David Letterman Confession: Calculation vs. Compulsion

Just as CBS star David Letterman was routing “The Tonight Show” in the ratings, a blackmail scheme drove him to admit on the air to the kind of sordid extramarital affairs –with company employees – that he mocks so mercilessly in others.

Mr. Letterman’s on-air confession, delivered on the set of his late night talk show on Thursday without advance warning or fanfare, would have been shocking, except that it was confusing: Mr. Letterman’s delivery about his “creepy” backstage behavior was so glib and deadpan that the audience couldn’t be blamed for assuming that the stand-up comedian was still joking at his desk. Mr. Letterman noted that it would indeed be embarrassing for his affairs to be publicly known, then paused a beat. “Especially for the women.”

And this incongruous blending of the serious and the comic, as much infidelity and possible abuse of power (the office affair is so often a crime of convenience), was what seemed to incense commentators on MSNBC and Fox News Friday morning.

This wasn’t an exception, however.

Mr. Letterman is an intensely private celebrity – practically a hermit – who has always processed his personal life in front of a studio audience. He seems to lead his life most fully in front of a studio audience; Mr. Letterman went for 18 years without ever missing a show, until quadruple bypass surgery in 2000 forced him to take a break.

He has a disconcerting habit of weaving deadly serious statements into humorous performances. He was admired for the heartfelt, emotional way he explained his return to the air after Sept 11. He was equally candid, or at least, forthcoming, about the bypass (he brought his surgeons onto the show), his brushes with a crazy stalker, the birth of his son and even his late life marriage last March. Most recently, he apologized, up to a point, to former Gov. Sarah Palin for making a sexual joke about her 14-year-old daughter.

In the middle of his ballyhooed interview with Madonna on Wednesday, Mr. Letterman made a passing, and at the time inscrutable, reference to having had a terrible day – in retrospect, that seems like a veiled allusion to the secret he stripped bare on Thursday.

Thursday’s admission looked a lot like calculation: Mr. Letterman was answerable to an audience that doesn’t answer back. But it also had the feel of a Lettermanly compulsion: a talk show host who can only speak openly on an open mike.