-Our first guest tonight is the longest-serving late-night host
in American television history and the original host of
this program, which premiered 40 years ago tonight.
Please welcome back to his show the one, the only
David Letterman.
[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪
-Wow. Thank you very much.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Very kind. Very nice. Thank you so much.
-Thank you so much for being here, David.
-Well, thank you for having me.
Thank you for being so kind to me.
I loved Amber and Jenny. I love the band.
And you're so lucky, because everybody is excited to see you,
and you come out and you tell your jokes
and they laugh at your jokes and stuff.
And of I had that Amber-and-Jenny thing,
I'd still be on the air.
Somewhere.
-Somewhere. -What a great idea that is.
-Yeah, their idea. They came up with it.
-And the music -- lovely.
-Yeah, they're really good.
We got a great band. [ Cheers and applause ]
Now, I do want to make sure we talk about
the past a little bit -- your past.
But the last time you were here --
I want to just refer to this -- you brought a tick.
-Oh, yes. -Yeah. And that was the tick.
And you asked us to test it for Lyme.
-Yes. And?
-It turned out it just had too much to drink.
-Nothing worse than a drunken tick, is there?
-Walked out of here a couple days later.
Slept it off and walked right out of here.
-Well, so it's a win-win, I guess, sure.
-So, have you stayed healthy through these
last couple of years?
-What have you heard? -Um...
[ Laughter ]
-Yes, I have stayed healthy.
And, honest to goodness,
if it weren't for your kind invitation,
I would not have known that this is the
40th anniversary of the beginning of
what you now do as the show.
I would not have known. -No idea?
-So thank you again for that.
-What were your memories leading up to that night,
the premiere?
You had Bill Murray as your first guest.
-Oh, my God, yes. Well, two things.
First of all, what was I consumed by?
Paralytic fear. -Mm-hmm.
-Because we had blown up the NBC daytime schedule
a year previously.
I -- We had a show --
A lot of us had a show that we thought was just great.
And it was on for 90 minutes, live, like 9:00 to 10:30 on NBC.
And it replaced two or three game shows,
and it turned out, America didn't want them replaced.
Certainly didn't want them replaced by me.
But when you're young, one of the nice complementary features
of being young is being dumb.
-Mm-hmm.
-And we all thought, "Oh, television is the way television
is because we're not there yet.
When we get to television, it'll be fine."
We were wrong about that and many, many other things.
So, we were on the air for -- I don't know -- maybe six weeks.
-That's it? For the morning show.
-That's it. Six weeks, maybe two months.
I don't know.
And then I had to go to the end of the line.
-And how long did you wait at the end of the line
before "Late Night" happened?
Not too long.
-Well, speak for yourself.
It seemed like an eternity.
Because in show business, if you screw something up
like blowing up a network's daytime schedule --
you're welcome -- you know, it could be a while
before they call your number again.
-Yeah.
-And -- But, eventually, we came back.
And I was still living with this trepidation that,
"Well, this can't possibly go any better than
the other one went."
But, so, you have that aside, and on the other hand,
you have Bill Murray and you think,
"Oh, my God, who can't love Bill Murray?"
So I had mixed emotions.
And then, the night of the show, I just felt fantastic.
And then that lasted, I guess, until my feet hit the floor
in the morning, and then the paralytic fear
starts all over again.
-Yeah, in those early days, a good show
doesn't last particularly long,
as far as putting your fear to bed.
-Well, that's right.
But I don't know that we were doing a good show,
Bill Murray excepted,
but we tried to be as unusual as possible,
because there was nothing else on TV in those days.
It went away right after Johnny Carson.
So then we had this show, and we tried to make it
as unusual as we possibly could, because we knew,
"How many people are actually watching?"
And they said, "Alright, we'll give you six weeks."
So they gave us six weeks, and at the end of six weeks,
they said, "Okay, you can come back and do six more weeks."
So, through the first year, we were never certain,
beyond a month and a half or two months, if we had a future.
And then things started to --
You know, the cement started to harden a little bit.
-Did you have a moment, then, where you started feeling
relaxed with the show and that you'd be around for a long time?
[ Laughter ]
-I'm trying to think if I had one waiting to come out here.
I don't know.
No, show business is awful and ugly.
How about you?
Now you, Mr. Established, ready to go,
"Here I am, thank you very much," you're in good shape.
-Well, I think I obviously had a different journey.
I was terrified when it started, but I had just finished up
a very long run at "SNL,"
so I did feel I was comfortable in the building.
I, you know -- -And people liked you.
People knew you. -They certainly knew me.
-Right. -Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
There was name recognition.
But it took me a while.
I would say it took me about 18 months.
I will say this.
I had an interesting journey, like everybody do in shows
over the last two years,
of going and doing the show at home.
I think you would have -- Terrible reason.
I think you would have enjoyed doing shows at home.
-Yes, you're absolutely right.
Now, the one thing that I still would insist on
at home would be makeup.
-Uh-huh.
-I'm not going to put on a show without makeup.
-Yeah.
-But the constraints of that, you don't look at them
as constraints so much as opportunities.
"Here I am at the house. What can I do?"
And, you know, I would go wake my family up one night,
see how that's going.
And how long were you at home?
-I was at home for almost, I guess, 9, 10 months.
And it was exhilarating, terrifying,
but it was so interesting, because you have
this audience here, and I love having an audience here.
-Now, while you were at home, was the audience still here?
-I did insist on it.
And, looking back, it was a public-health risk,
and I apologize for it.
-So the audience isolated for 10 months here at the studio.
-It was the same audience.
We didn't bring in a different group every night.
-Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.
You have food and blankets. You're fine.
-But it was -- I felt more connection
with the audience at home than I ever had before,
because there was nobody else out there.
-Right. And was there an intimacy
that developed that heretofore had not existed?
-It was the first time that I understood a thing
that I should have understood from watching your show,
which is, the people that watch your show
tend to watch it every night,
and so you can sort of lay in recurring bits.
You can make a callback joke to something.
On Thursday, you can call back Monday
with the sense that they probably were there with you.
And that became a nice, intimate connection that time.
-Yeah.
-You mentioned you would wake up your family.
One of the things that I first remember about your show,
your mom became a player on your show.
How did you first think that she would be a fun character
to bring on television?
-Well, first of all, this is exciting,
because in her life, in my life,
no one has ever described my mom as a player.
So thank you for that.
That's great! [ Cheers and applause ]
I was driving to work one day, in the old days,
and Howard Stern was talking to his mother.
-Mm-hmm.
-And I kind of put the pieces together and thought,
"I have a mother."
And it was because of Howard.
Then we started putting my mother on the show.
And people -- She became so popular because she,
in many ways for television, the perfect mother.
Snow-white, beautiful hair, a lovely woman,
and -- But the thing about my mom --
And everybody would say, "Oh, we love your mother.
We love your mother."
And I would say, "Yeah, try living with her for 18 years."
But she was the textbook definition of taciturn.
-Mm-hmm. -Just "Mom?" A lot of that.
So, we decided to send her to Norway for the Olympics,
I think after --
[ Laughter ]
-Not to compete.
-Oh, no, she was competing. -She did compete.
-Yeah, no. -She did poorly, if I recall.
-She did not medal.
We don't say she did poorly.
We say she did not medal. No.
[ Applause ]
So, what I found with mom was,
it was like I was doing a ventriloquist act,
because in the question,
I would have to supply her with the answer.
And we would get a lot of, "David?"
And people thrived on this and loved it,
and I thought it was a great way to bring us close together.
-Yeah.
-I don't know what your life was with your family,
but I felt an estrangement.
And I thought this would -- And it did.
We, in fact, became closer.
But the idea that she was just a ball of laughs and great fun,
eh...
I'd like to see the paperwork on that.
But she -- [ Laughs ]
She -- And God bless her.
She lived to be almost 94.
-Wow. -Yeah, it was amazing.
[ Applause ]
And as people say sometimes, "Good for her.
She died doing what she loved -- sleeping."
So... [ Laughter ]
We -- I cleared that with the family.
-Oh, that's good. -Yeah.
-That's very wise of you. That's very wise.
-Thank you very much. -You know the business.
Now we're going to go to commercial.
This is very exciting. We have a clip.
-Oh, yeah, now let me intervene.
And I'm sorry.
This clip -- And people come on shows with clips and stuff,
and there's never been a clip produced and shown
on a talk show that has impelled anyone to go see the movie.
They just -- It's like 60 minutes for, you know,
whatever.
Seth and I can chat about you.
And this clip is only representational.
-Mm-hmm. -It's not humorous.
It's not funny.
It's representational of the nonsense that we pursued
each and every night when I first started the show,
which, by the way, is so much better now, thanks to you.
-Well, I don't know if I agree with that.
And you can make your own judgment
after you watch this representational clip.
-When you work here at NBC,
one of the things you do a lot is ride in elevators.
And since a lot of sports originated from
real-life activities, there is no better sport
for this building than, of course, elevator races.
You are not allowed to ask anyone
to hold the elevator for you.
You must ride only on your assigned elevator.
And you must be polite to all other passengers.
-David, the atmosphere down here is incredibly tense.
I'd have to liken it to the scene at the 18th green
of a Masters golf tournament.
[ Starting pistol fires ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Some history.
-Excuse me just a minute. Speaking of history --
-Fantastic. -Apparently, we have a winner.
Is this... -I think it is.
[ Cheers and applause ]