 percent higher than what Smerconish’s national morning show got in January 2010.

ON A RECENT FRIDAY morning, Rayfield summons Bonaduce to his office, and WYSP’s morning man gets upstairs quickly.

“You’re the guy in Philly who can fire me without calling New York. What do you need?” Bonaduce asks, kissing up only semi-sarcastically. Bonaduce may be famous as a self-destructive wiseass, but he’s really an eager-to-please corporate soldier.

Rayfield explains that the ad-agency honcho for Acme Markets, who’s in Minneapolis, is a giant Bonaduce fan. She promised to give Rayfield a baseball signed by Twins catcher Joe Mauer, and Rayfield promised her a phone call from Bonaduce.

“Baseball—that’s the small white ball?” Bonaduce jokes.

“Not the small white ball you know,” Rayfield zings back. A drug reference.

They decide to make it a prank-y call. Bonaduce leans into the speakerphone.

“Hello, Miss Grothem? This is Steve Retton from the Minnesota Twins,” he ad-libs. “Have you been promising autographed merchandise to people?”

The client on the phone laughs. Grinning, Rayfield rolls back in his chair to watch Danny work. The king of Philly radio is getting exactly what he wants, for this moment fully Zelig-ed into goofball mode.