When Letterman Could Have Lost His Job—and Why

“Looking at it now, yes, I think they would have had good reason to fire me. But at the time, I was largely ignorant as to what, really, I had done. It just seemed like, O.K., well, here’s somebody who had an intimate relationship with somebody he shouldn’t have had an intimate relationship with. And I always said, ‘Well, who hasn’t?’ to myself. But then, when I was able to see from the epicenter, the ripples, I thought, yeah, they could have fired me. But they didn’t. So I owe them that.”—David Letterman, on his revelation of an extortion attempt against him arising from an affair with a staffer, quoted in Dave Itzkoff, “Calling It a Night,” The New York Times, May 3, 2015

With audience applause and pundits’ plaudits ringing in his ears, David Letterman took his final “Late Show” bows the other night. Viewers and readers have been reminded of how much he contributed these last three decades to his narrow but venerable entertainment genre: his mentoring of young comics, his boosts to roots music, the wildly popular and imitated Top 10 lists, his deconstruction of so many of the conventions of the talk-show format.

Largely forgotten, however, is the sex scandal that rocked his career in October 2009, when he disclosed to his audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater that he had reported to the police a $2 million blackmail attempt by a jealous boyfriend of a staffer with whom the talk-show host had had an affair.

From the tone of the many retrospectives published these last few weeks, one would have thought that it was a momentary, inconsequential glitch in an otherwise stellar career. The one person who acknowledges it was far more serious was Letterman himself.

In his recent cover profile in Rolling Stone, Letterman admitted the obvious: that, as a recent retired politician who had appeared on his show said two decades ago, he had caused pain in his marriage, to the point where he feared he had "blown up my family." But in the above quote from The New York Times, he acknowledged that the damage extended from the personal to the professional. For all the sharp jabs he delivered to CBS (and, before that, of course, even more so, to NBC) in the last two decades, he admitted, the network would have been well within its rights to terminate his contract.

That might have been one reason why Letterman said on his finale that CBS President Leslie Moonves had been “more than patient” with him.

It has been heartening to read in these interviews about the talk-show host’s love for his wife Regina, and the realization of his mistake in jeopardizing their relationship. Even now, though, it doesn’t appear that he really understands what his transgression was.

To start with, he did not simply have “an intimate relationship with somebody he shouldn’t have.” As he disclosed to the audience at the time, he had affairs, plural. In other words, it wasn’t a one-night stand, or an affair of the heart, but a pattern of misbehavior over multiple years, with multiple staffers, that created an environment of gossip, favoritism, and unwillingness to tell the boss he was making a big mistake. (Were it a businessman plunged into such a fiasco, Letterman would surely have made great sport of the name of his production company: Worldwide Pants.)

In addition, the on-air appearances by his lover leave the viewer with a queasy feeling in the stomach. What are we to make of this exchange, for instance? HE: "Why are you dressed as Little Bo Peep?" SHE: "Because you made me."

When he broke the news, he began by asking the audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater, “Do you feel like a story?” He then admitted the relationships that opened him up to the blackmail attempt, which he said was “scary.” As to whether this all might have been embarrassing, he said it might—for the female staffers involved. It would not be for another five days before he apologized to his wife and son for the damage this had caused them.

The manner of the disclosure didn’t sit well with Terry O'Neill, president of The National Organization for Women, who criticized the “clueless” Letterman for joking about the matter and casting himself as the victim. She assailed him for infecting the work culture "with uncertainty, gossip, and in some cases, hostility."

“Hostility”—that word lies at the heart of the legal definition of sexual harassment. O’Neill’s statement might sound like so much rhetoric, except it was put in a concrete, situational context by Nell Scovell, a longtime TV industry writer and “showrunner.” (Her substantial credits include writing for Murphy Brown, Monk, The Simpsons, Newhart, and N.C.I.S.; creating Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; and co-authoring Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.) In 1988, she walked away from her “dream job” of writing for Late Night after less than half a year, because she doubted that she could “thrive professionally in that workplace.”

In an article for Vanity Fair not long after the scandal broke, Scovell made clear what working in “that workplace” involved:

 “Did Dave hit on me? No. Did he pay me enough extra attention that it was noted by another writer? Yes. Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.”

This was not the type of quid pro quo example of sexual harassment that is the easiest to understand and condemn. But Letterman and his male managers felt that they were operating not a workplace but a happy hunting ground for female playthings, creating an atmosphere unhealthy for business operations and relationships.

Scovell had no interest in lawsuits, nor even in seeing her onetime employer (who, she wrote, told her in her exit interview that she was welcome to return) lose his job. But what bothered her, two decades later, was the continuing underrepresentation of women not just on Letterman’s writing staff, but also on Jay Leno's and Conan O’Brien's: “Out of the 50 or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women. It would be funny if it weren’t true.”

It would be interesting to see now whether that stark disparity exists five years later. But then again, everything about the scandal has faded like an old newspaper. Letterman, of course, survived and even thrived (including Kennedy Center honors two years ago), due in no small part to the following factors:

*The extortionist took a plea deal rather than risk a trial that might have embarrassed Letterman further. Had he elected to go to trial, Robert "Joe" Halderman, a long-time producer on the CBS show "48 Hours,” might have produced a continuing round of daily revelations, so specific and rich in detail as to make Letterman and CBS a running joke. The deal worked out between his lawyer and the prosecution assured that no new details would emerge.

*Letterman confessed to the whole thing early on. There was no repeated denial, such as others caught in such scandals (politicians such as Bill Clinton and John Edwards, for instance) engaged in. There was, thankfully, no “I did not have sex with that woman” to land him in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

*An obvious on-air lecher, Letterman could not be accused of hypocrisy. The talk-show host’s winks and banter with the likes of Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore might have been the most obvious of his on-air flirtations, but they were by no means the only ones. (For example, see this post from the Village Voice.) Any young starlet could expect similar treatment. Hence, there was not the slightest shock that he had been randy.

*This was show biz—what else do you expect? Politicians, generals and corporate heads have lost their jobs over this type of behavior. Letterman survived, in no small part because national security was not breached nor news credibility damaged. Moreover, affairs by entertainers are a dime a dozen these days—unlike during the studio era of film, when stars were guarded by a welter of lawyers and private detectives who ensured that nothing would sully a reputation.

*Confidentiality agreements provided protection not generally seen or understood by the public. Also called non-disclosure agreements, these assist companies, in one context, from taking proprietary information about products to competitors. In the entertainment world, they shield celebrities from tell-air memoirs by close aides, servants, nannies, and the like. Time was when they would groan at the likes of That Girl and Phil (1990), a now all-but-forgotten blabfest by Desmond Atholl that described what it was like to be major domo to spoiled-rotten Marlo Thomas and husband Phil Donahue, or Suzanne Hansen’s You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again, a catalogue of horror stories about working for agent Michael Ovitz and wife Judy. You don’t see that happening quite as much these days. What happens when such pacts are not in place occurred several years ago after Tiger Woods’ wife erupted over his infidelity. It turned out to be more than a single unfortunate incident in which the golf star and his estranged spouse might have united to keep their children from reading about it in the newspapers. The problem was that the women with whom Tiger had affairs were not employees, but instead professional consultants and the like he might have met during business but were not under contract to him, who now were more than ready to line up in front of microphones and proclaim that they had Tiger in their tanks. The chances for embarrassment have risen exponentially with social media as well. In the face of these challenges, even B and C list entertainers have confidential agreements for the help, according to a 2007 Los Angeles Times article.

*Letterman’s audience was too jaded to care. Jay Leno might have won the long-term war for late-night audiences because he appealed to a broader Middle America audience, but Letterman’s core viewership—urban and liberal enough to prize his ironic sensibility—provided him with superior defenses. Priding themselves on their edgy, seen-it-all attitude, how could they be shocked at what he copped to? Many were also New Yorkers, a tribe that not only had given wide latitude to mayors with shaky allegiance to their marriage vows (Jimmy Walker, Rudy Guiliani), but were also deeply grateful to him for bringing the talk-show format and its jobs back to Gotham, 20 years after Johnny Carson had departed for the West Coast.

*Letterman made so much money for CBS that only the prospect of a steeper financial loss stemming from his behavior could have made a difference. Companies are prepared to overlook a lot of problems created by someone who makes them fistfuls of money, even when those problems result from behavior that among ordinary mortals might be deemed spoiled, arrogant, offensive, psychotic, even criminal. It is one reason why Bill O’Reilly continues to survive at Fox News after revelations of off-camera actions that were misleading, piggish, and even violent, not to mention on-camera behavior that is undeniably and irredeemably intemperate and rude. Ultimately, in thinking about the Letterman scandal, the operative number is not 260—the approximate number of times, by 2008, that Letterman’s intern-turned-assistant-turned-lover, Stephanie Birkitt, had appeared on camera to sass her besotted boss—but $271 million, the advertising revenues generated in 2009 by The Late Show. (If you’re keeping score, that’s almost $100 million more than Jay Leno's Tonight Show was making at the time.)

Had any of the above factors not been operational, Letterman could very easily have been fired by CBS, in which case he would not have enjoyed a prolonged, joyful swan song but would have been remembered for a messy end to an achievement-packed career, the way that journalists Dan Rather and Helen Thomas are.

So let Letterman depart, then, older, wiser and chastened by his professional near-death experience. But in doing so, viewers should not forget either why he got into trouble or the continuing dangers posed to American business in general and the entertainment world in particular by the environment in his and all too many other offices in the U.S.

The Letterman scandal occurred not just because of a privileged but aging and insecure star but also because of an old boys’ club, in which he felt comfortable in mixing business and pleasure. The paucity of females among his writers meant that when women won any of the few other coveted staff openings, they would be reluctant to say or do anything to risk their positions.

That closed world continues to operate in Hollywood at large, even as the moving van has aleady taken away from the Ed Sullivan Theater all reminders of Letterman and his staff. Women continue to be so underrepresented among Hollywood directors that, as recounted in this Huffington Post article, the American Civil Liberties Union requested an investigation into the hiring practices behind these stats (women only represent 7 percent of directors, 11 percent of writers, and 18 percent of editors on the most successful films over the past 17 years). 

Progress has actually slowed for women in Hollywood over the past 20 years—a state of affairs that could happen only when people prefer to forget, as they have done with a certain talk-show host chuckling his way into the sunset.

Robin Williams’ Art of the ‘Broken Places’

Shortly after David Letterman jumped to CBS for his own talk show, Robin Williams came on as a guest. Watching, I was chuckling away, as I’m sure thousands of others were, when the conversation took an even zanier turn, to then-tabloid sensation John Wayne Bobbitt and his beyond-infuriated wife Lorena.

“It’s amazing, when she threw it [her husband’s mutilated member] out the freeway, she didn’t land it in some toxic dump,” Williams speculated. Whereupon, jumping out of his seat, he began to enact the results: Attack of the 100-Foot Penis, featuring the short actor practically making himself several inches taller as he lifted and squared his shoulders, Boris Karloff style, stalking around the set and staring madly into the camera. (You can see the results on this YouTube video.)

The whole audience was reduced to a collective puddle of laughter, enthralled, astonished and delighted by the lightning-flash free association, the synapses jumped in a single bound by this superman of improv comics. Comedians sum up this kind of galvanic effect on listeners with a verb: killed.

That word took on an alternate, far more awful connotation this week with the news that Williams had killed himself. The act prompted an extraordinary outpouring of grief in the social media, with much of it focused on a question born of anguish: How could someone whose work involved bringing joy to millions end his life in absolute despair?

The shock was compounded by the fact that Williams’ death came when, if not at the top of his game, he seemed eminently capable of reaching it again. And so the speculation began in earnest about what drove him to these awful final moments.

“It is often easier to account for a suicide by external causes like marital or work problems, physical illness, financial stress or trouble with the law than it is to attribute it to mental illness,” wrote Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in an op-ed this weekend for The New York Times.

It was those steep alimony payments to his ex-wives that led to his death, some people said. It was the failure last year of a sitcom, the genre that launched him to fame in 1978 with Mork and Mindy, others thought. It was survivor’s guilt over losing good friends such as John Belushi and Christopher Reeve. It was a recent diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s Disease.

But if the last several days have taught us anything, it is not only how little we knew about the actor, but also how little we know about others in his field plagued by this condition—indeed, how little we know, two decades after Prozac, about the best means of keeping depression at bay.

It turns out, for instance, that quite a number of stand-up comics, comic actors or directors have been affected by what has been called “the noonday demon.” We already knew that the late Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, and Williams’ biggest influence, Jonathan Winters, suffered from this affliction. In the past week, though, other comic entertainers’ similar struggles have become better known, including Carrie Fisher, Jim Carrey, Chevy Chase, Rob Reiner, Lena Dunham, David Letterman, and Luke Wilson.

Some observers have reacted viscerally to what they see as the cliché of the clown laughing on the outside but crying on the inside. An especially fierce dissent along these lines was voiced by Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute and a researcher in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, in a blog post for Scientific American Magazine. The media should dispense with “cutesy connections to genius that are not even supported in the scientific literature,” Kaufman stated bluntly. In this regard, he found no thread between Williams’ suicide, an event “strongly influenced by mental illness,” and his comic brilliance, the product of so much more in his life: “his compassion, playfulness, divergent thinking, imagination, intelligence, affective repertoire, and unique life experiences.”

Kaufman’s impatience with the simplistic thinking in the air this last week about Williams’ death is understandable. Yet, if we cannot accept a one-circumstance-fits-all explanation for the despair experienced by Williams and other comics, certain aspects of their livelihood and environment increase their vulnerability to misfortune:

*Schedules that define their outsider status. Comics, like many entertainers, do not work nine to five like most people. Five p.m. is, in fact, early in the day for them. After a show, their natural tendency is to celebrate with other professionals well into the morning hours. Their systems now run counter to the body’s natural rhythms.

*Questioning of social norms. Comics find fodder for their work everywhere. From religion to sexuality to politics, nothing is sacred for them. The bitterness underlying such routines can be energizing—until, like an engine allowed no rest, it gives out. At that point, they feel inadequate support from the institutions (including the family) in which so many ordinary people take shelter.

*Drug use. For the last several decades, recreational drug use has been an integral part of the entertainment scene, a sign of being anti-establishment and cool. (The first decade or so of Saturday Night Live was, by common agreement, coke-fueled.) But this use, when combined with an inherent tendency toward depression, becomes especially dangerous for some users.

*A penchant for risk-taking. David Steinberg, who made many appearances on The Tonight Show in the Johnny Carson era, was quite insightful about the frequency—even necessity—for failure in his and Williams’ line of work during an interview a year and a half ago with The Huffington Post: “There is no way, and everyone will tell you this, to get better at stand-up -- that is talking for an hour in front of a live audience who are paying money to hear you -- without failing. And failure is something that takes place in front of an audience….So basically, what makes it brutal … is that you can only get better at it by failing in front of an audience. There's no way to do it at home quietly.”

*Constant craving for creative validation. Returning to the stand-up term “kill,” three words should follow it: “or be killed.” While an actor might live for applause at the end of a show, a comedian will be virtually mainlining approval, from one joke to another. The results can be devastating when the laughs don’t come as often as expected.

Kaufman, I think, is right that Williams did not suffer because of his comic genius. But Williams did feel the ground shifting beneath him because of the environment in which stand-up comics must survive.

Over the last week, a quote has reverberated in my mind to explain the nature of survival in the midst of reverses: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

That passage comes from a crucial point in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Three decades after writing that, at an age and under circumstances roughly similar to Williams, with a similar high status in his field, he also chose to end his life. 

At some point in a not-so-distant future, as neuroscience advances, we may well look back on the current  regimen for treating the comic as something from the Dark Ages, much like we now do with the electroshock therapy used disastrously on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

In the meantime, though, we will be left to mournfully wonder why these two American masters came to be destroyed by their broken places.

Quote of the Day (Dick Cavett, on Talk-Show Hosting and Anxiety)

“It's a wonderful job for people who have never had a nervous breakdown but have always wanted one.”—Former talk-show host Dick Cavett, on being a talk-show host, quoted in John Heilpern, “Out to Lunch with Jimmy Fallon,” Vanity Fair, January 2013

And you thought that The Larry Sanders Show was fictional? Even one of the more successful practitioners of the art of the talk show, David Letterman, admitted to Charlie Rose that he has seen a psychiatrist.

Now, Seth Meyers is going to replace Jimmy Fallon on Late Night, as the latter takes over the throne for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. Only time will tell if this turns out to be a success—or if Meyers ends up making the same big, anxiety-producing mistake that Chevy Chase did with his brief fling with the gabfest form some years back.

(The image accompanying this post is a publicity photo from 1973 of Cavett with onetime Tonight Show host Jack Paar, who had come on to announce that he would be jumping into the talk-show fray again. That lasted all of a year. We’ll see if Meyers has better luck.)

Quote of the Day (Joey Buttafuoco’s Ex on Him and Amy Fisher)

“Why do we like train wrecks? Why do we like to watch? Why do we slow down when we go past an accident scene? It's the nature of the beast, I guess."—Mary Jo Connery, on America’s continuing fascination with ex-husband Joey Buttafuoco and her would-be killer, Amy Fisher, quoted in “Mary Jo Scoffs at Joey and Amy's Second Shot at Love,” quoted in Good Morning America, May 17, 2007

This particular “train wreck” occurred on this date 20 years ago, when Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the face on the doorstep of her Long Island home. Thus started the prototype of the modern tabloid sex scandal.

A shooting is a deadly affair—except when the media decide it isn’t. It might have been different if, against all odds, Mary Jo had died. But she survived and, for awhile, even stayed with and defended her sleazy husband. That seemed to give the media license for a free-for-all in which the victim in all of this came in for almost as much criticism as Joey and Amy.

Before long, the tabloids and network and cable stations were airing every detail of how the Long Island Lolita hooked up with Long Island Lothario Joey Buttafuoco. The hotter Joey’s denials of impropriety, the more obvious it became that the teen (16 years old when she began sleeping with the married man) was servicing him as much as he had serviced her in his normal capacity at his auto-body shop. And the more obvious the affair, the more undignified—ridiculous, even—Joey looked in disavowing it.

Every year, television honors its best with the Emmy Awards. I bet you can guess that none of the three TV movies about the affair (including one starring Drew Barrymore) ended up with any nominations.  I think it’s a safe bet, too, that all of the personnel involved with creating or green-lighting these products would prefer that their obituaries not mention these particular credits.

On the other hand, one person’s career achieved greater heights because of the affair—or, rather, because of its comic fodder for his act. Three years before Jay Leno’s “The Dancing Itos” parodied the O.J. Simpson trial principals, David Letterman discovered comic gold in another shooting. So incessant—and, yes, deadly funny—were his barbs that he had only had to utter the word “Buttafuoco” in his opening monologue to convulse his audience. He even got a guest on his show, Al Gore, to announce that his Secret Service nickname was “Buttafuoco.”

Wait a second…Something is wrong there. That moniker should have been assigned to Gore's boss, who, only a few months before this triangle, had heatedly—and misleadingly—denied his own fling with a tabloid-ready personality, a nightclub “entertainer.” Just as Joey should have avoided getting mixed-up with a confused teenager, so Bill Clinton should have run far, far away from a trashy blonde with dark roots and a weird penchant for spelling her first name “Gennifer.” And, just as Joey should have done with Amy, the President should have sung “Go Away, Little Girl” as soon as his eyes lit on Monica Lewinsky.

Many people wondered why Mary Jo stuck with her sleazy husband—though many of these same people did not ask why Hillary Clinton didn’t walk out on hers. (Eleven years later, tiring of his antics—including, in the interim, solicitation of a prostitute—Mary Jo at last filed for divorce.)

Earlier this year, Mary Jo remarried—the most visible she has been since she gave the heave-ho to Joe. She has certainly come out with more of a measure of dignity than Fisher (latest career move: Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew) or Joey (additional criminal charges: auto-insurance fraud and illegal possession of ammunition). After she referred to him as a "sociopath" in a memoir a few years ago, he hired a lawyer who sued her on the grounds that she had "made Mr. Buttafuoco a pariah in the community, causing him not just public embarrassment, but the loss of business."

At  least Joey's legal eagle was being paid to look like an idiot, unlike his thick-headed client....

Quote of the Day (David Letterman, With a Belated Apology)

"I would like to apologize especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future."—David Letterman, Late Night With David Letterman, apologizing for his joke about a daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin being “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez on a visit to Yankee Stadium

I had been gathering my thoughts about the Letterman-Palin spitting match, only to be diverted by other subject matter (and some events unrelated to the writing of this blog) over the last week. Over the last couple of days, I wondered about just shelving the whole thing, thinking the matter was passé.

Ultimately, I thought better of it, for two reasons:

1) I had so much written already, so why discard it?

2) Even when she does nothing remotely newsworthy or even interesting, Gov. Palin possesses some mysterious quality that makes otherwise allegedly normal people—not just erstwhile aging GOP Presidential candidates but also current but aging talk-show hosts—lose their minds.

Given the distractions Palin caused his campaign, John McCain is probably wondering these days if her star quality and the precedent he set in choosing her was really worth the candle. Similarly, Letterman might be wondering if the chance to score a few cheap laughs at her expense was really worth a situation that scared the network suits and forced him to make an unusual and very public apology.

Nobody with any sense other than historians, I thought, would take any notice of Palin for, oh, at least another year and a half. Actually, I was praying that nobody would take notice of her. With an economy still taking on water, with the Middle East a mess and with North Korea bellowing at Japan and the U.S. and anyone else it has a mind to, the least I need is braying from another Presidential hopeful.

But damn if John Kerry didn’t go and put Palin in the spotlight again! (What was I saying about “erstwhile aging GOP Presidential candidates” just before?)

In the middle of last week, as speculation began to swell on where in the world was Mark Sanford, the junior Senator from Massachusetts said at a party gathering, "Too bad if a governor had to go missing, it couldn't have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin."

There were some guffaws reported at the event, but my guess is that these people must have been paid to do so. Otherwise, the remark offers ample evidence why a couple of years ago, after another gaffe (about the educational level of armed-forces enlistees) slipped from his lips, Democratic primary support went “missing” for its 2004 standard bearer. You know, John Kerry.

Leave aside the dubious humor of wishing someone could disappear. There’s that tone, the sense that Lord Kerry, whose comically high self-regard rivals a former barfly in his state, the fictional Dr. Frasier Crane, has deigned to tell us something we don’t know after a high-profile Presidential campaign that concluded less than nine months ago: i.e., that Sarah Palin is the governor of Alaska.

There’s also the fact that at the point when Kerry made his remarks, Gov. Palin was visiting her state’s troops in Kosovo and Iraq, where her oldest son has been stationed. I imagine that if something ghastly happened while she was over there, the senator would have to harrumph and backtrack on the double.

Tone and context were also part of what tripped up Letterman, but only part. The affair represented almost a Rorschach test in our national politics.

But before we get to that, to answer some questions you might have had:

* Do I think Letterman is sexually perverted toward teenage girls, as initially implied by Gov. Palin’s spokesperson? No. Give me a break.

* Do I think Letterman was sincere in his apology? No.

* Do I think Letterman is blameless in this whole thing? No.

It was fascinating to watch the sides line up on this issue. The more likely you were to be liberal or to love Letterman, the more likely you were to believe that Sarah Palin was, as one respondent put it on one Web site I saw, a “media whore.” The more likely you were to be conservative or to love Letterman’s former late night rival, Jay Leno, the more likely you were to want Letterman picketed, pickled, boiled, roasted on a pit, then fired.

I have a somewhat different perspective. I’ve never felt undying allegiance to Letterman or Leno, and though I’ve never voted Republican in a Presidential election, I’ve split my votes among Democrats, Republicans and independents in other races over the years.

If you want to characterize me, call me a contrarian, someone constitutionally averse to sticking with one set of people whose positions, through mutual reinforcement, will only calcify over time.

I don’t expect to vote for Palin for President if she runs in 2012. Her positions on the environment, energy and guns would, by themselves, lose my vote, but her resume is, to put it mildly, thin.

Letterman said he didn’t intend 14-year-old Willow, but instead her 18-year-old sister, the famously unwed mom Bristol, to be the target of his joke. I have no reason to dispute his defense that he’d never joke about a 14-year-old and statutory rape, and I think Palin was merely making political hay when she said she didn’t believe him.

Anyone who has ever put his words out for examination, either orally or in print, is bound to sympathize with the “Late Night” host’s bewilderment that the perception of his remark did not match his intentions. Which of us hasn’t said or thought, “Why don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”

But none of this, in the end, constitutes a get-out-of-jail card for Letterman. This was not a joke wrenched out of context. Letterman is clearly nonplussed why so many people—not just conservatives, as you’d expect, but even the otherwise progressive National Organization for Women--were bothered by this.

So let me boil it down for him in a way that he—and other comics—should grasp:

Say what you want about politicians and officeholders. But if their kids are underage, spare us—and them—your barbs. They didn’t ask for it by entering public life. Just leave them alone.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan seems perhaps even more bothered than Letterman by all the fuss. Why shouldn’t people go after politicians’ families, he believes, since candidates put them on display for the voters?

Politicians, narcissists that they are, should understand that they enter the political arena at their own risk. And unlike shy, retiring Rachel Jackson or Mamie Eisenhower, today’s Presidential spouses are not just adults but, post-women’s-lib, active participants and public partners in their husbands’ campaigns.

But candidates' kids didn’t ask their parents to go for the grand prize. They have become collateral damage in partisan attempts to get at their parents.

It’s all part of the widening nastiness of politics over the last two decades. When he made fun of Chelsea Clinton’s looks on the air 15 years ago, Rush Limbaugh did nothing except expose his own cruelty. I was disgusted then, just as I am angered now at the treatment of Bristol and Willow.

Don’t get me wrong: after you pass 21, you’re pretty much on your own as far as your choices are concerned. If you’re one of Franklin Roosevelt’s sons, using your father’s name and power to get by, or Neil Bush, involving himself in a savings-and-loan just when this financial scandal became a big thing in his father’s administration—well, good luck.

But younger kids are different. Adolescence is about experimenting, stepping gingerly into a self you may not know yet. You’re not always going to make the right move.

If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to know of someone who’s made a fool out of themselves at least once with alcohol or other drugs during their teens. You might know someone, like Bristol Palin, in a crisis pregnancy. Heck, it might even have happened to you.

But chances are, you didn’t end up on the front pages of newspapers, on CNN or hundreds of blogs over it. Nobody is interested in it. Nobody should be, even if their parent is a politician.

A useful yardstick for assessing how to treat the erring children of politicians is Al Gore III. Two years ago, he was arrested for possession of drugs while he was driving. Since he was 24, that treatment was appropriate.

But while his father was Vice-President, when he was 13 and at the DC prep school St. Alban’s, the younger Gore was caught by school authorities with some mind-altering substances. The matter was publicized in the U.K., but not here in the U.S., because Gore made a personal appeal to journalists, many of whom had teenage kids at St. Alban’s and similar exclusive prep schools: What if it happened to your kid?

The reporters saw his point and almost universally sat on the story. I think they were right to do so. Kids should not be defined in the public eye at such a young age by a mistake, or even by a few of them.

I wish reporters—and comedians—would act with similar restraint today. Even if Letterman was correct that he went so far as to verify Bristol Palin’s age before ridiculing her (17 at the time of her pregnancy), he still would have been wrong to do so. The fact that so many other comedians besides him had already done so was no excuse.

I think Letterman’s joke boomeranged on him, in a way it might not have under other circumstances, because of:

* The sheer mass of his jokes about her. Evidently, over the last year, his number of jokes about Palin outnumbered those by Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart—none of them, be it said, disinclined to go easy on the governor—combined. Letterman had laid the foundation for a perception that he had something of a vendetta against her.

* The “Top 10 Highlights Of Sarah Palin's Trip To New York”. Some of the other remarks about Palin that night by themselves reeked with vehemence.

For instance, #9: “Laughed at all those crazy-looking foreigners entering the U.N.” A suggestion of zenophobia, perhaps?

Or #3: “Finally met one of those Jewish people Mel Gibson's always talking about .” Hmmm…anti-Semitism? If that was not what that one was about, what exactly was he hinting at?

Or #2: “Bought makeup from Bloomingdale's to update her ‘slutty flight attendant’ look.” Since when are flight attendants “slutty”? Since when is Palin? Since when has any major female candidate in memory been labeled “slutty,” aside from this instance?

It took a lot longer for Letterman to apologize to the Palins than he did when he made Paris Hilton cry a year and a half ago for her stint in the slammer. There’s a problem there.

I think Letterman will come back from this misstep, but it will take him longer to recover than he did from his disastrous appearance hosting the Academy Awards in the 1990s.

Last fall, Wall Street Journal media critic Dorothy Rabinowitz speculated that Letterman’s on-air fury over being ditched by John McCain was reminiscent of Arthur Godfrey’s exposure as a crank when he went after Julius LaRosa in the 1950s. The Sarah Palin incident makes that observation look especially prescient now.

It would be a shame if this highly talented comedian became defined by a mistake. But that was the same treatment he accorded Bristol Palin. He was certainly right, after Palin initially protested, that his joke was in "poor taste." He was also right to accept his mother's advice and apologize to the Palins. Let's hope that, like Bristol Palin, he'll make an effort to learn from his mistake.