David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

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."

"But that's not the way I am at all."

The cat yawned.

"That's not even the way I act when I'm acting," I said.

"Yes," Ron said, leaning toward me and pouring a very small splash of liquor on my glass's ice cubes, furred with frozen cola.

"Of course that's not you," my husband said, lifting his glasses. When tense, he always rubbed at the red dents his frames imposed on his nose. It was a habit. "That's why this is serious. If a you shows its sweet little bottom anywhere near the set of 'Late Night,' it'll get the hell savaged out of it." He tamped down another cigarette, looking at Ron.

"At least she's looking terrific," Ron said, smiling. He felt at his sharp little mouth, his expression betraying what looked to me like tenderness. Toward me? We weren't particularly close. Not like Ron's wife and I. The liquor tasted smoky. I closed my eyes. I was tired, confused and nervous; I was also a bit angry. I looked at the watch I'd gotten for my birthday.

I am a woman who lets her feelings show rather than hide them; it's just healthier that way. I told Ron that when Charmian had called she'd said that David Letterman was a little shy but basically a nice man. I said I felt now as though maybe the extreme nervousness I was feeling was my husband's fault, and now maybe Ron's; and that I very much wanted either a Xanax or some constructive, supportive advice that wouldn't demand that I be artificial or empty or on my guard to such an extent that I vacuumed the fun out of what was, when you got right down to it, supposed to be nothing more than a fun interview.

Ron smiled very patiently as he listened. Rudy was dialing a talent coordinator. Ron instructed Rudy to say that I wasn't really needed downstairs for makeup until after 5:30: tonight's monologue was long and involved, and a skit on the pastime of another NBC executive would precede me.

My husband began to discuss the issue of trust, as it related to awareness.

It turned out that an area of one wall of Ron's office could be made to slide automatically back, opening to view several rows of monitors, all of which received NBC feeds. Beneath a local weatherman's set-up and the March 22 broadcast of "Live at Five," the videotaping of "Late Night'"s opening sequence had begun. The announcer, who wore a crewneck sweater, read into an old-fashioned microphone that looked like an electric razor with a halo: "Ladies and gentlemen!" he said. "A man who is, even as we speak, checking his fly: DaVID LETTERMAN.'"

There was wild applause; the camera zoomed in on a tight shot of the studio's APPLAUSE sign. On all the monitors appeared the words LATE NIGHT APPLAUSE-SIGN-CAM. The words flashed on and off as the audience cheered. David Letterman appeared out of nowhere in a hideous yachting jacket and wrestling sneakers.

"What a. fine crowd," he said.

I felt at the fuzz of Pepsi and fine rum on my ice. My finger left a clear stripe in the fuzz. "I really don't think this is necessary."

"Trust us, Edi."

"Ron, talk to him," I said.

"Testing," said Ron.

Ron stood near the couch's broad window, which was no longer admitting direct sunlight. The window faced south; I could see rooftops bristling with antennae below, hear the tiny sounds of distant car horns. Ron held a kind of transmitting device, compact enough to fit in his soft palm. My husband had his head cocked and his thumb up as Ron tested the signal. The little earplug in Rudy's ear was originally developed to allow sportscasters to take direction and receive up-to-the-minute information without having to stop talking. My husband had sometimes found it useful in the technical direction of live comedy before he made the decision to leave commercial television. He removed the earplug and cleaned it with his handkerchief.

The earplug, which was supposed to be flesh-colored, was really prosthesis-colored. I told them I emphatically did not want to wear a pork-colored earplug and take direction from my husband on not being sincere.

"No," my husband corrected, "being not-sincere."

"There's a difference," Ron said, trying to make sense of the transmitter's instructions, which were mostly in Korean.

But I wanted to be both sharp and relaxed, and to get downstairs and have this over with. I did want a Xanax.

And so my husband and I entered into negotiations.

* * *

"Thank you," Paul Shaffer told the studio audience. "Thank you so much." I laughed, in the wings, in the long jagged shadows produced by lights at many angles. There was applause for Shaffer. The APPLAUSE sign was again featured on camera.

From this distance Letterman's hair looked something like a helmet, I thought. It seemed thick and very solid. He kept putting index cards in the big gap between his front teeth and fiddling with them. He and the staff quickly presented a list of ten medications, both over-the-counter and 'scrip, that resembled well-known candies in a way Letterman claimed was insidious. He showed slides side by side, for comparison. It was true that Advils looked just like brown M&M's. Motrin, in the right light, were SweetTarts. A brand of MAO inhibitor called Nardil looked just like the tiny round Red Hots we'd all eaten as children.