In the second paragraph of her 2000 New Yorker profile of Regis Philbin, Elizabeth Kolbert has a wonderfully casual insight that, unfortunately but not surprisingly, the rest of the 5,500 word essay fails to adequately deepen. She writes:
Philbin has made a career of anatomizing human frailty without ever drawing blood.
Which is to say that Philbin, like the other great talk show/game show/pageant host/USO faves — Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Dick Clark, Ryan Seacrest — has created for himself an amazingly compelling, but also deceptively opaque, public persona that offers up a facsimile of vulnerability and openness but never, as Kolbert writes, actually draws blood.
Philbin’s success, like the success of these other men (I can’t think of any women who fall into quite the same category, though surely there are some — Joan Rivers, for instance, comes close but is too caustic, too willing to offend), depends on the combination of a few qualities. He’s very nimble on live television. He seems to like everyone but also, in an unthreatening way, is adept at teasing them. He’s willing to be the butt of the joke but is never truly ruffled or exposed. And — and this factor can’t be underestimated — he’s been able to stick around for a really, really long time.
Philbin’s been a mega-success for so long (in celebrity years) that it becomes difficult to recall that there were many years when he was in the biz but not particularly successful at all. For almost 20 years after his brief stint, in the late 1960s, as the sidekick on Joey Bishop’s failed attempt to compete with Carson, Regis was basically, at best, a regional celebrity. He worked the morning show circuit in L.A. and New York; he had a rarely watched show on the Lifetime channel; he had a game show that tanked and then worked as a correspondent on another game show that tanked. It wasn’t until 1988, when his New York-based talk show went national, that Reeg went big-time, and not until 1999, when he hosted "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", that he went big-big-time.
Regis — who, after all, does nothing very well other than play the part of Regis — has become a kind of symbol of the arbitrariness of celebrity. But this is fundamentally wrong. The truth of Regis isn’t that his success is unearned or arbitrary, but rather that it’s all too earned and all too planned, that if one has a certain amount of non-specific performing talent, a certain amount of chutzpah, a relatively high narcissism quotient, and an absolutely exceptional commitment to fame, then becoming a celebrity is entirely possible.
There aren’t many Regises in the world in part because, of course, there’s room for only a few, but also because although there are millions upon millions of people whose deepest wish is to be famous, there are only hundreds of thousands, in a given culture at a given time, who have even a certain amount of non-specific performing talents, and only thousands out of those who are as committed to fame as Regis has been.
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Bonus Youtube of Regis on Letterman. Very funny stuff.
