The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [127]
By 2008 Dave had been at it in late night for twenty-six years, closing in on Carson’s record three-decade run. Nothing suggested Dave was about to stop, maybe because he realized, having observed Johnny, that shutting down a late-night show would pretty much entail shutting down life as he’d come to know it.
“Once you give up that chair, it’s over,” said one longtime Letterman associate. “It’s hard to imagine him without a show and it’s hard for him to imagine himself without a show.”
Had Dave mellowed at all? Maybe in some ways, his colleagues suggested; not so much in others. After the heart scare, he modified some behaviors (no more cigars), but if not quite the “maniacal asshole” about the show that he once called himself, he still often made it tough on people to work for him. People got cut off; Dave stopped speaking to them for months on end. That could include anybody, from the top down. One executive producer, Maria Pope, lost favor and contact with Dave (but not her job) for a long stretch of time. Even Rob Burnett found himself ostracized on occasion. The list of advisers Dave would actually listen to grew short, almost to the nub.
Letterman still pushed himself—and others—with an irascible style that took getting used to, especially up close. “This is a guy whose anger feeds everything,” said a veteran Letterman intimate. “Just in everything he did there was an underlying level of anger. He’s the kind of guy who’s having a cup of coffee and instead of just putting it down on the table, he’ll go, slam! He’d open a package and go ‘Raarrr!,’ tearing it apart instead of just opening it.”
As he had from early in his career, Letterman directed most of his anger and disgust at himself. In the old days the staff would often hear him in his office battering his stereo equipment with a baseball bat, all of them wondering, Is he mad at me? Did he not like my joke, or my segment? But when one of the producers would work up the nerve to walk in and ask him if everything was all right, Dave would say, “I hate myself. I’m the biggest asshole in the world. Look how I messed this up.”
For many of the staff, who stood in awe of him, these moments were almost heartbreaking. They would rather have had Dave turn to one of them and say, “You fucked up tonight, and I’m really pissed off.”
The top staff tried to shield the angry Dave from the rest of the employees, but they usually got the message. “It’s like always walking on eggshells,” one writer recalled.
One time Dave came into the office, stepped into the elevator, and saw one of the show’s interns. “Oh, hello,” Dave said perfunctorily.
The intern froze and stared at the floor. She had been told by one superior never to address Dave—never to look at Dave. Letterman went to his producers and instructed them to tell the interns to at least speak to him. They had to assure the terrified young woman that she would be doing them all a favor if she would just say hello to the guy.
Most days, Dave remained intently focused on that one hour a day when his nerve endings would tingle with the anticipation of being fully realized. In the early days he would juice himself up just before going on the air with a ritual of high-test metabolic enhancement. After drinking enough cups of strong coffee to stimulate the economy and before going downstairs to perform, Letterman would sit at his desk surrounded by a pile of Hershey bars. Carefully unwrapping each one, Dave would break four or five of them into their separate little squares and then pile them on top of one another into a little chocolate tower. He would proceed to eat all the squares as he went over the upcoming show with the producers. By the time the sugar rush kicked into his system, he would be backstage and ready to go on the air.
Every night the show, for good or for bad, defined who he was. The act of stepping out nearly daily onto a stage and standing in front