He may be pushing 80, but Regis Philbin joyrides like a 13-year-old boy.
“We’re driving in the car,” says his friend, comedian Don Rickles, “and he’ll roll down the window and yell out, on Broadway, ‘I’m with Don Rickles! Do you believe this? I’m riding in a car with Don Rickles!’ That’s something he likes to do.”
After more than five decades in show business, Philbin dines at the poshest restaurants, relaxes in Greenwich, Conn., and pals around with the most storied old-school entertainers. But he staunchly refuses to take himself too seriously, which is why we love him, and why we hate to see him go.
Yesterday on “Live! With Regis and Kelly,” Philbin announced he’s retiring in the late summer or fall — to the dismay of co-host Kelly Ripa and the shock of millions of viewers who’ve spent the past 28 years waking up to Reege’s salty, Bronx-tinged banter.
“He’s the one who started the morning chat,” Joan Rivers tells The Post. “Everyone has a morning chat now. But Regis was the first one to open the paper and do it. He changed what a daytime show looked like. I’m very upset that he’s quitting.
“He should look at Betty White!” says Rivers, who protests that Philbin’s getting out of the game prematurely. “She could have been a cougar with him!”
Donald Trump, a close pal of Philbin’s, disagrees. “There’s something very cool about what he’s doing,” he tells The Post. “It’s called leaving on top.”
Either way, nobody can say he didn’t put in the time. Our Reege is the 2009 Guinness World Record holder for “Most Hours on Camera,” with more than 16,343 cumulative hours under his belt. Time and again, he’s stolen James Brown’s title of hardest-working man in show business. In between hosting “Live!” for decades and popping up regularly on Letterman, Kimmel, Fallon, “The View,” Craig Ferguson and “Entertainment Tonight,” he made the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” a national phenomenon, shot cameos in an astonishing number of movies and sitcoms, voiced numerous animated characters and hosted awards shows — all while raising four successful kids, staying happily married to his wife Joy for more than 30 years and being maybe the world’s most devoted Fighting Irish fan.
“He’s just loyal and funny and terrific, and he gets it,” says Rivers. “Once he’s your friend, he’s your friend.”
In a season that’s seen the departure of two television deities already — Oprah Winfrey to her own network, and Larry King to retirement — the prospect of a Reege-less TV morning hits hard. More than either Winfrey or King, Philbin has become a beloved national treasure, our excitable grandpa, the guy we go to for technological befuddlement, snappy one-liners and a never-ending litany of everyday frustrations — all with the zing and pizzazz of a guy who was raised on the Rat Pack.
Yet the 79-year-old Philbin always manages to keep his finger right on the pulse — and he’s certainly never played the sap.
“If someone is an a – – hole, he knows they’re an a – – hole and he lets the audience know he knows,” Rivers says. “He doesn’t tolerate fools.”
Philbin and Ripa make it look easy, but doing 20-odd unscripted minutes five times a week is no small feat. Philbin famously refuses to talk to Ripa before the show starts, to make sure their conversation is authentic.
Whether they’re playfully pranking each other, engaging in man-on-the-street stunts or dressing up as their favorite pop-culture icons (this Halloween saw Reege dressed up as Elmo to Ripa’s Katy Perry), the two have hit on a chemistry that will be difficult for any replacement host to match — although Anderson Cooper, Neil Patrick Harris and Ripa’s husband, Mark Consuelos, among others, have given it their best shot.
It’s simple, really: More than any other morning-show personality, Philbin is willing to go the distance for a laugh.
“He’s always got that gleam in his eye, that he’s one step ahead of you with the joke — and he’s got that gleam in his eye because he’s just about to nail you,” says friend David Hasselhoff, who reports that Philbin refers to him as “Big Hasselhoff,” including when he visits the Hoff at home.
Back in 1990, the former “Baywatch” star recalls doing a spoof with Philbin and his co-host at the time, Kathie Lee Gifford, in which he had to rescue Reege from drowning. “We had a whole gag about me giving him mouth-to-mouth,” Hasselhoff recalls. “Which, thank God, never happened.”
“I used to sit there and watch his show,” recalls Tony Danza, “and I’d be amazed at the things he could do. Here I am, I [am almost] 60, I’m waking up with injuries, my knees are bothering me, and one day he has Adam Sandler on — Adam’s doing [the football movie] ‘The Longest Yard,’ and he makes Sandler go out onto 57th Street and Regis runs [out for a pass], and Sandler hits him way down the street. And I’m watching him, thinking how amazing he is. A one-of-a-kind guy.”
Born Regis Francis Xavier Philbin on Aug. 25, 1931, this son of a Marine was raised Irish Catholic in the South Bronx, attending the religious school Cardinal Hayes High. He went on to Notre Dame to pursue a degree in sociology, graduating with a bachelor’s in 1953 — and kicking off a lifelong passion for the school’s legendary football team. “This is my favorite place in the world,” Philbin once told People magazine en route to a Fighting Irish game. “The more I travel, the more I love Notre Dame.”
Professionally, the now-garrulous Philbin started off as a shy NBC page. In 1957, he told Broadcasting & Cable magazine, he showed up for his first day at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and couldn’t make himself go inside. “I just sat on a bench. I was too shy and nervous to go in.”
On his first talk show, “That Regis Philbin Show” in San Diego in 1961, finances were what forced Philbin to hone his signature breezy banter. There were no funds for a writing staff, so Philbin had to wing it. “I would sit on a stool, look into the lens, and I would just tell them what I had seen and done throughout the week,” Philbin told Broadcasting & Cable. “That is exactly what we do all these years later for the first 22 minutes of our show.”
In 1967, Philbin moved onto the national stage as a sidekick to Rat Packer Joey Bishop on a late-night show in the tough 11:30 time slot of the “Tonight Show.” He may have been playing the Ed McMahon figure, but Philbin was no wallflower: One night, prompted by Bishop, he serenaded his hero, Bing Crosby, with “Pennies From Heaven” — which led to a next-day album deal from Chicago’s Mercury Records, and more crooner duets down the road (including, hilariously, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with pal Donald Trump).
“We sang an old Rat Pack song together,” recalls Danza, who used to walk to work with Philbin while shooting his own morning show, from 2004 to 2006. “One of my favorite things was when we did the old Sammy Davis and Frank Sinatra routine ‘Two of a Kind.’ We didn’t rehearse. That’s one of the things I always loved about Regis — he was always game. He walked in and we just did it.”
Philbin’s the last of the greats, says Hasselhoff. “He’s a throwback to entertainers like Dean Martin, like Johnny Carson. He really has that flair of professionalism and just the old Rat Pack feel. There’ll never be another Regis Philbin on television. I’ll definitely miss the quality of his showmanship — he never puts people down, he never goes for the cheap joke.”
Philbin built his morning-show brand from the ground up. First in LA with co-hosts Sarah Purcell and Mary Hart, he moved to NYC in 1983 and presented opposite Cyndy Garvey then Ann Abernathy. But the show’s ratings were abysmal. Then, in 1985, he brought on a new co-host — the perky, quirky Kathie Lee Johnson (who’d soon marry football legend Frank Gifford) — and things began to look up. For a decade, “Reege and Kathie Lee” were a single household name; then, in a controversial ouster, Gifford departed, and the elfin soap star Ripa took her place.
Philbin’s personal life is as female-saturated as his professional one. From 1955 to 1968, he was married to actress Kay Faylan, with whom he had daughter Amy and son Daniel; in his second marriage to interior designer Joy Senese, who occasionally guest-hosts his show, he had two daughters, Joanna and Jennifer.
While hosting the wildly successful prime-time run of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire,” from 1999 to 2002, Philbin even became a somewhat unlikely style icon, known for his lively, monochromatic suit-and-tie ensembles. A short-lived clothing line, entitled “The Regis,” was launched by Van Heusen.
One of Reege’s favorite morning topics — aside from the papers, his health and heckling producer Michael Gelman — is his active nightlife around the city. A frequent patron of hot NYC eateries, he’s the antithesis of the snotty celebrity who doesn’t want to be recognized.
“Table 11, a big table in the middle of the restaurant, is his table, whether he’s [with] two or 10 people,” says Marion Scotto, owner of the Midtown Tuscan restaurant Fresco by Scotto. “No matter what his wife, Joy, says to him — ‘You’re on a diet’ or ‘You’ve got to watch what you’re eating’ — my potato and zucchini chips have got to be on the table.
“We just hope he doesn’t move out of New York City!” she says. “We need him here!”
At Meatpacking eatery Valbella, owner David Ghatan says Philbin makes everyone in the room feel like they’re in his posse. “Every time he walks in, there isn’t a table he doesn’t stop by and say hello to and joke around with,” Ghatan says. “He makes people’s evenings. He’s the perfect gentleman— extremely charming. He’s not one of those celebrities who don’t want to be bothered by their fans. If there’s a birthday party on one side of the room, he gets up and wishes the person a happy birthday. If there’s another celebrity in the room, he always goes over to say hello. One night Michael Bolton was here [at the restaurant’s Greenwich, Conn., location] and he was having fun and joking around and trying to sing like Michael.”
Jerry Seinfeld, another friend of Philbin’s, agrees. “Every place he goes is much better for having him, and everyone he’s with is much happier when he’s around,” Seinfeld tells The Post. “Regis is one of the greatest hosts in television history, but what’s most wonderful about him is that he is simply good company.”
Author Bill Zehme, who’s profiled and co-written two books with Philbin and is working on a third with him now, clarifies what he refers to as the “cult of Regis Philbin.”
“I write about an awful lot of famous people, and very rarely do you meet the same person off-camera as on, and love the person off-camera even more. He wants everyone’s life to be going well. He loves crawling into your life. When I started writing about him, he [asked me], ‘What’s your mother’s phone number?’ And he picks up the phone and starts calling her up and complaining about me trailing him all day for Esquire. And, of course, that thrilled her beyond human comprehension.
“He’s a humanist. He’s like everyman — but he’s the last one there is.”
Additional reporting by Brian Niemietz and Carla Spartos