How I Got This Way

by Regis Philbin

  But when it came to looking for Kathie Lee’s replacement, Gelman and I very deliberately decided to take sure-handed control of the selection process. Honestly, we just took our time finding the right fit. What was the hurry at that point, anyway? In fact, I’d even gone so far as to utter the near unthinkable on that Leap Day 2000 when Kathie Lee dropped the bombshell and announced her upcoming departure from our show. At first, of course, I articulated half-joking disbelief: “She’s kidding,” I told the viewers in knee-jerk reaction, even though I already half knew this moment had been coming. “She ain’t going anywhere. . . . She’ll be back, crawling in here saying, please. . . .” Until I quickly saw that she meant it. Especially when she next offered, very sincerely, to stay on until we could “find the right lady . . . if it’s a lady” to fill her seat. Then she added, “Hey, it’s the new millennium! Why not a guy?” And that’s when I shot off my mouth and said, “Why does it have to be anybody?” Naturally, she rolled her eyes and told me, “Oh, you’re really out of control now. . . .” Thanks again, Dana.

  Nevertheless, we had some fun over the next six months bringing in an array of different people to try on the cohost role for size. Some of them had no desire to take the job, but we knew they’d produce a day or two of laughs for the show anyway. Jon Stewart—yes, a guy—was one that I recall kidding around with quite enjoyably. Even Don Rickles got out of bed early one morning during a trip through New York and joined me at the desk. He wasn’t thrilled about it, but that only made him more Don Rickles—feistier than ever, of course—and we loved it. As another novelty, I think we even managed to have the entire cast of that season’s reality series Survivor, one by one, come give it a shot. None of them survived, however. There was pretty much a constant march of possible or improbable candidates—comediennes, actresses, musicians, newswomen, sports stars, you name it—and most dependably, my Joy, who has always been terrific at Host Chats and the guest interviews, even though she wanted absolutely no part of the full-time job. She gets more than her fair share of me off camera, as I’m sure she would happily tell you herself.

  And it so happened that during those months, not only was the name of our show temporarily changed to simply Live! With Regis but also, at long last, I actually won a Daytime Emmy for best talk-show host, my first ever in the very category that my whole career was built on. In the years following that totally unexpected victory, and even up until very recently, I had a lot of fun shouting out to no one in particular: “The only time Regis ever won an Emmy was when he was out there all by himself!” And then I’d repeat this kind of general noisy blustering until everyone was fed up with it or just very, very annoyed. Frankly, it was thoroughly enjoyable being so obnoxious, although some people who don’t know me better actually took it seriously. But those days are over now—with my solo Emmy outbursts, anyway—because just this year Kelly and I won the Daytime Emmy Outstanding Talk Show Host award together. Truthfully, it more than surprised us both. But what still bugs us most of all and remains an ongoing mystery is why the show itself, after twenty-three years of consistently strong production, has never once won the Best Talk Show award.

  But not to get too far ahead of myself: So there I was eleven years ago with somebody new sitting beside me every week, each one of them hoping to eventually get that full-time cohost job. As we got increasingly serious about our search, there did emerge a promising handful who we brought back in earnest several times for yet another look. The process actually turned quite competitive: Many beautiful ladies realized it was a choice, high-profile role on a long-running hit show, which would ultimately mean for them the start of both a new career and an altogether new life. We carefully analyzed and weighed all the possibilities. When you’ve interviewed as many people as I have through the years—which was really what I’d been doing with each and every prospective candidate on live television during those interim months—they inevitably all seem to blend in with one another. Unless, that is, they somehow stand out and leave a certain sparkle lingering in the air afterward. That sparkle is very important, and it’s obvious when it truly shines. There was one guest we’d had on with us a few years before who had done just that. Hers was a natural, quick-witted, unaffected, confident, fun-loving kind of sparkle that both Gelman and I remembered very well. Especially because it came from, frankly, such an unexpected source—I mean, a young soap opera actress? (Usually that kind of easy conversational spunk is innate only in a special breed of broadcaster types.) We decided to invite her back, this time to consider her as a possible cohost.

  So that was when this smiling, petite ball of fire named Kelly Ripa made her return to Live! for a test run at the rotating, up-for-grabs hot seat to my left. And my God, who knew what spontaneous combustion we’d make together? By then she was in her tenth year as an All My Children fixture, having started on the classic ABC soap at age twenty as a bright-eyed ingenue. But now we learned that along with her great sparkle, attractive looks, and ebullient personality—the word ebullient, by the way, drives her nuts, which I love—she also excelled at telling a good story. And that, of course, was so crucial to the opening Host Chat segment. In pulling up her memories of things that happened last night, last week, or even many years earlier, she could instinctively zero in on the funniest details, which came out of nowhere and somehow hit a comic bull’s-eye. That knack of hers pretty instantly struck a chord with the audience.

  Not only was she something of a revelation to us, but early on she was actually blindsided by a real-life revelation of her own, live on our show. It was one of those astonishing, unforgettable, true-life TV moments that you couldn’t have scripted even if you tried. We relived it, in fact, not long ago, during our tenth anniversary week, when Gelman sprang on us, as a surprise guest, my old Los Angeles psychic pal Char Margolis, who had also been our guest back on November 1, 2000—the morning of Kelly’s initial tryout, believe it or not. “I don’t mind telling you that Char, of course, is the reason I got my job here,” Pippa said, as Char walked onstage this time. “I am convinced.” For sure, Char had been the chief catalyst in creating what turned out to be an unforeseeable jaw-dropper of an introduction for any cohost, potential or otherwise. On that long-ago November day, she had spoken of how Kelly’s dear deceased grandmother was always watching over her. But then Char continued to reveal that her grandmother’s spirit also knew of other private developments on the horizon. . . .

  CHAR: I heard you say earlier that you’re married and you have a husband and a son. She watches over your son, and she’s also showing me another baby. And I don’t—

  KELLY: [gasping in shock here]

  CHAR: And she’s saying that she’s going to watch over you when this new baby comes. And it’s soon. It’s not far away. You’re not pregnant yet, are you?

  ME: Are you expecting?

  KELLY: [still gasping in shock]

  ME: Is that a yes?

  KELLY: I haven’t told my bosses [at All My Children] yet! Oh my God . . . oh my God!

  Well, right then and there, we all found out what she had shared with only a handful of intimates at that point—that she was a month or so into her second pregnancy. Sort of a broadcast minispectacular, which made a huge impact on the audience and also showed us what that most unguarded, spontaneous side of herself looked like. We had, up until then and even afterward for a couple more months, spent time working with other serious potential candidates, some of whom were quite good—but in the end it could only be Kelly. We kind of knew that from her memorable debut onward. She was the right choice and really the only choice. Like Kathie Lee, she knew exactly how to stir things up with me during the Host Chats. And also, just like Kathie Lee, who’d famously given birth twice during our years together, when Cody and Cassidy became household names, Kelly brought the promise of sharing further adventures in the Land of New Motherhood with us, too.

  “Yes, we’re talking babies again—get used to it!” I sho
uted, full of teasing exasperation on the morning of February 5, 2001, when we announced to our viewers that Kelly had gotten the job. And if you’re wondering how we unveiled her as our final selection, I remember starting that show by just cutting to the quick, figuring that everybody out there, me included, had had enough of the half-year talent search experiment: “Let’s get it over with!” I said, more relieved than anybody else, I promise you. “Say hello to my new cohost: Kelly Ripa. . . .” We all knew she had just the right equipment. Standing on the sidelines that day was her husband and All My Children costar, Mark Consuelos, with whom she’d already had a son, Michael, a few years earlier. During the broadcast, Mark hinted about various personality quirks I could expect from his wife (pregnant or not) on a regular basis, and I leapt at the chance to get the full rundown in order to arm myself: “Mark,” I pleaded, “let’s have coffee after the show!”

  Of course, their daughter, Lola, would arrive that June, right after Kelly had made it through the all-important May “sweeps” ratings period before taking her first maternity leave from the show. Then, two Februarys later, their second son, Joaquin, was born—yes, the little guy that “Uncle Regis” accidentally dropped on the floor (he was fine, and it wasn’t my fault, I swear!) when Gelman later cooked up a taped bit where I actually babysat for all three of the Consuelos children one evening so their parents could go out for dinner. Anyway, while I’m on this subject, it was mid-November 2001 when Kelly—and a bunch of our Live! staffers—went on the Letterman show to deliver a list of the Top Ten Things You Hear in a Typical Working Day with Regis. And it was Kelly who gave the Number One payoff entry: “Have you noticed how his cohosts keep getting pregnant?” Like I had anything to do with it! What, am I supposed to be some sort of fertility god? Then again, she did start referring to me on air in the very early going as Big Daddy, which I kind of liked. But that, I think, had more to do with a kidding sweet respect . . . I think? Meanwhile, I’d nicknamed her “Pippa” pretty quickly, which I still call her to this day. Besides the fact that the word suited her to a tee, another reason for it is that her real name begins with K, and it tricked me a little too often into mistakenly calling her “Kathie Lee”—and David Letterman has never stopped jokingly referring to her as “Kelly Lee” just to keep me all the more off-kilter.

  (By the way, because you’re probably wondering, I might as well tell you that among other entries on that Letterman Top Ten List were Numbers Seven and Six, “Regis, stop annoying people!” and “Does he ever shut up?” from our producers Mariann Sabol and Elyssa Shapiro—thank you, ladies—as well as Number Three, “Regis, put on your pants!” which came from Gelman, who you should know has never let me dress in privacy before the show throughout all our years together! He says it’s part of his job as executive producer, since he’s prepping me for the hour ahead with random last-minute details while I get myself suited up. But sometimes I wonder. . . .)

  Anyway, from the start, Kelly’s work ethic was strong—and it always stayed that way. At All My Children, where she continued in her long-running role of Hayley Vaughan until the end of 2002, she was used to putting in twelve-hour-a-day shifts. Even now, after ten years and counting, she still can’t get over the fact that her primary job as cohost at Live! is finished, more or less, after only one hour each morning. By strange coincidence, though, back when she was maintaining double duties on our show and on the daily megahit soap series, I also happened to be hosting four prime-time hour-long episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire every week. That added up to nineteen weekly broadcast hours the two of us were filling for the network. She joked on her first day, “I think it’s an ABC policy—you must work two jobs!” I said, “Between the two of us, we’ve got forty percent of the schedule covered. If we go down, ABC is over.” (For a while there, it wasn’t far from true that the Millionaire quiz show had given the ABC evening lineup such enormous ratings that it returned from the near dead to become a powerhouse reborn—which, of course, prompted me to remind everyone who crossed my path that Regis had single-handedly saved the network! How could I resist?)

  But back to that work ethic of South Jersey’s very own Kelly Maria Ripa: Yes, she would develop into a terrific talk-show host, but she always kept her skills sharp as an actress. I believe in my heart that she has all the comic ability and range to become the Lucille Ball of her generation. She’s just that good. So it only made sense that less than a year after leaving All My Children, she launched into a three-season run in her own ABC prime-time sitcom called Hope & Faith, in which she starred as a wild and scheming former soap opera actress forced to move back to Ohio to live with her decent and practical sister Hope (played by Kelly’s real-life close pal Faith Ford), a small-town wife and mother of three kids. To maybe heighten all the fine silliness of the series, she even coaxed me into my own recurring guest role—as the town’s slick, sleazy used-car dealer and local TV pitchman, Handsome Hal Halverson. How she and her sitcom gang imagined me as him, I’ll never know. But during the rehearsals and shoots for those episodes I watched her transform herself effortlessly from Kelly Ripa into the unrestrained Faith Fairfield, whose antics, I should add, tended to be very reminiscent of Lucy Ricardo at her most madcap. The show also gave us a chance to playfully blend our true-life daily Live! show bits into these two characters who were endlessly at odds—as Faith continued to try wheedling new cars from the unscrupulous Handsome Hal. I liked the way she set the tone for one of my appearances just before I came on-screen. . . .

  FAITH: He’s near. I can smell his cologne. It smells like—

  HAL: [emerging] Dollar bills, baby!

  At one point, Hal tried talking her into costarring with him in one of his cheesy TV ad spots: “You need a fancy car,” Hal told her. “I need a fancy star for my new commercial. This is kismet!” Faith reluctantly agreed, then said in a comic aside to her sister, “But I seriously doubt that being on TV with that guy will do much for my career!” We even had some fun in another episode when Gelman came on to play my son, Hal, Jr., just so I could dress him down in the guise of our fictional characters. He’d walked up to hand me some sales reports (just like the way he’s been plying me for years with daily Nielsen ratings printouts) and I barked, “Can’t you see I’m with people? Now, you sit on this stool over here and wait for me to speak to you!” And I’d also constantly reject his pleas for affection: “Why haven’t you ever said you love me?” he’d beg of Handsome Hal. “Say it! Say it!” That’s when Kelly’s Faith character looked on with disgust and said, “Could you imagine having to work with those two?”

  But it was in my third and final episode where the lines blurred more than ever between real and sitcom life. Suddenly down on his luck, Hal decided that he and Faith would be shoo-ins to take over the local morning show, Wake Up, Glen Falls, whose longtime cohosts had left for a bigger TV market. And so there we were, pretending to be morning cohosts, doing a clumsy, exaggerated version of our real Host Chat, with me flipping through the small-town newspaper looking for various topics. Honest to God, though, the script had me eventually landing on one ridiculous item that led her into some familiar ad-libbing straight from our own usual repartee on Live!. . . .

  HAL: Now, let’s move on to this new phenomenon in town. There’s a guy with a very long toe, right?

  FAITH: A long toe?

  HAL: A long toenail, I mean.

  FAITH: Long toenail? Longer than yours? [Here we actually started cracking up—since she’d gone off-script on a tangent we both knew a little too well, thank you.] Because I happened to have seen your naked foot and I know you buy your shoes a whole size bigger to accommodate those toenails.

  HAL: Oh boy. She knows me like a book.

  My line there was extemporaneous, too, because she really does know me like a book. Maybe a little too much so. But that knowledge, of course, would only continue to make our own show’s opening segment such a strong must-watch element throughout our years
of teamwork. She’s never been afraid to call me on my random peccadilloes: “You need some moisturizer on your leg!” she told me right on her first official day as my permanent cohost, in fact. (I think I’d been showing off a baseball scar received in Yankee spring training a few years before, always looking for some pity that never came.) Likewise, she’d pounce on whatever aggravations or oddities I’ve ever groused about—from my misadventures in finding the cure for snoring to my fondness for drawing elaborate diagrams to explain some new mix-up or other. (“Oh,” she’d say, shaking with sarcastic delight, “this is exciting! It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Philbin diagram! Come on, everybody, applaud!”) Once she gave me a pedicure on the air—a terrifying experience! (“I lost a bet!” was how she explained it one night on the Letterman show, even though I was the one being tortured.) But she wielded that pair of nail clippers like a weapon and went to work as I squirmed: “Don’t hurt me! Not too close!” I yelled. And she yelled back, “Stop it! You’re making me nervous!”

  Equally scary was the day she removed a splinter deeply embedded in my thumb. I know that this may sound like an everyday occurrence to you, but the magic of that opening Chat segment has always been to bring up our personal afflictions as they occurred and try to solve them right there. Regarding my splinter—needless to say, she probably does that sort of thing every day with her kids, which is maybe why she constantly refers to me as her oldest child. But this splinter, the darned thing just was burrowed so many layers beneath the surface. I tried to conceal my horror as she sliced and probed her way in there—“Look at the size of it!” I yelled, wincing like crazy, “I’m breaking out in a sweat!”—until she finally got it out and triumphantly displayed it to the cameras. Where else, I ask you, has splinter tweezing made for entertaining television?