How I Got This Way

by Regis Philbin

  For days afterward, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. At that point, our program was called The Morning Show (just like Jack’s was at CBS, in fact, when my mother first spotted him). My producer, Steve Ober, plainly saw my agony over this latest runaway Paar incident and, about a year later, also saw his chance to surprise me. Jack had made yet another retrospective NBC special that was about to air, so one day Steve very quietly booked Jack on the show, partly to plug the special but mostly to finally give me the thrill I’d waited for so long. It was all a big hushed-up secret when, without any warning, Jack simply walked out onto our set. I was completely floored. Jack took the stool next to mine and—as our own studio audience gave him a long huge ovation—I could see he was very excited about being there. But also a bit nervous, which, let’s face it, was always part of his charm anyway. Main thing: there we were, Jack and Regis—together at last! I was so stunned that I can barely remember our conversation, except that it happened.

  On that particular morning, the studio had an overflow of audience members, so we accommodated them by moving some extra rows of seats up to within a few feet of the stage. I remember this because, within seconds, Jack immediately began playing to a group of women sitting to his right. And I was sitting to his left! He barely ever looked at me! I do recall having had a tough time getting his attention. But he did get big laughs—especially with those women to his right. And in a few moments after the segment ended, he was gone again.

  But now I was in New York, and Jack was up in Greenwich, Connecticut, just forty minutes away, so fate had bound a real connection to finally occur. Sure enough, a couple of years later, Kathie Lee Gifford, my cohost at the time, was dining at 21, one of New York’s top restaurants, with her husband, Frank, and there at a nearby table were Jack and Miriam. They chatted for a little while and the Paars were quite effusive about our show; I guess he probably also remembered his surprise guest appearance with us not long before we went national. Kathie Lee reminded him of how much I admired him. Also, right around the same time, I happened to be talking about Paar with Dave Letterman one night. He said that he knew Jack only a bit; Paar had guested on Dave’s old NBC Late Night program and they’d communicated on and off. But then Dave just laid it out in front of me: “Why not call him and take him to lunch?”

  So that’s what I did. Joy and I met the Paars for lunch, and it was wonderful. I would prompt him, and all of those great old stories would just pour out of him. I loved it; it was simply the beginning of a treasured friendship. Soon after, Jack invited us to one of his lively dinner parties at his Greenwich home. And there, I finally managed to corner him for a moment, just the two of us, and privately tell him what he’d meant to me. He heard me, but I could see that he had a hard time taking compliments. But what parties he and Miriam threw! Always full of great names and old friends, so many of them now gone, like comic pianist Victor Borge, and the legendary showbiz caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Guests were usually split between two separate tables, with Jack presiding at the head of his table as only he could. Famously, he loved to lean in and say to anyone near him: “Tell me something that would interest me.” What a challenge! Usually it produced plenty of laughs. But if he’d hear too many laughs coming from the other table, he’d be up like a shot and over to find out who was getting the laughs and why. “What? What?” he’d ask breathlessly. But that was Jack: He hated to miss out on anything.

  For the most part, though, he had been living a rather quiet life up there in Connecticut. He dabbled a lot in painting and was quite good at it. Also, every day he would drive into Greenwich to pick out a movie at the video store, and then he and Miriam would watch it during their lunch. We got to know them better and better after Joy and I bought a weekend home in Greenwich as well, not too far from their place. And yes, throughout those years, I could never resist reminding Jack of what he meant to me. But just like that first time I cornered him, it seemed that Jack didn’t want to hear it, that it sort of embarrassed him. And yet he was always so complimentary and encouraging about our show. He couldn’t get over the fact that we cohosts—whether with Kathie Lee or later with Kelly—never even spoke to each other before the broadcasts, that there was no rehearsing at all, no quick meetings about topics to discuss, that we’d just go out and make it happen live on camera. Of all the people in the world, with maybe the greatest spontaneous mind in television history, he couldn’t understand how we did it! Coming from him, as you could imagine, I would never know a greater compliment. Ever.

  Sometime along the way, during a New Year’s Day party at our home, I introduced him to my pal the actor-turned-commentator-host Chuck Grodin, and the two became fast friends. We all would go to the best restaurants in Connecticut and always it was great fun. Jack had never stopped being a superb conversationalist. And there had grown such a great bond between us. Sometimes I couldn’t believe this was the guy I’d had so much trouble meeting.

  But later, strange and difficult things began to happen to Jack. One day Miriam went into the garage and encountered a snake. She screamed and yelled, “Snake!” and Jack grabbed his gun. Well, it wasn’t a real gun, but it was one of those things that makes a real loud bang to scare off deer. Jack was hoping the snake would react to it like a deer. Well, the snake beat it out of that garage, but the bang cost Jack his hearing in his left ear. Then things turned more serious. Jack had a stroke. It left him unable to speak. It was a tough time, but he could still see you, could still hear you in his good ear, and could still smile at a good joke. So we all tried to amuse Jack and get him through this terrible ordeal. The last time I saw Jack was Christmas Eve 2003. Our Christmas show had been pretaped for that day, so I was already in Greenwich that morning. Joy and I were spending our family holiday in Connecticut, and I’d decided to drive over and wish him an early Merry Christmas. I got there around eleven o’clock, and it was cold and dreary and pouring rain. His nurse answered the doorbell. She said, “Regis, I didn’t know you were coming.” I told her that I’d arranged it with Mrs. Paar. She said, “Come on in! Jack and I were looking at the show this morning and he was laughing.” I said, “Did you really hear him laugh?” She said, “Oh yes, he laughed!”

  She led me to the living room, where he seemed to be in good spirits. He still couldn’t talk, but he was a great listener. He loved hearing all the stories, all the gossip I could think up. But the problem was how to keep talking, which is a little difficult when the other person is unable to answer and join in. Nevertheless, I plowed ahead and gave it my best, until I had nothing more to say. And then we sat there, looking at each other, listening to the rain, and I began to feel very, very sad. Here was this sophisticated first-class man, one of television’s most legendary talkers, who loved nothing more than to engage in conversation. Suddenly that had all been taken away from him. It made me angry as I sat there with him. It wasn’t fair. That’s what had always kept him going, and now I sensed it was almost over. I finally got up, walked over to him, kissed his cheek, told him I loved him and wished him a Merry Christmas, and then I left. Jack Paar died not too long after that. To this day, I just miss him more and more. I realize how unique and very special he was, and I’m so glad I had the chance to finally say, “Thanks, Jack. You changed my life.”

  WHAT I TOOK AWAY FROM IT ALL

  Emulating the style of someone you deeply admire is a natural instinct. It helps free you to find your own style along the way.

  Never stop saying thank you to the people who’ve made the biggest differences in your life. No matter how much it embarrasses them.

  Chapter Nine

  BILL COSBY

  During the early sixties, it seemed that every time you looked up, a terrific new future star was emerging—somebody bright and original and just beginning to blaze across the culture of our business. Which brings me back so clearly to this story that started one particular Friday night during that long-ago era: I was the anchorman at San Diego’s KOGO-TV
in those days, and in that last hour prior to airtime, I had been busily preparing for our eleven o’clock newscast. That’s when I actually happened to look up—just at the right moment—at the office television set, which was tuned to one of my favorite shows, the NBC Friday-night prime-time Jack Paar Program, the weekly version Jack had started shortly after leaving the grind of his Tonight Show hosting job. It was then, quite accidentally, that I got my first look at the latest comedy sensation suddenly on the rise. There in New York, Jack was in the midst of announcing this brand-new name. He explained how funny and special this guy was and correctly predicted that he would go on to become a major star. And then he introduced the tall and youthful Bill Cosby. I had never seen him, but I had to stop and ask myself, Bill Cosby—why do I know that name? Then I remembered, in fact, that I had just booked him sometime within the last few days to be my guest on the following week’s Saturday-night interview show I hosted for the station.

  I couldn’t have been more thrilled that one of Jack’s guests would be mine as well—only a week later—on my own local show.

  And so Cosby came to San Diego and we met for the first time, forming an immediate bond that became a friendship we’ve maintained for all these years. (In fact, we happen to share the same personal booking agent, the irrepressible Kenny DiCamillo, who regularly tells me that the Cos always asks how I’m handling the fortunes, good or bad, of my beloved Notre Dame teams.) But back then he had been working in the nightclubs of New York and L.A., and was now appearing with the Kingston Trio at some San Diego hot spot. The wiry Cosby I met must have been in his mid-twenties. He was a well-dressed, great-looking young guy who had a loose-limbed athletic gait and a big open smile on his face. I would learn that he’d served in the navy and then went on to Temple University in his hometown of Philadelphia where he became a track star and also played defensive back on the Temple football team. But he possessed a brilliant gift for comic storytelling, which would serve him so successfully throughout the rest of his long and important career. My show, it turned out, would only be Cosby’s second television appearance, but he was made for the medium. He climbed onto the stool next to me that night and we got to know each other with lots of laughs flowing.

  But maybe I should point out that many of those laughs had sprung from an idea that occurred to him while he was backstage in our little greenroom waiting to come out. You see, another guest that night was a master hypnotist named Dr. Michael Dean, whose own popular nightly stage show had been the talk of San Diego. And so Bill—who’s always had a great eye for anything that he could turn to comic gold—saw his chance to have some fun by briefly mentioning that he’d just been trapped for a while in our greenroom with an accomplished hypnotist. But to drive home this point, he came out and repeatedly kept falling asleep during our interview! I’d ask him a question and he’d begin to answer, then suddenly just slump down on his stool and pretend to fall into a trance. It was great fun, with Cosby allegedly passing out throughout the course of our chat. All these years later, however, I do sometimes ask myself: Had the hypnotist really cast a spell on him backstage? Did I bore him to death on the show? Or did he just fake falling asleep that night in order to get all those laughs? Whatever it was—and let’s bet on its having been brilliant ad-libbing—it made for an unforgettable appearance, and was enough to prompt anyone who saw our little talk show that night to remember the name Bill Cosby. Over time, however, that was going to be inevitable anyway.

  But here’s something also worth remembering: Those were rather tense and racially divisive years in this country, yet Cosby never touched the subject in his routines. His onstage persona had nothing to do with skin color. His objective was to entertain, to be funny, to make you laugh no matter what your racial heritage. He gently forced his audience to connect only with his warmth, his playful personality, and his indisputable talent. He always wrote his own stuff—personal childhood yarns or great reimaginings of so many things we all took for granted. His wonderfully detailed and hilarious version of the old Noah’s Ark biblical story, for instance, was the centerpiece of a comedy album that became a runaway national sensation. His voice, his inflections, and his nuanced material could make the whole family laugh together—and families did, everywhere. Subsequently, color barriers dissolved a little bit more every time this happened.

  And then, of course, Hollywood took special notice. NBC signed him to do a caper show called I Spy, which featured two guys—one black, one white, both equal partners—working together to solve cases. They struck gold with the fun chemistry between the wily Cosby and the dashing actor Robert Culp. I believe it was Bill’s first real acting job and he was terrific. But for the TV business, it had been a bold move—practically unheard-of in those years—this simple pairing of what could be considered impossibly diverse costars on a major prime-time program. I thought Cosby did more for race relations with that show than anyone else could have attempted in any medium. But later on, he made even more important strides in this area.

  In 1984 he debuted The Cosby Show, a remarkably popular NBC sitcom focusing on an upper-middle-class African-American family—a successful doctor and wife raising five kids in bustling New York City. The Huxtable family, as they were called, had the same problems as everyone else, trying to instill key values in their kids and find day-to-day happiness in a complicated world. Oddly enough, even in the mid-eighties, this represented groundbreaking television—the depiction of an upscale black family was an altogether new concept for viewers. But week after week, year after year, it ranked as the number one, most-watched show in the Nielsen ratings. Never heavy-handed about matters of race, it provided more insight to viewers, who might’ve been less-than-enlightened people, than almost all of the equality lectures in history could have ever done. Cosby was setting an example and still getting giant laughs—always in a smart, wholesome way that makes most of our current sitcom crop look trashy by comparison.

  So at the earliest height of all the racial yelling and screaming in this country—and then in the decades to follow—Cosby was always doing things his way. He didn’t have to tell you he was a black man—he showed you what kind of a man he was with a great, relatable style. On The Cosby Show, he was doing his job—as both a comedian and an actor—by playing a loving husband and a wise father. And during the eight seasons the series ran, he showed us all how it should be done. All the people watching couldn’t help but say to themselves, maybe in a totally new way, “Hey, that family is just like mine.” That, I think, was Bill Cosby’s message to the country, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

  So it’s understandable that through the years, Bill Cosby became an icon in this country at an age earlier than most. He still goes out there onstage and sits in an easy chair and entertains the audience just like he always has. And he still works clean as a whistle. That’s another thing I like about him. Over the years many comedians have succumbed to constantly using the old f-word in their routines. Only a few have chosen not to use it at all: Cosby, Rickles, and Seinfeld don’t, and that’s because they don’t need to. But of course, the f-word is everywhere in our society—movies, Broadway stages, songs, and practically everywhere else you go. In comedy, it’s become such a crutch for so many stand-up performers; the reason why is that they know the audience will laugh, for sure, when that f-bomb drops. At first it was a shock for people to hear it from any professional entertainer. Now, it seems, the public has almost been trained to respond to it. For example, the other night at a stage play, I heard a character use it to describe a girl’s date: “He had a face like a f—— fish.” The audience screamed. The same line, minus the f-word, would have been simply: He had a face like a fish. Descriptive. But no laughs. The truth is that it’s the easy way out. But it’s so sad, isn’t it?

  I say these things because you should know that nobody feels more strongly about the topic than Bill Cosby. (The scolding calls he used to make to steer young Eddie Murphy away
from blue language are now legend.) Anyway, it’s been almost fifty years since that night in San Diego, and he’s been my guest many more times since then—but during one appearance on the morning show just a couple of years ago, we started reminiscing about that first show back in the sixties, and damned if he didn’t doze off again! Of course he was just kidding—I think—and said he still blames that hypnotist for the whole thing. But I know better. It’s Bill Cosby getting his laughs—a sound he may know better than just about anyone else alive. You’ve gotta love him and also thank him for all he’s done to cause the best kind of color blindness in our world. But really, I doubt we’ll ever be able to thank him enough for that.

  WHAT I TOOK AWAY FROM IT ALL

  A cheerful, relatable voice in the face of social turmoil will help dissolve that turmoil much more effectively than a strident, angry voice.

  There is no f-word more powerful than funny.

  Chapter Ten

  JOEY BISHOP

  I’ll admit it right off the bat: taking this particular job went against my every gut instinct at the time. But working as the sidekick announcer on ABC-TV’s new late-night entry, The Joey Bishop Show, would turn out to be both a true revelation and quite an education for me—in more ways than I can probably count. And most importantly, I was about to find out at last—in no uncertain terms—what my true talent was. Yes, that cursed question that I could never quite answer—the one that especially tortured me in those weeks before I replaced Steve Allen on my short-lived Westinghouse show—still plagued me. As it happened, the Bishop offer came out of the blue during a time when I was down in the dumps. By then, I was barely getting by, doing only a local once-a-week nighttime interview show on Channel 11 in Los Angeles. But believe me, I was plenty thankful I had that.