Bill Scheft: The show ends and they take a fucking wrecking ball to the theater the next day. GET OUT. That was stunning. 

Barbara Gaines: I was obsessed with those twenty-eight shows. The fact that the show was over, I kind of put that out of my mind. I didn’t feel the doom of it ending. I wanted to make these the best shows ever, but in doing so I wasn’t thinking that meant I was going out.

Rick Scheckman: I was going around giving people extra TV sets and desk chairs. Pat Farmer gave me an armrest from one of the guest chairs. We had to decamp so quickly. We taped the final show on Wednesday, we went in on Thursday and Friday, and then we were barred from the theater because they destroyed it. It was a work zone. They were destroying the offices on Monday.

Brian Teta: People started grabbing stuff quickly. I was resistant and it felt ghoulish, but now I wish I had taken everything, because of what they did. They took it down so fast. I cracked off a lamppost from the cityscape. I wish I had taken more—a bridge or something. It was sad that it was happening. 

Jeremy Weiner: I had everything packed up. I came back the next day to load it into the car. I was back for maybe an hour the day after, just to clear things out. They were already tearing it up. I had a few old late-night bumpers that were really cool from years ago. I didn’t take any specific piece of the set.

Joe Grossman: We certainly felt a little bit rushed, and there was the sense that they were kind of happy to see us go, but that is OK.

Jill Goodwin: I felt like people were in there five minutes after the end of the show ripping things apart. It was pretty crazy and sad. Parts of the bridge were going in the dumpster outside. It was like, “No. If we would have known you were going to just throw it away we would have made a list or something.”

Barbara Gaines: The next day there was spray paint on the walls, for which walls they were taking out and which they were leaving alone. So it said on my wall, “Out.” It was like “Get out.” It was crazy to walk back in to have this giant black paint saying they wanted us out by Friday. Instead of leaving like I should have, I came back on Monday. It was clearly over. CBS threw our set in the garbage. I know it is showbiz, but it felt so harsh. 

Photo courtesy of Barbara Gaines.

Rick Scheckman: I was very unhappy and made my displeasure known to a lot of people. It’s like a Broadway show. If Fiddler on the Roof closes across the street, the next day you see the set being loaded out and everything on the street because someone new is coming. They had to do it, but really on Thursday morning I got in at 10 AM and the theater was gutted. Overnight it was completely gone. So it wasn’t like Thursday morning you had a chance to grab stuff. It was gone. Then the mistake CBS did was throwing stuff into open dumpsters without guards. People could just jump in and take stuff—and they were doing it. I saw it. I am not getting in the dumpster to look for souvenirs.

Vincent Favale: The show bears a lot of blame for it. You have a crew there. I thought everything was going to be preserved. I think Dave got the things he wanted and Paul had the things he wanted. But there were still other iconic things there. The job is to strike the set. People have a job to do. It would have been smarter if we put a canopy over what we were loading out so it wasn’t a street spectacle—someone, maybe it’s me, maybe I am at fault. I should have been the coordinator. I would have put it in my basement, but that didn’t happen.

Rick Scheckman: I know there were some angry phone calls to CBS about “Why are there people in the dumpsters?”

Photo courtesy of Jill Goodwin.

Barbara Gaines: Every theater person knows, when the show is over, a new one is coming in. Even that didn’t quite hit me. It just felt like a dark week. “I’ll just go back to my office.” Then another week goes by. “Maybe I will go back next week.” Then suddenly ten months have gone by. It took a long time for me to realize I wasn’t working and it was over.

Janice Penino: The production offices were on floors eleven, twelve, and fourteen. I was in human resources on eight. We worked for Worldwide Pants. CBS wanted everyone out that Friday, so for most people it was this crazy whirlwind of trying to get these last shows done and all their stuff packed. The next day, after the wrap party, you had to pack and throw stuff out. All of a sudden it was over. For my department, we were gonna be in the office for eight more weeks or so to wrap up the business side. So those last six weeks, for me it was about explaining everyone’s severance package. It was all about closing that part down, but we were continuing because we had work to complete. We could pretend that things were gonna be normal for a little while, even though it wasn’t.

Steve Young: As the last show was ending, I went down to the sidewalk, and there were some Letterman fans hanging out at Rupert’s. They said, “You’ve got to go inside; everyone is pulling stuff out off the set.” There was lettering on the wall of the fourteenth-floor reception area that said Worldwide Pants. I pulled off the W, W, and P and brought those home. I saved a few cue cards from the last show’s monologue that had to do with my jokes or bits.

Jay Johnson: The show ended two years ago, but it feels like it’s been ten years. My memory is slightly blurry on all of that. On our social media channels the response from the fans was so great. We were getting so many comments and tweets from fans in those final weeks as people shared their feelings about Dave’s retirement. It was really an emotional thing to do. I would work a full day and then come home to rewind, and I would read all these comments on Twitter and Facebook that these fans were writing. I think Dave would have been embarrassed by all the outpouring of love, but it was nice to see that people reacted so well to this.

Jill Goodwin: I still have thirty-five episodes on my DVR that I have not been able to go back and watch. It’s just filled with so many thoughts. I wish Dave was still on the air, not that I had to work there. It is like watching old home videos—memories come back. 

Bill Scheft: We still have these reunions. I see people that hadn’t worked on the show in ten years because they wanted to come back and see each other. We were kind of all in this together. We took care of each other. You miss the people. The last time I talked to Dave we sort of laughed at the stuff we thought was so important. “A guy just pitched a no-hitter. We’ve got to get him to do a Top Ten.” [Laughs]

The writing crew watches the show. Photo courtesy of Lee Ellenberg.

Barbara Gaines: My mother would say, “Who did you meet today?” I met no one. I only concentrated on Dave. I might see Bette Davis out of the corner of my eye, but I am only talking to Dave. He was who I was taking care of.

Janice Penino: I don’t think any of us will go through anything like that again. We all lived with the fear of the show ending for so long and now that it has, we have survived. I think Dave would say the same thing. He’s fine. We won’t have each other again, but we had that moment and were a part of it. I never thought of it that way. We weren’t thinking about a legacy. No one had the time to think of it. It was bigger than all of us, but then we realized it at the very end. I am thinking as I am talking to you, “Who is gonna read this book? Who is gonna care what we did in the last six weeks?”

Joe Grossman: That is just Dave’s voice slipping into all of our heads, because that is what Dave would say. “Who is gonna want to read this?” The first instinct is always the self-deprecating mode. It is still basically an office job. It is just an office job where weird things happen. You spend most of your day sitting at your desk at your computer. You are just trying to write fat jokes instead of corporate reports. It was fun to have this office job where one day there is a kangaroo in my office. You don’t get that at most places. Someone said to me in all earnestness, “I am sorry we couldn’t get the monkey permit.” Where else would you hear about a monkey permit? We were all very lucky and very spoiled to work at a big show and make a good living being stupid all day. Despite any negativity you might hear, ninety-nine percent of my days were just great.

Lee Ellenberg: Dave gave viewers a chance to see behind the curtain. I used to love “Viewer Mail” because you got to see Dave’s office. I felt like Letterman was like Mister Rogers, when you take that trolley to the other world. I used to love getting to see that other world. We like Shecky, let’s put him on the show. We fought as much as anybody, but there were times where we tried to show what it was like behind the curtain. 

Janice Penino: Brian Teta was a really good intern and went off and started to work on other talk shows. A couple years go by and a new page came in and said, “Do you remember Brian? I am his girlfriend.” I said, “I am looking for a new pets coordinator.” We ended up hiring Brian. So he owes it all to his now wife. That is how things happened there.

Jill Goodwin: It felt like the end of the show had this manic energy. It was like everyone has senioritis and is going nuts. The writers had all this energy that we didn’t know what to do with. In the last month of the show, we would close the door to the writers’ room and then whack balls around the room. We broke lamps, people got hurt. We were like five-year-olds. People would be on the outside listening in and you would hear all the thuds and “Ows.” Someone showed up wearing a helmet. It felt so stupid. Dave’s office was right below us. I don’t know if he heard us. It was some childish way of coping with losing our jobs.

Joe Grossman: During the final years there were probably five of us who did the core writing for the show: Lee, Jeremy, Steve, Tom Ruprecht, and myself. That is the core era of my show. You are cranking out so much stuff every day. R.J. came along in the last two years or so. He was another quiet, awkward guy. He and I sat next to each other at the conference table. It was the one part of the table that you knew you were never going to hear anything from. 

Lee Ellenberg: Joe is a brilliant writer and one of my favorites I ever worked with. I was a fifteen-year writer, and I would put him in the top five that I worked with. I always thought Craig Thomas and Carter Bays were consistently good at what they did. They created a lot of references in the few years they were there. Steve Young is up there because he is the guy who wrote things that no one else could ever come up with. His sense of humor is bat-shit crazy. I was a big fan of Meredith Scardino; she makes me laugh to this day. My friend Jeremy Weiner was one of the best all-around writers. You need ten jokes? He’ll give you fifty. He is probably the least lazy human being I ever met. Tom Ruprecht is another one. If you had a joke emergency and you needed one joke you go to Tom. You go to Joe. I could also name twenty more, but those are the ones that I looked up to and aspired to be like.

Jill Goodwin: All my best friends are still people I met there. I started two days after I graduated college, so it really was growing up for me. Scheft, Gaines, Jude, they were great people to take you under their wing.

Bill Scheft: The day after the last show, Dave called a lot of people on the staff. He called me and we had a nice discussion about the show. He said, “All those afternoons, just you and me and the cards. We were always trying to get it right. On the last day, I thought we got it right.” That is like a rave from him. He never did anything like that. That was one of the last things that was said on that phone call. In the end, it became important to Steve Young, but Dave and I were a club of two that really cared about the monologue for all those years.

Barbara Gaines: We really did take care of each other: hearing Randi Grossack on my headset, working with Nancy, Kathy, Jude, and all those guys—funny, smart, good people. You don’t get that in civilian life. 

Jeremy Weiner: Jerry knew how to take whatever Dave was doing and capture it in the realest way possible. When Dave is making it up on the spot, to be able to follow that and put it together in a cohesive way is something. That was a tough gig and he did a great job. He turned that kind of stuff into something. Being in the control room, watching him work, was very exciting.

Randi Grossack: Jerry was great to work with. We worked so long together that if he just made a noise, I would know what it was involved with. He was unbelievably patient and creative. He would get out on the floor and get involved with the staging or the blocking. Like any TV director they have their moments, but I appreciate all the opportunities he gave me.

Eddie Valk: Jerry was instrumental in getting me to become a stage manager. He was always great with me. It was such a unique kind of show. I can’t explain the vibe. It was more like a family atmosphere. For the amount of stress level that everyone could have had, it always seemed like everything was doable.

Jill Goodwin: Jerry Foley was great during those last musical performances and trying to do different stuff with them. He did a great job.

Barbara Gaines and Jude Brennan. Photo courtesy of Jill Goodwin.

Barbara Gaines: I adore Jude Brennan. She is my bestie. She doesn’t like to talk. Jude was our steady, our adult. She taught me everything. We started on the morning show together. I was green and she showed me how to do whatever had to be done. One day she said, “I can’t get up at five in the morning anymore. I am leaving.” She wrote down ten pages in long hand on a legal pad how to do the job and left. When we were coming back to do Late Night, she was the first person they asked to come back.

Jill Goodwin: Jude was really dry and funny. She is the kind of person that could have been a writer. She and Barbara are best friends and are polar opposites. Barbara is like the crazy aunt at Thanksgiving and Jude is the put-together aunt, the buttoned-up voice of reason. She always was the last voice when no one knew what to do or was freaking out. “Does this joke cross the line? What does Jude say?” She came across as someone you didn’t want to cross. I worked closely with her for three years. Seeing her opposite Barbara and that dynamic, their whole careers were spent there with each other. They were almost like these really smart sisters. They were both fantastic bosses.

Kathy Mavrikakis: Jude Brennan was a wonderful mentor to me. She taught me how to not get upset about the bullshit, how to stay focused on what we were doing that day. She was supportive, wonderful, and shared her knowledge generously. She gave me parts of her job when I was her assistant so she could do more and then I increased my value over time. I owe her a lot. 

Barbara Gaines: The upper women in the company would be Jude, me, and then Kathy. Those three women were the top women and luckily had no ego. We just wanted the show to go well. I always said, “My show comes first and you guys are all part of the show. So tell me what you got.” Dave came first, then the actual production, then the staff, but I cared about all of it. If there was any maternal instinct in me, it came from Jude. Jude took care of me until I grew up a little—you know, until I was fifty.

Brian Teta: I will tell you this. At this point in my career, I have been lucky enough that I have met every single hero I had as a kid and adult. Presidents, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, actors and actresses in movies that I loved as a child. They tell you to never meet your heroes, and that is true, but Dave never disappointed. He was always so real on television; there was nothing artificial about what he was doing. Is he a little cranky? Sure, but you know that going in. He is smart, sarcastic, and funny. You are not looking for hugs when you go to work with Dave. There is nothing to disappoint you. He is kind of going to be what you expect.

Lee Ellenberg: The kind of quality that I liked in Dave I see in certain movie stars, where I could watch them do anything. I don’t know what it is. There are just some people who can just sit and talk and own the area around them in a way that no one else can. Dave has that. Whether I was there for twenty years or not wouldn’t have had any impact on the show. It was all who we worked for. I like to believe I made my contributions, but had I never stepped foot into that office Dave would still be as brilliant as he was.

Randi Grossack: It was the greatest experience of my life. I loved Dave before I worked there, and then to be involved in all of it is such a great gift. To have met and worked with people who are amazingly talented, smart, funny, and now are some of my closest friends, that means the world to me. To be so incredibly involved in the final piece, I was touched to be asked to work on it, and it became so important to me. I can’t thank Dave and Barbara enough to have been asked to work on it. I am so proud of what I did.

Eddie Valk: I kind of learned from Dave that you always want to make it count, just his passion for knowledge. He always knew everything going on. He knew the camera is here, that Paul is there, absorbed what was going on and maintained a level of awareness. That is something I would love to reach.

Janice Penino: Dave was a guy that was so talented yet so hard on himself. He spent a long time focusing on the wrong thing. Going forward I try to be very mindful of that, to focus on the right thing, as he is doing now. I am proud to be part of that group of people and to have had that camaraderie there. I got to make a difference in the lives of the people that worked there. I also learned loyalty. He did a lot of things for a lot of people that he never talked about. He always did right. 

Bill Scheft: I learned a lot of practical things. I learned to always put the very funniest word or phrase at the end of the joke, and put the strongest joke at the end of the run. To not be satisfied. He taught me a real work ethic. I thought I was a pretty hard worker before I went to work there. I really wasn’t. I was Mr. Shortcut. You turn in fifty jokes and on a good day he checked ten, put eight on cards, and did five. You realized that whether he took ten jokes or he took none, you were still a writer. There was value in what he did and what you did.

Jill Goodwin: Maybe Dave wasn’t in the writers’ room with us, but he still had a hand in all the writing and wanting it to be his vision. When someone worked on your script, you always wonder, “Is this making it better?” When Dave made changes, it always made it better. If it came back from Dave all marked up, you didn’t feel that Dave hated it. You thought he cared enough to make it better. He was the employee who was at the office the longest. First in, last out. Somewhat of a private guy, but had a crazy work ethic.

Steve Young: I learned to try my own sensibility and let it take the time to breath and to emerge. In my case and over many years, I did become the whole version of myself, which was usually something helpful to the show. “How can this be made better? Sharper? Shorter?” Dave was always in search of something good being made better, which I think I have absorbed.

Jeremy Weiner: One of my big takeaways from the show is to always try to push past that first take on things. Don’t just settle for the first thing that comes to your mind. Try to explore it and push beyond. Try to find a deeper or funnier way to do things. He came to play. That sort of informed my comedic world view. There was always a plan, but when things go awry, let it go and just see where it takes you. The best stuff was the stuff that wasn’t planned, and Dave just rolled with it and turned it into something magical.

Sheila Rogers: I learned working for Dave that you always would try to do the best possible job. You wouldn’t settle. Of course we did have to settle all the time, because it’s all about compromise. We all just tried our best for him. You wanted to make him happy. You wanted to be proud of the work you did for him. You didn’t want to disappoint him. I learned how important camaraderie is with your co-workers. We all felt very much part of a team.

Sheryl Zelikson: When I was in high school, I wanted to work for David Letterman. That show on NBC meant everything to me, and then to get that job as an intern, starting in the mailroom. David Letterman is curious, and I think that is such an important part of the show. He wanted to introduce you to things he liked that were not necessarily always mainstream. He was a voice that influenced culture, without a doubt. What I learned from the show was how to work at that level, to be curious, to do the extra work, run a tight ship, all the production things I learned from him. Everything that I’ve accomplished in my career is due to the fact that I worked at Late Show With David Letterman. 

Mike Buczkiewicz: Dave has shown me to have a natural curiosity. I think part of that is that I handled so many requests that were of a personal nature for him—that being guest segments about climate change, electric cars, Indy racing, and real-world events. I held oil from an oil spill in my hands. He was always a student to educate himself. He never put on an air of “I don’t need to know about that because I am David Letterman.” You can’t stop asking questions, because you stop growing as a person if you do.

 

Joe Grossman: That is where I learned how to write for television—not to get too committed to material, expect that all your stuff is going to get thrown out and don’t take it personally. He was such an influence on us all comedically and personally. Even though I rarely talked to him, everyone around the offices talked like him. All of us were so immersed in that voice, especially the writers, because we had to write in that voice. We all spoke in that odd language that he does—sometimes overly formal or archaic, and I still do it. It made us all better writers because of the good things we did at the show, and the not-good things. It taught me how to survive at a TV show. It changed my life for the better. I never thought I would get to work there, and I did. Dave actually knows who I am and would say my name sometimes and bring me out on the show. It’s still overwhelming to me. It’s hard for me to not believe that it was all some hallucination that I had.

Randi Grossack: There was just so much to take away from what he did. When I went through personal things in my life, he reached out to me and it was very touching. I always had heard stories about how he reached out to other people on the staff and quietly gave to charities. 

Lee Ellenberg: Professionally, short and funny is better than long and funny. It used to drive us crazy when we were writers there, but now I realize how important it is to be economical. If I have a comedic voice, Dave is one of those people that helped me get there. I don’t think comedy writing should be the most interesting thing about you, and I got that from watching Dave. You always got the sense that there was something deeper going on with him. He always acted like there was something he wanted to do more when the show was over. I thought that made the show better.

Vincent Favale & Rick Scheckman. Photo courtesy of Rick Scheckman.

Vincent Favale: I learned that when you are the figurehead, you have to be the hardest-working person. As hard as everyone worked on that show, no one worked harder than Dave. He set an example for me outside of my job. I am the first one in and the last one out because it is my brand.  I surround myself with people that share my vision. Be true to yourself and be comfortable saying no. Dave had no problem saying no.  

Rick Scheckman: I learned everything. I owe my life, my career to Dave. He was the one who made me a success. He led me to other business ventures because of the show. He always treated us so well. He had funds set aside if a staffer became ill, wanted to get a graduate degree. I would do anything for Dave. Right now if he called me and he had a flat tire and I had to come get him, I’d be in the car, hanging up on you.

Brian Teta: Dreams do come true. That is an actual thing. I think I learned that when you are working on a show like that, the next show is always going to come. There is always gonna be another chance at something, so you have to take big swings. You have to try, and it’s OK to fail. You have an idea to shoot Ben Stiller out of a cannon on 53rd Street? Maybe it will look silly, but it is worth taking a shot because there will be another idea tomorrow. No idea is too big. It is important to take those big swings.

Jerry Foley: Professionally, you’re given these opportunities, and at no time do you ever lessen your effort or take that for granted. Collectively, under his inspiration, there were no half-measures. I respected him for that. As long as you are gonna be in the game, then you better be engaged fully all the time. His work ethic, commitment, and professionalism were something I’ll carry with me for as long as I am in this business. 

Lee Ellenberg: The guy gave me a career. I’ll be forever grateful for that. He has done so much for me, and probably doesn’t know it. This business sucks sometimes. It is hard for someone to give you a shot. It is also hard to overstate the privilege of working for someone like that. If Dave’s reputation ages as well as I think it will, it will be cool to say I worked for him. I would like future generations to know he was something special. 

Jay Johnson: Everything from his approach to comedy to the way he took good care of his staff to his thoroughness in preparing every aspect of the show. Mostly, I guess, it would be to be true to yourself. He never, or rarely ever, did anything that didn’t stem from his own beliefs or his own sensibility. He never bowed to pressure or took the easy way out. He couldn’t be molded to fit someone else’s standards. He is uniquely Dave. And that’s what makes him such an icon. 

Kathy Mavrikakis: I learned that loyalty and friendship are superimportant to making your career satisfying. When you have that you can work in one place for thirty years. Losing that, even though it is good to move on, is the same as losing a marriage. Not to Dave, but to the people who worked for the show, my compatriots, the people who are in the trenches with me. We miss each other terribly. Over time we became pieces of a puzzle that all fit together. Now we are all thrown into the wind in our own new puzzles, which I am happy about, but at the same time it is like experiencing a divorce.

Jerry Foley: I saw Dave challenged by expectations and creative frustrations and I saw his reaction to that, and it was to continue to work and push and obsess. I saw him at high moments of great success, and there was no difference. There were plenty of complicated moments throughout those twenty years, but the takeaway was if you were smart, you found a way to embrace the differences; that would get you through the complexity of it. There was a pretty big reward if you could endure all that. It was worth it for sure.

Barbara Gaines: I personally was such a mess when I started on that show. I was young and unfocused. I had no idea who I was. Dave tough-loved me into being a human being. I would not be me today without him. He kind of saved me, because I was on a very bad path of drinking and drugging. For me personally it wasn’t going well and then it was. I think that is due to him. I learned how to be a manager of people. I gained confidence and got my dream job.

Bill Scheft: When he called me two days after the show on the Friday I said, “We couldn’t have ended better, but with me your finest hour will be what you did for my wife when she found out she was sick.” He made a couple of moves when she was first diagnosed, and he made my situation on the show more humane and I didn’t have to tell people. She came through that time but unfortunately didn’t subsequent to that. She died a year ago. My wife was a comic, and he always treated her like another comic. He was really demanding, but you look at these other guys, they don’t have people work for them for twenty years. The type of loyalty he engendered was because of the type of standards he set. The people I met on that show and worked with for twenty-four years are my best friends and some of the best people I ever met. I wouldn’t have had those people in my life if it wasn’t for him. That is an enormous legacy. How many people can you say that about?  And we took care of him, we did, but because it was something that was worth aspiring to. When it ended, you are not gonna—no point in looking for that again.  You are not supposed to have a writing job for twenty-four years. 

Kathy Mavrikakis: If I learned one thing from David Letterman, it’s that the word “trousers” is funny. And I learned if you walk into the door and kick it with your foot, you can pretend you hit your head on it. Where else would I have learned that?

Photo courtesy of @letterman, CBS publicity photo.

“Thank you and goodnight.” - David Letterman