I said here a week or three ago that I couldn't see why Jay Leno wouldn't accept the invite to appear on one of David Letterman's last shows. My thinking roughly paralleled this article from some time ago by Luke Epplin. I have also heard from many that Dave regrets how nasty their little "feud" got and that the two of them have had many friendly phone calls lately. I figured Jay would like the world to see that Dave no longer holds any grudges for real or imagined offenses.
Then yesterday afternoon, I had a phone conversation with a friend who knows Jay pretty well and he suggested a few reasons why Jay won't go on one of Dave's last shows and he convinced me to not expect it. He said, "If it were three or four years ago, even if Jay were still on opposite Dave, you'd be right. He would have shut his program down for a night and jumped on a plane to New York as he did when Dave wanted him in that Super Bowl commercial. But Jay has now moved past all that."
My friend went on to suggest a few reasons Jay wouldn't want to do it now and I'm not sure how many of them were his thinking and how many of them were what Jay's thinking but they convinced me not to expect that reunion.
So Dave's last three shows will probably be sans Leno. Everyone's assuming that he'll have Tom Hanks and Bill Murray plus Regis Philbin either as an announced guest or a surprise cameo. Sounds to me like there's room for one or two more big guests in there and I have no idea who they might be.
I know what I'd like to see but Dave will never in a thousand years okay this. I'd like to see him bring on a good interviewer like Bob Costas with the express mission of interviewing the host about how he feels about the show ending, what he's proudest of about it, what he can imagine for himself in the future, etc. But Dave won't give up that control of his own farewell.
A couple of folks have written me to ask, "Why are you asking about what Dave will do next? People do retire. Couldn't he just be retiring?" I don't think so. You can retire from selling plumbing fixtures and you don't get frequent offers to come back and sell one more toilet float or one more flush valve. Entertainers don't usually retire voluntarily, especially beloved entertainers. They just scale back and make occasional reappearances.
Yeah, Johnny Carson went away forever but he didn't really intend to. On his last telecast, he said he expected to come back with something. As it turned out, he never found that something. Everything presented to him either looked like an embarrassing comedown from his former heights or something that could flop and leave him looking like a failure as opposed to that guy who went out on top as a capital-L Legend.
I've been trying to figure out why I don't feel Dave will do what Johnny did. Johnny was 67 when he did his last Tonight Show and Dave is 68 so you could certainly make the argument that he's not too young to do what his idol did. I guess the reason it feels different to me is that Johnny always seemed like a part of the show business era that preceded him — Benny, Berle, Hope, Skelton, etc. He had seen plenty of those performers outlive the demand for their talents and appear, in some cases, somewhat pathetic as a result.
I don't think Letterman identifies with comedians who are older than him. Admires, yes; identifies, no. Just the way he talks, I think he feels like part of the generation that includes Jerry Seinfeld (age 61) and Steve Martin (69) and Martin Short (65) and Bill Murray (64) and yes, Jay Leno (65). These are all guys who are still working, none of whom has trouble finding an audience or worthwhile projects.
If Dave gives up performing now, he takes himself out of their category and makes himself older than he has to be. A lot of folks around Carson — and if I've heard this, I'm sure Dave has — felt that once Johnny had no audiences in his future, he started gaining weight and getting out of shape and aged a lot. Dave has an eleven year old son. That's a pretty good reason to not want to descend into Old Man mode and to instead stay active and healthy. Also, Johnny grew up at a time when being almost seventy was a lot older than it is today.
Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part and I should stop trying to predict. One thing I do know about Dave Letterman with reasonable certainty is what I once heard one of his writers say about him. He said, "Dave's going to do what Dave's going to do." I just hope what he does is not what Johnny did.