“It will be on how your ridiculousness is seen that whether you stand or fall depends,” Rudy said, leaning into my compact’s view to square the knot of his tie.
Less and less of Rockefeller’s skyscraper was visible as we approached. I asked for half a Xanax. I am a woman who dislikes being confused; it upsets me. I wanted after all, to be both sharp and relaxed.
“Appear,” my husband corrected, “both sharp and relaxed.”
“You will be made to look ridiculous,” Ron said. He and my husband sat together on a couch in an office so high in the building my ears felt as they’d felt at take-off. I faced Ron from a mutely expensive chair of canvas stretched over steel. “That’s not in your control,” Ron said. “How you respond, though, is.”
“Is what?”
“In your control,” Ron said, raising his glass to his little mouth.
“If he wants to make me look silly I guess he’s welcome to try,” I said. “I guess.”
Rudy swirled the contents of his own glass. His ice tinkled. “That’s just the attitude I’ve been trying to cultivate in her,” he said to Ron. “She thinks he’s really like what she sees.”
The two of them smiled, shaking their heads.
“Well he isn’t really like that, of course,” Ron told me. Ron has maybe the smallest mouth I have ever seen on a human face, though my husband and I have known him for years, and Charmian, and they’ve been dear friends. His mouth is utterly lipless and its corners are sharp; the mouth seems less a mouth than a kind of gash in his head. “Because no one’s like that,” he said. “That’s what he sees as his great insight. That’s why everything on the show is just there to be ridiculed.” He smiled. “But that’s our edge, that we know that, Edilyn. If you know in advance that you’re going to be made to look ridiculous, then you’re one step ahead of the game, because then you can make yourself look ridiculous, instead of letting him do it to you.”
Ron I thought I could at least understand. “I’m supposed to make myself look ridiculous?”
My husband lit a cigarette. He crossed his legs and looked at Ron’s white cat. “The big thing here is whether we let Letterman make fun of you on national television or whether you beat him to the punch and join in the fun and do it yourself.” He looked at Ron as Ron stood. “By choice,” Rudy said. “It’s on that issue that we’ll stand or fall.” He exhaled. The couch was in a patch of sunlight. The light, this high, seemed bright and cold. His cigarette hissed, gushing smoke into the lit air.
Ron was known even then for his tendency to fidget. He would stand and sit and stand. “That’s good advice, Rudolph. There are definite do’s and don’t’s. Don’t look like you’re trying to be witty or clever. That works with Carson. It doesn’t work with Letterman.”
I smiled tiredly at Rudy. The long cigarette seemed almost to be bleeding smoke, the sunlight on the couch was so bright.
“Carson would play along with you,” Rudy nodded. “Carson’s sincere.”
“Sincerity is out,” Ron said. “The joke is now on people who’re sincere.”
“Or who are sincere-seeming, who think they’re sincere, Letterman would say,” my husband said.
“That’s well put,” Ron said, looking me closely up and down. His mouth was small and his head large and round, his knee up, elbow on his knee, his foot on the arm of another thin steel chair, his cat swirling a lazy figure-eight around the foot on the floor. “That’s the cardinal sin on ‘Late Night.’ That’s the Adidas heel of every guest that he mangles.” He drank. “Just be aware of it.”
“I think that’s it: I think being seen as being aware is the big thing, here,” my husband said, spitting a sliver of drink-ice into his hand. Ron’s cat approached and sniffed at the bit of ice. The heat of my husband’s proffering fingers was turning the sliver to water as I looked at my husband blankly. The cat sneezed.
I smoothed the blue dress I’d slipped on in Letterman’s putty-colored green room. “What I want to know is is he going to make fun of me over the wiener spots,” I told Ron. I had become truly worried about at least this. The Mayer people had been a class act throughout the whole negotiations and campaign, and I thought we had made some good honest attractive commercials for a product that didn’t claim to be anything more than occasional and fun. I didn’t want Oscar Mayer wieners to be made to look ridiculous because of me; I didn’t want to be made to look as though I’d prostituted my name and face and talents to a meat company. “I mean, will he go beyond making fun? Will he get savage about it?”
“Not if you do it first!” Rudy and Ron said together, looking at each other. They laughed. It was an in-joke. I laughed. Ron turned and made himself another small drink. I sipped my own. My cola’s ice kept hitting my teeth. “That’s how to defuse the whole thing,” Ron said.
My husband ground out his cigarette. “Savage yourself before he can savage you.” He held out his glass to Ron.
“Make sure you’re seen as making fun of yourself, but in a self-aware and ironic way.” The big bottle gurgled as Ron freshened Rudy’s drink.
I asked whether it might be all right if I had just a third of a Xanax.
“In other words, appear the way Letterman appears, on Letterman,” Ron gestured as if to sum up, sitting back down. “Laugh in a way that’s somehow deadpan. Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd, and that that’s just where the fun is.”
“But that’s not the way I am at all.”
The cat yawned.
“That’s not even the way I act when I’m acting,” I said.
“Yes,” Ron said, leaning toward me and pouring a very small splash of liquor on my glass’s ice cubes, furred with frozen cola.
“Of course that’s not you,” my husband said, lifting his glasses. When tense, he always rubbed at the red dents his frames imposed on his nose. It was a habit. “That’s why this is serious. If a you shows its sweet little bottom anywhere near the set of ‘Late Night,’ it’ll get the hell savaged out of it.” He tamped down another cigarette, looking at Ron.
“At least she’s looking terrific,” Ron said, smiling. He felt at his sharp little mouth, his expression betraying what looked to me like tenderness. Toward me? We weren’t particularly close. Not like Ron’s wife and I. The liquor tasted smoky. I closed my eyes. I was tired, confused and nervous; I was also a bit angry. I looked at the watch I’d gotten for my birthday.
I am a woman who lets her feelings show rather than hide them; it’s just healthier that way. I told Ron that when Charmian had called she’d said that David Letterman was a little shy but basically a nice man. I said I felt now as though maybe the extreme nervousness I was feeling was my husband’s fault, and now maybe Ron’s; and that I very much wanted either a Xanax or some constructive, supportive advice that wouldn’t demand that I be artificial or empty or on my guard to such an extent that I vacuumed the fun out of what was, when you got right down to it, supposed to be nothing more than a fun interview.
Ron smiled very patiently as he listened. Rudy was dialing a talent coordinator. Ron instructed Rudy to say that I wasn’t really needed downstairs for makeup until after 5:30: tonight’s monologue was long and involved, and a skit on the pastime of another NBC executive would precede me.
My husband began to discuss the issue of trust, as it related to awareness.
It turned out that an area of one wall of Ron’s office could be made to slide automatically back, opening to view several rows of monitors, all of which received NBC feeds. Beneath a local weatherman’s set-up and the March 22 broadcast of “Live at Five,” the videotaping of “Late Night” ’s opening sequence had begun. The announcer, who wore a crewneck sweater, read into an old-fashioned microphone that looked like an electric razor with a halo:
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “A man who is, even as we speak, checking his fly: DaVID LETTERMAN!”
There was wild applause; the camera zoomed in on a tight shot of the studio�
�s APPLAUSE sign. On all the monitors appeared the words LATE NIGHT APPLAUSE—SIGN—CAM. The words flashed on and off as the audience cheered. David Letterman appeared out of nowhere in a hideous yachting jacket and wrestling sneakers.
“What a fine crowd,” he said.
I felt at the fuzz of Pepsi and fine rum on my ice. My finger left a clear stripe in the fuzz. “I really don’t think this is necessary.”
“Trust us, Edi.”
“Ron, talk to him,” I said.
“Testing,” said Ron.
Ron stood near the couch’s broad window, which was no longer admitting direct sunlight. The window faced south; I could see rooftops bristling with antennae below, hear the tiny sounds of distant car horns. Ron held a kind of transmitting device, compact enough to fit in his soft palm. My husband had his head cocked and his thumb up as Ron tested the signal. The little earplug in Rudy’s ear was originally developed to allow sportscasters to take direction and receive up-to-the-minute information without having to stop talking. My husband had sometimes found it useful in the technical direction of live comedy before he made the decision to leave commercial television. He removed the earplug and cleaned it with his handkerchief.
The earplug, which was supposed to be flesh-colored, was really prosthesis-colored. I told them I emphatically did not want to wear a pork-colored earplug and take direction from my husband on not being sincere.
“No,” my husband corrected, “being not-sincere.”
“There’s a difference,” Ron said, trying to make sense of the transmitter’s instructions, which were mostly in Korean.
But I wanted to be both sharp and relaxed, and to get downstairs and have this over with. I did want a Xanax.
And so my husband and I entered into negotiations.
“Thank you,” Paul Shaffer told the studio audience. “Thank you so much.” I laughed, in the wings, in the long jagged shadows produced by lights at many angles. There was applause for Shaffer. The APPLAUSE sign was again featured on camera.
From this distance Letterman’s hair looked something like a helmet, I thought. It seemed thick and very solid. He kept putting index cards in the big gap between his front teeth and fiddling with them. He and the staff quickly presented a list of ten medications, both over-the-counter and ’scrip, that resembled well-known candies in a way Letterman claimed was insidious. He showed slides side by side, for comparison. It was true that Advils looked just like brown M&M’s. Motrin, in the right light, were SweetTarts. A brand of MAO inhibitor called Nardil looked just like the tiny round Red Hots we’d all eaten as children.
“Eerie or what?” Letterman asked Paul Shaffer.
And the faddish anti-anxiety medication Xanax was supposed to resemble miniatures of those horrible soft pink-orange candy peanuts that everyone sees everywhere but no one will admit ever to having tasted.
I had gotten a Xanax from my husband, finally. It had been Ron’s idea. I touched my ear and tried to drive the earplug deeper, out of sight. I arranged my hair over my ear. I was seriously considering taking the earplug out.
My husband did know human nature. “A deal’s a deal” kept coming into my ear.
The florid young aide with me had told me I was to be the second guest on the March 22 edition of “Late Night with David Letterman.” Appearing first was to be the executive coordinator of NBC Sports, who was going to be seen sitting in the center of a circle of exploding dynamite, for fun. Also on the bill with me was the self-proclaimed king of kitchen-gadget home sales.
We saw a short veterinary film on dyspepsia in swine.
“Your work has gone largely unnoticed by the critics, then,” the videotape showed Letterman saying to the film’s director, a veterinarian from Arkansas who was panicked throughout the interview because, the electric voice in my ear maintained, he didn’t know whether to be serious about his life’s work with Letterman, or not.
The executive coordinator of NBC Sports apparently fashioned perfect rings of high explosive in his basement workshop, took them into his backyard, and sat inside explosions; it was a hobby. David Letterman asked the NBC executive to please let him get this straight: that somebody who sat in the exact center of a perfect circle of dynamite would be completely safe, encased in a vacuum, a sort of storm’s eye—but that if so much as one stick of dynamite in the ring was defective, the explosion could, in theory, kill the executive?
“Kill?” Letterman kept repeating, looking over at Paul Shaffer, laughing.
The Bolsheviks had used the circle ceremoniously to “execute” Russian noblemen they really wanted to spare, the executive said; it was an ancient and time-honored illusion. I thought he looked quite distinguished, and decided that sense played no part in the hobbies of men.
As I waited for my appearance, I imagined the coordinator in his Westchester backyard’s perfect center, unhurt but encased as waves of concussed dynamite whirled around him. I imagined something tornadic, colored pink—since the dynamite piled on-stage was pink.
But the real live explosion was gray. It was disappointingly quick, and sounded flat, though I laughed when Letterman pretended that they hadn’t gotten the explosion properly taped and that the executive coordinator of NBC Sports, who looked as though he’d been given a kind of cosmic slap, was going to have to do the whole thing over again. For a moment the coordinator thought Letterman was serious.
“See,” Ron had said as it became time for me to be made up, “there’s no way he can be serious, Edilyn. He’s a millionaire who wears wrestling sneakers.”
“One watches him,” my husband said, bent to check the fit of the cold pink plug in my ear, “and one envisions a whole nation, watching, nudging each other in the ribs.”
“Just get in there and nudge,” Ron said encouragingly. I looked at his mouth and head and cat. “Forget all the rules you’ve ever learned about appearing on talk shows. This kid’s turned it inside out. Those rules of television humor are what he makes the most fun of.” His eyes went a bit cold. “He’s making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things.”
“Well, there’s been a kind of parricidal mood toward rules in the industry for quite some time,” my husband said as we waited for the elevator’s ascent. “He sure as hell didn’t invent it.” Ron lit his cigarette for him, smiling sympathetically. We both knew what Rudy was talking about. The Xanax was beginning to take effect, and I felt good. I felt psyched up to appear.
“You could say it’s like what happened over at ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” Ron said. “It’s the exact same phenomena. The cheap sets that are supposed to look even cheaper than they are. The home-movie mugging for the cameras, the backyard props like Monkey-Cam or Thrill-Cam or coneheads of low-grade mâché. ‘Late Night,’ ‘SNL’—they’re anti-shows.”
We were at the back of the large silent elevator. It seemed not to be moving. It seemed like a room unto itself. Rudy had pressed 6. Both my ears were crackling. Ron was speaking slowly, as if I couldn’t possibly understand.
“But even if something’s an anti-show, if it’s a hit, it’s a show,” Ron said. He got his cat to lift its head, and scratched its throat.
“So just imagine the strain the son of a bitch is under,” my husband muttered.
Ron smiled coolly, not looking at Rudy.
My husband’s brand of cigarette is a foreign sort that lets everyone know that something is on fire. The thing hissed and popped and gushed as he inhaled, looking steadily at his old superior. Ron looked at me.
“Remember how ‘SNL’ had those great parodies of commercials right after the show’s opening, Edilyn? Such great parodies that it always took you a while to even realize they were parodies and not commercials? And how the anti-commercials were a hit? So then what happened?” Ron asked me. I said nothing. Ron liked to ask questions and then answer them. We arrived on Letterman’s floor. Rudy and I got out behind him.
“What happened,” he said over his shoulder,
“is that the sponsors started putting commercials on ‘SNL’ that were almost like the parodies of the commercials, so that it took you a while to realize that these were even real commercials in the first place. So the sponsors were suddenly guaranteed huge audiences that watched their commercials very, very closely—hoping, of course, that they’d be parodies.” Secretaries and interns rose to attention as Ron passed with us; his cat yawned and stretched in his arms.
“But,” Ron laughed, still not looking at my husband, “But instead, the sponsors had turned the anti-commercials’ joke around on ‘SNL’ and were using it, using the joke to manipulate the very same audience the parodies had made fun of them for manipulating in the first place.”
Studio 6-A’s stage doors were at the end of a carpeted hall, next to a huge poster that showed David Letterman taking a picture of whoever was taking his picture for the poster.
“So really being a certain way or not isn’t a question that can come up, on shows like this,” Rudy said, tapping an ash, not looking at Ron.
“Were those great days or what?” Ron whispered into the ear of the cat he nuzzled.
The locked studio doors muffled the sounds of much merriment. Ron entered a code on a lit panel by the Letterman poster. He and Rudy were going back upstairs to watch from Ron’s office, where the wall of monitors would afford them several views of me at once.
“You’ll just have to act, is all,” my husband said, brushing the hair back from my ear. He touched my cheek. “You’re a talented and multifaceted actress.”
And Ron, manipulating the cat’s white paw in a pretend goodbye, said, “And she is an actress, Rudolph. With you helping her we’ll help you turn this thing just the right way.”
“And she appreciates it, sir. More than she knows right now.”
“So I’m to be a sort of anti-guest?” I said.
“Terribly nice to see you,” is what David Letterman said to me. I had followed my introduction on-stage; the sweatered attendant conducted me by the elbow and peeled neatly away as I hit the lights.
The David Foster Wallace Reader Page 14