Philbin - How I Got This Way

All the people you read about here are special to me, but I would like to dedicate this book to Jack Paar. He showed me so many years ago how to do what I do.

Many years after that I finally met him and too many years after that I became his friend. It was too short.

Contents

Bing Crosby

Two Major Marines:

Major Rankin and Major Flake, USMC

Steve Allen

Ronald Reagan

Walter Winchell

Sydney Omarr

Cary Grant

Jack Paar

Bill Cosby

Joey Bishop

Dean Martin

Don Rickles

John Severino

Coach Frank Leahy

Coach Ara Parseghian

Coach Lou Holtz

Kathie Lee Gifford

Kelly Ripa

Donald Trump

Claudia Cohen

George Steinbrenner

Joe DiMaggio

Jerry Seinfeld

Steven Spielberg

George Clooney

Jack Nicholson

Howard Stern

Charles Grodin

David Letterman

Joy Philbin

I just reread my manuscript before I handed it in for publication. Naturally it brought back so many memoriesfrom some of the things in my life that I cant forget, to stuff I forgot or wanted to forget and remembered only because I took this time to review it all. Some of the chapters made me more sentimental than I expected. You can see that the people remembered here are people who made a difference for me. Most helped. Others made me wish I had done things differently. Some have died and I wish with all my heart that they could still be around to share more of these memories. When it was good, it was sensational. And when it got bad, well, I just wouldnt want to go through it again. But I was lucky to meet most of the people I did. Lucky to have their advice and their guidance, and it was only my own fault that I made some of the mistakes I made in my life.

I was there almost at the beginning of television. It was so different when I started. It was a climb from the New York NBC page staff to a TV station prop house in Los Angeles, to driving a delivery truck around Hollywood and after that a radio news car in the fifties around San Diego reporting what was going on in the city that day (not much, fifty years ago). Then finally getting, by chance, an invitation into televisionas a real broadcaster. And all along the way, meeting certain people who served as models and guides to me, inadvertently showing me how I wanted to live and what I ultimately wanted to do in this business. Hosting a 9 a.m. show when most of the world is going to work, going to school, going to the store, or going wherever people go in the morningwas that considered being a success? Did I stay there too long? Did I have any other place to go or was I lucky the way it all turned out? Lucky that I finally made a right decision coming back to New York? That I finally made this recent decision to move on? Were not sure how that will turn out, but there does come a time in your life, after youve spent twenty-eight years on TV in L.A. and twenty-eight more in New York, when moving on sounds like the right thing to do. Maybe its time for a change. Ive spent nearly seventeen thousand hours in front of a TV camera. Thats a record in our business... and now that I think about it, it was exciting. It was fun. It was more than I ever thought I would accomplish.

I guess Ive learned something more about myself in the process of looking back this way. Learned something more about the people who have influenced me, too. Hindsight can be a great gift. Everyone is just trying to find his or her own path in this world. You cant know what the future holds, but sometimes looking back at the past can help. This is my past. Maybe it can help you, even guide you, and hopefully provide you with a few good laughs.

REGIS PHILBIN

July 26, 2011

BING CROSBY

I t all began with Bing Crosby during the Depression of the thirties. I must have been six or seven years old at the time. My family lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house on Cruger Avenue in the Bronx, and every night at 9:30, I sat by my little radio in our kitchen and listened to a half hour of Bings records regularly spilling out over WNEW. His voice was so clear, so pure, and so warm that after a while I thought of him as my good friend. Even though he was out in faraway, glamorous Hollywood and I was in the humble old Bronx, in my mind we truly were friends and would always spend that special half hour together, just the two of us.

I listened to those songs of the Depression era and, even as a kid, I understood that the songwriters were trying to give hope to a struggling and downtrodden public. I grew to love those lyrics and what they said to me. I swear to you that those same songs have stayed with me for the rest of my life, and during various dark periods when I hit those inevitable bumps along the way, I would actually sing them to myself. Like When skies are cloudy and gray, theyre only gray for a day, so wrap your troubles in dreams and dream your troubles away.... Those were the sorts of lyrics that helped cheer an entire nation wallowing in hard times together, not to mention those who experienced bleak moments of their own in decades to come. Certainly they kept me going. So Bing Crosby remained a big deal to mehis mellow voice, his carefree persona, his very special aura. Dependable as could be, he was the friend who could always be counted on to make me feel better.

Now all through high school and college, my parents would ask me over and over again, What are you going to do with your life? What do you want to be? Well, in my heart I wanted to be a singer like Bing, but I worried about the reality of that dream. Did I think for one minute that I had the voice to pull it off? Of course not. It never occurred to me. I just wanted to be Bing! So I could never tell them I wanted to be a singer. They might think I was crazy or trying to achieve the impossible. But I did promise my folks that I would make my decision before graduating from the University of Notre Dame.

During those college years, my hope of becoming a singer did wane slightly. I majored in sociology and never took a single music-related course, much less any kind of class in public speakingno confidence for it, noneyet I still had a passion for it that burned inside me.

Two weeks before graduation, I discovered that one of my friends could actually play the piano. Gus Falcone was his name, and I explained my awkward situation to him. This would be the last chance to tell my parents my long-held secret, and with Gus at the piano, I could show them it wasnt altogether that impossible as a professional dream. Over and over, for two weeks, we rehearsed one of Crosbys great songs, Pennies from Heaven, in the campus music hall. Finally, the day before graduation, my folks arrived at Notre Dame, thoroughly shaken up by a severe thunderstorm they had encountered a half hour outside of South Bend. They got out of the car, already off balance due to the bad weather, but I bravely proceeded anyway: Mom, Daddont say anything. Youve waited a long time for this, so now Im going to tell you what it is I want to do for the rest of my life. Come with me.