How I Got This Way

by Regis Philbin

  Still, I’ve always wondered what made Lou so great. Setting difficult personal goals surely didn’t hurt. I once read that long ago he actually wrote out a bucket list of 108 things he wanted to accomplish in his lifetime. Among them, he wanted to coach at Notre Dame. He wanted to win a national championship. He wanted to jump out of an airplane and parachute down to earth. He wanted to learn magic and demonstrate it on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. (He did make it onto the Carson show for a terrific 1991 appearance but, alas, didn’t get to pull off any of his magic moves.) At lunch during this past year, I asked him how many of those 108 feats he had so far accomplished. He told me 102. He’s still working on the last six, and I wouldn’t bet against him. Nowadays, he’s a regular on ESPN during weekends in the fall, talking college football with Merle May, and once in a while he even does a little stand-up comedy as well as a few magic tricks in pretaped skits. He’s still great fun to watch. He also continues to speak at Notre Dame convocations, and remains a favorite at major business seminars across the country, being the masterful motivational speaker he’s always been. All of us alumni remember him and wish he had never left. He brings back fond memories of Friday-night pep rallies, when he’d move the crowds and literally will his teams to win games other coaches might’ve secretly thought impossible. He loved Notre Dame and we loved him.

  To this day, whenever I have an important challenge in front of me—whether it’s a new TV project I’m embarking on, a tough personal decision I have to make, or even something silly looming ahead like a crucial tennis serve—I still think of him. I’ll bounce that tennis ball over and over again, sizing up my serve, and right there in my mind’s eye, I see Lou Holtz in his sweater and Notre Dame hat, telling me that he wants me to hit it right. He wants me to win. He wants me to be perfect. I love him for that. Of course I’m still not perfect. But he keeps making me try.

  Thanks, Lou. And incidentally, if anyone in this life is actually perfect at being exactly who he or she ought to be, then that person could only be you.

  WHAT I TOOK AWAY FROM IT ALL

  Get yourself near people who exude great enthusiasm and watch how it rubs off on you.

  If you approach any task with perfection as your goal, it will always bring you that much closer to truly achieving it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  KATHIE LEE GIFFORD

  I’m still not exactly sure how or why this happened to me. But of course it did happen, and frankly, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like before it all started. Not that I’m complaining. I’m just talking about the fact that—for the last three and a half decades of hosting morning television—I’ve continually had a woman seated to my immediate left. Rooted firmly, poised at my elbow, fixed to my side, always glowing shiny and bright. Actually, there’s been a small full-time parade of these gifted ladies, one after the other, each beautiful, each sharp-minded, each ready to pounce on the next inadvertent stupid remark that might come out of my mouth, taking me to task, and not letting me forget about such remarks too quickly either. Where would I be without them? Where would they be without me? All right, they’d be doing just fine, but what memories we would have all missed out on—me and them and, I’m thinking, our viewers, too. You get the picture. It’s a picture that I guess I’ve shared primarily with six of them—and two, in particular, most famously of all. By that, of course, you must know I mean these last two—that pair of back-to-back dynamos who both became cottage industries unto themselves as I sat to their immediate right, fighting for my life, morning after morning after morning.

  As for the first of those two forces of nature, the one whose name sits up at the top of this chapter . . . Well, she was right there at that major moment of blastoff, on September 5, 1988, when people across the country suddenly began to get a glimpse of what I’d been doing locally at the start of every weekday, more or less, since 1975. And what I’ve always somehow just kept on doing—up until lately, anyway. Yes, she had been my cohost and copilot for three years already when our little New York–oriented WABC-TV Morning Show took flight that September to become the nationally syndicated Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee program. And what a life-changer that was. For both of us. Next thing we knew, our names and personalities became so hopelessly intertwined that wherever either of us went—and I mean anyplace in our actual separate off-camera lives—people couldn’t understand where the other one of us was. All we heard, over and over and over again, was “Where’s Kathie Lee?” and “Where’s Regis?” Somehow they couldn’t understand why we didn’t move around perpetually fused together twenty-four hours a day. It was a sign, of course, that we’d caught on as a combo in maybe the biggest way possible, which was a wonderful thing, to be sure—but oh, the questions . . . I once wrote out my definitive all-purpose response because, honest to God, I couldn’t take it anymore:

  Where is she? How is she? What’s she like? Her. Her! HER! All right, let’s get this out of the way! In answer to the most asked questions of my life: She is irrepressible, indefatigable, unsinkable, ambitious, a whirlwind, and, frankly, she is the one who’s really out of control. She’s feisty and fearless, brash and loving, sentimental and shameless, generous and demanding. There’s more than one woman here. Forget about Sybil—there’s a whole platoon of Kathie Lees, and they never get tired. Never!

  What’s funny to me is that long before anyone cared, there was one especially significant answer to the question of Kathie Lee’s whereabouts when we were not together that ought to be noted here. To rewind the tape a little bit, it just so happened that she had been working out in Los Angeles back when I was just getting my local KABC-TV morning show off the ground. Her name then was Kathie Lee Johnson, and she was a budding multitalent who sang (it’s hard to believe, I know) on the updated version of the old game show Name That Tune, in addition to having other pursuits in the business. But as fate decreed it, she found herself regularly tuning in to that morning show of mine, which no doubt helped to give her a very early understanding of what I was all about and also what our future together would someday entail. “When I first saw Reege on TV in Los Angeles,” she later said, after the two of us had been cohosting together in New York for about a decade, “I couldn’t figure out if he was adorably obnoxious or obnoxiously adorable. I still can’t. I just know that he is the absolute best at what he does. . . .” Those years in the mid-seventies marked the dawn of a whole new era in talk television, and—although neither of us could have known it then—it was a dawn that would somehow bring her into my life and plant her to my immediate left further on down the road . . . when we’d actually be ready for each other.

  Because all of a sudden, out of nowhere and yet everywhere all at once, it was happening: a gradual format switch that hardly anybody remembers, but I always will. The time had arrived for the two-headed, double-teaming phenomenon of male-and-female cohosts. My KABC general manager, the inimitable John Severino, explained it all to me, just as I was about to take over hosting the station’s daily ninety-minute A.M. Los Angeles program in 1975. (That’s when I was also still juggling entertainment reporting duties on both the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts.) Sev told me that television, like the rest of the world, was changing. It was all about balance and equality and individual points of view and so on—but the bottom line was that there would be male and female cohosts or coanchors on all talk and news shows, effective immediately.

  It was something new for me, to say the least. Sev then told me about his first choice of cohost for me: She was an up-and-coming sensation at the very same San Diego station where I’d in fact gotten my own start, KFMB-TV. Her name was Sarah Purcell. She’d been hired as a secretary, and when the AFTRA union went on strike, the station substituted for the on-camera people who had walked off the job those folks in the office who didn’t cower away from the broadcast spotlight. Sarah happened to be a good-looking blonde with a terrific personality and a winning smile. She jumped in to pinch-hit f
or the town’s number one weather-forecast personality, Bob Dale, who was a folksy midwestern guy from Ohio with a warm, humorous approach. He was just a pure TV natural. San Diego loved him, but Sarah, the secretary from Indiana, was soon making a major impact all her own. Since the weather in Southern California hardly ever changes, the forecast person has to offer up some entertaining antics besides simply reporting the very predictable meteorological numbers, and she magically pulled it off. So magically, in fact, that Hollywood heard about her, and just like that, Severino gave me my first cohost.

  I wanted, of course, to keep the style of my opening segment just the way it had always been since that original Saturday-night show in San Diego. The one where I just ad-libbed stories that I’d collected about the various things that had happened to me throughout the week. That part of the show turned out to have been a consistent favorite feature for so many viewers back then. But this was a daily show—with a cohost—and I soon learned that it would be a different ball game. It would require developing a near-instant rapport and chemistry with the other person. As I explained it to Sarah, there were no writers and no studio audience and we would have to be the sole audience for each other, all while making the viewers feel like they were right there with us. We would have to listen intently and respond right off the cuff to whatever the other was saying. There would be no meetings to discuss what we would talk about. In fact, we wouldn’t even speak to each other—and some mornings, not even see each other—until we went on the air. Which continued to be my unchangeable and quite essential preshow policy with every other cohost to come. In other words, I was hoping to keep it entirely spontaneous. Whatever we wanted to say to each other needed to be said first in front of the cameras. (My motto sort of became “Don’t leave it out in the hallway!” That means no small talk at all prior to setting foot in the studio at that moment of airtime.) I could do that by myself because I knew where I was going with each story I told; however, doing that with a cohost would be a new kind of challenge, demanding a lot of on-the-spot guesswork while navigating the course of our bantering. But, you know, it all worked out. Sarah learned quickly. And mastered it so well that, two and a half years later, NBC offered her a job on a prime-time show and she was gone.

  One day near the end of her run, we had as our guests Steve Garvey, the popular first baseman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and his pretty wife, Cyndy. A few hours after the broadcast, Severino called me into a meeting. Sarah, we knew, would have to be replaced the following week, and based on what he’d seen that morning, he suggested that we ask Cyndy. True, he said, she had very little TV experience, but she was also married to a Dodger great and was a beautiful blonde with charisma, so who cared about experience? “You’ll make it happen,” he told me—actually, more like ordered me—and that was that. Cyndy stepped in, caught on quickly, and became quite good at this almost indescribable Host Chat thing we were well on our way to perfecting.

  Truthfully, only one thing threw me about having a cohost: It meant that I could never again conduct an interview alone, a direct and focused one-on-one with a guest. I missed having that opportunity to lean in and try to create an intimate, memorable conversation. Now it would always have to be two of us talking with the guest at the same time, during which we would inevitably go our separate ways in the interview. We were never really able to build naturally from one question to the next. But that’s the way it would be for the next thirty-five years. It was a necessary and unavoidable compromise we had to make. And in the end, it wouldn’t be all that bad. But sometimes, with certain guests, I can’t help but think that a one-on-one interview could have been so much better.

  Still, the ratings on that local show went through the roof and it became one of those must-watch Los Angeles TV mainstays. Nobody in our 9 a.m. time slot came close. Once, the heavy-hitting syndicated Phil Donahue show turned up against us on a competing station . . . and then slowly, quietly went away. Years later, Donahue would jokingly complain to me that he never got a break in Los Angeles until they moved him to the afternoons. Meanwhile, Cyndy and I rolled merrily on into the start of the eighties until I got that ultimately regrettable call from NBC in 1981 and then proceeded to let them destroy a show that could easily have still been running on their NBC affiliates thirty years later.

  NBC president Grant Tinker, as I’ve noted, had personally reached out to offer me that job and suggested I keep everything exactly the way I was doing it on my A.M. Los Angeles show, and that included having a cohost. I thought about the possibilities. There was one young lady I’d noticed doing a local show on Channel 11 called PM West. Her name was Mary Hart. She had all the solid credentials along with her looks, her voice, and a keen interviewing technique. Also, there was, and still is, a genuine niceness about her and, of course, that relentlessly great smile. Yes, she was the one. But before we even started our nine o’clock run on NBC that last morning of November 1981, the New York–based network programming guys decided to cut the show to thirty minutes. That made success impossible. We really didn’t have the time or the chance to get established as a team, to get that give-and-take rapport cooking in the opening segment—or for that matter to have an opening segment at all! It was a predestined heartbreak, but Mary was a champ about it. Then again, tell me the truth: Have you ever seen Mary Hart without that beaming smile on her face? So we knew the end was inevitable, and one day in early April 1982, it came. The show was over.

  The very next day I got a phone call from John Goldhammer, my old program director at KABC, who’d become involved in developing a syndicated half-hour all-entertainment news show, the first of its kind. He wanted to know about Mary and whether she’d be a good fit for the format. “Are you kidding?” I told him. “She’d be a natural for that show.” Well, Mary got the job and you know the rest. She’s been the queen of Entertainment Tonight since it launched thirty years ago and is one of the main reasons for its enduring success. She gave the show a touch of elegance, friendliness, and sincerity that made it a hit. Her male cohosts have come and gone, but Mary Hart stayed and became one of the most famous names in the television landscape. I wish she could have done it with me on the national NBC network show that never had a fair shot.

  In any event, by 1983, it was back to local television thanks to my mercurial old boss John Severino, who’d become ABC’s network president. I was basically restarting my original L.A. show, except this time from New York City, where my cohost, very conveniently, would be Cyndy Garvey, who had recently moved east to be near her postdivorce love interest, the fine composer Marvin Hamlisch. Ratings for our brand-new WABC-TV Morning Show again started climbing pretty swiftly. Of course, the viewership couldn’t have sunk any lower than the minuscule numbers we’d inherited from the station’s previous morning regime. But in fact we were off to a truly great start, and at the end of that first year, I invoked the Misery Clause (remember that ploy?) and, just like in the old KABC days, signed a four-year deal (taken to the cleaners again) as executed by Sev, that ever-smooth contract negotiator. When Cyndy learned that I’d been given such a unique—and frankly, uncommonly considerate—option clause, she couldn’t understand why she hadn’t been offered one upon her hiring as well. I tried to explain to her about my especially nerve-wracking circumstances, having to uproot my family and such. But the issue escalated into a standoff between her and ABC management, then into a bitter feud, and before long it was over.

  Time for another cohost.

  This one came direct from Oklahoma, of all places, full of energy, moxie, and eager to make her mark on this hot show in the Big City. She was Ann Abernathy. We had already met in L.A. at an ABC affiliate preview of new season shows. She had a great engaging personality, and I knew she had all the right experience and qualities for her next big step. It occurred to me even then: This is our next cohost. She came here, fit right in, was quickly embraced by our viewers, and then, like something out of the movies, she soon after fell in love
with someone actually from the movies—quite literally, the Columbia Pictures chairman Gary Lieberthal. Right before our eyes, those of us at the show witnessed their romance blossom at an accelerated pace and knew she would inevitably have to make one of the biggest decisions of her life, because she was also in love with her New York–based TV job. In the end, Gary swept her off her feet and took her away to a new, exciting life in Hollywood. They bought the lovely old Richard Brooks–Jean Simmons home in Holmby Hills. Joy and I visited them there a year later, and she gave us a tour of her truly grand new lifestyle. And what a dazzling whirlwind ride it had been for her—from Oklahoma to New York City to the privileged enclave of Holmby Hills, all inside a couple of years. It should happen to all of us.

  What did happen to me next, however, would be the beginning of fifteen years in the spotlight with the One Who Changed Everything. Well, actually, nothing about the format of our morning program changed, then or ever really, except that my new cohost would quickly enough establish herself to be something of a human tsunami—unpredictable, unrestrained, uncompromising, unstoppable, and most of all, impossible to ignore. She arrived on that last Monday of June 1985, flushed and slightly breathless, with a song in her heart and a pair of running shoes on her feet. That was because she had just raced up Sixty-seventh Street from the set of Good Morning America, where she’d then been working for a couple of years as a special correspondent and occasional fill-in host for Joan Lunden. In fact, she’d just pinch-hit for Joan again that very morning when, mere moments later, she made her debut beside me as Ann Abernathy’s full-time replacement. She burst into our little WABC studio a few seconds after we’d gone on the air. “My new cohost can’t even get here on time!” I hollered, teasing her from the start, which she would reciprocate in kind (believe me!) for the rest of our long ride together. In fact, I think it took her all of about one show before she first called me a jerk on live local television. That, of course, continued throughout all our years of live national broadcasts as well. But it was her special way, I think, of showing me affection and respect, as only she could. I think.