The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [130]
Johnny, finally convinced, didn’t flood Dave with jokes, sending in only a few here and there whenever he felt they were worthy. Letterman could not help but be moved, but promised he would judge the material as he would that from any other writer. Later he would mention that Johnny had sent some jokes to him as early as the NBC days, when they were both on the network. But this was different. This was Johnny Carson, silenced by retirement, still using his comic voice, with Dave as the mouthpiece. Dave didn’t want to reveal the secret, and Johnny certainly didn’t want to offend NBC by having it publicly known that he was writing for the guy competing with The Tonight Show. So only a few insiders knew the source of the jokes, and which ones were Johnny’s when they got on the air.
Johnny himself took to watching the show each night wondering if Dave would use one of his submissions. (And if he did, yes, Johnny would be paid his seventy-five dollars.) Whenever Dave did, Johnny’s joy was infectious, and he would call Lassally and excitedly tell him, “Oh my gosh. I got a joke on the air last night. Dave told one of my jokes.”
Lassally could hear the pride in Carson’s voice. “He was like a kid in a candy store,” Lassally recalled.
After Carson died, on January 23, 2005, Dave put together a special show with Lassally and Doc Severinsen, Carson’s old orchestra leader, as guests. He ended the opening monologue that night with an explanation: Every joke he had just told had been submitted by Johnny Carson. They all got laughs—and if you listened closely, you could almost hear the Carson rhythms.
“Bad day in New York, today. The cab fare in New York has gone up from two dollars to two fifty. And as any New York City cabbie can tell you, that’s a twenty-two-rupee increase.”
“John Kerry, you know, was criticized for throwing away his military service medals back in the seventies. So, not to be outdone, today, President Bush threw away his National Guard Spotty-Attendance Ribbon.”
In 2007 David Letterman turned sixty, a fact he casually mentioned on the air, as he would when he turned sixty-one, sixty-two, and sixty-three. It was what it was. Dave was never going to change the way he looked or dressed or acted to try to counter the reality that he was now heading toward senior citizen status. The first and greatest sin for him remained phoniness. Dave would stand up and be who he was, no matter the consequences.
If anything, Letterman seemed to embrace growing older; his jokes and remarks at the desk often made reference to his age, as when he would ruefully comment that people sometimes took him for Harry’s grand-father when they went out and about. Harry did bring out the youthful Dave, who seemed to delight in all the mysteries of childhood that were being played out in front of him.
But on the show the cranky old guy that Dave had frequently assumed as a role throughout his career had now become a genuine cranky old guy—a development that, as usual, he often turned on himself. “I know a lot of people regard me as a snarky putz,” he said one night at the desk, joking about how he was thinking of replacing Oprah when she left her show.
Many nights he threw out lines that were some variation on the theme of his barely putting in an effort anymore and largely just mailing it in. “I quit trying ten years ago,” he said during one show. “We just do the same old crap night after night.”
His staff, however, saw that Dave was still tinkering, testing new ideas: obnoxious guests just showing up and sitting down next to him; bizarre phone calls from some angry guy to the phone on his desk; interactions with oddball characters like an actor playing Mike Singletary, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers. For fans who remembered the wildly inventive stuff of his early days (elevator races, show-us-your-pictures at the Fotomat, guests sitting in barber chairs),