How I Got This Way

by Regis Philbin

  But one afternoon during our regular bull session, I happened to notice that Paul Moyer, one of the station’s big-time anchormen, was out doing a run-of-the-mill live field report on the five o’clock news, direct from a sweltering Santa Monica playground, about its being one of the hottest days of the year. I couldn’t believe it. This was not a story worthy of Moyer’s stature as a major newsman.

  “Sev,” I said, “why is Moyer out there doing that kind of a report?”

  “He’s been a bad boy,” Sev said ominously. “I want to remind him that he’s an anchor, and should feel lucky that he’s not still just some street reporter.”

  “How long are you going to keep him out there?”

  And suddenly, in a loud and angry tone, Severino barked, “Until he learns his f——ing lesson!”

  I never knew what had prompted that punishment, and didn’t want to probe, but eventually all was forgiven and Paul returned to his anchor desk. Clearly, though, you didn’t want to mess with Sev. I knew how fortunate I was that he always seemed to take my side when problems arose. For instance, over the years I’d had troubles here and there with various newly hired producers about the opening segment of our morning shows. The uninterrupted eighteen-minute-long Host Chat would simply freak out some of these antsy producers—to them, it felt like an eternity of meandering airtime, no matter how entertaining it was. But I knew that’s what had always worked best for our show. I remember when KABC brought in a smart young guy from San Francisco to take over producing the show. His name was Ron Ziskin, and right off the bat, he thought the opening should be shortened. Rather than get involved in an argument upon his arrival, I decided to get my point across in another way. I took him over to Sev’s office to properly introduce Ron to our inimitable general manager. And that’s when I also casually mentioned to Sev that Ron wanted to shorten the opening—which, by the way, had become so popular that even many of our station employees would pop into the studio to grab some quick morning laughs during our freestyle banter. But now here was a new guy, determined to cut it back, timewise. Almost on cue, Sev leaned in close to Ziskin’s face and, pointing over toward me, told him in a firm whisper, “Do it his way.” And then he grabbed each of Ziskin’s cheeks, gave them a little twist, and again with that whisper added, “Kapish?”

  “Jeez,” Ziskin said as we walked back to our studio. “I fear him.” Then he asked me, “By the way, what does kapish mean?” With a straight face, I explained to him, “It means ‘Or else you die.’ ” Of course it really means “Do you understand?” But I couldn’t resist, and Ziskin never brought it up again.

  No matter that Sev and I maintained a strong relationship back then, he turned into a sly and cunning businessman whenever my contract renegotiations would roll around. I didn’t have an agent in those days, so I had to do my own bidding. It was no contest. He’d split a piece of paper into eight pieces—four for him, four for me. He’d then have me write on each piece what I thought the increments of my annual pay raises should be over the next four years. And he would do the same on his four slips of paper. He’d say, “Whoever’s numbers feel fairest will be the winner.” Of course, I was grateful for any kind of pay hikes at all, and so, for some strange reason, he won every time.

  And there was something else that happened during my seventies stay at KABC-TV. My then A.M. Los Angeles producer, Frank Kelly, said one day, “Why don’t we take a camera crew and do a live hour before the Academy Awards as the nominees walk the red carpet.” The Oscars, after all, was an exclusive ABC telecast. Our preview show would only be for our station in Los Angeles—perfect for that Hollywood-happy market. It was a great idea. In those days, the academy put up some bleacher seats for the movie fans right in front of the long red carpet with ropes on either side. The likable and well-known reporter Army Archerd would stand at the foot of the carpet. As a longtime columnist for Daily Variety, everybody in the business knew Army. He was a favorite among actors and actresses, many of whom would never talk to any other reporter but him. One by one, he would announce who was arriving: “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s that wonderful actor Richard Burton.” There would be polite applause, and once in a while an audience member might shout out, “Hi, Richard.” Nothing too raucous.

  Meanwhile, we would be waiting at the other end of the carpet. This was still the era when real movie stars commanded Hollywood, not just new faces in teen magazines, and they handled themselves with class and poise. It turned out to be a special night. The ratings for our preshow broadcast were sensational. The next year the station even gave us a second camera for the red carpet show. And yes, I did ask some of the ladies, “Who did your dress?” I just had to know.

  The following day Howard Rosenberg, the TV writer for the Los Angeles Times, would spend his entire column beating my brains out, along the lines of “What a ridiculous idea the whole thing was. Regis Philbin talking to Fred Astaire . . . how dare he.” Howard killed us every year, and I’ve got to admit he was sometimes quite funny about it. But the show was such a big success that it spawned what you now see every single Oscar day, as about twenty-five cameras from all over the world are aimed at the star entrances, while dozens and dozens of TV producers and their assistants run all over the carpet grabbing their next glittery guests. It’s a combination of hysteria and madness, and I know how it started. I was there. Long before it became this mob scene. Too bad, Howard Rosenberg is no longer at the Times to report on all that insanity now. He’d have a ball with it. Better them than me.

  But back to what seemed like my all too one-sided contract negotiations. After six years at KABC, with the ratings flying higher than ever, John Severino was rewarded by being named president of the entire ABC television network. He would run it all from the company’s New York headquarters. I hated to see him go. At an enormous good-bye party, he thanked everybody for making ours the top-rated station on the network, but especially singled out me and Jerry Dunphy, the main news anchor. I was touched and happy to get that kind of recognition but also knew that I’d miss Sev very much. Meanwhile, months went by and my contract eventually ended, but there’d been no call to come in and renegotiate with the station’s new general manager. So I pondered what kind of strategy I should take: Do I just go in there and say “Let’s talk” or wait for the new manager to call me in? I decided to let him call me. I was going to win one of these negotiations someday, I vowed. But before anything happened, my phone rang and Grant Tinker, one of the most astute and respected executives in all of television, was calling me with a bombshell of an offer. He was taking over the presidency of NBC, had faithfully watched my morning show for seven years, loved it, and now wanted me to come over to do the same thing for them—across the entire network. I was beside myself. All these years I had yearned for just one more crack at going national. And this was it. My KABC contract had expired. Nobody had called. I was free to walk off the lot. Still, it was tough to tell the general manager, Tom Van Amburg, that I was leaving. He got very upset and instructed my producer, Frank Kelly, to escort me off the premises immediately—without a chance to ever go to my office one last time and gather my things.

  But that was nothing compared to Severino’s reaction from New York. He was furious and embarrassed to have to explain to other ABC execs how this could’ve happened, how my contract could have expired so easily under the new KABC management. But rather than focus on the oversights of his successors in L.A., he made me his primary target of revenge. That night he called me from New York, his voice low and menacing as he unleashed a tirade of language that would curdle blood and other fluids. He had taken it personally, very personally, and told me so in no uncertain terms. Let’s just say—if I might now try to clean this up for you—that he claimed that I had, um, violated him in such a way that he could never forgive me, nor would he ever forget what I had just done to him. And he kept repeating this over and over again until the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up. I
even thought I detected vague threats of professional retribution. Sev always sounded as if he had a little touch of the Italian mob capo deep inside of him, which is probably what made him such an effective leader. But this rant was terrifying, stirring up enough of my Irish Catholic guilt to leave me shaking. He knew exactly where your most vulnerable buttons were located and just how to push them. It was tough falling asleep that night after that call. Same thing held true for lots of nights to follow.

  Also, he’d made it quite clear that my new NBC show was destined for failure. And in this case, he was right. There was no way to do a fresh 9 a.m. morning show live from Los Angeles; we would be relegated to a one-day tape delay, and worse yet, the show was cut down to thirty minutes even before we got on the air. My opening segment had always run nearly twenty minutes; it was the lynchpin to our success at KABC (and of course, later in New York forever after). Without that easygoing, extemporaneous, and newsy opening chatter, all we’d have was just another show; the rigid time strictures would simply defeat any chance we had to succeed. It was a recipe for doom—and also a loud and horrible echo of the Westinghouse fiasco. Severino had predicted we’d be gone in six months. He hit that one right on the nose. Six months would, in fact, be the total life span of the show, before the plug was mercifully pulled.

  My friends were stunned but, at the same time, knew I was never going to make it being crammed into a half-hour format. My cohost, the terrific Mary Hart, was hired the very next day to anchor Entertainment Tonight, where she stayed for thirty years and became iconic in her own right. Meanwhile, I went into seclusion. I lived in the doldrums daily with nothing to do. Nothing, that is, except become a master at playing Pac-Man video games, which happened to be our daughter J.J.’s obsession at the time. When she was at school each day, I commandeered the machine for hours on end. Here I had gone from being the king of Los Angeles morning TV to this reclusive and lost Pac-Man addict. But I could only welcome the distraction, while waiting for another shot at . . . anything.

  One night deep into this grim period, Joy and I attended a lavish wedding party for producer Duke Vincent, the number two guy in Aaron Spelling’s organization, which had created so many major hit series that continually lit up ABC’s prime-time schedule. Anyway, it was a beautiful tented backyard affair held behind a lovely home in the exclusive Holmby Hills section of L.A. I should have known that many important ABC executives would be there, and of course I should have expected Sev to walk in, too—but when he did, I still was somehow taken by surprise. Very quickly he spotted me and came over to tell me—in a not so friendly way—to meet him over in a dark corner of the yard in a few minutes.

  Naturally, we hadn’t talked for many months, probably not since his last call gloating over my NBC morning failure. Our rift was no secret to most anyone who knew me. But my friend Mike Srednick, who had just caught sight of the two of us having that initial exchange near the buffet line, was convinced that peace between us could be restored and he rushed over to tell me so. He was sure that in the next few minutes Sev was going to invite me back and it was all going to be great again. While I stood waiting in that secluded corner of the yard and Sev ominously walked toward me, I could see that Srednick had strategically positioned himself close enough to watch, if not hear, this momentous conversation that was about to take place. Srednick, bless him, even had both of his thumbs hoisted up in the air, predicting a victorious outcome.

  Meanwhile, here was Sev, my former beloved boss—whom I unwittingly “betrayed” because KABC hadn’t gotten around to offering me a contract to continue my local morning show, whereas Grant Tinker had promised me his whole network, very much to my regret, of course, in retrospect—now glaring deeply into my eyes for an awkward moment. And as Severino began to talk, I knew that Srednick was prematurely celebrating my return to Sev’s good graces. What Sev had to say was not good at all. It was as if no time had passed between conversations—he just picked up where he’d left off on those torturous late-night phone calls he’d made to me after my NBC deal was completed. (He had been relentless, expressing his utter disgust with me during those early weeks.) As he had vowed previously, he vowed once again, this time face-to-face: He would never forget what he believed I had done to him. Over and over again he repeated that immortal Italian quote—that chilling phrase describing the worst thing you can do to an Italian male, or any male—signifying the end of our long, great friendship. (My pal Srednick was beyond stunned to have misread the moment so completely.)

  And that was also the end of that night’s wedding party for me. There was no point in even trying to return to the happy festivities. Instead, I returned to my lingering unemployed Pac-Man hell, wondering what would become of my so-called career. As it happened, nearly two years had passed since the NBC nightmare, and several months since my gruesome backyard square-off with Sev. Now it was January of 1983, and quite unexpectedly I received a call from a New York–based William Morris agent named Jimmy Griffin, whom I’d never met. But he informed me that he’d just had a meeting with John Severino. On a hunch—with me planted firmly in mind—Jimmy reminded Sev that the local New York WABC-TV morning show had tanked miserably since the departure of its veteran host Stanley Siegel. He knew that this was nothing less than an enormous humiliation for the most prestigious station on the whole ABC network. But he also knew, to some degree, how Sev felt about me. Maybe he didn’t know just how terrible the breach between us had gotten, but he took a shot anyway. In the middle of his pitch, he said very earnestly, “If you think with your head and not your heart, Sev, you know Regis can turn your mornings around here on Channel 7.” I will always be indebted to Jimmy for that one line, which, I think, brought about my return to New York City.

  Because somehow, Severino’s head must have grasped what his heart had for so long refused to accept, much less consider.

  Sev told Jimmy to have me call him, which I did, expecting the worst and receiving not a warm but at least a straightforward and businesslike proposal. He suggested that Joy and I come to New York for a long weekend to explore the idea of possibly moving there. He also mentioned that even he hated New York, warning me, “It’s cold and it’s dark and ugly here. I just want you to know that.” I said I knew that, but I didn’t care. So shortly afterward, on Presidents’ Day weekend that February, we arrived on a Saturday night and checked in at the legendary Plaza Hotel. At the time, ABC kept an upper floor reserved for guests and network affiliate honchos, so we were terrifically impressed; this, I sensed, seemed to be the star treatment. Along those same lines, great seats had been set up for us at Broadway shows like Dream Girls and La Cage Aux Folles. It was all very exciting, but Severino did have a point: After spending all those years in California, the weather in New York seemed colder than ever. The snow was piled high and dirtily in the streets. And of course, we worried about how Joanna and J.J. would ever get used to these gray concrete canyons, jammed with people rushing in all directions at once. We also looked at some potential apartments that might suit us. They all seemed so small and cramped. No doubt we would miss our good-size home under the warm sunshine, our backyard with the pool, the green lawn and the palm trees in front of the house. It became a monumental decision to make, and at the end of the weekend we were beside ourselves trying to fathom whether the lifestyle change was the right choice. Really, it was simply driving us nuts.

  Finally we decided that we just couldn’t make the move. We’d have to stay in California; this cross-country urban shift would clearly be too traumatizing for our family to stand.

  But how could I tell Severino? I would have to go see him in person—for the first time since that awful backyard encounter, no less. So I went over to the ABC building on Sixth Avenue and entered his office prepared to deliver the bad news. He was cordial until I told him I couldn’t take his offer. Then he and his chief network lieutenant, Mark Mandala, started in—these two passionate Italian big shots—working me over, but do
ing it in the most peculiar way. They started carrying on as though I weren’t even standing in the same room with them.

  “He could be a big star here!” Mandala yelled out, like he was convincing himself of the fact.

  “But he don’t wanna come here!” Severino yelled back, reverting to old-style street grammar, as he did whenever getting himself heated up.

  “The people would love him!” cried Mandala.

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Sev. “Don’t you hear him? He don’t wanna come here!”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s missing!”

  “Don’t you understand? He don’t wanna come here!”

  It all began to sound like something out of The Godfather. And that’s the way it went until I finally decided to insert myself into the conversation. After all, this was me that they were arguing over. I spoke of the problems that troubled us most about moving east, so they might better understand: the comfortable house I would be leaving, the school situation for the kids, the physical uprooting of our lives, the New York weather, noise, sirens, etcetera, etcetera. But I was no match for these two Italians (even though I’m one-half Italian myself). In fact, they began to speak strictly in their native language and were getting louder and louder with each sentence that I didn’t quite understand in the first place.

  Then Severino stopped and stared at me for a long time. I thought to myself, Good God, he’s not going to lapse into that scary “violation” diatribe again, is he? Because I couldn’t take it. But instead he spoke English, and of course, being Severino, he had another plan to dangle before me. In a suddenly friendly tone, he said, “Ehhhh, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna give you a clause in your contract that nobody else has ever gotten. We are gonna call this clause ‘The Misery Clause.’ You work here for one year, then you come to me after that, and you say to me, ‘Eh, I’m miserable!’ Then you can leave and go back west . . . or we can talk some more about a new contract that you’ll like even better.”