How I Got This Way Read online

  ME: [overwrought, as usual] Dave, this is one of the busiest days of my life! I’ve got reporters here. Barbara Walters is at my door, Katie Couric is down in the lobby crying! I mean, there’s only so much I can do! What do you want?!

  DAVE: Regis, when I spoke to you this morning I was crestfallen at the news that you were leaving television, but I think I misunderstood something. Is there something that needs to be cleared up about the announcement?

  ME: Well, you know, I had a drink before I made the announcement.

  DAVE: Well, like any other Tuesday.

  ME: What’d I say? I’m leaving the show. I’m not retiring from show business!

  DAVE: Right, but as I said to you, my concern was that once Johnny Carson left his show, we just never saw the man again. But you’re telling me now that we will, in fact, be seeing you again?

  ME: No, I didn’t say that, Dave.

  DAVE: Will you at least come on my show?

  ME: Once in a while. But not too often, Dave. Really! . . . You know, it’s twenty-eight years, Dave. Every day. Day after day. The same studio. The same desk. The same audience! Those same thirty-five people who came every morning to see me!

  DAVE: [visibly shaken] Ohhh, Regis, don’t say that. I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want you to leave.

  ME: Really? You mean I should stay? No kidding?

  DAVE: I don’t want this to happen. This is too important. This is too meaningful. I don’t want this to happen.

  ME: Dave, it’s too late. I mean, I made the announcement. I’m gonna have to go now. But you know, I’m gonna have a lot of time on my hands. Can I come and hang out at your office?

  DAVE: Maybe . . . I don’t—no, not really. But we will be seeing you after you leave the show?

  ME: Dave, you’d make me feel much better if you’d just sing a couple of lines of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with me. I mean, I’d really sleep well tonight. Okay, Dave, come on, just you and me!

  TOGETHER: “There’s no business like show business / Like no business I know. . . .” [We got up to the lyric about “stealing that extra bow” and then he just hung up on me.]

  DAVE: [to his audience] Coulda gone on forever. But I’m tellin’ ya, I’m just sick about this, ladies and gentlemen. Because he’s one of a kind. Television will not be the same. And it’s making me ill to think that no more will he be on the TV. But I hope to God he comes here. God bless, Regis Philbin. We’ll be right back. . . .

  Okay, I’m pretty sure nobody had ever asked God to bless me since my sainted mother did so many years ago. I do think Dave actually likes me, deeply! But who knows for sure? He is, as I’ve said, a man of mystery. Anyway, a couple months later, at the end of March, I made my first Late Show appearance with him since the day I’d delivered my misinterpreted Moving On announcement and received David Letterman’s invocation of God’s blessing. And he still wouldn’t stop with the pleading and cajoling—until at least we hatched a plan together. . . .

  DAVE: Now listen to me. I gotta talk to you about this seriously.

  ME: What?!

  DAVE: You can’t leave the show. I know we were screwing around about it last time, but you really can’t leave the show. First of all, we don’t want you to leave. Second of all, you don’t want to leave. So, three . . . don’t leave!

  ME: I don’t know what to tell you, Dave. I mean, how much longer are you going to sit here?

  DAVE: I’ll stay as long as you stay, because I know the network would like me to go. I know they want me out.

  ME: Really? Well, then maybe we should go together.

  DAVE: No, no. You’re not going anywhere—because you’re an icon. You gotta stay. Don’t go. You don’t want to leave.

  ME: Now why do you say that?

  DAVE: Because I know you don’t want to leave. You are TV.

  ME: Why don’t we leave together?

  DAVE: All right.

  ME: Honest to God. I’ll tell you what. I’ll leave in November. I’ll walk down the street. I’ll wait in the back here for you. Then you leave—we get out on Fifty-third Street, we walk into the sunset. You know how the sun sets? . . . And we sing! We gotta sing. Sing with me!

  DAVE: Okay, what are we going to sing?

  ME: [starts singing “The Way We Were”] “Memories, like the corners of your mind . . .”

  DAVE: [caving in once again, singing] “Misty water-colored memories . . .”

  TOGETHER: “Of the way we were . . .” [huge applause]

  DAVE: I’ve got another idea. You do the same thing, except I come out and we get on horses. We re-create the ending of Shane.

  ME: I remember Shane. [Paul Shaffer and the band started playing a galloping cowboy rhythm complete with harmonica.]

  DAVE: You’re on a horse. I’m on a horse. And we don’t know whether Shane is coming back. But we know Shane has been shot. We just don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. So you and I are on the horses. We’re slumped in the saddles, and we ride down Broadway. And then we get a kid to come out onto Broadway. And we have him saying, “Shane! Come back, Shane! Shane, come back!” And then we ride right out the door and right down to Times Square.

  ME: Right out the door. I love it.

  DAVE: That’s something, huh?

  ME: Will we be singing “Memories . . .”?

  DAVE: No. We’re not singing “Memories . . .”!!

  Well, at least, we would’ve finally achieved something close to my Montana Letterman ranch dream scenario with the two of us in cowboy mode—out there roughing it and sitting round the fire, like real friends. Except, in our special way, I know we’re just that already, and have been for a good long while now. I also know I’ve had great fun with him on his show. And great fun watching him most nights at home. He is a real broadcast comedy pro at work and a truly great original talk-show host. A perfect throwback to all those legendary guys I admired so much a long time ago. And that’s why he’s the late-night guy for me. Don’t get me wrong. They’re all good or they wouldn’t be there. But for me Dave is the best for now and maybe for all time. I’m just happy to be a small part of his program and of his own remarkable legacy.

  WHAT I TOOK AWAY FROM IT ALL

  A joke at your own expense really costs you nothing, if it’s delivered with affection. Or something close to it.

  Those who’ve shared the same health scares as you and eagerly comfort you along the way are the realest friends you can find.

  Laughter heals us all. So you might as well just laugh. A lot.

  Chapter Thirty

  JOY PHILBIN

  This is the chapter I fear the most.

  Yes, it’s true: Right in that classic tradition of saving the best for last . . . without a doubt, that’s what I’m doing now. But when you finally get to talk about the best, how do you even begin to put into words everything that this one remarkable person encompasses and means to you? You can write about all kinds of people, even about your friends who maybe never knew how you really felt about them . . . but writing about your wife?

  Well, that’s about as dangerous as it can get.

  And as difficult.

  Because, I promise you, there won’t be room to say everything that could be said or should be said. I’m not so sure there are even enough words in the English language to do the full job, anyway. Others who have appeared in these pages certainly may have influenced or enhanced my life in various important ways.

  But this one—well, to put it simply, she is my life.

  How to start? She’s really a beauty, inside out and vice versa and then some. Great face. Great figure. Wonderful personality. Charming conversationalist. All the things you desire in a woman. And it’s really an understatement to say that she’s been a great wife, a great mother, a great cook, and loyal as the day is long. She also happens to be as smart as a
fox, loves the finer things in life, and isn’t afraid to work hard for them. She wins all the arguments, returns your puny salvo with sheer dynamite, and asks you the most absolutely unanswerable questions you’ve ever heard. She sees right through all the baloney, wherever she may find it, from whomever it might come. It’s uncanny. She is the complete package.

  She came with the right name. Joy. You couldn’t improve on that. Or on her, for that matter.

  Her special presence in my world, of course, has been right on view practically forever. You all know her, even if you haven’t met her. Back when I started hosting these morning shows and in the years since, Joy’s been coming on TV with me. At first, in those A.M. Los Angeles days especially, she was apprehensive and would give herself negative reviews and swear that whatever show we’d just done was the last show she would ever do. We don’t go through that anymore. She’s over it. She even had her own series dedicated to home design and celebrity lifestyles for many years, and always came across with great flair and ease. But for sure, I think she’s been a great asset to our Live! show. When you do a show like this for decades, your audience wants to know more and more about your life. Wants to meet your wife, know your family. They always enjoy some inside stuff, the simple day-to-day quirks and realities of your personal world. And I’ve always had plenty of stories to tell them about adventures with my one-of-a-kind wife.

  And I do mean adventures. Or maybe I mean misadventures, all things considered. Sometimes I make the mistake of saying yes to going shopping with Joy, and that, a little more often than sometimes, can lead to a problem. I don’t know anyone who can totally disappear in a department store or a grocery store or even a one-room hair salon like her. She just vanishes, while I trudge up and down the aisles or floors looking for her . . . in vain. The shopgirls dependably get a kick out of seeing this dopey husband trying to track down his wife. Sometimes they shout out to me, “She went that way!” I feel like a lost child trying to find his mommy—and I just know those girls behind the counter will be talking about this pathetic sight with everyone who crosses their path the minute I’m out of earshot. It’s embarrassing.

  Sometimes, up in Greenwich, further misadventures happen when we set a time to meet back at the car where we’ve just parked. She may take a different route. She may get lost. I can’t help her. I’m trapped in the car waiting for her while she’s walking north to Boston. It’s almost unbelievable. (All right, I admit I could make matters easier by actually having my own cell phone handy, but as you may know I keep hoping cell phones and computer technology will turn out to be a passing fad—and to her infinite credit, Joy somehow puts up with it.) Sometimes when I’ve told stories on the show about things like this—how we got so mixed up and how it prompted our latest stupid argument about who was right and who was wrong—the finer details would get so complicated that I’d have to draw a map or make a sketch of the logistics so the audience could follow along. Every once in a while, those are the tales that later lead to a knock-down, drag-out war, after I blabbed about it on the air. A war that always seems to end abruptly with me, for some reason, apologizing profusely.

  The only thing worse has been when, right after one of these crazy squabbles, Joy has ended up pinch-hitting in the cohost chair on the following morning. That’s when I know I never had a prayer. I remember once, on the night prior to one such morning, I tried taking her in the middle of a blizzard to a certain film she wanted to see—and frankly, I guess I’d gotten so confused about which theater we had to get to that we never did make it there, or anywhere else for that matter. We just went home. In cold, stony silence. Because by that point, she had stopped speaking to me. For the rest of the night. Joy recounted the story in an interview a few years ago, which went like this: “We went to bed not speaking and the next day Kathie Lee called at six thirty in the morning and said she was snowed in. . . . So I went out there on the show with him and we had not spoken a word. It was very icy out there. We didn’t look at each other until we finally had to tell the audience what was going on.” (Let me just interject here and for the record note that I actually opened that particular show by telling the audience, “Just so you know, we’re not speaking to each other right now. . . .” Hey, at least I got it out there right away. Anyway, back to Joy’s all-too-correct version of the outcome of events that morning.) “We each told our side of the story and then we took an audience vote and I won. I was right.”

  That’s right—everyone sided with her, and, naturally, I ate crow on live television.

  I expected nothing less.

  If you don’t know how Joy landed in my life, it happened in the late sixties at The Joey Bishop Show. She was Joey’s executive assistant—Joy Senese was her name, an effervescent young woman who’d come to Los Angeles from Chicago. And of course, she saw all the ongoing drama behind the scenes at the show with a bird’s-eye view. She knew the ins and outs, the tantrums, the laughs, the works. She was extremely attractive and very efficient and more or less ran the office. Bishop had many friends dropping by to visit him during the day, most of them male. I used to watch them enter that office and stop dead in their tracks at the desk of this gorgeous redhead who was sweet and charming and always in charge. Often these guys found a way to loiter around her desk longer than the time they ever spent visiting with Joey. Let’s just say she was very popular.

  Somehow David Letterman led her into this topic a couple years ago during an appearance we made together to plug our duet album of standard tunes, Just You, Just Me, and perform a number from it. (Joy’s singing voice had always been a revelation to me. Long before she and I ever decided, on a lark, to put together our own occasional nightclub act, I’d heard that beautiful voice trilling some song or other around the house. She did this whenever she happened to be especially happy—so it always made a big impact on me for that reason alone.) Dave, meanwhile, had always been verrrry complimentary about her during my frequent guest shots, usually making fun of how a guy like me could’ve ever gotten a magnificent woman like her. (What a scream, right?) Anyway, poor Joy had no idea Letterman would go probing into those old Bishop days on that particular night. Then again, neither did poor Regis, as you’ll see here. . . .

  DAVE: Joy, I know you worked on The Joey Bishop Show. You had to meet all the big stars. [then, as a sad afterthought, he gestured over to me] Including you, Regis.

  ME: Okay, thanks for remembering me! I appreciate it.

  JOY: And also including Warren Beatty—he was a great-looking guy.

  DAVE: [brightening] Now Warren Beatty, he was a bachelor in those days?

  JOY: Yes, he was for a long time.

  DAVE: Was there any kind of . . . ?

  JOY: I mean, he was just very flirtatious.

  ME: [perking up uncomfortably!] I never heard this story! He was flirtatious, did you say?

  JOY: Excuse me, can I finish?

  DAVE: [lecturing to me to butt out] Have you ever been on a show before?

  ME: Good heavens, I’m sorry! Go ahead, Joy—tell him.

  JOY: Anyway, Marlon Brando came in one day.

  DAVE: Marlon Brando! Wow.

  ME: I never heard about him, either!

  JOY: He came into the office and was very charming. This was when Marlon Brando was thin and handsome. He engaged me in conversation.

  ME: [leaning in, because how could I not?] What did he say?

  JOY: He was very smooth.

  ME: How . . . smooth . . . was he?

  JOY: And he invited me to have dinner with him. I said, “Where would we be going?” And he said, “To my house.” I said, “Ohh,” and thought—

  ME: I think I’m gonna leave now. I can’t take it anymore!!! [then composing myself] Okay, so tell us what happened.

  JOY: He frightened me, so I turned him down. I thought it was just as much fun to be able to say, “Marlon Brando asked me out and I turned him down.” />
  DAVE: [clearly a little too happy about all these revelations] Oh yeah, that’s a great story! It’s a wonderful story.

  ME: [clearly a little sick of this topic] Big deal, big deal.

  So how did she end up with me?

  I still don’t know. Lucky, I guess. We married on March 1, 1970—less than a handful of months after the Bishop show had shut down, leaving me not exactly knowing what I’d end up doing next, other than taking her as my bride. On March 1, 1995, I sat down to write a little essay about her (which, like this chapter, was far from easy to do), and I thought I’d share a little of it here again now:

  Our anniversary day. Twenty-five years. Silver. I remember her, and that day, like it was last week. She was the sweetest and the savviest and the sexiest. She had perfect posture, the greatest pair of legs I had ever seen, and a walk that instantly captured your imagination. She was charming, friendly, and always smiling. . . . She was independent and proud and had just enough of a temper to keep you on your toes. . . .

  We met in the middle of my life’s low cycle. She was in her prime. She could have had anyone she wanted. Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars were wooing her. She could have wound up with any of them. But it turned out to be me. I wasn’t so sure about her choice. There were so many problems. The future looked bleak. Once I remember stopping the car and advising her to get out and run as far and as fast as she could. Luckily for me, it was in a rather shabby part of Hollywood and she wouldn’t leave. I never knew for sure if it was because she was afraid, or too much in love to get out and run. Then, March 1, 1970, we were married. Of all places, we did it in Forest Lawn. One of the most famous cemeteries in the world. I wondered if that was an omen. But the wedding chapel was charming. Despite a driving downpour of rain that lasted all day and all night, we had a lovely wedding. It was held around four in the afternoon. It was all ahead of us from there. The next twenty-five years. And now, a quarter century later, she remains exactly the same as I found her. Only sweeter. And savvier. And sexier.