Dawn of a New Day

The silver Rolls-Royce limo sat regally outside the front door of the Westbury Music Fair, as two women wearing too-tight lame dresses stood ogling it while eating nachos dipped in yellow goop from plastic containers.

It was intermission for the final stage performance of Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, and things were the appropriate Regis-and-Kathie-Lee combination of tony and tacky.

The New Yorker was there chronicling the events, but so were the fans slurping frozen pina coladas out of cone-shaped plastic glasses. Kathie Lee was beaming in her designer clothes and subdued jewels, but then she crawled over a severely overweight man in the front row, claiming “lust” for him and repaying him by letting him examine her new dental work.

The orchestra had violins and timpani and tuxedoed men, but quite a number of fans already had bought and donned Kathie Lee T-shirts, with the powder-blue silhouette of a lamb in a raincoat and the Web address, https://www.onthelambrecords.com, that will send you to a place on the Internet to buy more Kathie Lee paraphernalia.

Alas, Kathie Lee is leaving, no more to be “Live” with Regis.

This was a last fling with 3,000 neighbors--Regis having spent his teen years in nearby Mineola; Kathie Lee being domestic for years just across Long Island Sound in Connecticut.

Every song lyric was thought poignant; every tune brought either tears or at least a partial standing ovation.

No matter how little slack many have given Gifford over the past few years, the Westbury concert was a lovefest, proof that after 11 years of syndicated bliss, she was not going to go away emotionally empty-handed.

Yet there are certainly those who will never warm to the woman. Howard Stern, for one, professes not to understand at all her attraction. In the Stern-produced sitcom “Son of the Beach,” the lead character--lifeguard Notch Johnson--regularly confronts the mean-spirited mayor Anita Massengil and her evil son, Cody. Stern has more than hinted that the TV son is named after Gifford’s oldest child.

Events in recent years have saddled Gifford with more than a little bad publicity.

In 1996, her clothing line was shown to have been made in sweatshops. The next year, the tabloid Globe showed pictures of her husband, former football great Frank Gifford, having an affair with a stewardess. Although Gifford tried to make amends by distributing money to aggrieved sweatshop workers and was clearly stepped-out on by her husband, her image became even worse.

The clothing business “was just an unwashable blight on her character,” said Matthew Felling, the media director of the Washington think tank Center for Media and Public Affairs. “It’s amazing, but she can’t get a break anywhere.

“The astounding thing about [Frank’s] affair was that she got so little sympathy anywhere. It was almost like justifiable adultery. She is the anti-Katie Couric: not warm, not likable, but recognized and, oddly enough, appreciated.”

Her upbringing is, by the facts at least, a series of oddments. She was born in Paris (Aug. 16, 1953) and grew up in Bowie, Md., outside of Washington.

She was Kathie Epstein then, the daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother. She said she became a born-again Christian at age 11 and reportedly baby-sat for outspoken spokesperson and beauty queen Anita Bryant.

Like Bryant, Gifford became a singer and a beauty queen at a young age, winning the Maryland Junior Miss title at 17 and starting to sing gospel while attending Oral Roberts University, which was founded by the evangelical Christian pastor and orator.

By 20, though, she was in Hollywood, appearing as Nurse Callahan, an off-and-on minor character on “Days of Our Lives,” and singing commercial jingles. Her big break came when she was recruited to be a singer on the syndicated “$100,000 Name That Tune,” a 1977 revival of a popular 1950s game show. That led to a one-year gig on “Hee Haw Honeys,” a spinoff of the country-western variety show, where she played Kathie Honey, the cute daughter of the owners of the Hee Haw Honeys Club, a Nashville nightspot. By that time, she was Kathie Lee Johnson, married to Paul Johnson, her first husband.

Her career and personal life were about to go off in a million different ways over the next seven years.

She sang in nightclubs, guest-hosted “A.M. Los Angeles,” became a special lifestyles correspondent for “Good Morning, America,” left Johnson and started dating Gifford, a sporting icon 23 years her senior. Then in 1985, she was paired up with Philbin to host what was then called “The Morning Show.”

Three years later, Disney’s Buena Vista arm syndicated it and it became what it has been until today: “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.” (It will become simply “Live With Regis” starting Monday; no replacement for Gifford has yet been chosen.)

Since then, she has recorded kids albums and slow jazz; written an autobiography (“I Can’t Believe I Said That”) and a book with her son, Cody (“Listen to My Heart”); sung the national anthem at the 1995 Super Bowl, and performed on Broadway in the Stephen Sondheim revue “Putting It Together”; shilled for Carnival Cruises; and supported very publicly several charities, but never seemed to have gotten much public credit for it.

“The problem, I think, is that despite everything her fan base is very thin,” said Todd Boyd, a professor at USC’s School of Cinema-Television. “Some people, like Oprah, can cross a million boundaries. Others are confined to a moment, a place.

“I wonder if her leaving this show won’t be a part of the David Caruso syndrome,” continued Boyd, referring to one of the original stars of “NYPD Blue,” who left the show intending to have a movie career, only to quickly fade from view.

“When you find people whose celebrity is relatively thin in the first place, it becomes hard to stretch it past that original moment. I wonder if we will remember her a few years from now.”

‘I’m Not Used to Hearing Nice Things’

“It’s a bittersweet time for me, but it’s the right decision,” Gifford said Monday evening by phone from her home in Greenwich, Conn.

That morning on “Live’s” first day of saying-goodbye-to-Kathie-Lee week, friends Marilu Henner and Diane Sawyer came on and had mutual teary moments with Gifford.

“Days like today are both hard and sweet. Marilu and Diane, they say such nice things. . . . I’m not used to hearing nice things.”

She laughed uncomfortably. She knows the brickbats will slow down soon, and she knows, too, that that is a mixed blessing.

“There have been times when I have been so glad that I have a daily talk show, so I can have a chance to comment on things daily. But I’ve been a target too,” she said. “Frank said something to me years ago . . . , that some people in our country will forgive anything but success. You can murder, rape and pillage, but, really, don’t be successful.”

“Live’s” longtime executive producer, Michael Gelman, said he isn’t happy that Gifford is leaving, but that the show will continue apace when she does leave. She is leaving, he adds, a far different woman than when she came.

“She was almost a wide-eyed, innocent kid back then,” said Gelman. “Now she is a wife, a mom and a celebrity. That is a lot of metamorphosis. I’d like to think we are all wiser for it.”

Gifford said she will spend Monday--her first post-”Live”--in a recording studio and then go home to be with her kids. Her big goal then comes in September, when she gets to walk Cody to fifth grade and Cassidy to first grade on the first day of school.

“Never have done it. It’s always been an important day for work on a new season,” said Gifford, adding that she’s never really regretted talking about her children on the air, one of the things for which she has been most criticized.

“Look, one of the best things about this job is that I am on the air for an hour and can usually be home in the afternoon,” she said. “So I spend most of the rest of my time with my kids. What else do I have to talk about on the air?

“Besides, they say they love it,” she said. “Cody says, ‘Did I make the show today?’ Half the time the kids are begging me to say things.”

“She may be the patron saint of domineering parents, and she may also be like scrapple--part of breakfast, but hard to digest,” said media critic Felling. “But give her this: She has clocked in every morning, interviewing various and sundry Hollywood characters, and she was able to quit on her own schedule.”

* The final “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee” airs today at 9 a.m. on KABC.