How I Got This Way (14 page)

Chapter Thirteen

JOHN SEVERINO

T
his is a business where the same person can keep coming back to be a key part of your life over and over again. Especially from behind the scenes in those executive suites—which was where this particular guy repeatedly brought about some of the most important changes my life has ever known. For sure, he was fiery and unpredictable, which our special relationship eventually would reflect through the years.
Oh God, would it ever!
But maybe I should have expected that long before we actually worked together. I mean, the first time we literally crossed paths, he signaled to me, as only he could, that he was nobody’s pushover. . . .

So how about this for a first impression: As I’ve told you, when I left San Diego in 1964 to take over Steve Allen’s national Westinghouse program, the big bosses insisted on parading me around that October on a promotional tour of all the cities whose stations would be carrying our show. First stop was Boston’s WBZ-TV, a very important station in the chain. As the plane landed at the airport there, I looked out the window and saw a high school band lined up on the tarmac playing the Notre Dame fight song. I was not used to this kind of fanfare, to say the least, and felt my panic rising when the Westinghouse vice president Jim Allen told me that these kids had been trotted out there to salute me, never mind that they had no idea who I was. I was totally embarrassed. Then came a procession of cars through the rainy streets of Boston on the way to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. That’s when I began to spot what turned out to be WBZ employees standing on every street corner leading to the hotel, each of them holding up a placard saying:
“Welcome Regis! You’re going to be great!”
Riding along in the car with a group of upbeat Westinghouse and station execs, I was overwhelmed and even touched by this display of support—in the rain, yet! But then something happened to bring me back to reality. There was one guy out on a corner who wasn’t holding up a sign as we drove by; instead, I saw him hold up something else. Yes, it was his middle finger. I couldn’t miss it. I asked the execs, “Who was
that
guy?” They said, “Oh, that’s John Severino. He’s starting a new job at ABC Chicago tomorrow, but we asked him to come out here today to greet you along with everyone else. And he’s probably not too happy about standing out in the rain. Don’t worry about it. You’ll never see him again, anyway.”

Those, by the way, are the sorts of offhand statements that people like to call “famous last words”—the kind that never turn out to be even close to the truth.

Now let’s skip ahead ten years, during which time the
Bishop Show
had come and gone, and I had been picking up work wherever I could—from hosting a weekly talk show on KHJ in Los Angeles to doing the same thing on Saturday nights for KMOX-TV in St. Louis, which, I’ll confess, made for quite a rugged ongoing commute from my L.A. home. And there was the six-week stint filling in for an ailing Denver sportscaster, too. You get the picture. Then, like a flash, it was on to Chicago where I’d just gotten an urgent call from WLS-TV station manager Chris Duffy. He needed me to immediately come and take over the local early-morning talk show as the summer (and possibly more permanent) replacement for its popular host Bob Kennedy, who had suddenly died. When I arrived—wouldn’t you know it?—the general manager and top boss there was a guy named . . . John Severino. Turned out, however, that my first day in Chicago was (
once again
) to be his last day at the station: He would leave town within twenty-four hours to go run KABC-TV in Los Angeles. Anyway, he watched my first Chicago show that final day before heading west and told Duffy that he very much liked what he saw. (Apparently, giving me the finger ten years earlier had less to do with his opinion of me and more to do with getting soaked in the rain!) Frankly, I was lucky that he’d still been there and was able to see me do my thing, if only for that one morning. Somehow, whatever he enjoyed about my work then stuck in his head and would pay off for me in a surprising way months later. Because at the end of that summer in Chicago, I didn’t get the permanent replacement hosting job after all. Bitterly disappointed, I returned to Los Angeles, again with no prospects for work. Many bleak weeks followed until, on the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, I got a call from John Severino’s office at KABC. Could I come in and see him that afternoon? I was both stunned and thrilled. So I showed up at his office promptly at four in the afternoon only to see that his secretary, Verla, was a girl I had known way back in the fifties during my KCOP stagehand days. (See?
All
kinds of people keep turning up again when you work in the television business.)

Verla said that Mr. Severino had just returned from a luncheon party and was waiting for me in his office. I opened the door and walked in. The room was dark. Shades pulled halfway down. He wasn’t at his desk. I turned to look around, and there he was lying on his couch.
That must have been some party at lunch,
I thought. “Oh, hi,” I probably blurted. “I didn’t see you there.” Severino cut right to the chase. He said, “Can you do the same crap David Sheehan does?” Sheehan was one of the first reporters in the country to critique movies on local newscasts; his work in town over at Channel 2 had always been top-notch.

I said, “You mean review the movies?”

“Yeah,” he answered, barely opening his eyes.

“I’d love to do it,” I said.

I needed that job and was about to continue my pitch when Severino simply said, “Okay. Be here Monday. Check in at the newsroom that morning.” And that was that. It was back to scale pay, just like I was starting all over again. Nineteen years in the business—
and . . . I . . . was . . . starting . . . all . . . over . . . again
. Still, I did need that job. Which would not only include movie reviewing but also general entertainment reporting. I hit the ground running that first day: I took in a movie, rushed back to the studio, edited a clip, wrote a review, and delivered it on the 6 p.m. news. Then I hurried home for a quick supper with Joy and the girls before having to dash off with a camera crew to cover some star-studded Hollywood event for the eleven o’clock news. After a few months, the station sales manager told me the news ratings were up and viewers seemed to enjoy what I was doing. Everybody was happy.

During the next year, though, the host of the KABC morning talk show decided to take a job in Atlanta. And that’s when I saw my opportunity. I went to Sev and reminded him that that’s what I really did, and what I had always done best—hosting talk shows. He did recall liking me in that role on his last morning in Chicago, which was why he’d hired me here in the first place. But, he said, there’d been an upward ratings spike in our newscasts, on which I’d become such a dependable team member, and he didn’t want anything to interfere with that. So I told him I could do all three: the ninety-minute talk show in the morning, the movie review for the early-evening broadcast, and an entertainment-world piece at eleven at night. Yes, a fifteen-hour day. And I did it. But it didn’t take too long before the morning show,
A.M. Los Angeles,
became a big hit. And even though the news ratings had never been higher, I was wearing down hard with this killer schedule. So after a year of pounding away on that all-day-and-night treadmill, I went back to him and admitted I couldn’t keep up the breakneck pace. I was running out of steam. He took me off the eleven o’clock news, but he didn’t like doing it one bit.

Now most people feared Sev. Probably for good reason. He was a fierce and calculating competitor, bursting with gruff Italian machismo. He could chew out anyone who displeased him like no one else I’ve ever encountered. He was a tough guy all right, but from the start he was very supportive of me, maybe because I had gained a little national recognition working with Joey Bishop on our ABC network a handful of years earlier. Who knows? Every afternoon at five, after I got my movie review ready for the six o’clock news, I would go over to his office to shoot the breeze with him. He would set up a tray of cheese and crackers and serve up a couple of cold Cokes and we’d have a lot of laughs.

But one afternoon during our regular bull session, I happened to notice that Paul Moyer, one of the station’s big-time anchormen, was out doing a run-of-the-mill live field report on the five o’clock news, direct from a sweltering Santa Monica playground, about its being one of the hottest days of the year. I couldn’t believe it. This was not a story worthy of Moyer’s stature as a major newsman.

“Sev,” I said, “why is Moyer out there doing that kind of a report?”

“He’s been a bad boy,” Sev said ominously. “I want to remind him that he’s an anchor, and should feel lucky that he’s not still just some street reporter.”

“How long are you going to keep him out there?”

And suddenly, in a loud and angry tone, Severino barked,
“Until he learns his f——ing lesson!”

I never knew what had prompted that punishment, and didn’t want to probe, but eventually all was forgiven and Paul returned to his anchor desk. Clearly, though, you didn’t want to mess with Sev. I knew how fortunate I was that he always seemed to take my side when problems arose. For instance, over the years I’d had troubles here and there with various newly hired producers about the opening segment of our morning shows. The uninterrupted eighteen-minute-long Host Chat would simply freak out some of these antsy producers—to them, it felt like an eternity of meandering airtime, no matter how entertaining it was. But I knew that’s what had always worked best for our show. I remember when KABC brought in a smart young guy from San Francisco to take over producing the show. His name was Ron Ziskin, and right off the bat, he thought the opening should be shortened. Rather than get involved in an argument upon his arrival, I decided to get my point across in another way. I took him over to Sev’s office to properly introduce Ron to our inimitable general manager. And that’s when I also casually mentioned to Sev that Ron wanted to shorten the opening—which, by the way, had become so popular that even many of our station employees would pop into the studio to grab some quick morning laughs during our freestyle banter. But now here was a new guy, determined to cut it back, timewise. Almost on cue, Sev leaned in close to Ziskin’s face and, pointing over toward me, told him in a firm whisper,
“Do it his way.”
And then he grabbed each of Ziskin’s cheeks, gave them a little twist, and again with that whisper added,
“Kapish?”

“Jeez,” Ziskin said as we walked back to our studio. “I fear him.” Then he asked me, “By the way, what does
kapish
mean?” With a straight face, I explained to him, “It means
‘Or else you die
.
’
” Of course it really means “Do you understand?” But I couldn’t resist, and Ziskin never brought it up again.

No matter that Sev and I maintained a strong relationship back then, he turned into a sly and cunning businessman whenever my contract renegotiations would roll around. I didn’t have an agent in those days, so I had to do my own bidding. It was no contest. He’d split a piece of paper into eight pieces—four for him, four for me. He’d then have me write on each piece what I thought the increments of my annual pay raises should be over the next four years. And he would do the same on his four slips of paper. He’d say, “Whoever’s numbers feel fairest will be the winner.” Of course, I was grateful for any kind of pay hikes at all, and so, for some strange reason, he won every time.

And there was something else that happened during my seventies stay at KABC-TV. My then
A.M. Los Angeles
producer, Frank Kelly, said one day, “Why don’t we take a camera crew and do a live hour before the Academy Awards as the nominees walk the red carpet.” The Oscars, after all, was an exclusive ABC telecast. Our preview show would only be for our station in Los Angeles—perfect for that Hollywood-happy market. It was a great idea. In those days, the academy put up some bleacher seats for the movie fans right in front of the long red carpet with ropes on either side. The likable and well-known reporter Army Archerd would stand at the foot of the carpet. As a longtime columnist for
Daily Variety,
everybody in the business knew Army. He was a favorite among actors and actresses, many of whom would never talk to any other reporter but him. One by one, he would announce who was arriving: “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s that wonderful actor Richard Burton.” There would be polite applause, and once in a while an audience member might shout out, “Hi, Richard.” Nothing too raucous.

Meanwhile, we would be waiting at the other end of the carpet. This was still the era when real movie stars commanded Hollywood, not just new faces in teen magazines, and they handled themselves with class and poise. It turned out to be a special night. The ratings for our preshow broadcast were sensational. The next year the station even gave us a second camera for the red carpet show. And yes, I did ask some of the ladies, “Who did your dress?” I just
had
to know.

The following day Howard Rosenberg, the TV writer for the
Los Angeles Times,
would spend his entire column beating my brains out, along the lines of “What a ridiculous idea the whole thing was. Regis Philbin talking to Fred Astaire . . . how dare he.” Howard killed us every year, and I’ve got to admit he was sometimes quite funny about it. But the show was such a big success that it spawned what you now see every single Oscar day, as about twenty-five cameras from all over the world are aimed at the star entrances, while dozens and dozens of TV producers and their assistants run all over the carpet grabbing their next glittery guests. It’s a combination of hysteria and madness, and I know how it started. I was there. Long before it became this mob scene. Too bad, Howard Rosenberg is no longer at the
Times
to report on all that insanity now. He’d have a ball with it. Better them than me.

But back to what seemed like my all too one-sided contract negotiations. After six years at KABC, with the ratings flying higher than ever, John Severino was rewarded by being named president of the entire ABC television network. He would run it all from the company’s New York headquarters. I hated to see him go. At an enormous good-bye party, he thanked everybody for making ours the top-rated station on the network, but especially singled out me and Jerry Dunphy, the main news anchor. I was touched and happy to get that kind of recognition but also knew that I’d miss Sev very much. Meanwhile, months went by and my contract eventually ended, but there’d been no call to come in and renegotiate with the station’s new general manager. So I pondered what kind of strategy I should take:
Do I just go in there and say “Let’s talk” or wait for the new manager to call me in?
I decided to let him call me. I was going to win one of these negotiations someday, I vowed. But before anything happened, my phone rang and Grant Tinker, one of the most astute and respected executives in all of television, was calling me with a bombshell of an offer. He was taking over the presidency of NBC, had faithfully watched my morning show for seven years, loved it, and now wanted me to come over to do the same thing for them—across the entire network. I was beside myself. All these years I had yearned for just one more crack at going national. And this was it. My KABC contract had expired. Nobody had called. I was free to walk off the lot. Still, it was tough to tell the general manager, Tom Van Amburg, that I was leaving. He got very upset and instructed my producer, Frank Kelly, to escort me off the premises immediately—without a chance to ever go to my office one last time and gather my things.