Specifically her early-’80s appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman,” when Dave was still new to the 12:30 p.m. slot following Johnny Carson, for all those insomniacs and caffeine fiends out there, and she was a regular — more than a regular, a staple, settling in on that appealingly unadorned set every two weeks.
But be warned. You might want to fortify your psychic defenses should you care to take this particular viewing excursion, such is the hammerblow of nostalgia on returning to a more leisurely, and strikingly unstupid, mode of televised entertainment, even down to the bumpers, the artistic still images of Ed Koch-era city life that marked transitions to a commercial break.
Strikingly uncommodified, too. Fran Lebowitz was not selling anything, other than maintaining a certain currency for herself. She simply sat there shooting the shit with a somewhat self-effacing Letterman who, still in his 30s, had not yet been simultaneously worn down and built up by the warping effects of celebrity.
Let’s say that was a couple of years past the publication of her last collection of essays, 1981’s “Social Studies,” which to this day remains her most recent book of new work. So, even then she was famous for being famous, as we’d put it today. For making the rounds. And while that may not be an original thought, it’s also not a criticism.
Because why privilege writing? Just talk. “Social Studies,” she told Letterman, was the one that had the cigarette airbrushed from the cover of its paperback edition, leaving her hand oddly suspended next to her face.
This led to a story of how her love of smoking got her slapped in the East Hampton Cinema, a contretemps that drew the cops and made the pages of The New York Post, she went on.
And on. I could listen to her all day. Or make that all night.