Late-Night TV Hosts Credit Allen With Giving Them Their Zany Format

It was a booking that has become late-night TV’s stock-in-trade: A presidential candidate needing votes--in this case Vice President Al Gore--visits a talk show that is forever in hot pursuit of ratings--in this case, “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”

Such mutual back-scratching would hardly merit attention had Steve Allen not died the night before of a heart attack at 78. So much has changed since Allen began hosting the original “Tonight” show on NBC, live at the Hudson Theater in 1953, that he could be seen upon his death as both an innovator and an anachronism.

As they signed off their respective shows Tuesday night, his young successors paid homage--Leno and Conan O’Brien of NBC, David Letterman of CBS.

Letterman, particularly, has acknowledged in the past how blatantly he has borrowed from Allen’s grab bag of comedy gags. In his day, Allen took the camera into the street and dropped himself in water, covered with tea bags; Letterman has taken the camera into the street and dropped himself in water, covered this time with Alka-Seltzer tablets.

“You started the whole thing. You’re the reason we have a desk here. You’re the reason talk shows are what they are today,” Letterman told Allen on Oct. 23, 1980, when Allen appeared as a guest on “The David Letterman Show,” an Emmy-winning, morning variety comedy series that ran for three months on NBC.

And yet, to do some of the things today that Allen did as “Tonight” show host 45 years ago would be tantamount to career suicide. In an era when the economics of late-night TV had yet to be realized, Allen booked the kinds of guests that reflected, not movie releases or new sitcoms, but his eclectic, evolved tastes--the beat poet Jack Kerouac, jazz musicians from Chet Baker to Dave Brubeck, and cutting-edge comedians from Lenny Bruce to Mort Sahl.

“I never remembered being on television when I talked to Steve. I wasn’t looking for the red light,” said Sahl, who made his first appearance on “Tonight” in 1954, between spots at the Blue Angel. Today, among the things that Sahl recalls is what Allen had on his desk--a dictionary, a thesaurus, the “fruit juices he was addicted to” and a whistle, blown when a joke veered into the danger zone.

As Allen himself told it, some of those old shows were lost, removed from an NBC storage facility in New Jersey and torched to create more shelf space. Among the shows incinerated was Allen’s interview with author Carl Sandburg, who played the banjo.

For a generation that includes Letterman, Allen was as important as Ernie Kovacs or Johnny Carson.

“I can’t imagine any comedian in his late 30s to his 50s who’s not staggered by the loss of Steve Allen, mainly because in that generation, as soon as your eyes were open to comedy, there he was,” said Richard Lewis, a comedian and Letterman contemporary. “It was like finding a reviewer you really like and going to see films because that reviewer is in sync with your tastes. Steve Allen was like the hip uncle I never had.”

Following “Tonight” and “The Steve Allen Show,” which aired on NBC from 1956 to 1960 before a brief run on ABC, Allen returned in the ensuing years with various short-lived syndicated variety series taped in Los Angeles. The first one aired in the early 1960s; the comedy was at times wilder than on his earlier shows. “They did things that Letterman quite correctly admits they adapted for his own show,” says Rick Ludwin, NBC’s senior vice president in charge of late-night programming who has been at the network since the days of “Late Night With David Letterman.”

As he had in New York, when he moved to Los Angeles, Allen exploited the “found humor” of street life, once re-creating the D-day invasion by sending his troops of comedy players into the Hollywood Ranch Market.

Allen died the same day he was featured in a full-page ad in The Times from the Parents Television Council, an organization lobbying to reinstate a family viewing hour on television, free of sexual situations and violence. On the surface, Allen was an unlikely public face for a group that was an adjunct of conservative advocate L. Brent Bozell’s Washington, D.C.-based Media Research Center. The entertainer had long been an advocate for both liberal politics and culturally daring artists--most notably the comedian Bruce.

Sahl, who remained close to Allen, says that Allen simply thought there was a “terrible bill due” for the trading of crude humor for ratings and that it “was driving talent out of the business.”

For those too young to recall his work, in fact, Allen has left a rather humorless reputation. And that’s a shame to those who credit him with starting a comedy institution.

A great deal of the late-night talk show grammar can be traced to Allen--the opening monologue, the bit using the studio audience, the theme show, the road show.

On his first “Tonight” show, Allen quipped that the broadcast of more than 90 minutes would go on forever.

“Obviously,” Ludwin said, “it takes on another meaning when you see the clip today.”