The remembrances of 9/11 this year, 25 years after that shatteringly tragic event for the United States of America—but especially for New York City—brought back the shock, the sadness, the feeling that from that morning on, nothing might ever be the same.
In the immediate aftermath, with thousands of lives lost and a gaping, smoking hole in the city’s famous skyline, grief imposed a silence so profound that speaking, singing, or laughing seemed unacceptably out of bounds.
But something happened on the Monday that followed: the revival of an American ritual that had, for a generation, offered diversion, escape, a bit of familiar shared experience.
Late-night television returned to the air.
Specifically, the host who had become most identified with New York, who had celebrated and mocked the city in equal joyful measure and, in so doing, confirmed its teeming vitality, stepped up to try to convince viewers that they were allowed to soften their grieving with the cathartic release of laughter.
David Letterman brought back his Late Show to CBS and the historic Ed Sullivan Theatre.
“Anyone who was living in New York City at the time, we all know what that felt like,” recalls Rob Burnett, who fit that description and showed up for work as Letterman’s executive producer 25 years ago on this date, Sept. 17, 2001, not knowing what kind of work could possibly be done.
But he knew his star had decided to push on toward some semblance of a return to life as the country, and the city, had known it.
The show had been dark the previous week; Letterman was at his vacation home in Montana. He and Burnett had spoken by phone the day the towers fell.
“I remember him saying, ‘I need to get back and feel what this is,’” Burnett says. “It was really all Dave. His gut. The decision to come back was his. The decision of what to say was his.”
Almost nothing but wall-to-wall news coverage had been airing across television. No one in show business, in comedy, certainly in late night, had stepped forward to resume anything that might resemble entertainment.
They were waiting for Dave.
No one said that out loud. “It wasn’t like there was a conference call among the talk-show hosts,” Burnett says. But later many of the other hosts acknowledged that Letterman, so closely associated with the city, had to be first.
It was, the Letterman staff knew, a risk. “Are people going to think this is wrong of us to do?” Burnett recalls wondering. “There was an added level of strangeness because what we do for a living is so silly. It was a very difficult time to be silly. What people craved more than anything—and I know what I was craving—was normalcy. It was an impossible thing to achieve. But that was what everyone wanted.”
The format of the show was cut down. No opening theme, no traditional monologue. Just a shot of the marquee, then inside to Dave at his desk. “There was no writing. Not even consulting, honestly,” Burnett remembers.
Nothing Letterman was going to say was committed to cue cards. He had no notes in front of him. He just spoke: of the awful sadness, the human devastation, the need for courage.
“We knew the format. We’d all discussed and agreed what that was going to be. But on the actual content of what Dave was going to say? We trusted him.”
Letterman showed no nerves before he began speaking. “I would say he felt pressure. Heightened, I would say.”
As Letterman spoke, Burnett listened, standing off-camera at his regular post. “It was very impressive, effective. What I sensed in watching it was Dave was more concerned outwardly than inwardly. He was genuinely trying to authentically speak and say eloquently many of the things we were all feeling.”
Dave choked up a bit. “I think the core of it was being a New Yorker and believing and caring about what you’re saying,” Burnett says. “I was a New Yorker who went through this like everybody else. I was very moved and I felt better from it.”
The show had two guests: the CBS News anchor Dan Rather and Letterman’s frequent guest, foil, and pal, Regis Philbin. An emotional Rather put the news in context. “It was just two guys talking from the heart,” Burnett says.
And then came Regis, who always made Letterman comfortable because he always delivered. That night, he opened a path for Dave to find some laughs. It had only been a short time since Regis’s longtime co-host, Kathie Lee Gifford, had left. Dave asked Regis if Kathie Lee was coming back.
Regis said, “If you really want to end this thing, send her over there.”
“That just exploded the place,” Burnett recalls. Later Dave found an opening to get an explosion of his own, dropping in an off-the-wall non sequitur reference to Philbin’s show biz start as a late-night sidekick: “So how did you meet Joey Bishop?”
Reviewers of Letterman’s commentary were awestruck. That didn’t mean he’d satisfied his harshest critic, the one who famously berated himself for any perceived failing.
“I do not remember him self-flagellating over it,” Burnett says. “It was almost impossible to praise Dave about anything. He would never really accept praise. I do remember saying to him after the show: ‘I think that was terrific.’ He didn’t say anything back—and that’s as much as you’re ever going to get from him.”
The show was never rerun. It certainly was never chosen as the show’s Emmy submission.
“Dave never wanted to promote it. I think all of us shared the feeling that we’re a pebble, a tiny cog, in the 9/11 story. We don’t want to now start saying: ‘Oh look at what we did.’ There are people who ran into a burning building.”
Of course, the show was changed, like the country was and the city was. For years, from Letterman’s days at Late Night on NBC and all through his run at CBS to that point, the show had always opened with some sort of gag about the city, its traffic, its garbage, its shooting victims’ chalk outlines.
“After 9/11 we never in the history of the show opened in the old way,” Burnett says.
From that point forward, the show’s announcer, Alan Kalter, opened with the same introduction:
“From New York, the greatest city in the world!”
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