"… if this were somehow taped and played back on the air while you looked on in horror?" my husband muttered as he satisfied himself about the intercom. "Letterman would eat it up. We'd look like absolute idiots."
"Why do you insist that he's mean? He doesn't seem mean."
Rudy tried to settle back as serious Manhattan began to go by. "This is the man, Edilyn, who publicly asked Christie Brinkley what state the Kentucky Derby is run in."
I remembered what Charmian had said on the phone and smiled.
"But was she or wasn't she unable to answer correctly?"
My husband smiled, too. "Well she was flustered," he said. He touched my cheek, and I his hand. I began to feel less jittery.
He used his hand and my cheek to open my face toward his. "Edilyn," he said, "meanness is not the issue. The issue is ridiculousness. The bastard feeds off ridiculousness like some enormous Howdy-Doodyesque parasite. The whole show feeds on it; it swells and grows when things get absurd. Letterman starts to look gorged, dark, shiny. Ask Teri about the Velcro. Ask Lindsay about that doctored clip of him and the Pope. Ask Nigel or Charmian or Ron. You've heard them. Ron could tell you stories that'd curl your toes."
I had a compact in my purse. My skin was sore and hot from on-air makeup for two straight days. "He's likeable, though," I said. "Letterman. When we watched, it looked to me as though he likes to make himself look ridiculous as much as he does the guests. So he's not a hypocrite."
We were in a small gridlock. A disheveled person was trying to clean the limousine's windshield with his sleeve. Rudy tapped on the glass panel until the driver activated the intercom. He said we wished to be driven directly to Rockefeller Center, where "Late Night" taped, instead of going first to our hotel. The driver neither nodded nor turned.
"That's part of what makes him so dangerous," my husband said, lifting his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. "The whole thing feeds off everybody's ridiculousness. It's the way the audience can tell he chooses to ridicule himself that exempts the clever bastard from real ridicule." The young driver blew his horn; the vagrant fell away.
We were driven west and slightly uptown; from this distance I could see the building where Letterman taped and where Ron worked in an office on the sixtieth floor. Ron used to be professionally associated with my husband before Rudy made the decision to go over to Public Television. We were all still friends.
"It will be on how your ridiculousness is seen that whether you stand or fall depends," Rudy said, leaning into my compact's view to square the knot of his tie.
Less and less of Rockefeller's skyscraper was visible as we approached. I asked for half a Xanax. I am a woman who dislikes being confused; it upsets me. I wanted after all, to be both sharp and relaxed.
"Appear," my husband corrected, "both sharp and relaxed."
"You will be made to look ridiculous," Ron said. He and my husband sat together on a couch in an office so high in the building my ears felt as they'd felt at rake-off. I faced Ron from a mutely expensive chair of canvas stretched over steel. "That's not in your control," Ron said. "How you respond, though, is."
"Is what?"
"In your control," Ron said, raising his glass to his little mouth.
"If he wants to make me look silly I guess he's welcome to try," I said. "I guess."
Rudy swirled the contents of his own glass. His ice tinkled. "That's just the attitude I've been trying to cultivate in her," he said to Ron. "She thinks he's really like what she sees."
The two of them smiled, shaking their heads.
"Well he isn't really like that, of course," Ron told me. Ron has maybe the smallest mouth I have ever seen on a human face, though my husband and I have known him for years, and Charmian, and they've been dear friends. His mouth is utterly lipless and its corners are sharp; the mouth seems less a mouth than a kind of gash in his head. "Because no one's like that," he said. "That's what he sees as his great insight. That's why everything on the show is just there to be ridiculed." He smiled. "But that's our edge, that we know that, Edilyn. If you know in advance that you're going to be made to look ridiculous, then you're one step ahead of the game, because then you can make yourself look ridiculous, instead of letting him do it to you."
Ron I thought I could at least understand. "I'm supposed to make myself look ridiculous?"
My husband lit a cigarette. He crossed his legs and looked at Ron's white cat. "The big thing here is whether we let Letterman make fun of you on national television or whether you beat him to the punch and join in the fun and do it yourself." He looked at Ron as Ron stood. "By choice," Rudy said. "It's on that issue that we'll stand or fall." He exhaled. The couch was in a patch of sunlight. The light, this high, seemed bright and cold. His cigarette hissed, gushing smoke into the lit air.
Ron was known even then for his tendency to fidget. He would stand and sit and stand. "That's good advice, Rudolph. There are definite do's and don't's. Don't look like you're trying to be witty or clever. That works with Carson. It doesn't work with Letterman."
I smiled tiredly at Rudy. The long cigarette seemed almost to be bleeding smoke, the sunlight on the couch was so bright.
"Carson would play along with you," Rudy nodded. "Carson's sincere."
"Sincerity is out," Ron said. "The joke is now on people who're sincere."
"Or who are sincere-seeming, who think they're sincere, Letterman would say," my husband said.
"That's well put," Ron said, looking me closely up and down. His mouth was small and his head large and round, his knee up, elbow on his knee, his foot on the arm of another thin steel chair, his cat swirling a lazy figure-eight around the foot on the floor. "That's the cardinal sin on 'Late Night.' That's the Adidas heel of every guest that he mangles." He drank. "Just be aware of it."
"I think that's it: I think being seen as being aware is the big thing, here," my husband said, spitting a sliver of drink-ice into his hand. Ron's cat approached and sniffed at the bit of ice. The heat of my husband's proffering fingers was turning the sliver to water as I looked at my husband blankly. The cat sneezed.
I smoothed the blue dress I'd slipped on in Letterman's putty-colored green room. "What I want to know is is he going to make fun of me over the wiener spots," I told Ron. I had become truly worried about at least this. The Mayer people had been a class act throughout the whole negotiations and campaign, and I thought we had made some good honest attractive commercials for a product that didn't claim to be anything more than occasional and fun. I didn't want Oscar Mayer wieners to be made to look ridiculous because of me; I didn't want to be made to look as though I'd prostituted my name and face and talents to a meat company. "I mean, will he go beyond making fun? Will he get savage about it?"
"Not if you do it first!" Rudy and Ron said together, looking at each other. They laughed. It was an in-joke. I laughed. Ron turned and made himself another small drink. I sipped my own. My cola's ice kept hitting my teeth. "That's how to defuse the whole thing," Ron said.
My husband ground out his cigarette. "Savage yourself before he can savage you." He held out his glass to Ron.
"Make sure you're seen as making fun of yourself, but in a self-aware and ironic way." The big bottle gurgled as Ron freshened Rudy's drink.
I asked whether it might be all right if I had just a third of a Xanax.
"In other words, appear the way Letterman appears, on Letter-man," Ron gestured as if to sum up, sitting back down. "Laugh in a way that's somehow deadpan. Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd, and that that's just where the fun is."