Hey, it’s no joke self-professed “gunslinger” David Letterman is now a married man.
Letterman announced at last night’s taping of “Late Show” that he has married longtime gal pal Regina Lasko, the mother of their 5-year-old son, Harry.
Letterman, 61, said the couple was married by a Justice of the Peace on Thursday at 3 p.m. at the Teton County Courthouse in Choteau, Mont.
Letterman has owned a house in Montana for years, and joked that the marriage almost didn’t happen.
But it’s not what you think.
“So now, we get ready to go and we’ve got to drive into the courthouse and it’s muddy, and we’re supposed to be there at 2, and it’s me, Regina and Harry in the pickup truck,” he said.
“So we get two miles from the house and we get stuck in the mud I mean, turn the truck over, stuck in the mud.”
Letterman said he was forced to leave the truck with Lasko and Harry inside and walk two miles back to his house “into a 50-mile-an-hour wind” to get help.
“It’s not Beverly Hills, it’s Montana, for God’s sake,” he said.
“And the whole way I’m thinking, ‘See, smart ass, see, see. You try to get married, this is what happens.’ ”
The marriage was a long time in the making for Letterman and Lasko, 49, who began dating in February 1986 when Letterman was hosting “Late Night with David Letterman” on NBC.
“I said, ‘Well, things are going pretty good, let’s just see what happens in about 10 years,” Letterman said.
“I had avoided getting married pretty good for, like, 23 years, and I . . . secretly felt that men who were married admired me . . . like I was the last of the real gunslingers, you know what I’m saying?”
It’s Letterman’s second marriage, but his first in more than 30 years. He married his college sweetheart, Michelle Cook, in 1969. They divorced eight years later after Letterman moved to LA to pursue his career.
Letterman was also in a long-term relationship with Merrill Markoe, who wrote and helped produce “Late Night.”
Letterman hosted “Late Night” for 11 years and bolted for CBS and “The Late Show” in 1993 when NBC chose Jay Leno to succeed Johnny Carson as host of “The Tonight Show.”
Letterman, a stickler for privacy, rarely speaks publicly about Lasko who’s remained mostly in the background on the couple’s 108-acre estate in North Salem.