Word: letterman
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...would always entertain us; he was the comedy writers' comedian. I'd call him the '90s Steve Allen: smart, funny and very likable, with a more modern sensibility." The key is likability -- that elusive, soft-core charisma. Has Conan got it? "He doesn't have the sardonic glibness of Letterman," says Betsy Frank, a senior vice president at advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, "which a lot of people like but probably a lot more people find a bit tiring. Conan has a purer kind of humor, and that's being perceived positively...
...Leno, he hopes just to keep sailing along. "With the Tonight Show," he says, "you don't make sharp turns. It's like trying to turn the Titanic around." The Titanic, Jay? Are you just a tad apprehensive about an iceberg named Dave? Next week, to counter Letterman, Tonight is running a spiffy lifeboat drill: guests include Bill Cosby, Luke Perry and Garth Brooks. But Leno is in the game for keeps. "With all these shows," Leno says, "it's not how good the show is, it's how long you can continue to make it good, every night...
Workmen are still wandering through the halls, rats are being chased in the basement, and bulletproof glass is being installed in David Letterman's office. Not really bulletproof; that's just the way Letterman likes to describe the protective pane designed to prevent him from accidentally tossing a baseball right through the glass, as he did once at his old NBC office, raining shards on pedestrians below. But Letterman is already gushing over his unfinished suite as if he had just moved into Windsor Castle. "Look at | this," he says, striding into the room in his workaday outfit...
After a decade of the fabled Letterman irony, one can be excused a skeptical pause. Is he serious? Or is this another Letterman put-on, one of those statements meant to convey its precise opposite -- the way "those fine, fine people at General Electric" on his old show usually meant Dave had had another dustup with his bonehead corporate bosses. Letterman's new headquarters -- located a few stories above New York City's Ed Sullivan Theater, where he is about to unveil his new late-night talk show on CBS -- are clean, all right, but not without intrusion. The smell...
...getting around it; David Letterman sounds, well, happy for a change. Or, at least, as happy as an insecure, driven, angst-ridden performer with a pathological fear of failure can be. Certainly no one has more of a right to enjoy himself for a spell. For the past two years, Letterman has been the most wrangled-over, gossiped-about, sought-after star in television. When Jay Leno was chosen to succeed Johnny Carson as host of the Tonight Show, it was Letterman, the disappointed office seeker, who drew the sympathy vote. Last fall, when his contract with NBC was coming...