(Spontaneous exchange just before reading “Top Ten Memorable Moments in Comic Strip History,” July 15, 2014. The list had been inspired by an item that the beloved Archie Comics series would end in the next issue with the accidental murder of Archie.)
DAVE: So, that’s it. Archie’s dead. Gone. Adios. What’s going to happen to Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie? They’re all unemployed.
PAUL: Archie made specific instructions that his staff would continue to be paid after he was killed.
In ten years of all-boys boarding schools, I had two headmasters. Both had catchphrases they were fond of. One, David Pynchon of Deerfield Academy, would constantly use a line he copped from his predecessor, Frank Boyden: “Finish up strong.” The other, Robert P.T. Coffin, Jr., of the Fessenden School, frequently trotted out one that was all his: “Twenty minutes to pack and leave.” (If I find a pack of cigarettes in a boy’s desk, I’ll give him twenty minutes to pack and leave. . . . If I hear a boy talk back to one of the kitchen staff, twenty minutes to pack and leave. . . . If I see a boy wearing underpants on his head without a note from the school nurse, twenty minutes to pack and leave. . . .)
Both turns of phrase lovingly apply to whatever it was that transpired in the last six weeks of the late-night life of David Letterman. Not the underwear on the head, but the rest of it.
We really did finish up strong. Ask anyone. Ask all the not-yet-fake media people who called the last show “perfect” and all those viewers who met Dave for the first time on his way out and all the prodigal devotees who flocked back to the dock where they might not have trod since half-past NBC to see him off.
But don’t ask any of us. We were in the middle of it. Carried by a momentum that built on itself, rather than the lurching adrenaline-based urgency of getting a strip (nightly) show on the air and in the ether five times a week.
“I am living these shows,” executive producer Barbara Gaines said to me on more than a few occasions. We all were. We all knew it, and we didn’t. We knew it because we knew it was unavoidable and finite. We didn’t because when it was over, we got twenty minutes to pack and leave. Like it never happened.
So, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would love to know what happened. If only there was a book. . . .
The irony that it takes an outsider to aptly chronicle the last twenty-eight installments of the Late Show is not lost on me, or any of us who alternately skipped and trudged that surreal road of destiny. I say “surreal” because I remember almost none of it now, just what I am without. Which was the all-oars-pulling pursuit of a glorious finish, but not thinking about the, you know, end.
You don’t see this scene on TV anymore, but you used to all the time. It’s the scene where the guy has finally left his wife and moved in with the girlfriend. And they’re all set up in the new apartment and it’s about a month in and one night after dinner the girlfriend walks into the kitchen and finds the guy sobbing over the sink. She thinks he’s broken a glass and says, “Hey, don’t worry about it.” But there’s no broken glass. He just looks at her, blubbering, and says, “I miss my family.”
You don’t see this scene anymore because television has decided it’s not realistic or relevant. And it’s not, unless instead of a month, it’s three years later and it’s you blubbering over the sink. And there’s no broken glass. And no girlfriend. And no wife to go back to anymore. But you still miss your family.
You are going to see a lot of names here. Names you may have known. Names you didn’t know, and frankly, should have. Names who humbly give credit to other names. Names worth fifty points in Scrabble (Mike Buczkiewicz). Pay attention, I am begging you.
Bill Scheft (Late Night 1991-1993, Late Show 1993-2015)
Manhattan
March 2018
Barbara Gaines and Bill Scheft. Photo courtesy of Bill Scheft.