David Letterman: Is He the New King of Late-Night TV or Just the Pride of Indianapolis?

p>He has all kinds of worries. He worries that one day he'll cease being funny, like a ballplayer losing his legs. When it gets hot out, he worries that the earth has broken out of its orbit and is speeding toward the sun. Nail biting seems to him an eminently reasonable philosophical stance.

"I think if you have any sense, you'll adopt the view of life," he says matter-of-factly, "that if the bucket of shit can explode, it will explode."

His fears of disaster confirmed, his career totally and forever shattered, Letterman retreated to his house in Malibu to feed his beloved Bob and Stan, jog up and down the beach and learn whether he could successfully do nothing.

Not everyone was as pessimistic. His head writer, Merrill Markoe, did not desert him, although, in truth, to do so would have necessitated moving, as she was living with him and the beloved Bob and Stan. His key staff members kept in touch, even in exile. "The spirit of the group was that we were coming back," says Barry Sand, the producer. "It was just a matter of time."

There was some objective evidence to support this position. Even though he was a canceled man, Letterman had been kept under contract by NBC to the tune of either $600,000 a year (New York Times estimate) or "a handsome living" (Letterman estimate). Moreover, millions of ordinary Americans continued to believe that someday Letterman would succeed Johnny Carson.

Indeed, there was a kind of global consensus formed around the conclusion that the failure had not been Letterman's but that of NBC's programming department. To this day, bushmen in Papua New Guinea, will tell you, "Lettah Man? Daytime slot murdah him."

On morning TV, eighty percent of your guests must be experts on the price of cellulite. Or so it seems. Far from unleashing Letterman's gleeful mockery, such dullards finally clogged the joke pores and wearied him. His sly-boots smirk congealed into a mask of frozen horror. "It was a strange land in which we found ourselves," he would later reflect.

Things had gone wrong from the start. The original producer quit the week before the show's premiere, throwing its first weeks into chaos. Then NBC parachuted in a concept worse than chaos, a vision of Letterman playing father to a warm TV "family," even as had the great Godfrey, the Australopithecus of talk-show hosts, back at the dawn of video. Straight man to a bunch of second bananas, Letterman got lost in the shuffle and felt uneasy in the no man's land between sketch and interview. It was miscasting. Give him a real FBI-man guest to chew on, and it's funnier than having him mock-interview a comic doing FBI shtick.

Doom intruded, with its usual lack of humor. Even though the show began to find itself in the final weeks — Letterman loosened up, the supposedly cretinous daytime audience began to wise up, the ratings rose, the critics cooed — sorry, it was too late. There is a bizarre and fatal effect whereby when too many big-market affiliate stations drop a show, it can no longer possibly get survival ratings. Several affiliates had bailed out immediately. The end was inevitable, and everyone knew it. Letterman backpedaled and tried to clinch, feeling bruised. "Every day, I felt like I was in Vietnam," he reminisces, throwing his arms over his head like some reeling, battered, bleeding pug trying in vain to avoid a rain of killer blows, "and people were screaming, 'Stop the fight! He's out on his feet!'"

A Hoosier Lad

He Grew up, like so many boys, Young, thin, American, white, male, sports-loving, gaptoothed. He was neither a varsity hero nor a distinguished scholar nor an aspiring felon; no, just sort of an ordinary, normal, decent teenage jerk like you and me — except for one nascent quirk that at the time seemed like an annoying habit but would later change the courge of late-night scheduling at a major American television network.

But put it in your own words:

"I never had a whole lot of friends, but I was in the group of people that was always making fun of everybody else. You know, we weren't in the honor society, so we made fun of the honor society. And yet we weren't the guys stealing cars, so we made fun of the guys stealing cars. We couldn't do much. My grades weren't good, and the guys I hung out with, their grades weren't really good. And we couldn't go out with the really good-looking girls. We would egg their houses. We'd find the best-looking girl and without ever even asking her out — we'd just assume she wouldn't go out — we'd just go egg her house on theory, you know, just, hell, 'Screw you, I know you're not gonna go out with me, so we'll egg your house.'"

Yes, he could make fun of, a talent that has reached its apotheosis in late twentieth-century urban America, where you can make a fortune doing what you once did just to let'em know you were alive, as good as they were. I scoff, therefore I am.

Indiana, this occurred in, Indianapolis. Unexceptional background: middle-class family life — Mom, Dad, sisters, that sort of thing. Letterman got into college with little help from his grades, Ball State U. (no jokes please) in Muncie. What to study? After the most serious career consideration ("You don't need to be doing something that involves heavy lifting. Don't look for that kind of work. Look for something you can do easily") he majored in radio-television.

The decision led, with awesome finality, to work in radio and television.