How I Got This Way (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

JOE DIMAGGIO

T
he New York Yankees, as you’ve probably figured out by now, have always been my favorite baseball team. Raised in the Bronx, not too far from the great stadium, I went to more than quite a few of their games as a kid. At one of them, my father said to me, “Watch how Joe DiMaggio runs out to center field. He’s different from the rest of them.” I watched intently and saw exactly what he meant. DiMaggio had a graceful gait to him. An almost elegant lope combined with a proud, confident look. You could tell he knew how good he was and what he meant to his team. The New York press noticed him, too, right from his rookie days onward: His greatness was just that evident from the start. They loved him. They helped make him into even more of a national hero than he was already when he set the record for hits in consecutive games. He did it in fifty-six straight games during the 1941 season—a streak nobody has broken in seventy years. In that same year, Les Brown’s band had a big novelty hit record called “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio”—I remember it started out with the lyric “Hello Joe, whatta you know? / We need a hit, so here I go. . . .” Twenty-seven years later, the unforgettable impact he’d made came up once again in the Simon and Garfunkel hit song “Mrs. Robinson”: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. . . .” Joe, by then long retired, was reportedly upset by that line at first—he hadn’t gone anywhere, he complained—until Paul Simon personally explained that Joe represented a great continuity the world yearned for more than ever. Really, it was a very poignant reference in a terrific song that will play on forever.

I don’t need to tell you that Joe had a tremendous career, even though military service took him away for three seasons while he was at the height of his powers. But even after he returned, his amazing skills picked up right where they’d left off. Then, in the early fifties, his successor came along just as Joe entered retirement at the end of the 1951 season. Young and swift and powerful, Mickey Mantle took Joe’s place—as much as anyone ever could—and the next generation fell in love with the Mick the way the prior one had fallen in love with Joe. Rarely has one team had two great center fielders like those two immortals, back-to-back. For more than thirty years the Yankees were covered in center field like no other team in history. Mantle, who was my age, was simply great in his own right, a star in every category. But DiMaggio was my first idol. And when you’re a young kid and you fall in love with your first ballplayer, you always remember him best.

For a while, DiMaggio’s private life got almost as much attention as his professional life had. Everyone remembers Joe’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe, the most beautiful and iconic movie star ever. What a match they made—on paper, at least. But the sheer combined star power of that union probably meant that it could’ve never lasted, which it didn’t. DiMaggio was simply not cut out for Hollywood. And she was the most publicized woman in the world—her movies, her personal appearances, her every move hounded by the press. Once, when she went over to Korea to appear before the troops, DiMaggio decided to stay home. The troops loved her, of course—how could they not?—and gave her thunderous ovations. When she got home, she was still so overcome by that reception that she said to her husband, “Joe, you should have heard the cheers.” And Joe answered quietly, “I have.” That very famous little exchange alone tells you why it just didn’t work out between them; even though he loved her and always would, divorce was inevitable. When she died in 1962, DiMaggio flew to Hollywood, took over her funeral service, banned many people he thought had brought harm to her, and had her body placed in a marble crypt at the well-known little Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. For decades afterward, someone sent a half-dozen fresh red roses to Marilyn’s crypt three times a week. There was never any indication as to who the mysterious sender was. Many thought the flowers came from Joe, which indeed was probably the truth.

By the time I returned to New York in the early eighties, Mickey Mantle had left the game many years earlier and the Yankees were floundering. But DiMaggio remained the city’s premier legendary baseball idol. One night, while walking on Seventh Avenue, I watched a limo pull up to the Sheraton Hotel and out stepped Joe, tanned and silver haired. The crowd spotted him and immediately began a commotion. They formed two lines to flank his walk toward the hotel and started chanting, “Joe! Joe! Joe!” He smiled, waved, and kept going. Even after he entered the building, they ran after him, up the stairs and into the lobby. It was quite a demonstration of pure awe and respect, and it truly warmed my heart. They still remembered and revered him.

On a warm sunny day in July 1997, the Yankees were playing an afternoon game at the stadium. My devotion to the team had been renewed all the more after befriending George Steinbrenner a handful of years earlier at the Indianapolis 500. And as I’ve said, I was regularly invited out to watch the games from his box at the stadium. Hideki Irabu was pitching that day. The press was very high on him. Reports from Japan said that Hideki was sensational on the mound. They said he would ignite the Yankees again. I wanted to take a look for myself, so I went up to the stadium with one of my agents, Kenny DiCamillo, via the subway, which always makes that trek to the Bronx so much less complicated. Turned out, we got out there so early that Steinbrenner’s suite was empty; everybody was still at work. Then Kenny and I peeked through the windows at the Boss’s private box of about forty seats attached immediately outside of the suite. We saw only one person sitting there. He had silver hair and wore a suit. We looked at each other and we both knew it was Joe. All alone. No one else was there or anywhere near, for that matter.

Kenny suggested I go down to a seat across the aisle from him and maybe he’d say hello. DiMaggio was very private, very reserved. He had been bothered by fans all his life, besieging him for autographs, pictures, whatever. I didn’t want to be one of those people. But I walked down the stairs anyway and sat across the aisle from him. Like I said, the afternoon was an increasingly warm one, but he was dressed in a dark suit, a starched white shirt, and a dark tie. He looked great—cool and comfortable. A few seconds later, he looked over and said, “Hey, how did you get here so soon?”

Joe DiMaggio had recognized me.

That alone knocked me out.

I told him I took the subway, and almost before I finished the sentence, I’d crossed the aisle and was sitting next to him. Apparently he was waiting for a friend to join him and didn’t mind striking up a conversation. What luck! To be able to sit with him at the stadium he had owned, symbolically at least, back when I was a kid. . . . Did I tell him I was a big fan? Yes, you bet I did. I wished I’d had more time to prepare for this conversation, but as soon as I told him that, I backed it up by reciting his old Yankee lineup for him: Charlie “King Kong” Keller and Tommy Henrich flanked him in the outfield. The infield had Red Rolfe at third, Phil Rizzuto at short, Joe Gordon at second, Babe Dahlgren at first (Lou Gehrig had passed several years earlier), and either Bill Dickey or Yogi Berra alternated behind the plate. DiMaggio smiled and warmed to the names. It wasn’t long before we got to talking about those players and about the old stadium as it looked in his day. He reminded me of how, back then, the left center field wall was 430 feet away from the plate, but it had since been moved in considerably closer for today’s hitters. Also, there’d been a high black wall out in left field that would have turned present-day home runs into doubles. Now it was gone. He told me he could have hit at least seventy-five more homers if he’d had this modern field reconfiguration to play on. We really got into so many of those differences between the game of yesteryear versus the way it’s played today. Batters now have gloves to support their hands and tighten the grip on their swings. Joe used his bare hands. And when he played, the old center field bleachers weren’t blacked out in the middle to make it easier for hitters to spot a fastball, which otherwise could blend into the crowd of fans. Joe had to eyeball all those pitches coming at him, with perfect precision, through that blur of white shirts in the stands.

I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, carrying on an impromptu and spontaneous conversation with the Yankee Clipper himself. He even told me he had watched my show lots of mornings down in Florida, where he now resided. Anyway, the Clipper and I went at it for an uninterrupted twenty-five unforgettable minutes before his friend showed up. I went back to sit with Kenny in another area of the Steinbrenner section. We were both thrilled at my luck.

Near the end of his life, which was just a couple years later, Joe was admitted to the Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, for lung cancer surgery, along with other complications. He had helped build a children’s wing at that same hospital and he was among friends there. But the medical reports were ominous. I called the hospital and spoke to his nurses. It didn’t look good; yet he hung on for a while and was able to spend his last several weeks at home. Some mornings on the show, I would give him a shout-out: “Joe, New York loves you! Stay strong and don’t lose this one. We’re counting on you!” But Joe didn’t make it this time. He died March 8, 1999. As terrible as I felt, I knew how fortunate I’d been to spend time having that easygoing chat with him and the chance to tell him what he meant to me as a kid. And on through the rest of my life, for that matter.

Now, when I watch the YES baseball cable network in New York and see those old clips of the Yankee greats, I know exactly what’s coming: The Babe is first, and then Lou Gehrig, and then there’s Joe making an incredible catch in the outfield—and making it look ridiculously easy, too. Or I see him smacking a line drive and turning on the gas around first base, stretching a single into a double with a beautiful slide. And then I remember so well how he used to trot out to center field with that gait, that class, that pride. Nobody ever ran out there like Joe did. Nobody ever will either.

Chapter Twenty-three

JERRY SEINFELD

P
eople who know me—maybe the one who married me, most of all—understand that there’s one thing in life that aggravates me to no end:
I hate being late
. I’m sure it’s the lifelong broadcaster inside of me that’s hung so watchfully on to every ticking minute of locked-down airtime day after day. But I’m the same way off the air—probably a little too much so, to tell you the truth. Nevertheless, I do get upset, for instance, whenever we turn up late to a party. And this is why I’m slightly embarrassed to confess that I came
ridiculously late
to the party that happened to be the popular and brilliant
Seinfeld
television series, which thrived on NBC prime time for nine great seasons through the nineties. In fact, I only began watching that phenomenal Jerry Seinfeld sitcom when it started running in syndication every night of the week at 11 p.m. in New York. By then I’d gotten to the point where I could no longer take watching the grim local newscasts at the end of my day anymore. I couldn’t possibly fall asleep after learning about all the ongoing murders, robberies, political backstabbings, and troubles without solutions. So one night I finally just started flipping around the dial to the other stations in search of relief and escape—and there I discovered Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer on this show that was so well written and perfectly cast that I knew pretty quickly that it would stand as this generation’s
I Love Lucy.
I became obsessed with it, in fact.

So almost every morning on our own show, I began talking about the previous night’s episode: the terrific fast-paced, triple-layered plotlines, those awkward situations that crept up on each character, the mundane annoyances they all endured as everyday New Yorkers—it was a masterpiece. And also timeless. Except, of course, that—timeless or not—most of those episodes had originally aired years earlier, which, as I recall, prompted a little bit of eye rolling from both Kathie Lee and our audience.
Okay, I’d come late to the
Seinfeld
party—I admit it!
Nevertheless, I was crazy about the show, which was famously described by Seinfeld and his series cocreator, Larry David, as being “about nothing.” Jerry, of course, had guested with us a few times during the show’s prime-time heyday and had once even congratulated Kathie Lee and me by declaring that we did “nothing” better than anyone else on television. At the time, I sensed it was a compliment, even though I wouldn’t fully appreciate what he meant until those
Seinfeld
reruns overtook my bedtime television viewing routine. I remember responding to his comment sometime later, saying, “We have a lot of fun talking about nothing all that important and nothing in particular. We just cover the little incidents and minutiae of life. To Jerry, that’s nothing. If he thinks we’ve elevated it into an art form, what am I going to do? Argue with him?”

Well, I would never argue with Jerry’s great observational comedic genius. But back in early 1994—which was still before my
Seinfeld
fever had fully gripped me—I found myself in a minor (but everlasting!) quibble with him and his writing team. Let me explain: Turned out a call came from his Los Angeles production office. They wanted to know whether a scene set on our morning
Live!
show could be filmed and incorporated into what would become a very famous episode entitled “The Opposite.” One of the plotlines involved the irrepressible Kramer character coming on our show to promote a stupid coffee-table book he’d dreamt up that could also convert into an actual miniature coffee table. Kathie Lee and I would play ourselves and conduct a crazy interview with Kramer (as played by the fine, unpredictable actor Michael Richards), who’d end up wreaking his usual havoc with us during our chat. Soon enough the script arrived and it was very funny, of course. Except the
Seinfeld
writers had, for some reason, decided to have me react to Kramer’s antics by repeatedly declaring, “This guy is
bonkos
!”

Now I had never said the word
bonkos
before in my life. I’d never even heard of the word! I thought what they meant was
bonkers
—which wasn’t funny either, but at least it was recognizable. Right away, it began eating at me:
bonkos
?! Finally I called the
Seinfeld
headquarters out in Hollywood. I wanted to talk to someone on the writing staff to make sure it wasn’t just some typographical error. And if it wasn’t, could I
please
get the word changed! I mean, it just wasn’t funny—and why should I become the only
Seinfeld
guest in history who never got a laugh? Whichever writer I wound up with on the phone listened to me and probably decided that I was in fact bonkos. After patiently hearing me out, he then quickly assured me that
bonkos
would definitely get a laugh. He said, I swear to you, “Don’t worry about it, Regis. We think it’ll be very funny! This is what we do for a living—get laughs.” Well, how could I—a mere TV morning-show host—argue with one of those award-winning top-notch comedy writers?

So I hedgingly accepted his promise, and before you knew it, the day arrived when we would shoot our big scene with Kramer—immediately after one of our actual
Live!
broadcasts. I was impressed to see Jerry Seinfeld on the studio floor with us, off to the side, making sure the scene captured exactly what they wanted. But even then, at the very last minute, I appealed to Jerry about
bonkos
. And Jerry, too, thought
bonkos
was hilarious.

For the record, I will now share with you just how hilarious
bonkos
actually was.
Three times
they had me blurt it out during the course of our brief scene with Kramer, who was dressed as this suave and distinguished coffee-table-book author. First, before I introduced him: “This guy could be a little
bonkos,
really.” (Confused silence from the audience on that one.) Second, while he clumsily demonstrated how the book transformed into a little table: “Did I tell you this guy was
bonkos
?” (Here, Kramer got screams; Regis and his
bonkos
got nothing.) And third, before the interview ended with Kramer gulping some water that he then deposited in a spit-take all over Kathie Lee: “I’m telling you, this guy’s
bonkos
! He really is!” (Kramer had now brought down the house, while Regis had instantly wanted to leave the house and never come back.)

Yes, our studio audience loved the whole thing, and Kramer was, naturally, a hilarious smash with everybody. Me and
bonkos,
on the other hand—we got nothing, not even one laugh. Only silence. I mean,
deafening silence
. I’d known it from the beginning. I had died a horrible death on that otherwise great episode. It was so bad, in fact, that I’m certain I’ll go down in the annals of television history as the only guy who never even got so much as a chuckle on the classic
Seinfeld
series, whose reruns I continue to love, in spite of that nightmare. Still, I will never forget that silence, nor will I ever get over it. It remains embarrassing to this day, okay?

I guess I’ve never let Jerry forget it either—but more importantly, I’ve also never stopped reminding him that his series will always stand the test of time and never stop being funny. I recall being out one night for dinner several years ago with Joy and some friends when who should suddenly approach the table but none other than the man himself, Jerry Seinfeld, with his then future wife, Jessica Sklar. I not only crowed to him about what wonderful work he’d done with that show, but I also confessed that we were about to rush right home to watch that night’s syndicated repeat. “I’ve gotta get my
Seinfeld
fix or I can’t sleep,” I told him, which he took in the right way (I’m fairly sure). Fate, however, had conspired against me this time because when we got home and turned on the TV, there it was . . . again: the dreaded
bonkos
episode. Sleep came a little harder to me on that particular night.

In the years after the show ended, Jerry moved back to New York and still lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, exactly where his series was set (although the show was primarily filmed in Los Angeles). He’s become quite the devoted family man, thrilled to be home with his beautiful wife, Jessica, and three kids, when not out on the road doing his terrific stand-up act. I see him from time to time around the city—in Central Park biking with Jessica, at various functions around town, and sometimes as a guest on our show. Earlier this year, he walked out as a surprise, dressed in black tie no less, to present Kelly and me with an enormous cupcake commemorating the ten years Pippa and I have been working together. Who else but Jerry could pull off black tie first thing in the morning? There was even one night a while back when the Seinfelds invited us out to dinner and he patiently answered my endless stream of silly questions about the series, probably boring poor Jessica to death. But I think he enjoyed all the reminiscing, anyway. He never stopped smiling.

And that’s the one thing I continue to notice about Jerry Seinfeld in every situation where our paths have crossed: It’s his smile. It’s always there. The man is genuinely happy. You can’t get Jerry down with any bad news. He doesn’t allow it. If he’s not smiling, it’s only because he is too busy laughing. What a wonderful quality—and one that we should all be lucky enough to possess. Frankly, because I happen to envy that specific quality of his, I was all the more shocked and touched one day when I read a terribly generous quote he gave after I announced that I was leaving our morning show: “Every place he goes is much better for having him, and everyone he’s with is much happier when he’s around.”

Really, I still can’t believe he was referring to me. Because that’s exactly how I feel about him—and also about the ongoing effect of that wonderful show he gave us. It’s still running every night. It’s still hot, even in syndicated repeats around the world. And it’s still the best sitcom I’ve ever seen. In fact, the only time I don’t laugh while watching is when one certain episode turns up again and I hear that word—
bonkos
. I don’t care what anyone says: It’s just not funny. But that is my
Seinfeld
legacy, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. Still, I was proud to be a part of it.
Bonkos
and all.