TV

David Letterman’s Retirement Has Raised Questions Of How He Treated Young Female Guests On-Air

With his decades-long career at an end, David Letterman's creepy-uncle persona is coming under fire.

by Alex McKinnon  22 May 2015

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After literally thousands of shows and 33 years on-air, iconic late-night host David Letterman has taken his final bow, with a star-studded farewell episode airing last night. The TV stalwart’s retirement has seen an outpouring of praise and nostalgia — everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to the Foo Fighters to Bill Murray to US President Barack Obama has guested at the Ed Sullivan Theater in recent weeks to pay tribute, and even rival talk-show hosts encouraged people to change the channel and watch Letterman’s final Late Show. Using the hashtag #ThanksDave, fans have pointed to his emotional monologue just after 9/11 and his return after battling quintuple heart bypass surgery in 2000 as highlights of a career that reshaped American television.

But with the milestone has come criticism for how Letterman interacted with female guests, particularly younger ones. A couple of days ago, Gawker released a supercut clip of Letterman treating women invited on his show — some as young as nineteen or twenty — in overtly sexist and demeaning ways; making raunchy comments, showing photos of them in their underwear, touching their clothes and hair and telling them that they smell nice.

It makes for distressing, even slightly nauseating viewing, and has already sparked fierce condemnation in some quarters; over at Daily Life, Eleanor Robertson highlights the “unequal power dynamic between Letterman and young female guests” as the factor that “gives his behaviour that sharp edge of real creepiness,” and describes Letterman as someone who “never miss[ed] an opportunity to demonstrate how easy it is to be casually sexist when you’re a rich white man with a TV show.”

Whether Letterman is actually a lecherous old pervert or is hamming it up as part of his ongoing subversion of the late-night genre isn’t really clear, at least not from that video; as the New York Times points out, Letterman has always styled himself as “a one-man sendup of the talk-show genre. Even after more than 30 years, Mr. Letterman never lost his arch, ironic self-awareness; he did not sink into the easy, quid pro quo conventions of late-night talk shows, but kept defying them.”

It could be that Letterman’s intention was never to objectify his guests, but rather to send up the sexism of late-night shows by taking the creepy-uncle vibe to extremes — Julia Roberts famously played up to Letterman’s shtick by insisting he kiss her on the lips every time she appeared on the show, and in an on-air confession of infidelity in 2009 Letterman described his sexual relationships with female Late Show staffers as “creepy”. But some of the young female guests in that clip are clearly, even visibly, uncomfortable with what Letterman is doing; does Letterman get to show a photo of nineteen-year-old Emma Watson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at a red carpet event to the audience while she sits beside him because it’s intended ironically, as a meta-commentary on the sexism of late-night shows? The effect seems no different.

Letterman’s immense stature has seen him weather controversy multiple times, but seemingly all-powerful and universally beloved figures have fallen from grace come retirement, old age or death before; the fall of Rolf Harris and Hannibal Buress’ now-iconic set outing Bill Cosby as a serial rapist are proof enough of that. The backlash against Letterman hasn’t reached anywhere near those heights, at least not yet, but in the lead-up to his retirement a number of female comedians have lampooned the treatment of women on late-night; Amy Schumer’s spoof of a sleazy old talk-show host interviewing a young actress went viral last week, while in a move reminiscent of 30 Rock‘s semi-subtle digs at Cosby back in the day, Tina Fey used her final Letterman appearance two weeks ago to strip off her “last fancy dress” and reveal a Spanx one-piece with the words ‘BYE DAVE!’ written across the stomach. Whether those little rumbles eventually metastasise into something larger or get lost in the deluge of teary farewells remains to be seen.