David Letterman's Shtick Shift

The sensibility is turning, however. The battle to succeed Johnny is not a casual thing — and it is no accident that the pretenders have fallen in heavy heaps. Neither Joan Rivers nor Arsenio Hall nor David Brenner was prepared to hold on to that heavy wheel. There is a strength and resilience required to track the mood of the nation, and Johnny (who owns part of Letterman's show) knows it is not to be given easily.

Carson's administration had the taste to bring in Jay Leno as his regular replacement. A kind of synthesis of Carson and Letterman, Leno has managed to master the monologue and still assault the talk convention. The best stand-up in America at the moment, a lantern-jawed populist with a sweet belief in localized values — even when he is lacerating, he reminds you that he calls home a lot — Leno has pioneered using Reagan-era reassurances without Reagan-era reaction. He barnstorms the country, as vaudeville performers did — only they didn't have TV eating up their material as they went along — peppering music fairs and colleges and resorts, churning out a living newspaper report on the nation that makes sense to him. It was Leno who said that Quayle was making his own Vietnam movie, Full Dinner Jacket.

With Leno moving into line as the true heir apparent of The Tonight Show and with imitators chasing Dave, Late Night had the task of coming up with something new, a step ahead, to move on. Turnover Time. What would the leader of his generation do?

Just as this question was being asked, the television and movie writers went on strike, and Carson and Letterman joined them. Friends say Johnny and Dave had endless phone conversations about how the unwanted vacation was driving them crazy. Carson went back first, in mid-May, and soon after, edgy and restless, Letterman decided to return. Even though the prospect of it, Letterman says, gave him the "biggest panic attack of my life," it also created a kind of rebirthing for him. He put together the material himself, went out and winged it. He got a shave on the air. He dredged up his own top-ten lists. He ran with longer interviews. He wasted air time. Like Carson, Letterman showed scary seams without his writers, who had become a brilliant land force on his behalf. Toward the end of the five weeks without his writers, the program slouched and sagged, dead spots spanned the air. Letterman's wide-eyed double takes found silent, responses.

But he also found a kind of liberation as a television host. With the structure smashed, he came up with the kind of program he believed in, personalized broadcasting that was more like radio — most notably, the Sandra Bernhard-Madonna episode, a fiery little landmark on late-night television. People don't remember nights on the talk beat unless Don Rickles smashes Johnny's cigarette box. The Madonna scenario was equal to the best car-crash encounters that Jack Paar managed to create.

Bernhard showed up, sex and attitude overwhelming the coolness of the camera, until the show was, within milliseconds, as dangerous as great television comedy should be. She entered in a T-shirt and dungaree shorts, Frenched Dave hard on the mouth for five seconds, then attacked her critics, playing one's pleading telephone message on the air. After a little while, she called out her playmate, Madonna, who was dressed identically, and the two girls became twin sirens, noodling each other and Letterman, whose stunned excitement brought out unsuspected hormonal directness in him. At the highest tension point, he reached unconsciously for a huge cigar — pulling the camera back to himself and regaining control of his show. Without his writers or cue cards, he had made great television.

So at last, David was learning how to govern. Can he ever wield as Carson has? Only Carson can work on the simultaneous level of being blissfully Nebraska dopey and L.A. smart, as in "Elvis Presley just signed with the William Morris agency — so people will stop seeing him."