by Regis Philbin, with Bill Zehme
Hyperion, $5.99 paper
You think you know horror in print? What, Stephen King? Anne Rice? Clive
Barker, maybe? Hmph!! These so-called masters of the macabre are Sunday school
pantywaists next to the testosterone-fueled half of “America’s favorite morning
team.” You haven’t tasted true literary terror — the kind to induce cold
sweats, nausea, chronic chicken skin — until you’ve stared into the ghastly
gaping maw of The Ego That Wouldn’t Die! The sheer, undiluted, rampaging
narcissism of Regis Philbin in this book is enough to make H. P. Lovecraft’s
shambling shoggoth look like a milk-fed puppy!
In his latest self-penned, self-centered tome, the Reege chronicles roughly a
year in his life — June 15, 1994, to May 19, 1995 — to give us — the
presumably curious public — some sense of his routine, his inner thoughts, his
true feelings about his wife Joy, his fabulously successful syndicated TV show
Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee, his co-host the maharani Gifford, her
babies Cody and Cassidy, et cetera, ad nauseam. What we get, in tepid,
oatmeal-like prose severed into sentence fragments so brittle they would
unnerve Emily Dickinson, is an up-close-and-personal look at a man whose
complete lack of inner thoughts is disturbing, and whose true feelings about
everyone and everything always — brace yourself! — relate to himself. Life is
a mirror. A shiny surface. That always reflects images of him. Reege.
The tone is set from Paragraph One. The author speaks: “Anyway, here goes:
Take my life, please. This will be a year of it, more or less. A diary. A
record of what it’s like being me. It’s not always easy being me. I joke about
living under a permanent dark cloud. (Of course, anything is dark compared to
the blinding halo of a certain co-host!) And sometimes it does seem like
everything happens to me. But I must confess: I’m just a guy like any other
guy.”
Yeah, right.
It’s apparent that what Philbin is shooting for is an off-handed,
self-deprecating tone. But what becomes alarmingly clear as you get further
into the book — say, page two — is that surging, churning, roiling beneath
this regular guy facade is the Amazing Colossal Conceit, a conviction that he
is genuinely better than others — funnier, more interesting, more deserving of
attention and success — and that when he jokes about a slight toward him,
however unintentional or unrelated to him, he seethes with a real resentment.
It’s… oooh, scary.
The upshot is, each entry is its own gruesome frightfest, which makes the book
almost like 365 tales from the crypt. Choosing the creepiest segment of the
book is nigh impossible. Is it when Reege touts himself as David Letterman’s
“show saver”? Perhaps when he describes his devotion for Notre Dame football
with all the obsessive passion of a stalker? Could it be when he boasts of his
invention of the “Host Chat” — that opening show prattle in which he and
Kathie Lee engage — as if it were the Jonas Salk vaccine? Or the time when he
is so bored on a plane trip that he pinches a sleeping infant just to provoke
some activity?
If you think you can handle such terror, by all means, pick up the paperback
with the man in the Satanic red jacket staring at you with the eyes of the
undead. But we must confess: In The Year of the Abominable Mr. Reege, we were
too creeped out to go past Christmas.
— Barbara Chisholm and Robert Faires
This article appears in October 25 • 1996 and October 25 • 1996 (Cover).