Final Edition

Around this same time 23 years ago, I was an unmarried features writer for the daily newspaper in Savannah. To the extent that I was known professionally at all in Georgia’s “Coastal Empire”—which wasn’t much, believe me—it was for my movie reviews. I tended to be quite sarcastic and take many liberties with language and decorum, which I was free to do because it was a terrible paper with lax standards, and anything I wrote ran pretty much unedited.

(I still think I may have been the first movie reviewer to opine as to why films had been assigned their ratings. Newsies earned a PG for “contributing the dull-inquency of minors.” The R rating of the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead may have owed to a bare-breasted corpse, as “the undead know no modesty.” Reviewers do this sort of thing all the time now. Where’s my credit? I’m still bitter.)

Anyway, reporting never was my strong suit, as I couldn’t hand-write quickly and had trouble reading my own scrawl. That meant that I lost the meaty parts of lots of quotes. I should have tape-recorded everything, which is what I do in my job now. I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t. I guess tighter deadlines were part of it. Also, a recorder would’ve been one more thing to carry, and I had no more hands then than the one that I have now.

The thing I hated doing the most was person-on-the-street interviews. Sitting alone in dark theaters was exactly my comfort level; abandoning my anonymity to walk up to strangers was its antithesis. But one day this week in 1992, I volunteered to drive down to couple of local malls to ask people their opinions. The reason was that Johnny Carson was retiring.

It goes without saying that the entire broadcasting landscape was hugely different then. The television networks still were king, with very little meaningful competition. “Media” was a word unto itself, not the lesser addendum to “social.” This week, people have been taking to Twitter and Facebook to share their thoughts about the end of David Letterman’s run on late-night TV. But back then, if you wanted to know what people thought about, say, Carson signing off from The Tonight Show after a quarter-century at its helm, you looked to newspapers, media and the boob tube, because reporters had to ask those questions for you. You had no way to ask them yourself.

I needed to ask people about Johnny. I couldn’t quite imagine the world without him. Not that I stayed up to watch him that often, or even taped him, though I did have a VCR. But when I did see him, both Johnny and the world he’d created around himself delighted me. He was so funny, and quick, and skilled at interviewing whoever sat in his guest chairs. His facial expressions and comic timing were perfect, whether he was serving as Don Rickles’ foil or a leopard from the San Diego Zoo was pawing at his scalp. His putdowns of buffoonish Ed McMahon, garish hornblower Doc Severinsen and bland saxophonist Tommy Newsom were hilarious. His over-the-top shtick as Carnac the Magnificent struck me as unfailingly, well, magnificent.

Let’s just say I didn’t get out much in high school or college. On any of those many nights when I wasn’t out on dates, however, I always could count on Johnny to provide me with laughs. As I got older, I saw his show less and read more about how he wasn’t the nicest or warmest guy in real life. He himself joked on camera about his divorces, but it seemed that he was divorced from people in more ways than that. Those details never much bothered me, though. In fact, it seemed to me that Carson in some ways was battling his very nature in order to entertain us. Anyway, I didn’t want to have a drink with Johnny. I wanted him ride Ed, the purported lush, for having drunk a few too many.

It wasn’t that I expected the people I’d be interviewing that day to feel as sad about Johnny’s departure as did I. Jay Leno, Carson’s designated successor, had a lot of fans and was getting a lot of hype. Then as now, popular culture tilted young, and Johnny was not young. I expected older people to lament but accept his passing from the late-night scene, much as they lamented but accepted their own increasing marginalization and eventual death. Most people my age—I was 33 then—probably were readier than was I for a changing of the guard. Those who were 20-something and younger probably wouldn’t much care one way or the other. Maybe they were watching that hip Arsenio Hall on the upstart Fox network.

Well, sure enough, a couple of youngsters I questioned at the malls shrugged about Carson but praised Hall. (Interestingly, one 23-year-old added, “But Letterman’s the man.”) Most of Johnny’s biggest fans shared his age bracket. Several senior citizens told me it had been years since they’d stayed up until 11:30 pm—meaning that while they wished Carson well in retirement, they'd have no loss to lament. My favorite respondents were a 22-year-old guy named Mike Jacobson, who bucked his generational norm by asserting, “Jay Leno will never be a Johnny Carson,” and 50-something Suenell Williams, who swooned, “I catch Johnny two or three times a week. I love him. I’ll miss him.”

Overall, the local mood was captured by the next morning's headline: “Savannahians Have Mixed Feelings on Carson’s Departure.” My lead sentence was “Johnny, maybe we just knew ye for too long.”

I of course have been thinking of all this as David Letterman has signed off this week after an even longer run—33 years—on late-night TV. There are so many parallels and interconnections, given that Carson had been Letterman’s mentor and was Carson’s personal choice as successor. Although Letterman was—is—the decidedly edgier of the two comedians, they shared a certain comic sensibility. They even seemed to mirror each other personally in key ways. As was Carson, Letterman is intensely private and is known not to be particularly cuddly off the set. There’s evidence that both men have treated the women in their life badly, although Carson wasn’t forced by an extortion plot to come clean on his behavior.

Also, as I had Carson, I loved Letterman the Host. The biggest knock on him, though more in his earlier years, was that he could be mean to his guests. But he always was harder on himself than he was on anyone else, and often hysterically so. In his unpredictability and his determination to follow his own whims—whether laconically taking fast-food orders from perplexed motorists or dropping objects off tall buildings just to gauge their splat—he really did redefine late-night comedy.

Again, I won’t pretend that I watched Letterman all that often. But when I did, I quickly was sucked in. Even when I didn’t quite get what he was trying to do, or when it just wasn’t working. Like Carson, Letterman reveled in his work. He aimed to please, both himself and the viewer, possibly in part because the rest of his life was a mixed emotional bag. There, too, were echoes of Carson.

Lynn and I actually caught a Late Show taping at the famed Ed Sullivan Theatre many years ago. Waiting on line outside with all the other happy fans on that February afternoon was a kind of New York dream. The show itself was an unmemorable one, but we didn’t care. We’d seen Dave in his natural habitat! Afterward we souvenir-shopped next door and had our photo taken with the Bangladeshi guys who’s been featured in several of Letterman’s on-camera gallivants through the neighborhood. It was winter, but the sun was shining. I’ll never forget it.

So, I felt I had to watch Letterman’s final show in real time, even though I knew it would be available—immediately afterward and in perpetuity—on any number of platforms, to use a word that didn’t exist in that meaning in 1992. If you care at all about Dave’s exit, you either watched it yourself, or read a review of it, or perhaps checked out the final, all-star top 10 list on YouTube. It certainly wasn’t the funniest Late Show ever, but to me it was kind of perfect.

Most of the jokes were at Dave’s own expense, and most of the sentiment was deflected onto his sidekicks and staff, of whom he was sincerely and movingly appreciative. Highlight reels captured some of his best bits over the years. He closed it all out with a dizzying, rapid-fire flash of Scenes From a Career as Foo Fighters—the band that had cancelled a South American tour to be his first post-heart surgery musical guests in 2000—played their deeply affecting song “Everlong.” Among its lyrics are these words: “And I wonder/If anything could ever feel this real forever/If anything could ever be this good again.”

I wonder that, too. Much as I did 23 years ago. Except that this week’s late-night departure has the added resonance, for me, of the final line in my long-ago newspaper story.

“I hate to see him go,” silver-haired Herbert Smith told the much-younger me, “because it means I’m getting old.”