Keith Olbermann: A Letterman Appreciation – You Know Him, You Love Him, You Can’t Live Without Him

[Adenoid_Hynkel]

My perspective on David Letterman is a little different, I think, than most of his other frequent-but-really-not-that-big-a-deal guests. For one thing, while I can still be freshly awestruck by his intelligence and his creative genius, I like his humanity even more. The thing I like most about Dave is Dave.

Plus, I had been a fan for 25 years before I was ever on the show, and I had managed to meet him at NBC even though neither of us worked there. I was just leaving 30 Rock to get back to ESPN when I heard this very familiar voice shout my name and then, “What the hell are you doing here?” I explained, with a mixture of surprise and pride, that Bryant Gumbel had brought me down from Connecticut to be the sports guy on a panel for the Today show year in review for 1994. Without missing a beat David said, “Well I don’t believe that for a minute,” and then he excused himself to pre-tape something with Bryant. “I gotta go make an ass out of myself now.” It was about 9:30 in the morning, and it was a great practical demonstration of how hard this man worked to make that show what it was.

The process of making that show was not like that with Jay Leno or Craig Ferguson. Craig would have said hello to you three times and hugged you twice by the time you came out onstage, which was warm and lovely. Jay would come in to your dressing room and sit on the couch and talk to you for half an hour, which was also very generous (and entertaining; a producer once literally pulled him out of my room). These were gregarious guys, and Dave wasn’t. I never saw him at CBS except when we were on the air. When I started going on in 2006, for all I knew he was actually built into the desk like Captain Pike from the Star Trek pilot and they threw a tarp over him after the show was over.

But then, for whatever reason, he let me “in.” Even counting every time I was on — and I did one silent cameo and another bit where I broke into the studio, and best of all, I once got to do an entire Top 10 list — I don’t think I made the list of the top 100 most frequent guests. Maybe I was on 16, 17 times. But after I’d been on once or twice, David started to talk to me, very confidentially, especially during the commercial breaks on those nights when I was on for two segments. I mean, we talked about my dad when he was in the hospital, and we talked about his mom, and we talked about our respective cases of shingles — all the stuff Dave supposedly never talks to anybody about.

http://deadline.com/2015/05/keith-olbermann-david-letterman-retirement-appreciation-1201429400/

[KT2000]

1. when McCain bailed for Couric

that was really good TV and Keith relates it well!

"One night those skill sets combined to produce the highlight of my career. I’ve done a lot of stuff in 35 years in this business. I’ve anchored everything from a presidential primary debate to the World Series. Just in Dave’s realm, I’ve been on the shows of nine different late-night network talk-show hosts. But the night John McCain bailed on him in September 2008 tops it all. David and his staff had about 15 minutes to find somebody else, and they called me. I’m not kidding myself here: I was a) in an office five blocks from his studio, b) free for the next hour, c) a political guy when they had just lost their only guest who happened to be the GOP nominee for President, and d) I had already once come in as a pinch-hitter for a same-day guest cancellation. But to turn to me? I would have cancelled the show before I had me on!"

[monmouth4]

2. They surely don't make the tv shows like that anymore. What a joyous time...n/t