Dave at Peace: The Rolling Stone Interview

Oh, my God — fantastic! They're calling from the Museum of the Moving Image. We have couriers on motorcycles on the way!" It's an early evening in late August, and David Letterman is giving a predictably sarcastic post-mortem on tonight's taping of Late Show, which ended just a few minutes ago. He's sitting in the sparsely decorated midtown Manhattan office of his business manager, Fred Nigro, and he's exchanged his tailored on-air suit for a logoless navy-blue T-shirt and a baggy pair of khaki shorts. Tanned and relaxed, he looks like he could be renting windsurfers at a beach shack; a few sunburn patches fleck his nose. He recently returned from a vacation in his Montana home, where, among other things, he hosted a doctor and nurse who'd helped perform the emergency quintuple-bypass heart surgery that saved his life in 2000. "These are people who were complete strangers when they opened my chest," he says. "And now, eight years later, they're among my best friends."

Letterman is now in his 26th year in late-night television — the longest run in the arena besides that of Johnny Carson, who walked away when he'd done a tidy 30. Though Letterman began his career as a wiseass talk-show arriviste — mocking the staid form with Monkey Cams and giant suits made out of Alka-Seltzer tablets, he has become, at 61, the standard. His old rival Jay Leno, who famously beat him out for The Tonight Show, dominates him in the ratings, but Letterman's irreverent influence resonates in everything from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and, yes, Leno. A night with Letterman isn't as enterprisingly wacky as it once was, but it's still capable of greatness. Every time the "Dave's lost his relevance" whispers start, there's a moment with an Oprah, a Bill Clinton or a Paris Hilton — or, going back, his nervy performance just one week after 9/11 —that reasserts his rare place as one of TV's last great broadcasters, a Midwest-raised wall between America and showbiz BS.

In a pair of interviews with Rolling Stone — one in person in New York and another on the phone to Montana — it became clear that these are energetic days for Dave. The foremost reason, of course, is Harry, his four-year-old son with his longtime girlfriend, Regina Lasko, whom Letterman occasionally prides over on air. There's still an afterglow from his surgical recovery. Professionally, there's a tantalizing shift in the late-night world — next spring, O'Brien will take over The Tonight Show desk, with Leno prematurely setting off for destinations and networks unknown. It's an unsettled, exciting time, and Letterman's infamous self-laceration streak has been supplanted by . . . well, maybe not total happiness. He is David Letterman, after all. But it's something close.