How I Got This Way (32 page)

And there were other times, more personal. Like the night twenty-one months earlier, in mid-January 2000, when I was sitting there in the guest chair and he confessed to me—and to his entire viewership—that he was worried about going in the next morning for an angiogram and possible heart procedure. Not even his staff knew about it until that moment. Suddenly he was telling me that I was his “role model” and began asking me all about the angioplasty I’d undergone years earlier. . . .

DAVE:
Were you scared?

ME:
I was scared, yeah.

DAVE:
Because they take that thing and go right up inside your . . .

ME:
They run it right up your groin muscle.

DAVE:
Right. Very close to your deal!

ME:
Well, in my case, it was
too
close to my deal. In fact, that was a big deal! It’s not so funny when it’s
your
deal!

DAVE:
No, it’s not funny. I don’t know why you’re laughing and kidding around here!

Understandably, the man was rattled, and rightly so. The next morning he received a very successful quintuple bypass at New York Hospital from the same surgeon who would do my own triple-bypass operation seven years later. (When that time came and I knew the bypass was inevitable, who else but Dave could I call, just to get his reassurance that everything was going to be okay? And guess what, he told me all the right things, which helped me more than he knows.) Anyway, five short weeks following David’s procedure, there he was back on the air, and once again (at his insistence!) I was sitting right next to him, picking up right where we had left off. And as usual I was trying to pry loose some of the details of what he’d just gone through. . . .

ME:
Now let me ask you something—when they had you on the gurney and they were wheeling you down the hallway, what were your final thoughts before you went under? Did you think of me at all?

DAVE:
Actually, I was thinking about Joy. . . .

Anyway, as I told you at the top of this chapter, Letterman slips my name into practically any given monologue on any given night. His head writers, the Stangel brothers, and their writing team have made sure I remain a choice punch line, no matter what the setup. And frankly, I like it—even though I’ve protested onstage with regularity. Naturally, since I’d become his “role model” as a hospital patient, he has always pounced on my medical problems with glee. On the eve of my triple-bypass operation, I was sitting in my bed watching his show and he told the audience: “Well, Regis is going for his heart bypass operation tomorrow morning. They’re going to take his clothes off, put him on a gurney, and crack him open like a lobster.” And the audience screamed with laughter. Try to sleep after that one. He used that operation for material all through my hospital stay. “This wasn’t Regis’s first operation, you know,” he said one night. “A few years ago, he had Kathie Lee Gifford removed.” But on the day I came back to work six weeks following the procedure—even though he never, ever appears as a guest on any show—he was there for me that morning. He wanted to return the favor of my being his first guest after his bypass surgery seven years earlier. I was both thrilled and touched. And of course he was very funny, which couldn’t have been more welcome after that trauma:

DAVE:
You look tremendous. Unbelievable. Wow. Look, Regis, don’t be a hero. If you need to lie down, Kelly and I can finish up here. This is good. A couple of heart patients. This isn’t a TV show, this is a recovery room. [
big laughs
]

ME:
[
to the audience
] You know that David, of course, went through a quintuple bypass . . .

DAVE:
Actually, my first bypass was
The Tonight Show
. Thank you very much.

ME:
Boy, some things we just can’t forget. Let go of it, Dave!

DAVE:
Let’s start talking about the surgery! C’mon! For me, it was the most exciting thing in my life, ever. Even today.

ME:
Listen to the man . . . you came on your show just as you are now, and you talked about the glory of having this surgery.

DAVE:
Oh, it’s the best. And it looks to me that when they put you out, they gave you a little rinse. Looks to me like your hair is a little lighter.

ME:
It got a little grayer, I think! But, Dave, you didn’t tell me how tough this procedure was.

DAVE:
It’s HELL! But now don’t you feel like a hero? Don’t you feel like nothing can stop you? Nothing can get in your way? [
Then he turned to Kelly and said in an aside, holding two fingers an inch apart
] You know, you came this close to having your own show. . . .

And of course, later that night on his
Late Show,
he talked about his visit with us earlier and said, “I saw Regis today. He’s a changed man. Yeah, I saw a nurse change him backstage.” There’s no stopping him, you see, when it comes to me. I guess it’s that bond I mentioned earlier, one that operates on some unspoken wavelength all its own, maybe just broadcaster to broadcaster—because Dave Letterman has always considered himself a broadcaster first and a comedian second. That could be why he took the news of my departure from the morning show much harder than I could’ve begun to imagine. But on that morning of January 18, 2011, when I made my announcement about moving on, I apparently didn’t hammer away hard enough to clarify the “moving on” part of it. Which meant, in fact, that I was simply leaving behind the early-riser broadcast routine and
moving on to other ventures
. Suddenly the word spread like wildfire that I was retiring—which, in fact, was the one word I never said. I thought I’d been clear about that. But ever since, people everywhere have kept telling me they’re so sorry that I’m retiring. They hope I enjoy my retirement; they tell me I deserve a nice retirement. Nobody remembers “moving on.” I should have known this would happen when Dave called me twice that day: once right after the show, full of concern, and then later on at home, while he was on the air taping his show, so that he could talk me out of this “retirement” I’d never announced to begin with. . . .

ME:
[
overwrought, as usual
] Dave, this is one of the busiest days of my life! I’ve got reporters here. Barbara Walters is at my door, Katie Couric is down in the lobby crying! I mean, there’s only so much I can do! What do you want?!

DAVE:
Regis, when I spoke to you this morning I was crestfallen at the news that you were leaving television, but I think I misunderstood something. Is there something that needs to be cleared up about the announcement?

ME:
Well, you know, I had a drink before I made the announcement.

DAVE:
Well, like any other Tuesday.

ME:
What’d I say? I’m leaving the show. I’m not retiring from show business!

DAVE:
Right, but as I said to you, my concern was that once Johnny Carson left his show, we just never saw the man again. But you’re telling me now that we
will,
in fact, be seeing you again?

ME:
No, I didn’t say that, Dave.

DAVE:
Will you at least come on my show?

ME:
Once in a while. But not too often, Dave. Really! . . . You know, it’s twenty-eight years, Dave. Every day. Day after day. The same studio. The same desk. The same audience! Those same thirty-five people who came every morning to see me!

DAVE:
[
visibly shaken
] Ohhh, Regis, don’t say that. I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want you to leave.

ME:
Really? You mean I should stay? No kidding?

DAVE:
I don’t want this to happen. This is too important. This is too meaningful. I don’t want this to happen.

ME:
Dave, it’s too late. I mean, I made the announcement. I’m gonna have to go now. But you know, I’m gonna have a lot of time on my hands. Can I come and hang out at your office?

DAVE:
Maybe . . . I don’t—no, not really. But we will be seeing you after you leave the show?

ME:
Dave, you’d make me feel much better if you’d just sing a couple of lines of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with me. I mean, I’d really sleep well tonight. Okay, Dave, come on, just you and me!

TOGETHER:
“There’s no business like show business / Like no business I know. . . .” [
We got up to the lyric about “stealing that extra bow” and then he just hung up on me.
]

DAVE:
[
to his audience
] Coulda gone on forever. But I’m tellin’ ya, I’m just sick about this, ladies and gentlemen. Because he’s one of a kind. Television will not be the same. And it’s making me ill to think that no more will he be on the TV. But I hope to God he comes here. God bless, Regis Philbin. We’ll be right back. . . .

Okay, I’m pretty sure nobody had ever asked God to bless me since my sainted mother did so many years ago. I do think Dave actually likes me, deeply! But who knows for sure? He is, as I’ve said, a man of mystery. Anyway, a couple months later, at the end of March, I made my first
Late Show
appearance with him since the day I’d delivered my misinterpreted Moving On announcement and received David Letterman’s invocation of God’s blessing. And he still wouldn’t stop with the pleading and cajoling—until at least we hatched a plan together. . . .

DAVE:
Now listen to me. I gotta talk to you about this seriously.

ME:
What?!

DAVE:
You can’t leave the show. I know we were screwing around about it last time, but you really can’t leave the show. First of all, we don’t want you to leave. Second of all, you don’t want to leave. So, three . . .
don’t leave!

ME:
I don’t know what to tell you, Dave. I mean, how much longer are you going to sit here?

DAVE:
I’ll stay as long as you stay, because I know the network would like me to go. I know they want me out.

ME:
Really? Well, then maybe we should go together.

DAVE:
No, no. You’re not going anywhere—because you’re an icon. You gotta stay. Don’t go. You don’t want to leave.

ME:
Now why do you say that?

DAVE:
Because I know you don’t want to leave. You
are
TV.

ME:
Why don’t we leave together?

DAVE:
All right.

ME:
Honest to God. I’ll tell you what. I’ll leave in November. I’ll walk down the street. I’ll wait in the back here for you. Then you leave—we get out on Fifty-third Street, we walk into the sunset. You know how the sun sets? . . . And we sing! We gotta sing. Sing with me!

DAVE:
Okay, what are we going to sing?

ME:
[
starts singing “The Way We Were”
] “Memories, like the corners of your mind . . .”

DAVE:
[
caving in once again, singing
] “Misty water-colored memories . . .”

TOGETHER:
“Of the way we were . . .” [
huge applause
]

DAVE:
I’ve got another idea. You do the same thing, except I come out and we get on horses. We re-create the ending of
Shane
.

ME:
I remember
Shane
. [
Paul Shaffer and the band started playing a galloping cowboy rhythm complete with harmonica.
]

DAVE:
You’re on a horse. I’m on a horse. And we don’t know whether Shane is coming back. But we know Shane has been shot. We just don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. So you and I are on the horses. We’re slumped in the saddles, and we ride down Broadway. And then we get a kid to come out onto Broadway. And we have him saying, “Shane! Come back, Shane! Shane, come back!” And then we ride right out the door and right down to Times Square.

ME:
Right out the door. I love it.

DAVE:
That’s something, huh?

ME:
Will we be singing “Memories . . .”?

DAVE:
No. We’re not singing “Memories . . .”
!!

Well, at least, we would’ve finally achieved something close to my Montana Letterman ranch dream scenario with the two of us in cowboy mode—out there roughing it and sitting round the fire, like real friends. Except, in our special way, I know we’re just that already, and have been for a good long while now. I also know I’ve had great fun with him on his show. And great fun watching him most nights at home. He is a real broadcast comedy pro at work and a truly great original talk-show host. A perfect throwback to all those legendary guys I admired so much a long time ago. And that’s why he’s the late-night guy for me. Don’t get me wrong. They’re all good or they wouldn’t be there. But for me Dave is the best for now and maybe for all time. I’m just happy to be a small part of his program and of his own remarkable legacy.

Chapter Thirty

JOY PHILBIN

T
his is the chapter I fear the most.

Yes, it’s true: Right in that classic tradition of saving the best for last . . . without a doubt, that’s what I’m doing now. But when you finally get to talk about the best, how do you even begin to put into words everything that this one remarkable person encompasses and means to you? You can write about all kinds of people, even about your friends who maybe never knew how you really felt about them . . . but writing about your wife?

Well, that’s about as dangerous as it can get.

And as difficult.

Because, I promise you, there won’t be room to say everything that could be said or should be said. I’m not so sure there are even enough words in the English language to do the full job, anyway. Others who have appeared in these pages certainly may have influenced or enhanced my life in various important ways.

But this one—well, to put it simply, she
is
my life.

How to start? She’s really a beauty, inside out and vice versa and then some. Great face. Great figure. Wonderful personality. Charming conversationalist. All the things you desire in a woman. And it’s really an understatement to say that she’s been a great wife, a great mother, a great cook, and loyal as the day is long. She also happens to be as smart as a fox, loves the finer things in life, and isn’t afraid to work hard for them. She wins all the arguments, returns your puny salvo with sheer dynamite, and asks you the most absolutely unanswerable questions you’ve ever heard. She sees right through all the baloney, wherever she may find it, from whomever it might come. It’s uncanny. She is the complete package.

She came with the right name. Joy. You couldn’t improve on that. Or on her, for that matter.

Her special presence in my world, of course, has been right on view practically forever. You all know her, even if you haven’t met her. Back when I started hosting these morning shows and in the years since, Joy’s been coming on TV with me. At first, in those
A.M. Los Angeles
days especially, she was apprehensive and would give herself negative reviews and swear that whatever show we’d just done was the last show she would ever do. We don’t go through that anymore. She’s over it. She even had her own series dedicated to home design and celebrity lifestyles for many years, and always came across with great flair and ease. But for sure, I think she’s been a great asset to our
Live!
show. When you do a show like this for decades, your audience wants to know more and more about your life. Wants to meet your wife, know your family. They always enjoy some inside stuff, the simple day-to-day quirks and realities of your personal world. And I’ve always had plenty of stories to tell them about adventures with my one-of-a-kind wife.

And I do mean adventures. Or maybe I mean misadventures, all things considered. Sometimes I make the mistake of saying yes to going shopping with Joy, and that, a little more often than sometimes, can lead to a problem. I don’t know anyone who can totally disappear in a department store or a grocery store or even a one-room hair salon like her. She just vanishes, while I trudge up and down the aisles or floors looking for her . . . in vain. The shopgirls dependably get a kick out of seeing this dopey husband trying to track down his wife. Sometimes they shout out to me, “She went that way!” I feel like a lost child trying to find his mommy—and I just know those girls behind the counter will be talking about this pathetic sight with everyone who crosses their path the minute I’m out of earshot. It’s embarrassing.

Sometimes, up in Greenwich, further misadventures happen when we set a time to meet back at the car where we’ve just parked. She may take a different route. She may get lost. I can’t help her. I’m trapped in the car waiting for her while she’s walking north to Boston. It’s almost unbelievable. (All right, I admit I could make matters easier by actually having my own cell phone handy, but as you may know I keep hoping cell phones and computer technology will turn out to be a passing fad—and to her infinite credit, Joy somehow puts up with it.) Sometimes when I’ve told stories on the show about things like this—how we got so mixed up and how it prompted our latest stupid argument about who was right and who was wrong—the finer details would get so complicated that I’d have to draw a map or make a sketch of the logistics so the audience could follow along. Every once in a while, those are the tales that later lead to a knock-down, drag-out war, after I blabbed about it on the air. A war that always seems to end abruptly with me, for some reason, apologizing profusely.

The only thing worse has been when, right after one of these crazy squabbles, Joy has ended up pinch-hitting in the cohost chair on the following morning. That’s when I know I never had a prayer. I remember once, on the night prior to one such morning, I tried taking her in the middle of a blizzard to a certain film she wanted to see—and frankly, I guess I’d gotten so confused about which theater we had to get to that we never did make it there, or anywhere else for that matter. We just went home. In cold, stony silence. Because by that point, she had stopped speaking to me. For the rest of the night. Joy recounted the story in an interview a few years ago, which went like this: “We went to bed not speaking and the next day Kathie Lee called at six thirty in the morning and said she was snowed in. . . . So I went out there on the show with him and we had not spoken a word. It was very icy out there. We didn’t look at each other until we finally had to tell the audience what was going on.” (Let me just interject here and for the record note that I actually opened that particular show by telling the audience, “Just so you know, we’re not speaking to each other right now. . . .” Hey, at least I got it out there right away. Anyway, back to Joy’s all-too-correct version of the outcome of events that morning.) “We each told our side of the story and then we took an audience vote and I won. I was right.”

That’s right—everyone sided with her, and, naturally, I ate crow on live television.

I expected nothing less.

If you don’t know how Joy landed in my life, it happened in the late sixties at
The Joey Bishop Show
. She was Joey’s executive assistant—Joy Senese was her name, an effervescent young woman who’d come to Los Angeles from Chicago. And of course, she saw all the ongoing drama behind the scenes at the show with a bird’s-eye view. She knew the ins and outs, the tantrums, the laughs, the works. She was extremely attractive and very efficient and more or less ran the office. Bishop had many friends dropping by to visit him during the day, most of them male. I used to watch them enter that office and stop dead in their tracks at the desk of this gorgeous redhead who was sweet and charming and always in charge. Often these guys found a way to loiter around her desk longer than the time they ever spent visiting with Joey. Let’s just say she was very popular.

Somehow David Letterman led her into this topic a couple years ago during an appearance we made together to plug our duet album of standard tunes,
Just You, Just Me,
and perform a number from it. (Joy’s singing voice had always been a revelation to me. Long before she and I ever decided, on a lark, to put together our own occasional nightclub act, I’d heard that beautiful voice trilling some song or other around the house. She did this whenever she happened to be especially happy—so it always made a big impact on me for that reason alone.) Dave, meanwhile, had always been
verrrry
complimentary about her during my frequent guest shots, usually making fun of how a guy like me could’ve ever gotten a magnificent woman like her. (
What a scream, right?
) Anyway, poor Joy had no idea Letterman would go probing into those old Bishop days on that particular night. Then again, neither did poor Regis, as you’ll see here. . . .

DAVE:
Joy, I know you worked on
The Joey Bishop Show
. You had to meet all the big stars. [
then, as a sad afterthought, he gestured over to me
] Including you, Regis.

ME:
Okay, thanks for remembering me! I appreciate it.

JOY:
And also including Warren Beatty—he was a great-looking guy.

DAVE:
[
brightening
] Now Warren Beatty, he was a bachelor in those days?

JOY:
Yes, he was for a long time.

DAVE:
Was there any kind of . . . ?

JOY:
I mean, he was just very flirtatious.

ME:
[
perking up uncomfortably!
] I never heard this story! He was flirtatious, did you say?

JOY:
Excuse me, can I finish?

DAVE:
[
lecturing to me to butt out
] Have you ever been on a show before?

ME:
Good heavens, I’m sorry! Go ahead, Joy—tell him.

JOY:
Anyway, Marlon Brando came in one day.

DAVE:
Marlon Brando! Wow.

ME:
I never heard about him, either!

JOY:
He came into the office and was very charming. This was when Marlon Brando was thin and handsome. He engaged me in conversation.

ME:
[
leaning in, because how could I not?
] What did he say?

JOY:
He was very smooth.

ME:
How . . .
smooth
. . . was he?

JOY:
And he invited me to have dinner with him. I said, “Where would we be going?” And he said, “To my house.” I said, “Ohh,” and thought—

ME:
I think I’m gonna leave now.
I can’t take it anymore!!!
[
then composing myself
] Okay, so tell us what happened.

JOY:
He frightened me, so I turned him down. I thought it was just as much fun to be able to say, “Marlon Brando asked me out and I turned him down.”

DAVE:
[
clearly a little too happy about all these revelations
] Oh yeah, that’s a great story! It’s a wonderful story.

ME:
[
clearly a little sick of this topic
] Big deal, big deal.

So how did she end up with me?

I still don’t know. Lucky, I guess. We married on March 1, 1970—less than a handful of months after the Bishop show had shut down, leaving me not exactly knowing what I’d end up doing next, other than taking her as my bride. On March 1, 1995, I sat down to write a little essay about her (which, like this chapter, was far from easy to do), and I thought I’d share a little of it here again now:

Our anniversary day. Twenty-five years. Silver. I remember her, and that day, like it was last week. She was the sweetest and the savviest and the sexiest. She had perfect posture, the greatest pair of legs I had ever seen, and a walk that instantly captured your imagination. She was charming, friendly, and always smiling. . . . She was independent and proud and had just enough of a temper to keep you on your toes. . . .

We met in the middle of my life’s low cycle. She was in her prime. She could have had anyone she wanted. Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars were wooing her. She could have wound up with any of them. But it turned out to be me. I wasn’t so sure about her choice. There were so many problems. The future looked bleak. Once I remember stopping the car and advising her to get out and run as far and as fast as she could. Luckily for me, it was in a rather shabby part of Hollywood and she wouldn’t leave. I never knew for sure if it was because she was afraid, or too much in love to get out and run. Then, March 1, 1970, we were married. Of all places, we did it in Forest Lawn. One of the most famous cemeteries in the world. I wondered if that was an omen. But the wedding chapel was charming. Despite a driving downpour of rain that lasted all day and all night, we had a lovely wedding. It was held around four in the afternoon. It was all ahead of us from there. The next twenty-five years. And now, a quarter century later, she remains exactly the same as I found her. Only sweeter. And savvier. And sexier.

T
hose early years of our marriage were especially tough ones for me professionally. But at each new twist in the road, she has always guided me with her terrific innate wisdom through the big decisions we had to make. The job possibilities or impossibilities. The homes we purchased. The moves we made. Moving can be a terrible experience. We had just completed all the renovations in our Los Angeles residence, culminating with a brand-new gourmet kitchen she had so long yearned for. And along came an offer to go to New York. She never blinked an eye about leaving when we talked about it. She sensed bigger things in the big city, especially once we’d set our minds to giving it a whirl. Still, that one was hard to believe when the four of us finally uprooted to New York and found ourselves initially cramped into twelve hundred square feet of apartment space. Prior to that, I had been out of work for a year and a half, but we did have a lovely large house out west, which we would have to give up. The kids had been enjoying their lives and friends at school. It wouldn’t be easy for them to make this change, and it wasn’t. Years later, they would thank us for taking them to New York, telling us that it had added so much enrichment to their young lives. But eventually, in adulthood, they did wind up back in Los Angeles. Their work was there. I will tell you, though, that Joy
did
blink an eye earlier this year when I decided it was time to move on from my morning show toward horizons yet known. It reminded me, just a little, of our crosstown move back in the mid-nineties from the ritzy Upper East Side, which she loved so much, over to the Upper West Side high-rise that happened to be located directly across the street from my studio and office. I had come to hate that traffic-clogged commute every morning and dreamt of the ease of walking to work within two minutes. Luckily, she took very quickly to what turned out to be our vibrant new neighborhood full of nice shops (of course) and great restaurants and the fabulous Lincoln Center. The only contingency was that she made me promise that I would never come home for lunch and hang around the rest of the day. That’s when she decided I needed a second job to get me out of the apartment. Thankfully, the
Millionaire
show happened around that time and she got her personal space back.