HAPPILY DETHRONED
Former late-night king doesn’t miss the spotlight for a second
The David Letterman who was set to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Sunday has got a bushy white beard — stop asking, folks, they will BURY me in it, he says.
At 70, he remains a masterful storyteller, infinitely curious and quick with a quip. There was a time, even he’ll admit, when he cared about nothing more than that TV show.
“It was The Late Night Wars, oh ‘Jay’s winning, nobody likes me, and everybody likes Jay,’” he says. “Now I think, what was that? Who’s at war here? There’s no war anymore. And I think, why was I in the war?”
Letterman invented an entirely new language for television, one steeped in irreverence, edge and sarcasm but fortified, particularly as he grew older, by his presence as a trusted, calming voice. After the World Trade Center attack, it was Letterman who returned to the air with a sombre eight-minute monologue that displayed both a steady hand and a comforting vulnerability.
His comedy career, unofficially, began in Indianapolis, where he grew up.
Steve Brown, a lifelong friend, remembers sitting around one day after school when Letterman, then just 13, saw a listing in the want ads of the local newspaper. A guy was selling propane tanks. Letterman picked up the phone.
“This guy had a large quantity, I don’t know, maybe 50 of them,” Brown says. “So Dave gets the guy on the line and he put him on for 15 minutes and had the guy convinced that he was from the naval department and they were interested in buying all of these and they were going on a miniature submarine project, that they were going to equip them as weapons. He got to the point where he was actually trying to negotiate a price.”
Harry Joseph Letterman, his father, introduced him to Jack Benny’s radio show. Harry owned a flower shop but seemed happiest when he was playing organ, which he could do for hours, or putting on an impromptu show, even at church functions.
“He would throw in jokes, he would have props,” Letterman says. “He would turn something dull into something silly. While he liked flowers and liked growing them and arranging them, it is not where he wanted to be.”
In 1975, two years after his father’s fatal heart attack, Letterman quit his gig as a weatherman on a local TV station and drove to Los Angeles. That’s where he met Merrill Markoe, a brilliant writer, and a group of comics that included Leno, Elayne Boosler and Robin Williams.
What set Letterman apart, as much as his material, was his persona. He was a fidgety, self-deprecating figure.
He could be a complicated boss. Do you like me? Barbara Gaines, the former receptionist who rose to executive producer, asked him in an insecure moment.
“‘You’ve been here, I’ve promoted you, don’t look for approval,’ ” she remembers him saying. “‘You’ve seen I haven’t fired you. You’re in. Don’t be a ninny.’”
But Letterman was hardest on himself.
Former show writer Jim Downey remembers watching as Letterman grew more comfortable.
“It was like someone who was afraid to ask a girl to dance and suddenly came back and it was like watching Footloose.”
Letterman sometimes get dewyeyed.
Gaines remembers urging her boss to include a clip of his 9/11 monologue in various highlight reels. He wouldn’t. Letterman won’t even watch old clips. When the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts asked for help putting together video highlights for the Twain ceremony, he and Mary Barclay, his longtime assistant, sat at a monitor.
“Could you turn down the sound?” he asked first. She looked over and he had his hand over his eyes.
Letterman also wishes he had been properly medicated earlier. His wall-punching tantrums were regular, ugly and “triggered over nothing.” Around 2003, he began taking an antidepressant.
“And so now I feel like probably most people feel,” he says.
Letterman’s biggest regret wasn’t losing The Tonight Show to Leno in 1992. It wasn’t the embarrassing affair with a staffer he revealed on the show in 2009 after a former CBS news producer threatened to blackmail him. He wishes Harry, 13, had a sibling. For years, he fought with his girlfriend, Regina Lasko, 56, about starting a family. His resistance, he admits, was he felt he couldn’t do the show and be a father.
Then, in 2003, they had Harry, named after Letterman’s father.
“And then the minute the kid is born I realize: Holy s---, I have made an enormous mistake and tried to defend it for 15 years now,” he says. “I was wrong. I could not have been more wrong.”
Letterman and Lasko, married in 2009, spend summers in Montana, where there’s good fishing and enough space to teach the kid how to drive stick. During the school year, they’re in New York.
Letterman likes to tell Harry stories.
He and Harry went to see Battle of the Sexes, the dramatized account of the Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King celebrity tennis match.
“It’s a very good movie, but what hadn’t occurred to me is that it’s a lesbian love story,” Letterman says. “So you see a lot of goodlooking girls in their underpants making out.”
He stares straight ahead.
“We’re both eating our popcorn. ‘Uh huh. I see. OK.’ Then it would go away and we could breathe again.”
He thinks about a fishing trip he took with his father 60 years ago. They stopped to use a bathroom. Young Dave spotted a prophylactic machine.
“And I came out and said, ‘Jeez, there’s a machine in there. It’s not candy. It’s not cigarettes.’ And my dad said, ‘Ah, one day you and I are going to have that talk.’ And we never did.
“I always think of that and I pester Harry. ‘Have we had the talk? We should. Especially now. Let’s have the talk.’”