COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Dave’s mess reaches past ‘Late Show’
I dearly wish it didn’t sound like such hindsight now. But, I swear, you could see on the air where an unhappy lover could make David Letterman vulnerable.
We saw his assistant Stephanie Birkitt on the air for years. One of Letterman’s most creative contributions, in fact, to Talk Show World has been to make “stars” of the show’s staff, whether stage manager Biff Henderson or building maintenance man George Clarke or office assistants Laurie Diamond (now his executive assistant, whom he used to call “Rose” on camera) and Stephanie Birkitt.
Whether her sisters in Letterman’s office appreciated Birkitt being singled out to get extra air time (and money), her on-air relationship with the boss was delightful at first—teasing sibling stuff with a loving older brother delighted to have a sunny and simple on-air foil. He called her “Monty.” She called him “Mr. Carney.” We were being given a fictional on-air portrait of the Letterman workplace— playful and silly, a happy and casual dorm for middle America’s sons and daughters despite the obvious fact that The Big Guy in charge was such a total moody neurotic—a man consumed by what he has since identified on the air as “Midwestern Lutheran guilt.”
But then things—even on the air— started to curdle. Birkitt, wearing her “Late Show” jacket, would give Letterman restaurant passes for audience members, or some such thing. There would be no employer/employee badinage. She’d shoot him glances that seemed to have genuine hostility.
Was it garden variety worker/boss tension? Or can we now see that it was something deeper—a relationship no longer intimate in a way it had been?
Messy. Very, very messy. And ill-advised. And that’s even before the Letterman show turned last week into the biggest offstage mess in the history of late-night network television. The alleged blackmail threat by Robert “Joe” Halderman — reportedly Birkitt’s lover for four years, until August — forced Letterman to admit, on the air, to sexual relationships with female staff members.
Yes, of course, he should have prepared his audience Thursday for the fact that his tale was a serious one, not comic at all. Yes, of course, it undercuts his future ability to continue as late-night TV’s leading maker of zipper and hypocrisy jokes.
Otherwise, I simply don’t foresee long-term damage to Letterman at all, unless there are forthcoming sexual harassment suits (which seems unlikely). Who on earth expects any comedian/ star to be anything other than 1) randy and 2) surrounded by almost as much female availability as a rock star?
When I first heard the story, my gut reaction was that Letterman will survive a lot of dark and stormy nights, but that CBS News—already wobbly —will take the worst hit of all from it.
Halderman was a longtime employee of CBS News, most recently of “48 Hours.” To have him charged with such vile blackmail is a revelation of something journalists secretly know—that some very foul people sometimes find their way into the profession. Ever since Watergate gave journalism a clear-cut illustration of how much information equals power (which can, of course, be leveraged for money), we’ve seen more than the occasional benighted specimen of the human species.
Not only is one very suspicious looking “mushroom” out in the light, but Halderman’s lawyer is using his career and professional reputation as his virtual defense (that’s what he did on the “Today” show Monday).
Letterman, it seems to me, can handle anything thrown at him. If I worked at CBS News right now, though, I might not be so confident.
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