The Late Shift Read online

  For a year Letterman tried talk radio, an excruciating experience at a minuscule, 5,000-watt, daytime-only station. Through an ad in a Hollywood trade paper, he got the name of a Hollywood agent who actually responded to his letter and promised to represent him if he ever came to L.A. Letterman had already decided he had to go there, had to try. Michelle supported the plan and helped convince him he could do it. She arranged to quit her job on precisely the day he said they’d be leaving, only to have her husband get cold feet and stay at the radio station for another three months.

  On Memorial Day weekend, 1975, Dave and Michelle Letterman closed up their Indianapolis lives, packed up the Cutlass and the truck, and pointed them west. They drove tandem though the plains and desert, with Letterman staring at the alien landscape, his stomach refusing to unknot, wondering what the hell he’d done.

  The Tuesday after they arrived, Letterman turned up at the agent’s office, only to learn he wouldn’t be much help; the agency had shut down its business as of that morning.

  After a couple of nights at the Safari Motor Inn on Vineland Avenue, Dave and Michelle settled into a semidetached house in a Hispanic section of town. Their landlady, Gladys, was riddled with arthritis and needed frequent trips to the hospital for care. Dave had to lift her into his truck because her knees were locked. “I had time to do this because I wasn’t doing anything else, and I thought, all right, at least I’m being decent to this woman.”

  Michelle quickly got a good job as an assistant buyer for the May Company. That took care of keeping them alive, and allowed Letterman to chase his muddled muse. The second Monday after he arrived in Los Angeles, he showed up at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. It was amateur night. He took the flimsy material he had prepared, stared into the blinding beam of the spotlight, and stepped forward onto the stage.

  Within seconds he felt a surge of exhilaration like nothing he’d ever before experienced. All that terror—the decision to quit his job, to drive across the country—hadn’t been for nothing. Letterman thought: “At least you put the gun to your head and you didn’t flinch.”

  With a boyish face that seemed to convey an impish temperament (dozens of writers would later compare him to Huckleberry Finn), Letterman was tall, skinny, young, long-haired, red-bearded, and extremely raw. But he clearly had something. Mitzi Shore, the club owner, told him, “Ah, you should come back next week.” Letterman, convinced he’d bombed, held on to the words as he went out into the night, looked out across the lights of L.A. spread out below Sunset Boulevard, and thought: “How did I get to this bizarre place?”

  Jay Leno saw him at the club soon after; he knew a new voice had arrived. “A lot of times on amateur night, guys constantly do things like ‘What if Bob Dylan was a tree,’ ” Leno said. “But all of a sudden this new guy from the Midwest gets up and he has this really clever, hip material. He knocked everybody out.”

  Leno was then already a prince among the stand-up frogs. The others saw him as a polished, powerful stage presence, honed from years of working comedy clubs in Boston and New York. He was younger than many of the new comics at the Comedy Store, including Letterman, but he seemed to be so far ahead of them, they’d never catch up. They stood in awe of Leno.

  Letterman was so impressed by Leno’s ability as a stand-up that he told himself he ought to go back to Indianapolis, “because he was doing it the way I wanted to, and I thought I’d probably never do it as well.”

  But Letterman learned by watching Leno. “Jay filled in a huge blank for me. What I learned from Jay was you can do almost anything if you have a consistent attitude.” He also took note of how Leno connected himself to the audience. “I get it: We’re all Jay’s hip friends,” Letterman said.

  And so he started absorbing Leno’s attitude and moves. The act improved quickly. Letterman’s material was always strong—smart and sharp and verbally creative. The geek from Broad Ripple High in the Speedway City, the speech major from Ball State in Muncie, started sounding like the smartest guy in the room.

  But the more deeply he immersed himself in Hollywood, the more Letterman found himself cringing. Even in his fringe association with show business, Letterman was growing repulsed by the sleaziness of it, the phoniness and the shameless self-aggrandizement. He resisted hiring an agent or manager, and when he did, the manager he picked, Helen Gorman (later Kushnick) had a volatile temperament that Letterman could not long abide. Helen had seen Dave performing in the clubs at the same time she’d seen her other big client, Jay Leno. She thought Dave was clever, good-looking (he’d dropped the beard), and had a lot of promise. But after only about a year working together, Dave’s business relationship with Helen ended.

  Even without managers, his career accelerated. The other comedy clubs wanted him. Talk of television had started. Then he picked up management he could live with: Jack Rollins, a classy New York manager of acts like Woody Allen and Billy Crystal, took him on. Rollins told Letterman exactly what he wanted to hear: His future was in television.

  All was going well—except the marriage. Michelle Letterman never stopped supporting her husband in his climb. She had been the only believer at one time. But Letterman, in his words, “behaved badly.” He started performing at a Comedy Store in Pacific Beach. Out late every night, Dave loved the camaraderie with the other comics as well as the attention he was getting from some of the customers. Eighteen-year-old college girls from San Diego filled the place. Letterman, married at twenty-one and still mostly a naive Hoosier, succumbed to the abundant temptations. He drank, he caroused, while his wife waited at home. “It was embarrassing and superficial,” he said. Letterman, the man who despised shallow show business posturing, had been seduced by his first taste of public popularity. As the good life with the beach girls beckoned, Letterman decided he wanted out of his marriage, a decision that had a devastating effect on his wife. She had given up her life in Indiana to allow him to pursue his dream of making strangers laugh.

  “I ruined the marriage,” Letterman said. “For what I put her though, I felt like I should burn in hell for the rest of my life.” The guilt lingered long after the marriage ended. Much later he learned that she was happily remarried, and he hoped that might help “flush the horrible memory for her.” His conclusion: “It was just me being a dork: Hey, young girls! It took a long time for me to reconcile the guilt.”

  Still, the breakup had one creative side effect for Letterman: Merrill Markoe entered his life.

  Markoe had been teaching art at Southern Cal when she decided to try comedy writing. She tried television writing, but found it alienating to see her work fed through the sausage-making process that produced television comedy. Looking for her own voice, Markoe tried stand-up at the Comedy Store, where she quickly noticed this tall guy from Indiana. Dave was the second-best guy at the club, Markoe concluded. Like everyone else, Merrill thought Jay was the best. “He had the attitude, the cleanest attitude,” she said. “Jay started all that ironic stuff that you then started to see everywhere.”

  It certainly turned up in David Letterman’s act, some of it written by Merrill Markoe. After they started to go out, she began giving him some of her jokes. That was the beginning of a collaboration that would produce ground-breaking television, a ten-year personal relationship, and, in the end, a lot of unhappiness for Merrill Markoe.

  Dave didn’t open himself to many people. But Merrill was quickly a special person to him. “We were on one of our first dates,” Letterman said. “I was drunk, of course, and I told her. She was the only person I ever told.” And so Merrill Markoe got to hear David Letterman’s dream. Step one: get to the “Tonight” show, do a killer spot, and then sit next to Johnny Carson, who was his idol. Step two: succeed Carson as the host himself some day.

  “All the time I knew him,” Markoe said, “Dave dreamed of going on the ‘Tonight’ show, and of being the host.” Letterman resisted doing the “Tonight” show until he was convinced he was totally ready. He’d seen other guy
s go on once with their best four or five minutes, do well and then be asked back, only to bomb because they only had 4 or 5 good minutes. Letterman wanted to have at least a half hour of A-quality material before he took the biggest step of his life. In November 1978, he was ready.

  The nerves Letterman felt that night would have reduced him to a puddle of perspiration if he had not perfected his routine to the point where he could have performed it in a coma. “I knew I had that one cold. Unless there was an earthquake or a power outage or an assassination, I knew I had that one slick. I did it and it worked beyond my wildest dreams, and I sat down and Johnny Carson is sitting right there, and you’re just talking and talking and praying to God that it’s over soon, and you’re looking around and you’re seeing stuff that you’ve seen on TV for years. And you can’t let yourself think for a second or, you know, your head would explode. So you’re talking and talking and just praying, Oh please go to a commercial, please go to a goddamn commercial! And the next thing you know you’re out of there and it’s just, Holy Christ, I was on the ‘Tonight’ show!”

  Letterman’s spot struck everyone who saw it the same way: A new star had just emerged. “When he walked through the curtain on the ‘Tonight’ show for the first time, I got chills,” said Tom Dreesen, one of Letterman’s closest comic friends. “I knew he had found his home. He did the strongest first shot I’d ever seen.”

  Letterman’s life changed instantly. “I was in a different dimension. It’s like West Point graduation and your hat’s in the air. All those years hanging around the Comedy Store and driving around in your truck and heating up burritos at the 7-Eleven, and drinking warm quarts of beer. All of a sudden it’s changed. You’re on the ‘Tonight’ show. It was like a miracle. It turned me upside down. I go to the Comedy Store now and I was an important guy because I had been on the ‘Tonight’ show. I was one of the chosen few.”

  Letterman made just two more “Tonight” appearances—and then was asked to guest host. It was the all-time record for fastest trip to Johnny Carson’s chair.

  Fred Silverman, about to be honored at a B’nai B’rith dinner in early 1980, needed to provide some entertainment from his NBC stable of stars. Naturally he asked Carson first, but that was a futile gesture. He inquired about Bill Cosby and some others, but no one was available. Silverman was in a characteristic black rage when one of his PR executives, Alan Baker, mentioned that he had just seen David Letterman at a club and he had been very funny.

  “He damn well better be funny,” Silverman told Baker.

  The night of the event, Baker held his breath when Letterman was introduced as the evening’s entertainment. Two minutes into Letterman’s performance, Baker let out a gasp of relief. Laughter cascaded through the banquet hall. Afterward, Silverman happily accepted congratulations all around the room for the superior entertainment. As he left that night he said to Baker, “We’ve got to get this kid a show.”

  Silverman soon decided what it was to be. He wanted Letterman to start a daytime talk/service show with a regular “family” of performers, ninety minutes live every morning at ten from New York. Arthur Godfrey’s name was mentioned as what to shoot for.

  Dave and Merrill didn’t care what Fred Silverman wanted; they had their own vision of what their show would be: funny, inventive, groundbreaking. Everything daytime television had never been. Merrill, the head writer, was forced, thanks to a last-minute resignation, to take over as producer, a job she had never done in her life. Nobody on the show knew how to find cue cards to write on, so they used enormous pieces of cardboard. They stumbled onto the air in June 1980.

  The show only righted itself after a new producer, Barry Sand, brought in to impose some order, suggested they dump everything else and concentrate on Letterman. And the new director, Hal Gurnee, who had once worked with Parr, brought a sense of inventive style to the show’s look. Markoe, freed up to write for a cast of one, created strong point-of-view pieces that she and Letterman liked: Dave out in New York at some bizarre shop, Dave observing Valentine’s Day in the cafeteria. One day they even set the show on fire—by mistake. Letterman thought they would all get kicked out of show business for that one.

  They didn’t—but they certainly weren’t setting the business on fire. The ratings never even built up a pulse. After a few weeks a few viewers noticed that Letterman was starting to hit his stride. But the situation was already hopeless. Stations started dropping him in favor of syndicated game shows. Letterman got on the phone and begged station managers to give the teetering show a chance. Nothing he did mattered. The show was canceled, and given four weeks’ notice.

  If Letterman had taken time to think about it, he would have been devastated. Instead he was devastated later. He still had a show to do, and once out from under the burden of NBC’s expectations, the show really cut loose. Dave took the show live to the home of a family in Cresco, Iowa. He roamed the halls of NBC looking for wilder stories, finding them in unlikely subjects like the grotesque food available in the sixth-floor vending machines. He flew in a farmer from Missouri named Floyd Stiles and gave him a gooey, show business-style tribute.

  Merrill came up with one idea because she and Dave loved their dog Bob so much. Merrill thought she could make a segment out of the stupid things people do with their pets. She called it Stupid Pet Tricks.

  “The David Letterman Show” lasted nineteen weeks on the air. Letters poured into NBC condemning the cancellation. College kids hitched across the country with petitions to save him. A group of housewives from Long Island tried to block traffic in Manhattan in protest. The show won two Emmy Awards.

  None of it made any difference, not even to soften the blow for Letterman. For the first time in his career, something had gone totally wrong. He had failed, and it only confirmed his deepest doubts about himself. Letterman didn’t think in terms of a show being over; he thought his career was over.

  Within weeks Westinghouse Broadcasting was talking about an offer for a syndicated show. NBC acted swiftly, signing Letterman to a holding contract—he was paid to do nothing. Letterman, still shell-shocked from the cancellation and needing to prove he was still worth something, told one reporter it was a million-dollar deal. It was, in one respect. NBC agreed to pay Letterman that much as a penalty if it didn’t come up with a new show for him before the contract ended. In reality he made several hundred thousand dollars, still not bad for doing nothing.

  Not that it salved the wound. Letterman knew of other contracts signed in order to keep talent off the market, and the talent sometimes never resurfaced. Letterman went back to California, where he and Markoe shared a Malibu beach house, and stewed. He worked the clubs, and subbed for Carson some more.

  The NBC holding deal had one other side effect: It helped fuel speculation that Letterman might be in line to succeed Carson. There was always speculation about the “Tonight” chair; it went with the royal metaphor: If somebody is king and rules late-night television, then it must follow that somebody else is next in line. Of course, the others presumed to be in the line with Letterman at the time included such names as Richard Dawson and Burt Reynolds.

  But Carson himself seemed to be sending signals about what he thought of Letterman. Unlike previous heirs apparent, whom Carson tended to freeze out, Letterman seemed to have ingratiated himself to Carson. And Carson even dropped his name on the show. In his monologue on April 8, 1981, Carson said recent developments in Washington had him wondering: “If I quit, what would the line of succession be? Would it be Letterman, Bush, Haig, or would it be Letterman, Bush, Tip O’Neill, and then Haig?”

  A few months later, on a night when the monologue was falling flat, Carson said, “Why don’t I just go on home and we can bring Letterman in right now?”

  The buzz about the line of succession was Letterman’s first opportunity to reveal his feelings about someday getting Johnny Carson’s job. He shrank from the prospect, either dismissing the speculation as nonsense or even occasionally declari
ng he really had no interest at all.

  Partly this was simple respect: Letterman idolized Carson and found the idea of looking as if he was pushing him out of the “Tonight” show completely repugnant. But the other part was strategy; nobody had ever got far openly coveting Johnny’s job. “I knew there was no future in making an enemy of Johnny Carson,” Letterman said.

  NBC had that million-dollar penalty payment forcing the issue of finding a show for Letterman. The network program executives didn’t have to think too hard about a program that would suit Letterman’s talents. The idea of extending the late-night comedy franchise another hour had not gone away. And the show Letterman wound up doing in the morning had struck everyone who saw it as a misplaced late-night talk show.

  NBC made the link between the shows closer by giving Carson Productions a weekly fee to cover the cost of making sure the shows didn’t duplicate each other in guest bookings. The weekly fee of $5,000 paid the cost of hiring an executive from Carson Productions, David Tebet, a former NBC talent manager who was close to Carson. Tebet served as the liaison between the two shows.

  Still, a few other issues had to be resolved. In the months before Letterman took his new show to late night, he had a meeting with Tebet, who spelled out the late-night rules: First, no monologue. Second, the band could have no more than four members. Third, the bandleader, or whoever was going to qualify as Letterman’s Ed McMahon, could not sit down at the panel with the host.

  With those stipulations, the new show would have Johnny’s blessing.

  Merrill Markoe couldn’t have cared less. She wanted the show to be as different from “Tonight” as possible anyway. They’d call what Dave did in the show’s first minutes “opening remarks.” A four-man rock band was far more to their own taste than Doc Severinsen’s big-band sound. And Paul Shaffer, the new bandleader, would stay in the band area and banter with Dave from there.