The Father Of Late Night

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By Newsweek Editors

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Long before Ed McMahon ever whooped "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny!" there was Steve Allen. Allen invented the whole late-night-TV shtik--he opened with a monologue and schmoozed with his bandleader; he loped up into the studio audience with a mike and took the camera out into the street; he booked celebrities (Lenny Bruce, Carl Sandburg), as well as silly pets. It was wacky live TV: Allen in funny hats or wearing pajamas, uttering his famous ad-libs (which tended to fall flat in print). "If the audience likes you," he once said, "it will laugh at anything you say." And whether or not everyone did like him, with the launch of the "Tonight" show in 1954 he created an insomniac's paradise and changed television forever.

Last week, when Allen died of a heart attack at the age of 78 in Los Angeles, his followers--Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien --paid him tribute on the air. "He was terrific because he was endlessly resourceful and gifted and had a great mind for stuff to do on television," said Letterman, Allen's most direct descendant. "And so we just said, 'Well, heck, let's just steal all of those great ideas'." But Allen was more improvisational than anyone in high-stakes television is today. "The show was loose, it wasn't structured," explains McMahon. "He could put a camera outside the Hudson Theatre and talk to a mounted policeman for five minutes and get great comedy." Adds Regis Philbin, who first saw Allen live as an NBC page, "He had a spontaneity to him that I just loved."

Allen, the son of vaudevillians, broke into TV as a wrestling announcer. He held viewers in a hammerlock for years after his "Tonight" stint ended in 1957, first with his own variety show, then as host of "I've Got a Secret" and finally with a bizarre program on PBS called "Meeting of the Minds," in which actors, portraying historical figures like Aristotle or Freud, debated their characters' philosophies (Allen's wife, Jayne Meadows, appeared as Madame Curie). The comedian, who played the piano, was also said to have written thousands of songs. Considered an intellectual in Hollywood, Allen wrote more than 40 books--memoirs (most fetching title: "Hi Ho, Steverino"), novels, poetry and nonfiction--and was an activist for such causes as ending the death penalty. One of his TV routines was his comic reading of real letters to the editor--but Allen himself was a prolific writer of such letters, many to this magazine. Eerily, the day his death was announced, the Los Angeles Times printed a full-page ad Allen had placed for his latest cause. Next to a picture of Allen screamed the headline: TV is leading children down a moral sewer and you and i can stop it. He must have longed for those innocent early days when the dirtiest thing on live TV was a Freudian slip on-air.

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