Fire Up The Color-Tinis

 

It's been 22 years since Tom Snyder made his national television debut hosting The Tomorrow Show, a late night talk show that aired from 1 to 2 a.m., following the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And as I recall, in 1973 there was nothing else like it. Snyder chain-smoked his way through the wee hours, lighting one cigarette after another and enshrouding the studio in a blue haze. There was no audience, no cameramen milling about, just Snyder. And the selection of guests made for a queer parade of misfits and crackpots and misanthropes (one of Snyder's first-ever shows degenerated into an hour-long shouting match with a precociously savage neo-Nazi and Klan Grand Wizard named David Duke).
         But The Tomorrow Show was pretty consistently entertaining, and Snyder himself was weirdly compelling--at least in part because without a studio audience there for reactions, he seemed to bifurcate, performing not just as host but becoming his own sidekick, too, reacting to his own performance. Frowning and grinding his jaw one moment, chortling and hooting the next, depending on how he was doing. Or on how he thought he was doing, which was--and still is--often affectingly at odds with reality.
         But then, in 1980, things started to go bad. NBC renamed Snyder's show Tomorrow Coast to Coastand forced him to share the air with the frighteningly fatuous Hollywood gossip columnist Rona Barrett, whom Snyder appeared to despise. And oddly, NBC decided to saddle Snyder with a studio audience--this, after he'd developed the peculiarly intimate style that not only didn't require an audience, but one that an audience actually worked against. And to leverage Tomorrow 's hip quotient, Snyder was forced to book guests like John Lydon, who was then lately of the Sex Pistols, and for whom Snyder had absolutely no feel. To say the least.
         Finally--and in retrospect, inevitably--Tomorrow Coast to Coast was replaced on February 1, 1982, by the genuinely hipper Late Night with David Letterman .

So when David Letterman signed his new contract with CBS two years ago--after a decade long run in Tom Snyder's old spot--it was only fitting that he brought Snyder on board for the The Late Late Show , which was, of course, to follow Letterman's own Late Show. More to the point, it was also fitting because Snyder, of all the talking heads who have flickered briefly in the late night constellation, perhaps comes closest to embodying the perfect foil for Letterman.
         We know Letterman as "Dave," for instance, but the intimacy is, like everything else about Letterman, archly ironic and finally distancing. Letterman is a notoriously private person, and he may well be the least known (known , not recognizable) celebrity on Earth.
         Not so with Tom--just plain Tom, with no double-edged inflection, no wink, no nudge. Because Snyder, unlike Letterman, craves intimacy like a junkie craves his next shot of dope--and which Snyder's stories seem to suggest, in not very oblique terms, probably goes back to a childhood spent with quasi-alcoholic parents (this, among many other things you may or may not want to know about your host).
          The Late Late Show opens with a shot of Snyder alone on a stage, seated in one of two facing over-stuffed chairs. There's no studio audience Snyder doesn't need. The camera closes in, until Snyder's face fills the screen. He smiles--provided there's been no headline-grabbing tragedy that day--and begins his opening monologue, during which he makes frequent and weird references to his mother. Such as this on a recent evening:
         "Mom, as you know, a couple of weeks ago had the problem with the, uh, you know." Tom pauses, looks left and right, and then punches his right fist into his left hand. "So we called the doc and he got her moving, if you catch my drift here." This reference to his mother's bowel movements, by the way, is not an isolated incident. Several nights later, Snyder narrated another, and evidently unrelated, episode.
         On another night, Snyder told his TV audience about an evening at "the club," even though the story had no real point--except that "there were a lot of guys up there. Tom Posten was up there last night. Don Knotts. Robert Stack." Snyder tosses these things off as asides, but they're more than that. His name-dropping is a symptom of his need for intimacy and acceptance (which, oddly, reminds me of Bill Clinton). On the one hand Snyder seems to be crowing about the swells he runs with; but, simultaneously, on the other hand he seems left out, too, like a child none of the popular boys will ever notice.
         The larger point here is that Snyder is--engagingly, I think--in love with his own history. The real crux of those stories about his mother and about his brushes with genuine celebrity is that he, Tom Snyder, is a featured player in them. And the confessional is his favored form. During his monologues he often waxes nostalgic, recalling what a callow and stupid youth he was. And it is during his monologues that Snyder is most alive. He almost seems disappointed when his guests finally arrive and take the chair opposite him. But if his guest is a similarly seasoned show biz veteran, Snyder will take the opportunity to revisit the old days, and the implication is always same, that things were so much better back when.

Finally, there's something about Snyder and his The Late Late Show that projects a heart-breaking loneliness. It's not just the stories, either, that subtly or overtly suggest Snyder's really a nobody and he knows it. It's physical. The set around the stage is dark, and Snyder sits alone in a very subdued spotlight. It somehow conjures how you feel when you're awake late at night, all by yourself, with the bedside light on and the room dark around you. And when I'm awake and I don't know what to do with myself, I'm glad that Tom Snyder's back on the TV, and that I can, as Snyder puts it at the end of every monologue, smiling broadly, "fire up the color-tinis and watch the pictures as they fly through the air."