"Too Tired to Do a Show"

Back when the late night talk show world was more innocent, there was David Letterman and Teri Garr...

Excerpt from this article that Teri Garr wrote:

I first met David Letterman when I was doing a promotional tour for Young Frankenstein in 1974. Twentieth Century Fox sent me to 10 cities in 10 days. As part of the tour, I was a guest on the Indianapolis radio show Dave was hosting at the time. We hit it off right away. Eventually, he got his own show on NBC, at 12:30, after Johnny Carson. That was Late Night with David Letterman. In the early ‘80s I went on that show every chance I got. Sometimes it was planned, sometimes—not so much. Often, I would get a call from Robert (Morty) Morton, Dave’s producer at the time, asking if I could be in New York for the next night’s show. I always asked, “Who died?” and then hopped on a plane anyway. At first I did it to promote the movies I was in, but as my rapport with Dave grew, I just did it for fun. And I mean fun in the masochistic sense of the word. Dave reminded me of my older brothers; he was always trying to get my goat, and he usually succeeded. Every time I went on the show I wound up exasperated. He’d make fun of me for being “ill prepared,” or he’d goad me into telling some story—like my story about going to the party at Elvis’s—when I had no desire to tell it. I’d toss my hair and threaten to storm off the stage, but then I’d stay for the abuse and come back for more. (It wasn’t really abuse, it was comedy. There’s a fine line.) I guess what it comes down to is that I was happy to entertain, even if it was at my own expense. I liked being in front of the live studio audience. That immediacy, the same immediacy I’d gotten used to on Sonny and Cher, was missing in the movie world.

One November night in 1985, Dave decided to do a show from his office. Not the studio, mind you, but his actual office, upstairs from the studio. It was the “Too Tired to Do a Show” show. I was the first guest to appear that night. We sat in his office. There was no audience, so there was no laughter, live or canned. He said, “This is my office. I have my own bathroom. Do you want to see it? Do you want to take a shower?”

I would've liked to have read more than that but the ding-dang-dong site requires you to SUBSCRIBE to read more. (The nerve!)

Here's a clip I managed to find from this show: