Dave Vs. Dave : Rolling Stone

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As he says now, "I just thought, 'This is the epitome of hypocrisy.' Here's this little girl, just dumb luck, hits the shot; I as a joke hand her the money — it's show business. It wasn't like 'Gimme that 10 grand, you little ...' It would be different if we were dealing with a Bosnian orphan. We're dealing with an Academy Award-winning movie star, who's in big-budget movies." Nonetheless, says one source, "the recovery from it was as bad as the original mistake." Also in the tabloids that week was a report that the recently dismissed Morton had been overheard in a juice bar growling, "There wouldn't be any Worldwide bleeping Pants without me," which is perhaps why Dave grabbed the paper with the Paquin story and muttered, "Is there anything else in the paper I need to apologize for?" (What the tabloids didn't notice was Morton, three Fridays after his firing, dining with Jay Leno and Leno's wife, Mavis, at the MGM Grand Hotel, in Las Vegas.)

"Dave is an absolute perfectionist," says CBS' Moonves. "I've never seen anybody who cared about detail as much as he does. He has one of the best work ethics of anybody I've ever been in business with. Maybe it's not the best thing for his personal health, but that's the way he's built, and I think that's why he's so successful." Although as he approached 49, Letterman complained that he "can't stay up late enough to watch my own show," he's notorious for prolonging his days at the office to agonize over the shows he thinks flopped.

Letterman's woes are not solely of the spirit. For some 10 years, he's been fighting chronic pain in his neck, the result of a whiplash injury in a car accident. "I'm not pulling rivets or tossing ingots, you know?" he says. "It's mostly indoors, and there's no heavy lifting. But unfortunately the neck is an area physiologically where stress is stored, and if the machinery is overloaded with stress, next thing you know, you're seein' birds. It won't kill me, but it'll drive you nuts, you know? It makes you feel like an old man: 'Oh, jeez, I can't move.' "

In fact, life at $14 million a year can be pretty good. Letterman likes to say he spends weekends "hiding under the house," but on breaks he's more likely to travel with girlfriend Regina Lasko to St. Barts (where, one observer says, "lunch costs $3,000" and Letterman won't be pestered by ordinary citizens). Letterman, who says of Lasko, "She's my current girlfriend and has been for the last eight years or so," admits that she "really, really, really would like to get married. It makes perfect sense, but I still have not brought myself to that commitment just yet. It's not because I don't care about her, it's not that I have any deficiency or she has any deficiency, it's just ... I feel like, well, I did that once and ... it was my fault it didn't work out. ... I guess I'm being immature — emotionally I'm very immature. On the other hand, if I am ever going to be able to have children, most women probably would want to be married before you pursued that. And that's something that I have to address pretty quickly because I'm going to be 49 in a couple of days."

During the third week of April, Letterman and Co. emigrated to San Francisco to shoot remotes and gather steam for the week that would usher in May sweeps. Meanwhile, they aired reruns, including an exemplary show from last May's trip to London. We saw a free-and-easy Dave, a guy who actually looked comfortable in his stardom. Though the local press largely scoffed at his topical British jokes ("Let's just make him Lord Acerbic of Ironyville!" sniffed the Guardian), he was actually great fun playing America's Joe Lunchbox for the Brits, confiding that Princess Diana "spent the night at my place once," delivering a pork chop to a hard-drinking working-class gent he befriended, accepting the Top 10 list from Salman Rushdie. Guest Meg Ryan giggled contentedly as Letterman said, "I believe in my heart that you're a goddess." His mother came on, getting an air kiss, flowers, then an actual peck from the son who may secretly be as shy as she is. (The cult of Mom seems quite strange given the remoteness that comes across when they're together on camera.)

The London show's best moments were wonderfully nonsensical in classic Letterman style. He found a nicely dressed local, equipped him with a cell phone and badgered him with calls and chores. "Can you eat a scone in 15 seconds?" Dave said, then, standing just feet away, interrogated him via phone all the while, creating crumbs and laughs in profusion. It was gloriously moronic, a had-to-be-there moment, which, thanks to video, we were.

No matter how sharply Letterman's numbers dip, no matter how worrisome his self-flagellating becomes to those who nurture a fondness for the possessed fellow, we still recognize the particularly Lettermanesque laugh that at once embarrasses and refreshes us. And no matter how much he squirms and gyrates in the harsh light the ratings cast on his damaged dominion, Letterman, and those laughs, are not going away.

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