Gentleman Caller : Stage: Steve Allen, with wife Jayne Meadows, will pay a visit to Encinitas this weekend for a performance of A.R. Gurney’s ‘Love Letters.’

Steve Allen likes to perform A. R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” because he gets to play a gentleman.

“I think he’s an admirable character,” Allen said of the upper-crust Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, who is one of just two actors in the show. Allen is concerned that gentle men, and gentlemen, are a vanishing breed. “We need more people like that in our world and in our society,” he said.

Comedian, author and actor, Allen, 69, will star in Gurney’s tale of a bittersweet love affair, carried out largely through letters, on Saturday at the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas.

His co-star is his wife, Jayne Meadows, to whom he’s been married for 37 years.

The performance in the 450-seat theater is already sold out. San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre staged “Love Letters” for seven weeks just last fall, but San Diego has not tired of the play yet, at least not with Steve Allen performing. Reservations for a possible second show, a matinee on Sunday, were being taken at press time.

Allen, the creator and first host of NBC’s “Tonight” show, isn’t joking when he puts such emphasis on the importance of being a gentleman. He links the decline in manners to nothing less than the deterioration of Western civilization.

“It’s part of the general collapse of our entire culture,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “We’re not taught manners anymore. I was looking at some old shots where I was on the ‘Tonight’ show in the 1950s, and the men in the audience were wearing suits and the women were tastefully dressed.

“Now, if you look at the average audience, I don’t think you’ll see a suit in the whole house. You’ll see grungy outfits, dirty outfits, low-cut dresses and short-shorts. In the average audience today, you might be lucky if there are 50 ladies and 50 gentlemen instead of screaming idiots and drunks.”

To appreciate the importance of the word gentleman to Allen is to understand how hard he worked to escape his own chaotic upbringing.

Allen was born in Harlem to vaudevillians Belle Montrose--to whom he credits his “funny bone”--and Billy Allen, Belle’s straight man. His father died when Allen was 1 1/2, and his mother left him to be raised by aunts, uncles, strangers and in boarding school. He grew up in Chicago, Des Moines, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Two years ago, he described his family to The Times as “a disorganized, Irish, Studs Lonigan, lower-middle-class family--a lot of drinking, a lot of irresponsibility.”

He credits the movies for making him different.

“I did indeed learn from the movies,” he said. “I didn’t go to the theater when I was 14 and say, ‘I want to learn to be gentleman.’ I just saw on the screen people like Fredric March, Gary Cooper, William Powell and Cary Grant, who were saying wise, witty, compassionate things,” he said. “They were dressed well, they didn’t eat with their bare hands or scream. It was a far more genteel, civilized society.”

Another factor that made him different was his talent--or rather, talents. He has written 36 books, composed 4,000 songs, produced 40 albums, created and hosted the “Tonight” show. He wrote and moderated TV’s Peabody- and Emmy award-winning “Meeting of the Minds,” has published poetry, given jazz concerts, starred on Broadway and in motion pictures and written a play called “The Wake.”

It’s not that he decided that, when he grew up, he wanted to do everything, he says. He simply decided that, when he grew up, he didn’t want to give up any of the things he loved to do.

“Everything I did as an adult was my pattern at 14,” he said. “In school, I was acting in school plays, playing the piano, writing poetry and fiction and sports news--all the things I now do for a living.”

His teachers urged him to concentrate on just one area, but he resisted.

“That’s marvelous advice for 98% of the human race, but thank God something in me didn’t listen,” he said. “It would have been silly to do one and throw the others away.”

Allen played in “Love Letters” in 1989 at San Francisco’s Theatre in the Square and twice at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, most recently in June. He got the idea for performing “Love Letters” here in May, when he checked out the La Paloma while performing jazz at the Belly-Up Tavern in Solana Beach.

It’s no coincidence that one of the new owners of the La Paloma is Stephen Lee Cotter, 38, Allen’s and Meadows’ nephew. Cotter became a partner in the theater in February and was looking for an event to kick off what he called “a long association with legitimate live theater.”

Help a nephew realize a dream--what else would a gentleman do?

“Love Letters” will be performed at 8 p.m. Saturday at the La Paloma Theatre, 471 1st St., Encinitas. 789-5171.