How I Got This Way (22 page)

But back to that work ethic of South Jersey’s very own Kelly Maria Ripa: Yes, she would develop into a terrific talk-show host, but she always kept her skills sharp as an actress. I believe in my heart that she has all the comic ability and range to become the Lucille Ball of her generation. She’s just that good. So it only made sense that less than a year after leaving
All My Children,
she launched into a three-season run in her own ABC prime-time sitcom called
Hope & Faith,
in which she starred as a wild and scheming former soap opera actress forced to move back to Ohio to live with her decent and practical sister Hope (played by Kelly’s real-life close pal Faith Ford), a small-town wife and mother of three kids. To maybe heighten all the fine silliness of the series, she even coaxed me into my own recurring guest role—as the town’s slick, sleazy used-car dealer and local TV pitchman, Handsome Hal Halverson. How she and her sitcom gang imagined me as
him,
I’ll never know. But during the rehearsals and shoots for those episodes I watched her transform herself effortlessly from Kelly Ripa into the unrestrained Faith Fairfield, whose antics, I should add, tended to be very reminiscent of Lucy Ricardo at her most madcap. The show also gave us a chance to playfully blend our true-life daily
Live!
show bits into these two characters who were endlessly at odds—as Faith continued to try wheedling new cars from the unscrupulous Handsome Hal. I liked the way she set the tone for one of my appearances just before I came on-screen. . . .

FAITH:
He’s near. I can smell his cologne. It smells like—

HAL:
[
emerging
] Dollar bills, baby!

At one point, Hal tried talking her into costarring with him in one of his cheesy TV ad spots: “You need a fancy car,” Hal told her. “I need a fancy star for my new commercial. This is kismet!” Faith reluctantly agreed, then said in a comic aside to her sister, “But I seriously doubt that being on TV with
that
guy will do much for my career!” We even had some fun in another episode when Gelman came on to play my son, Hal, Jr., just so I could dress him down in the guise of our fictional characters. He’d walked up to hand me some sales reports (just like the way he’s been plying me for years with daily Nielsen ratings printouts) and I barked, “Can’t you see I’m with people? Now, you sit on this stool over here and wait for
me
to speak to
you
!” And I’d also constantly reject his pleas for affection: “Why haven’t you ever said you love me?” he’d beg of Handsome Hal.
“Say it! Say it!”
That’s when Kelly’s Faith character looked on with disgust and said, “Could you imagine having to work with
those two
?”

But it was in my third and final episode where the lines blurred more than ever between real and sitcom life. Suddenly down on his luck, Hal decided that he and Faith would be shoo-ins to take over the local morning show,
Wake Up, Glen Falls,
whose longtime cohosts had left for a bigger TV market. And so there we were, pretending to be morning cohosts, doing a clumsy, exaggerated version of our real Host Chat, with me flipping through the small-town newspaper looking for various topics. Honest to God, though, the script had me eventually landing on one ridiculous item that led her into some familiar ad-libbing straight from our own usual repartee on
Live!. . . .

HAL:
Now, let’s move on to this new phenomenon in town. There’s a guy with a very long toe, right?

FAITH:
A long toe?

HAL:
A long toenail, I mean.

FAITH:
Long toenail? Longer than
yours
? [
Here we actually started cracking up—since she’d gone off-script on a tangent we both knew a little too well, thank you.
] Because I happened to have seen your naked foot and I know you buy your shoes a whole size bigger to accommodate those toenails.

HAL:
Oh boy. She knows me like a book.

My line there was extemporaneous, too, because she really does know me like a book. Maybe a little too much so. But that knowledge, of course, would only continue to make our own show’s opening segment such a strong must-watch element throughout our years of teamwork. She’s never been afraid to call me on my random peccadilloes:
“You need some moisturizer on your leg!”
she told me right on her first official day as my permanent cohost, in fact. (I think I’d been showing off a baseball scar received in Yankee spring training a few years before, always looking for some pity that never came.) Likewise, she’d pounce on whatever aggravations or oddities I’ve ever groused about—from my misadventures in finding the cure for snoring to my fondness for drawing elaborate diagrams to explain some new mix-up or other. (“Oh,” she’d say, shaking with sarcastic delight, “this is exciting! It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Philbin diagram! Come on, everybody, applaud!”) Once she gave me a pedicure on the air—a terrifying experience! (“I lost a bet!” was how she explained it one night on the Letterman show, even though I was the one being tortured.) But she wielded that pair of nail clippers like a weapon and went to work as I squirmed: “Don’t hurt me! Not too close!” I yelled. And she yelled back, “Stop it! You’re making me nervous!”

Equally scary was the day she removed a splinter deeply embedded in my thumb. I know that this may sound like an everyday occurrence to you, but the magic of that opening Chat segment has always been to bring up our personal afflictions as they occurred and try to solve them right there. Regarding my splinter—needless to say, she probably does that sort of thing every day with her kids, which is maybe why she constantly refers to me as her oldest child. But this splinter, the darned thing just was burrowed so many layers beneath the surface. I tried to conceal my horror as she sliced and probed her way in there—“Look at the
size
of it!” I yelled, wincing like crazy, “I’m breaking out in a
sweat
!”—until she finally got it out and triumphantly displayed it to the cameras. Where else, I ask you, has splinter tweezing made for entertaining television?

But unpredictable escapades—even those (I truly hate to admit) that occasionally involved my more serious health issues—have led to quite a range of memorable moments in the course of our great ride together. I remember, once again during her first real day on the job, that I bellowed (purely as a joke): “
Angioplasty!
That’s what Kathie Lee gave me!” Then I looked over at her a little fearfully and said, “What are
you
gonna give me?” Well, it was true that a few years before Pippa arrived I’d successfully received the blocked heart valve ballooning angioplasty procedure and all had remained fine for a long while. But out of the blue, in the spring of 2007, I had to necessarily undergo a triple-bypass heart operation, which as you may know is no fun at all, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, I managed to rally myself back to work six weeks and one day after that difficult major surgery. But in the interim, I was proud of the way Kelly held down the fort with such finesse—and all kidding aside, I was more than touched by her concern throughout my recuperation. A couple weeks before I returned, I saw her one night go on with Dave Letterman (with whom I’d already formed quite the heart-problem support system). She knocked me out in talking about how she’d dealt with my absence: “I’m kind of exhausted,” she confessed very sweetly. “I never thought of a talk show as hard work. I thought that I was just supposed to sit there and, like, dust him off a little bit, and throw my head back and laugh at his jokes. Now, suddenly, I’m taking time cues. I’m trying to read off a cue card that I can’t see. It’s very difficult. The whole thing is, you go, ‘Look—I didn’t sign up for
this. . . .’
Regis really
is
the show, and he does the majority of the work.”

Well, she was being beyond overly generous, especially with her last sentence there. But I confess that work has always been my lifeblood and my pleasure, so I was thrilled to get back to our studio and start mixing it up with her again—and to very quickly diffuse any chance of things getting all sentimental and maudlin. I’m not too good at that stuff. After the audience kindly embarrassed me with a beautiful ovation, Pippa and I did agree that it had felt more like six months to six years since I’d last been sitting there. But then it was time to find our old rhythm of teasing byplay, which, as I’d expected, picked up pretty close to where we’d left off a month and a half before. . . .

KELLY:
I’ve gotta tell you. You look remarkable. I mean, it’s incredible.

ME:
Well, I lost eight pounds but I aged twelve years.

KELLY:
No, you did not age. Be honest. Did you have a face-lift? His heart surgery was just a ruse, wasn’t it?

ME:
No, I didn’t have a face-lift. I had a heart lift. . . . Anyway, I would regularly watch you in the mornings, and I’ve got to tell you something. When you’re not with me, you actually
shine
! Little glistenings of light come radiating off your face, you’re never happier, you’re never more—

KELLY:
[
rolls her eyes
] Ebullient?

ME:
Exactly right! You really are. What
is
it? What do I do to you to dim the light? [
Here, despite my best effort, was where I saw the Big Emotion coming . . . uh-oh. . . .
]

KELLY:
Let me tell you right now: I felt that, for six weeks, my light
was
dimmed. Completely.

ME:
[
now fighting for my life to bring back a little humor—please!
] Awww . . . Isn’t she something? That’s a line she used on
All My Children,
1988. I was watching that day! “My light has been dimmed!”

KELLY:
You can laugh about it all you want, but I personally missed you. . . . There were all these moments that I’d go, “Gosh. I am the luckiest person alive. I get to sit here with
you
every day. . . .”

ME:
Now you’re talking, baby! Now
I’m
beginning to see the light!

Anyway, we were off and running and back on track with our regular routine that I’ve come to know so well. Every morning it begins like this: She comes out of her dressing room with about thirty seconds to go before airtime. We walk down the hall toward our studio to make that entrance and to begin that next show. And because she happens to be such a stunning-looking lady, I take great delight in stopping briefly at the occasional dressing room on the way down that hall and announcing to our male guests sitting there—in my most obnoxious way, “Take a look at what Regis gets every morning at nine o’clock, whether he wants it or not!” And then we’re out through the door to the stage, where the fun begins.

That’s the way it’s been for just over a decade, as of this writing. Last February, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of
Live! With Regis & Kelly,
during which John Ogle—our associate producer, whose expertise at archiving and splicing together classic moments from the show is uncanny—produced a week full of terrific montages that brought back lots of great memories. Naturally, he included many bits from our incredibly elaborate Halloween shows, the ones in which Gelman has insisted that Kelly and I (along with himself and the always game Art Moore, our executive in charge of production) climb into the guises of various famous personas for each segment of that annual hour. And as arduous and annoying as the process of pretaping so many of these dress-up bits has been, they do always magnificently showcase Kelly’s great versatility in truly becoming any character thrown at her. Each year, she somehow has made everyone she imitated look better and come across funnier than the real versions could hope to be. During the course of our 2010 Halloween show (which producer Elyssa Shapiro meticulously oversaw), for instance, Pippa’s pageant of transformations included
Jersey Shore
’s Snooki (with me as her tough guy pal “The Situation”), Cher, Lady Gaga,
all three
Kardashian sisters, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, and other assorted players. In some of those segments, I was turned into the likes of Justin Bieber, Elmo from
Sesame Street,
Steven Tyler, and
also
maybe a less convincing version of Lady Gaga, to name a few.

I mention that particular Halloween show for a reason—a reason that neither Kelly nor I fully understood back on the recent June evening when we found out we had won the Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Hosts during the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony, which was being televised live from Las Vegas. I probably don’t have to tell you that neither of us were in Las Vegas at that moment: Kelly was off attending a music festival in Colorado, and I was half watching the festivities with Joy in our Greenwich weekend house. You see—despite my fluke solo victory back in 2001—it gets to the point that, when your show keeps going down in flames after contending so long for these awards, you just can’t help but lose interest. Kelly’s pal Anderson Cooper opened the envelope onstage that night and took a stymied look at the card revealing the recipients’ names before announcing that there had been a
tie
in the hosting category—between Oprah’s favorite medical guru, Dr. Oz (whose new syndicated series had already just won for Outstanding Informative Talk Show), and . . .
us
. . . Regis and Kelly. “Did you see the look on Anderson Cooper’s face when he saw our names?” I asked when we returned to our show a week later clutching our shocker Emmys. “The look said,
‘Why them?’
”

Kelly defended him by postulating, “We
all
know he
just said our names
—we probably didn’t even win these things!” And then she announced: “Now that we’ve won the glorious Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Hosts, we have decided to take ourselves out of the competition! So everyone else can experience Emmy gold. . . .” I added, “Yes, let the little people win!”