March 7, 2000

Letterman bites guest-host bullet: Andrew 'Dice' Clay, call your agent

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

For years David Letterman had no use for guest hosts, but now he's finally given in - and for the most un-Letterman-like reasons imaginable.

Sidelined by heart bypass surgery and now on the mend, Letterman is taking it easy by showing up for work a few nights a week and getting pals like Bill Cosby, David Brenner, Regis Philbin, Kathie Lee Gifford, and Nathan Lane to make up the difference for him.

Longtime TV watchers may feel relieved at this late-in-life conversion of Dave's, because, after all, talk shows have since prehistory been as much about guest hosts as they are about hosts.

Indeed, there was a time B.C. (before Carson) when it was nothing BUT guest hosts. After Jack Paar went sulking off into the night and before Johnny Carson was at contractual liberty to take over his spot, NBC turned the show over to wall-to-wall guests for months on end.

From April through September 1962, viewers were treated to a cavalcade of the great and near-great ranging from Art Linkletter, Soupy Sales, Joey Bishop, Jimmy Dean, and Mort Sahl to Donald O'Connor, Jack E. Leonard, Hugh Downs and Groucho Marx.

Once Carson took over and became a broadcasting personality of unprecedented popularity, NBC was highly motivated to cater to his whims by (a) paying him a lot of money, (b) cutting the show from 90 minutes to one hour, and (c) allowing him to engage guest hosts so that he could stay home and relax in front of the tube some nights, just like his viewers.

However, the guest-host expedient goes back almost to the beginning.

Really old people will recall that “The Tonight Show" actually was launched in 1954 under the hosting aegis of Steve Allen, who himself gained increasing viability as a broadcast commodity as the years went on.

Finally Steverino was given his own primetime show, forcing him to cut back on his "Tonight” labors, which in turn occasioned him to bring aboard no less a legendary TV figure than Ernie Kovacs to fill in the gaps two nights a week.

The sad fact of the matter is that the fate of guest hosts has not always been happy.

Take Joan Rivers - please.

To give her her due, she was perfect as a guest host. Her rapid­fire mouthiness was such a salubrious counterpart to Johnny's less manic schtick that he actually crowned her permanent guest host from September 1983 to 1986.

Then the whole thing turned into a Greek tragedy. Hubris took over, causing Joan to think that she could herself become another Johnny Carson. Off she went to start her own talk show in competition with the NBC franchise, a move that turned Johnny against her and did her no good in the long run - the show failed, rather dismally.

All during the Joan era no other guest host had appeared on "Tonight," but now Johnny went back to playing the field. Pre-and post-Joan, he engaged as guest host such luminaries as Joey Bishop, Bob Newhart, John Davidson, David Brenner, McLean Stevenson, Jerry Lewis, and - fatefully - both Jay Leno and David Letterman, who in later life were at loggerheads over the Carson dynastic succession.

Perhaps the saddest case of guest-hostitis was contracted by McLean Stevenson. He was so popular on the very popular sitcom "MASH" and went over so well as a Carson guest host - his mild, wry, slightly melancholy demeanor was both funny and disarming, and he was great at letting guests do their stuff - that he quit "MASH" with the idea that he was right on the verge of rising to stardom.

It didn't happen (his sitcom "Hello Larry" is synonymous with television (failure to this day), and no one ever makes a permanent show-biz niche simply by filling in as a late-night talk show host (unless he's Joey Bishop). So eventually he lapsed into obscurity and never emerged until his untimely death in 1996.

Finally, in 1987, Carson named Leno his permanent guest host. Meantime, Letterman had his own post-Johnny show, produced by Johnny's own people. This is what is known in the industry as a train wreck waiting to happen.

When Carson announced his retirement, what Dave seemed to forget was that he himself is basically an acerbic, barely pleasant TV personality whose stock in trade is behaving like an anti-Carson. Having forgotten that, he conceived an ambition to take the "Tonight" torch from Johnny, Of course, Leno had the same idea - and the rest is history.

The current state of affairs is especially un-Letterman-like insofar as Dave's ratings fortunes - his former friend Leno has been besting him in the Nielsens season after season - have been immeasurably enhanced by the old illness-and-sympathy syndrome, the kind of thing the old Dave always made merciless fun of.

As for the quality of his guest hosts, is anyone surprised that Bill Cosby doesn't come off well? All you have to do is recall his millions of talk-show appearances over the years to realize that the beloved star has, despite his wise paterfamlllas persona, a serious personality deficit, never managing to restrain himself from one-upping his colleagues and engaging in borderline passive-aggressive behavior.

Regis and Kathie Lee as guest hosts - now that's more like Letterman. No doubt Dave is genuinely devoted to Reege and his old-fashioned showbiz smarm, but that doesn't stop him from tacitly presenting him to America in the character of a laughingstock. The same goes double or treble for Kathie Lee.

Only time will tell if Letterman decides to stick with the guest-host dodge once his ticker has won a clean bill of health. If he does, maybe the best thing he could do is go the anti-guest-host route. Kathie Lee is a good start. Tonya Harding is probably available.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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