The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [146]
Not because his admissions seemed incredible, the associate said. Everyone who worked around Dave, starting early in his career, was aware that he certainly took a healthy interest in women. They also knew he tended to meet and converse with only women he worked with, because his awkwardness in social settings made it unlikely he would meet them anywhere else. It began with the early love of his professional life, Merrill Markoe, the extraordinarily talented writer who inspired many of his breakthrough ideas and shared his personal life (to her eventual regret) for about a decade. It continued with Regina Lasko, whom Letterman also met at 30 Rock, and who had been his life partner for more than twenty years before they married in 2009.
But as one woman who interacted with Dave in his Late Night days put it, “Everybody was after him; he was so cute and sexy.”
The longtime associate who’d been so surprised by how Dave went so public said, “Isn’t that why some people go into show business? Isn’t that why half these guys become comics? So they can fuck around? Isn’t that why rock stars become rock stars? Yes, Dave had his flings over the years, but never once did anyone hear him say he wanted so-and-so to get a raise. He was never like that.”
What was most extraordinary about his confession that October was the fact that Letterman spoke so directly about the situation—on television. One friend from his early TV days said, “This is a guy who used to not like to say the word ‘sex.’ He was skittish about it. It was shocking to me to hear him talk like that. Shocking.”
A big part of the reason for that shock was that Letterman had an almost physical revulsion against anything that he perceived as personally humiliating. One colleague from the show remembered Letterman’s distress over things like a bad haircut. “He would come in on Monday and people would ask how his weekend was. He would say, ʹI had to hide under the house the whole weekend. This fucking haircut. I couldn’t let people see me with this haircut. I look like Howdy Doody.”
Among Letterman’s colleagues, friends, staff members, rivals, old enemies, fans, and nonfans alike, the reaction fell along similar lines: Dave took a situation suffused in negative, even career-threatening, connotations and somehow revealed it, dissected it, and neutralized it in one remarkable performance. It was like a scene out of The Hurt Locker: Letterman carefully, systematically defused a time bomb sitting in his own lap. “He went right into it, cut the wires, and left,” said a veteran staff member.
“Not only did he defuse the bomb,” said Jimmy Kimmel, “he then threw the bomb into enemy barracks and fucking blew everybody else up by making himself front and center again.”
The question of course, remained: While it might result in Dave’s getting a little more immediate attention, what would his confession mean for the show long term? Inside the offices at Worldwide Pants—and at CBS—nobody was really certain. What if a parade of former girlfriends marched forth to condemn Dave as a serial womanizer? Worse, what if some women came forward to say Dave either hit on them obnoxiously or took advantage of his position as the boss to get them into bed? No one really knew precisely what Dave meant when he said he had had affairs with women—plural—on the staff.
Some people knew about Stephanie, of course. For years Dave’s evident infatuation with one of his assistants, Stephanie Birkitt, had been the subject of gossip around the office—and even among some viewers. Stephanie, who at thirty-four was about half Dave’s age (sixty-two), had appeared on the show more than 250 times. Dave, who had pet names for her like Monty, Smitty, and Dutch, had her dress in cute costumes or dance goofily for him, or even serve as a comedy correspondent. She interviewed Survivor losers, always asking, “Did you see or touch any monkeys?” And she got to take trips to places like Turin, Italy, where she served as the show