`Hi everybody, this is Tom Snyder.”
Tom Snyder is on the air, again. Late at night, again. Talking one-on-one, again. Guffawing, again. Intense, again. Emotional, again.
Except this time he`s on the radio and ”Tomorrow” is yesterday.
”Tomorrow” was Snyder`s late-night talk show that ran on NBC from 1973 to 1981. It was billed as ”a sophisticated talk show for adults.” Those were heady days. Snyder owned the post-Carson, predawn hour.
In those days, no one had ever heard of David Letterman. Snyder was the cult favorite. Dan Aykroyd spoofed him regularly on ”Saturday Night Live.”
TV columnists used up trees debating his future: Will he replace Johnny on
”Tonight?” Or will he go straight to ”Today?” Or is he headed for the
”Nightly News”? The horizon stretched endlessly before him.
When he said he slept alone, thousands of fans sent him teddy bears. When he was delayed by a presidential address, thousands more jammed the White House phone lines to complain. He was hot, he was hip, he was handsome-even with long, lumpy hair that refused to stay down, even in a safari jacket. He was, back in the `70s, a happening. The show was funny, controversial, irreverent, intimate, smart-alecky. John Lennon was a regular viewer. Snyder was interviewing satan worshipers when Geraldo Rivera was still Jerry Rivers. He was exploring the who-does-what-to-whom dynamics of group marriages before Oprah Winfrey bought her first leather skirt.
But now, his TV days are behind him, and Snyder is working 9 p.m.-to-midnight for the ABC radio network out of Los Angeles. (He`s heard locally on WLS-AM (89).) And how does he feel about it?
”I couldn`t, I just couldn`t be more pleased with the way everything`s turned out.”
But, isn`t radio a terrible comedown?
”Nooooo, unemployment is a comedown.”
Snyder is in the Presidential Suite of the Swiss Grand Hotel, chewing on nicotine gum-he recently quit smoking-and drinking cold coffee. He brought his radio show to town and presided over a retrospective of old ”Tomorrow” shows at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. He`s still handsome, still ridiculously tall, 6 feet 4 inches, still slim, with white hair that still won`t stay down. Same bushy, black eyebrows. But at 52, the former Peck`s bad boy of television seems to have mellowed.
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The once formidable ego appears under control. He`s not giving any more quotes like, ”Failure and I are strangers, and I want to keep it that way.” The days of outrageousness are over. The fun days. There was the day he was asked what he`d do if he were host of ”Today” and he said, ”Get rid of Jane Pauley.” The day he was doing the local news in New York and he told the weatherman to go to the window and ”take a leak.” Oops, he meant a look. The night he told his audience, ”Orson doesn`t flush,” after he shared a dressing room with Mr. Welles. The day he told a TV critic a joke: There`s this rich Arab who takes his kid to Disneyland and says, ”Son what do you want?” The kid says, ”I want a Mickey Mouse outfit.” So the father buys him NBC. The three days when he refused to allow Rona Barrett to go on the air, after she`d been brought on the ”Tomorrow” show to goose the ratings.
That was about the time when his reputation went from outspoken and spontaneous to unpredictable and dangerous. The then-president of NBC news, Richard Wald, put it bluntly: He was afraid Snyder would embarrass him. So he stopped considering him for ”Today” or ”Tonight” or the ”Nightly News.” There were no more prime-time specials such as ”The National Love, Sex, and Marriage Test” or ”The Incredible Shrinking Gas Pump.” One NBC executive said Snyder would have been lucky to get a game show. After ”Tomorrow” was canceled to make room for Letterman`s stupid pet tricks, he switched to ABC and spent a couple of years in New York anchoring the local news-failure-and a couple in Los Angeles hosting a local talk show, opposite Oprah Winfrey-failure, again. It was a week substituting for Larry King that made him realize that he could have a future in radio. He has been on since October 1987.
”I can`t wait to get to work everyday. I have the greatest job in America. I get to go in every night and talk to very interesting people and get fairly well paid for it. . . . I had no idea of the reach, the immediacy, the fun, and the intimacy of late-night radio. All America is out there.”
Snyder`s life revolves around his radio show, and his day is spent waiting until it`s time to go to work.
”I`m not at parties, I`m not in the loop. I`m very uncomfortable with that sort of thing.” After the show he goes out for a snack and a cold beer. ”I have my party on the air,” he says. Then he goes home and goes to bed. Since he was divorced in 1975, after 17 years of marriage, he has kept his private life extremely private. ”I don`t ask people about their love life and I don`t talk about mine,” he says.
Snyder says there`s no way he`d go back to the grind of daily television. The pressure is too enormous. The demands are too high.
”I can`t tell you the jobs I`ve turned down-names of shows you`d know, being done by people you know. I turned them down because I don`t want to get involved in the tremendous pressure of day-to-day, five-times-a-week television with its instant ratings and the enormous competition, and the pressure of advertisers, and the money involved. . . .
”And the executives watch this and they can`t help but be influenced by it and they can`t help but come in and make changes and try to fix it. What allowed our show to run for 8 1/2 years was the enormous patience of NBC. . . . Now they put on a show for eight weeks, 13 weeks. They don`t have a chance.”
Probably the least appealing format to Snyder is a late-night talk show. Not only would he be competing with Hall and Sajak and ”Nightline” and Bob Costas, but also with his own best days.
”I can`t go back and do late-night televison. I will fail if I do that because it isn`t what it was. It`s now six guests, five minutes apiece. I don`t think people who do television trust the innate intelligence and taste and attention span of the American audience. They think they have to ram it down our throats every 30 seconds. They don`t.
”You know, Mary Tyler Moore tried to come back in a sit-com. She can`t. Every time we turn on the new Mary Tyler Moore show, we want to see Mary in the newsroom. Dick Van Dyke tried to come back. He can`t. We want to see Dick Van Dyke back in 1965 with Mary and Sheldon Leonard and Carl Reiner and Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie. We don`t want to see him now. We want to see him then. You know, (Jack) Paar tried a late-night comeback and it didn`t work. And Dick Cavett tried it and it didn`t work. I`m not going to be one of those. I know it`s not for me. I did that. It`s on to something else and, luckily, I believe this is it.”
Isn`t life funny? Back in 1977, Snyder was asked whom he would most like to interview. He thought hard and then came up with his dream lineup: Jackie Kennedy, Idi Amin, Jack Paar, and . . . Carrie Snodgrass. Carrie Snodgrass?
Yes, that`s not a misprint. She was the star of a hot movie at the time,
”Diary of a Mad Housewife,” and she made Snyder`s list. The way things worked out, she`s the only one he actually got to talk to.
”And,” he says, ”while it was interesting, it wasn`t what I thought it would be.”