Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 14, 1991 TAG: 9103130162
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ALEX WITCHEL THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
Regis: "I turned it down."
Kathie Lee: "In your dreams."
Regis: "Frankly, I didn't have to do it." (Wickedly.) "I'd like to see you suck it up for that second show every night."
Kathie Lee: "I suck it up to come in here every morning." (Audience laughs.)
Regis: "No one even heard you were in town until you were with me." (No one laughs.)
He has a point. After roles on shows like "Name That Tune" and "Hee Haw Honeys," Kathie Lee Gifford has hit the big time.
Gone are the days when she opened in nightclubs and casinos for the likes of Milton Berle and Rodney Dangerfield. "Live With Regis and Kathie Lee" plays to 3.5 million households each day, including those in the Roanoke area that tune in weekdays at 4 p.m. on WSLS (Channel 10). The wait for tickets in the studio audience is six months to a year.
The formula is simple: He's the backbone, she's the butterfly. Like a skilled hostess circa 1954, it is her job to look glamorous, keep the conversation light, and counter her often cantankerous co-host with her own cute-as-a-button brand of openness.
One morning last week, when tasting an array of frozen pizzas, she sampled a square from Wolfgang Puck, the chef from Los Angeles who started the trend of putting things like smoked salmon on pizza. A much-publicized size 4, she held the piece like a cockroach between her very long fingernails and observed that there was a hair on it. That's Kathie Lee.
So when her staff says she can only grant half an hour for an interview because she has to save her voice for a Rainbow and Stars rehearsal, you wonder. Is pretension rearing its ugly head? Asking her to speak before singing is not exactly like asking Itzhak Perlman to build a snowman before playing, but all right. Half an hour.
The interview takes place in her dressing room after a "Live" taping. She is wearing a purple sweater over a matching mini-skirt, with a silk scarf tied around her neck.
Her jewelry could stop traffic. Her wedding ring (after her first marriage, to the gospel composer Paul Johnson, she married Frank Gifford, the sports announcer) is a huge emerald-cut diamond. She wears two more bands of diamonds on another finger and her watch is vintage Marie Antoinette, gold encrusted with diamonds. Her secretary brings coffee, and the nanny collects her 1-year-old son, Cody, leaving us in a dressing room dominated by a crib and a rack of elaborate dresses.
As she speaks, Gifford is apparently nervous. In the first five minutes she says: "I'm a very open person. I share the real me. I've learned to live with criticism. I'm comfortable in my own skin."
It must be her pre-show mantra. It certainly isn't conversation.
"I've been rehearsing for weeks, months, for Rainbow and Stars," she says. "I'm singing music from the big-band era, the kind I grew up on. My dad was a jazz saxophonist, and played with a group called the Five Moods. And my mom sang on the radio."
Her father was a naval officer, whom her mother met while working at the Naval Research Center at Annapolis. "My father always said there's no shame in failing, just in not trying. In your own heart you try to be the best."
Which is why she's doing Rainbow and Stars.
"I'm nervous about the show," she says. "I really want it to be good. I did Freddy's five years ago and got lousy reviews, but I sold out and got standing ovations. Why? I don't know and I won't waste time thinking about it. The people paid and had a good time, and that makes it a success. I've succeeded in this business so long because I know what I'm not. Critics don't buy tickets. If I please the people who buy tickets, then I'm a success.
"I can't be all things to all people," she adds. "The hard part is that people see me as a talk-show host. But this is not a hobby. I've done this professionally."
And she has studied. She was a voice major at Oral Roberts University and she studied in Los Angeles for five years "with the same people who coached Barbra Streisand."
That was back in her single days when she was still Kathie Lee Epstein, a name about as likely as Willy Ray Horowitz. How did that happen?
She doesn't answer, talking instead about the research she's doing on her parents for a book she's writing. About? "My life." An autobiography? At the age of 37? "I'm a little embarrassed," she says, sensing perhaps that she should be. "But," she continues, "Simon & Schuster Pocket Books thinks there's a market."
And Kathie Lee Gifford is never one to turn down a market. Besides her television show she is also the official spokeswoman for Ultra Slim Fast (she lost her post-pregnancy weight with it), the Home Furnishings Council (the dressing room is drowning in Laura Ashley), and Carnival Cruise Lines ("Sunny weather/All together/Ain't we got fun?")
But "Live" is her first priority.
On the air, she'll say anything in the interest of being unpretentious, like telling about the time she caught her gardener urinating in the backyard, or recounting the most intimate details of breast feeding.
"I make fun of myself for a living every day of my life," she says. "You can either laugh with us or at us."
But isn't it just a little disingenuous to perpetuate a nose-pressed-against-the-glass stance in her accounts of the high life? Of cabaret singing or eating at Le Cirque or living it up at a Broadway opening night?
"That's the challenge of it," she says. "To do it in a way that only pokes fun at itself and doesn't create envy in another person. My mom and dad came from nothing. I've been one of those people. So, I try to tell a story without creating an aura of `don't you wish you had my life?' because that would be cruel."
She gives an example. "A friend of ours was being knighted by the Canadian government. So there I am in Ottawa in the president's home, whatever they call him there, the prime minister. I'm in a white dress, and I get the biggest lipstick smudge on it. So, that's how I tell the story. Every woman can relate to that."
Really? It's pretty hard to believe that someone who "came from nothing" would nonchalantly appear at the prime minister's home in a stained white dress without a fight. At the very least didn't she call housekeeping at her hotel and try to get it fixed?
"Whatever stories we tell are real-life experiences," she says, ignoring the doubt. "People understand our hearts. We just bring out our lives and share them on television."
Which is why her fans will find her at Rainbow and Stars.
by CNB