THE AMERICAN talk show host David Letterman last week confessed to his millions of viewers that he had had sexual relationships with the women who work on his television programme. Letterman was trying to ward off a blackmail attempt; indeed he had successfully done so, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
Quite the Duke Of Wellington he was. It was the Duke of Wellington who told a blackmailer to publish and be damned. Here was Letterman doing the 21st century equivalent. His blackmailer had threatened, among other things, to write a screenplay about him.
During his on-screen confession Letterman was very charming in his aw-shucks kind of way. He acknowledged that the women involved might find his revelations embarrassing but, the implication was fairly clear, needs must. The on-camera confession certainly must have made for an interesting day in the powder room. But then, it seems, life in that particular powder room must have been pretty interesting for a while.
Office life, eh? One minute you’re indulging a multimillion dollar ego and the next you’re all over the evening news, and not in a good way. I hope those girls have their pension rights sorted. The whole story of Letterman’s shenanigans just leaves you pitying the women workers with whom he had sex.
We cannot call them his colleagues, because Letterman is a multimillion dollar media superstar and the women, presumably, are not.
They are foot-soldiers in the television wars and that, even on such a sophisticated and famous show as Letterman’s, is not at all as glamorous as it sounds.
Letterman, on the other hand, is an established, unassailable talent of such longevity in American television that in his office he must be kind of like Louis XIV at Versailles – the sun king around whom everything revolves. No wonder he can’t wait to get to work, and leaves his house at six o’clock in the morning. (This was the hour at which he found the blackmail message in his car, he said.)
It is easy to understand why Letterman, who has been extraordinarily famous for decades, likes to spend his time either in the office or at home. It would, presumably, be very difficult for him to seek out female companionship in the outside world but, good Lord, could he not have given it a go? Surely he could have hired a penthouse and made a couple of phone calls.
No sensible adult could deny that offices can be hotbeds of attraction and lust – or should be, if they are operating correctly. Sexual energy is good for work. But it just seems kind of lazy, as well as creepy, to have sex with a series of female employees. Could you not pick one employee and stick with her? How must these women feel about each other? Is it regarded as your administrative duty to sleep with Letterman or as a lucky break for you?
Of course charismatic, workaholic male bosses with narcissistic tendencies have been doing exactly what Letterman has done for decades; it is amazing what office life can absorb. presidents Kennedy and Chirac did exactly the same thing.
At the time they thought of themselves as rather rakish and privileged, but the women involved were not that thrilled, in any sense, by their experiences. They seem to have succumbed to their bosses’ advances on the grounds that they would do it for a quiet life. That’s not very passionate, is it?
I cannot think of one charismatic, workaholic female boss with narcissistic tendencies who has had serial sexual relationships with male employees.
It is a shame, but female executives in my experience are more likely to be shooting home to cook the dinner, shore up the defences of domesticity, and try and keep their marriages on track than they are to be sidling up to a junior employee after a couple of drinks with a series of embarrassing emotional demands. Unfortunately.
You could say that these revelations about Letterman’s multiple dalliances with female members of his staff give a whole new meaning to the expression back room girl, but that would be inaccurate – back room girl, like personal assistant, is a title that has always had the option to turn into a dirty joke.
Everyone, with the possible exception of Mrs Letterman and his other female partners, agreed that by making this confession on public television Letterman had done absolutely the right thing. He had also done the right thing by going to the police when the blackmail attempt was first made. By giving his putative blackmailer a dud cheque for $2 million. By making a frank statement which led to the arrest of the blackmailer.
Letterman had done the right thing – strategically, that is. A consultant in crisis management called Eric Dezenhall told the New York Times: "With the death of shame and geometric shortening of attention spans, yesterday's crisis is today's blip."
In other words, the people forget. Our brains are on overload and even the most celebrity-fixated of us will forget about the sex life of a man in his 60s – Letterman is 62 – whom we have never met. This is what Letterman, like the Duke of Wellington in similar circumstances, is banking on. But that powder room at Letterman’s office would still be a very interesting place to be.