In Praise of Regis Philbin

Regis is a passionate sports fan and above all he lives and dies for Notre Dame football. If anyone can wake up the echoes shouting her name it is Regis. He and I are old friends in a low-key sort of way. We live just a block from each other on New York's West Side. We go to the same gym, and I can vouch for the fact that Regis is in very good shape for a man of 69, or 68 or 66, whichever age he decides to be that day.

I know something about Notre Dame football too, though not as much as Regis, to be sure. The other day, with Millionaire madness raging, I spotted him crossing our street and decided to test him and find out how good he was.

"Regis," I said. "During World War II, one all-American Notre Dame quarterback went into the service. What was his name?"

"Angelo Bertelli!" he shouted out, quick as a flash. "You're right!" I shouted back. I did not ask him if it was his final answer, because everyone is doing that these days.

"What branch of the armed services did Angelo Bertelli enter?" Again, a quick answer, but with a slight pause this time.

"The United States Marine Corps," he said. (Regis is an ex-Navy man, and his father was in the Marines, so I doubted he was going to blow that one.)

"And when he left Notre Dame to serve his country, what other quarterback, soon to be an all-American himself, replaced him?" I asked.

"Johnny Lujack!" he answered immediately. If there had been other contestants, as in Jeopardy, there's no doubt Regis would have hit the buzzer first. I think Regis could beat Alex Trebek in a category on Notre Dame football on Jeopardy, even if Alex, as seems likely, already had all the answers. I don't see many people beating Regis at Jeopardy on Fighting Irish football history. After all, when Regis was a fan in the fall of 1949, Notre Dame won the national championship. Regis knows his stuff.

"And the final question," I asked, deliberately not placing a price tag on it. We were on the corner of 67th and Columbus, and just trying to cross Columbus Avenue in the middle of the day can make you nervous enough. "Are Notre Dame quarterbacks in general as good as they are promoted to be by that powerful publicity machine?" Well, that was the tough one, and I knew it and he knew it.

"Not these days," he said. It was the right answer, said with a certain melancholia.

My friend Regis is really famous now, big-time famous, evolving from what was for the past decade your solid, well-above-the-norm fame. Sometimes now in the morning when I give our dogs their first walk of the day I can see the lines beginning to form outside the ABC studio across the street, and it surprises me that they are lining up for Regis--yes, Regis Philbin--and the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? show. His fame because of Millionaire is now beyond comprehension. If he was famous before because he was second banana to Kathie Lee, then he is right up there at the solo top now, near where Michael Jordan used to be, and where Oprah is, and where Mick Jagger remains eternally, and where Bill Clinton still is, though I suspect Bill is about to fade pretty quickly. Some of those people at the top, like Michael, are now seeking anonymity, but Regis is not. His entire life has been an assault upon anonymity.

So it is a level of fame that is startling even to him. While the Regis and Kathie Lee show made him quite famous, this is fame of a different nature. "You think you know something about fame if you have a morning show and it's successful," he told me. "And then one day you go into prime time, and it is an entirely different kind of thing. Everyone in the world seems to know you."

This seems like the most unlikely peak in a long, hard quest, and a long, very bumpy odyssey. Few people who reach the level Regis has this late in the game have banged around quite as much, or for quite as long. People who know him say his big break came in 1967 when he was second banana to Joey Bishop on The Joey Bishop Show, which is something of a contradiction, because Joey Bishop himself was never first banana. Also, Bishop did not treat Regis very well, and when the Bishop show died, Regis as much as Bishop was blamed.

For that reason, among others, says Dave O'Leary, a Lansing, Michigan paint dealer who has been Regis' closest friend since their freshman year at Notre Dame, when they roomed next door to each other, Regis believes he is the greatest living example of Murphy's Law. That is, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong--and, more important, it will go wrong for Regis Philbin, not for anyone else. That has happened through much of his career, and the great thing about his supersuccess is that in his mind, it's still happening. That is, if you're Regis Philbin, you can go off the charts and still Murphy's Law applies.

The most recent example of this came a few years ago, when Regis met up with Johnny Garson, who had always been a major hero to him. They had never had much contact, but a luncheon was scheduled with the help of mutual friends. It went exceptionally well, so well that Carson suggested dinner for the two of them--a great moment, dinner with his idol at his idol's invitation. And so on the appointed night Regis set off for the restaurant. He is a terrible driver and has no sense of direction, and eventually he got lost. Though he tried to call the restaurant, he arrived an hour late and Carson, his hero, had already left.

That being said, this is an unusually sweet moment for Regis. Week after week Millionaire remains one of the highest-rated shows on television. The New York Times, using its own shorthand, lists it only as "Who..."

"Who..." saved the ABC network, as Regis likes to point out, and costs remarkably little to produce. And every-where he goes, strangers come up and ask questions. And when he answers they always ask if that is his final answer. Not long ago, he went to the wedding of Michael Gelman, his producer, and after the vows were exchanged, an elderly man came up to him and asked, "Is that Gelman's final answer?"

And I, so close in age to Regis, love the idea that in this, the country of the young, where amazing, indeed meteoric levels of success tend to happen only to the very young, to rock stars, and actors, and the young men and women who are in the dotcom business and have already made their half-billion each before they're 30, such celebrity has happened to an old guy--a geezer like me.

Not only that, it is happening to an old guy who has been counted out so many times and has had so many shows die on him that at many critical moments in his life he's been considered virtually unemployable. Back in the Seventies, when he was in his 40s, he was forced to work for scale.

Regis, it turns out, deals with his age with a certain benign flexibility, or inventiveness, depending on how you want to describe it, because show business prefers the young to the old and is obsessed by demographics. I learned somehow a long time ago that Regis and I were both born in 1934 and that we both graduated from college in 1955. When I was interviewing him for this piece, that seemed to be true. But then, as we talked, it appeared that there might be another birthday and another date of graduation. Dave O'Leary, who is his classmate, graduated in 1953, which means Regis was probably born in 1932 at the latest, and possibly even 1931. That would make him minimally 68, and possibly 69. His oldest friends from Notre Dame are amused by this slight actuarial waffle, and a few years ago at a class reunion they gave him a Mickey Mouse watch that was inscribed to him. It was called the Ponce de Leon Award, and it was awarded to "the Classmate Who Lies the Most About His Age But Still Looks Good Enough to Get Away With It." His exact age does not, of course, matter. Regis is eternally a kid.

Regis has, I think--and it is crucial to understanding him--true grit. O'Leary thinks it has always been something of an uphill fight for him, and that his talents and charm are hard earned, won in part in self-defense and also in the never-ending attempt to win over his father.

Frank Philbin, a Marine officer during World War II, was a tough, unbending man, a real-life Great Santini, says O'Leary (referring to the character in the Pat Conroy novel of the same name, played so well by Robert Duvall in the movie). He was a man whose son was doomed never to be able to win his admiration. They were like oil and water; the things the father could do well, the son could never master, and water; the things the son, lighter of heart and blither of spirit, could do well, the father could never appreciate. Driving lessons often ended in shambles, with Regis getting out of the car in some distant verdant place and walking home.

When Regis was at Notre Dame the family moved from the Bronx to a Long Island suburb called Mineola, where some railroad tracks ran through the backyard. The senior Philbin had been assured by the real estate agent who sold him the house that it was from an old abandoned line, no longer in use. The real estate agent, it turned out, lied. When the train went by every day it sounded like it was going right through the house, and O'Leary remembers Regis doing wonderful early routines, throwing himself on the floor in a prayerful position as if to have his life saved, or diving under the dining room table, shouthing, "It's going to get us this time! It's sure to get us this time!" His father was not amused by the routines.

Regis has been at this game for 45 years now. His is a long, hard career, because he has the kind of talent that is easy to underestimate. He was working almost from the start in a medium that is cool, and Regis is--whatever else--not cool. Not many people have spent as much time in grade, doing as many different shows as Regis, waiting for the lightning to strike. He has spent a lifetime knocking on doors and being hired by people who did not want to hire him. But somehow they took him on anyway (largely, they would say, as a (continued on page 208) Regis Philbin (continued from page 122) favor to Regis, even though they did not really need him). And then, when he did well, they somehow never gave him much credit for doing well.

He had always wanted to be in radio and television, but when he was at Notre Dame he had been too timid to try the college radio station. He had seen The Tonight Show with Jack Paar and thought he could do a show like that. So, after leaving the Navy in 1955, he decided to try show business. He went back to New York and worked briefly as a page at NBC. He told friends he had seen the future and it wasn't NBC. "I'll be a page here for 50 years," he said. And then he went west to look for work. He was to spend the next 45 years in endless different cities, the Willy Loman of broadcasting, knocking on doors, often being rejected, sometimes making it, rarely getting credit for his talent.

He began by delivering film to an independent station in Los Angeles. No one was lower on the totem pole. He has been working in network and local television for almost as long as there has been television, before satellites, before the coming of videotape, before the coming of Walter Cronkite as an anchor, before the coming of color.

If doors opened for Regis early on, they opened only partway and then they closed quickly. No level of success came easily. Not many people played second banana to Joey Bishop and lived to tell the story. But Regis did. He was always honing his talent, aware somehow that he could do certain things others could not do, that he had a style and a way with audiences. He learned to read audiences and learned to connect to them, to fashion a certain social contract with them. He knew how good his instincts were and that no one was better with a certain kind of live audience.

•

We are in the new studio where Millionaire is being taped. It is 5:50 P.M. and I am being allowed to sit in and watch. Inside it looks like a small but modern Roman amphitheater. The audience, about 300 people who have been waiting outside the studio since morning, is already seated. Regis welcomes me in and introduces me to the audience, and names some of my books. The audience applauds enthusiastically for me. Regis looks at my tie and announces to the audience, "And his tie is way out of line!" This from a man who now dresses like someone out of Pal Joey and has gone to dark on dark on dark in jacket, shirt and tie in his newest incarnation. My tie is, in fact, quite beautiful, a family favorite, picked out by my daughter--yellow, Hermes, little chicks being hatched from eggs.

It is not a good day at the office for Regis. The computers that drive the show keep breaking down and they constantly have to redo all the small connecting links, the segues of which make the show look so smooth when you watch it. Sometimes they make a bit of progress. The contestant will answer a question, and just as they are about to go to the next question, the computers go into full-scale glitch mode. It is hard on the contestant and just as hard on Regis, who has to be sharp and focused and funny and in control and right on the beat. The contestant, Dave Lukov of Rockingham, North Carolina, is asked his profession and he answers that he is a grief counselor. "Grief counselor," Regis says. "We could use one around here today."

The early questions are easy: What do you call a collapsible tent (a pup tent), what punctuation mark is required for an interrogative sentence (a question mark), who played Remington Steele on television (Pierce Brosnan). And then a killer. In a comic strip called Cathy, sometimes Cathy is drawn without her: eyes, nose, ears, mouth. Lukov is stumped. So am I. I no longer read the comics and have never heard of Cathy. Even the members of the audience do not look happy about the question. Lukov is floundering and he desperately asks for their help, so the audience votes. It is a close vote and they choose D, ears. Regrettably it is Cathy's nose. Dave Lukov is on his way back to Rockingham. The audience, having helped throw him overboard, seems a bit deflated.

The next group of contestants is lined up. They are about to be given their entry exam, which is to list in historical order the date that these political works were written: The Prince, The Communist Manifesto, Common Sense and The Republic. Piece of cake, I think, wondering even as I write down my answer, which I do in what I am sure is record time, what would have happened if I had been the contestant the last time, and whether there is anyone I could have called who would have known anything about Cathy and her missing nose.

I am watching Regis all the while, During these computer-driven breaks he slips offstage, goes to a seat outside the view of most of the audience and tries to rest and keep himself focused. Anyone who knows anything about what he does knows how hard a job this is, to keep focused, to drive something like this show forward, keeping the pace and the timing just right, to be ever bright and constantly on. He does it four times a week, and the morning show five.

For the moment, sitting out there alone, unobserved by the camera and the audience, he looks oddly vulnerable, not in any way the all-powerful host of the nation's leading television show. He looks like someone rather smaller, someone trying to pull himself together, the kind of person we know all too well, the Regis who almost did not make it. Then as the break ends and his producers signal that the dreaded computer has been coaxed back into action, I can see him pull himself together, stand a little taller and walk back to the stage and take charge.

•

Regis and I first met 28 years ago when I was on a book tour and I went on a show called Tempo, Which he co-hosted in Los Angeles. It was one of the countless shows he has emceed over the years, if not in LA, in whichever city had a show and an opening, any kind of and opening for a host who always seemed in danger of falling without a parachute. In 1972, I was finishing up the tour with my book on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, and I was scheduled to get 10 minutes on his show, which ran from nine until noon. In those days 10 minutes was the going amount of time for a book on a morning or midday talk show. By chance, one of the other guests was the semi-well-known comic George Jessel, whose humor had always escaped me, just as my talents obviously escaped him. That morning Jessel seemed to be in an unusually foul mood, and apparently I was the cause of it. Three decades later I am still inclined to regard him as one of the most unpleasant people I've ever met.

Jessel was scheduled for 10 minutes too, and he seemed greatly displeased by that, and displeased by my presence in the greenroom with him, and the fact that I had been allotted equal time. He complained quite bitterly both to the producer, a bright, personable young woman, and to Regis himself, about sharing time with, as he said, "some kid with a $2 book." Actually I was 38 at the time, no longer thought of myself as a kid, and the book cost $10 and was already number one on the Times best-seller list.

The truth is that George Jesse did not merely complain: He threw what I would call a major-league tantrum, a personal one at that, and in time there was a brief conference between the producer and Regis, and they resolved the problem. First, they moved Jessel to a separate room, and then took five minutes off his time and gave them to me. It was, all in all, a terrific morning, one that I still recall with great pleasure.

So, you can see, our relationship began well. I liked Regis from the start. He and I, to be sure, did not seem like a natural couple, he with his unbridled California enthusiasm, even in the morning, and me with my New York skepticism and my charm, marginal on the best of occasions but most assuredly a good deal less evident in the morning than in the evening. But I liked him. It was not just the truncating of Jessel, admirable though that act was. I had a quick sense of what worked for Regis--a certain joyousness, a willingness to throw himself into his roles, an utter lack of pretense and perhaps more than anything else an ability to make fun of himself. Because I wrote a good many books, all of which led to tours, and Regis was co-hosting a good many shows, some of which ended happily but most of which did not, we crossed paths several times, always pleasantly.

After about 16 years of going up and going down in the world of television variety shows, getting shows and losing shows in different cities--New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Los Angeles again, Denver, Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles again--Regis landed in New York, in my general neighborhood, on a national show with several co-hosts, including Kathie Lee Gifford. That show went national in 1988. My wife, who likes the television set on in the morning (as I do not), was fascinated by Kathie Lee from the start. And thus, to my surprise, I often breakfasted with all three of them--that is, my wife, Kathie Lee and Regis. In time, and it took me some time to understand this, I realized that Regis was very good at what he did. He was talented, deftly so, and very likable, and quite funny. He was also surprisingly good at disguising just how talented he was, so that almost no one knew how hard it was to do what he did every day--to make fun of himself, keep the show moving and remain eternally youthful, buoyant and friendly, never, ever, in the process crossing or threatening Kathie Lee.

So I began to study Regis. And I began to have epiphanies about him. The first aspect of his personality that I soon discovered was the ability to charm and get away with things others might not be able to get away with. I decided Regis, in some way, had been doing this all his life, that it was a factor of personality. He was the cute, irrepressible nephew who could tease and say otherwise unspeakable things to the staid, unsmiling, rich dowager aunt and not only get away with it but become, without anyone ever admitting it, her family favorite. I sensed this was a quality he had, always had, and that he had learned to turn it into a professional shtick.

That allowed him to misbehave just slightly, Peck's bad boy, but never go over a certain line with the audience. He remained a pal of the audience; the audience expected light, charming misbehavior from him. In the process they became a family, Regis and the audience, and it was part of the family contract that Regis was going to break just a little crockery, be just a little sassy. It was the obligation of the other, more stern members of the family to forgive him. They had to forgive him, because the great unspoken secret of the family was that it was not much of a family without Regis as the designated imp.

For a time I marveled at how unsophisticated he was, how good he was in effect at being hit by the pie, a pie he had put in play himself, as second bananas are supposed to. And then I had my real epiphany: Regis was, in fact, a considerable sophisticate, and he was quick and funny, a good deal more sophisticated than almost anyone realized. But while most successful people hunger to seem more sophisticated than they really are--we all want an upgrade, to go from economy to first class in sophistication--Regis, by the nature of personality and career options, was willing to appear less sophisticated than he really is, to downgrade from first class to economy, in order to play his part and be the victim. And he was willing to do this for the good of the show and the persona he had created on it.

Watching him all those mornings, coffee with Regis in our kitchen, so to speak, I became and admirer, and I realized that he was very good and very funny. The routines he did every morning on the perils of living in New York were, in fact, small masterpieces. He knew how to take all the minor atrocities of daily life in New York and turn them into material: the garbage truck that comes too early and too noisily and deliberately positions itself so that no cars can get past it on the street, so all the other drivers are stacked up behind it, honking their horns; the streetlights that don't change from red to green; the construction crews that are not supposed to start work until eight but start work at seven A.M. This was Regis at his best: Regis as a social commentator, living a wonderful celebrity life but in a city where nothing functioned properly, at least not for him, and the gods conspired, sometimes working overtime, to heap humiliations upon him. I watched and I suddenly realized his laments for the city, the kind of joyous victimization of Regis Philbin, were, more than I realized, my own: Regis was, in the midst of everything else, one of New York's better social critics.

In time Regis moved to our neighborhood on the West Side of New York. Regis loves baseball, and when one of my first sports books came out, this on the Yankees and the Red Sox, I was booked on his show. Regis greeted me in a baseball uniform that looked like it had seen its best days when Babe Ruth was just leaving the orphanage in Baltimore. It was also about four sizes too big for him.

His willingness to put me on the show helped our friendship greatly, as did his sightings of me. On occasion, Regis would see me walking the dogs on our street, and apparently having nothing better to talk about on the air that morning, clearly at a loss for better material, he would announce to his audience that he had seen me on the street, that New York is a great city because you can walk to work and see a Pulitzer prize--winning author walking his dogs! When he did these sightings, friends of mine would call that day from all over the country to congratulate me on walking our dogs, and being so close a friend of Regis'.

So when the Millionaire series started, I paid attention. I watched with my family, trying to imagine myself in the hot seat, facing Regis, answering the questions, and, truth be told, I usually went out at around $32,000. I'm not sure the lifelines would have been much of a help either, because the questions that stumped me were about pop culture, and almost none of my friends would know the answers. But I liked the show, and I decided quickly that it worked not because of greed, though greed always helps, and not because it was about working miracles.

Millionaire works because Regis made it fun and nicely optimistic, and turned both audiences, the one in the studio and the more important one at home, into an extended family. He knew just how funny to be, and how tart to be and when to let the spotlight fall on the guest and when to shine it on himself. He always knew where the line was, which, if he crossed it, meant he went from being funny to being mean. It was the role of a lifetime and he was at his very best in it. He had prepared himself for it for some 40 years.

He had created something of a happy family, one where the audience knew that, all things being equal, unless the contestant was just an appalling jerk--which sometimes happened--Regis wanted the guests to win, just like the audience wanted them to win. Families root for family members to succeed; the jealousy would have to come later, when they all decided on how the million dollars would be spent.

•

The Millionaire show is done for the day. Regis seems momentarily tired, smaller again, shrunk down from the commanding presence demanded to run the show. We are in his dressing room, talking about Notre Dame and who was the coach when he went there (Frank Leahy) and the quarterback (Bob Williams) and his special love of the place. It taught him that there was so much more to life than he had seen before in the Bronx. When he arrived there, according to Dave O'Leary, he had been on three dates in his life. He was so green, says O'Leary, that he did not know how to make a phone call from a pay phone.

Regis interrupts our interview to do a phoned-in command performance. The new dotcom systems company Cisco is having its annual meeting, and John Chambers, the head of it, is a huge fan of Regis and the show. At the appropriate moment, Chambers is going to call Regis and ask him some questions. Soon Chambers comes on and he is asking Regis the requisite questions and I can hear his answer: "How many employees do you have?" "John, the answer to that is 30,000. Yes, that's my final answer." They talk some more and Regis is telling Chambers pensively, "You know, John, I think I should be running the company for you."

It has been a phenomenal year. There he is on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide and Forbes. Yes, Regis Philbin on the cover of Forbes, holding up two sacks of money (The Celebrity 100. The World's Highest-Paid Entertainers and Athletes). Kobe Bryant and Britney Spears had to appear inside the magazine.

These are good days. He apparently will soon sign a contract for ABC ("I saved the network!") for some $20 million a year, which is not bad for someone who always sensed he had a talent but never exactly knew what the talent was. He waited a long time for lightning to strike. "I outlasted them," he says of all the entertainment world geniuses upon whose doors he once knocked so unsuccessfully, and the other geniuses who gave him the job but, in time, his walking papers as well.

A little more than a year ago, Joy, his wife, told him he ought to get another show, because he was coming home every day in the late morning through with work for the day. She thought he needed an afternoon job. So he asked around, thinking he might try some Kind of game show, and he heard about Millionaire, based on a successful British show. He liked the idea of it, and then he saw the tape and knew it was made for him. He knew he could use all the talents he had worked on for so long, that intuitive sense of an audience and the ability to play with an audience in a funny and yet kind and almost loving way. No small trick, always knowing how far to go, and where the line was. He says he was not on the short list for the show, that Phil Donahue and Montel Williams were. What impressed Michael Davies, the ABC executive who had the rights to the show, was Regis' Passion for it, and for that he eventually got it.

Sometimes Regis says he wishes the fame had come a little earlier, that it would have made his life a little easier. But it is sweeter now, and he is all the more grateful after all those years of banging his head against the wall. "I know how lucky I am now, "he says. It's a nice story. And it has been a long, hard journey to get to the end of it. And I, who have known him on and off for almost 30 years and have seen him in various incarnations over that time, am aware of how close a call it is. I know it could have gone the other way, that instead of being the most famous television personality in the country, he could as easily be the Willy Loman of television, someone for whom it might never have happened, still trying his damnedest though, and doing nightclub routines in a motel lounge in some smaller city, and getting by, as Arthur Miller once wrote about Willy, on a shoeshine and a smile. Instead, it's a Frank Capra story: Good guy does good things, waits a long time and good things happen. We need a few of those.

He was to spend the next 45 years in endless different cities, the Willy Loman of broadcasting.