Seth Meyers opened Late Night by sharing a heartfelt tribute to Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner following their deaths on Sunday.
“I did not know Rob and Michele very well, but I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with them and they were delightful people to be in a room with,” the host said. “I had Rob here on this show for the first time a couple months ago and I could have talked to him for hours about his work, about his career.”
Meyers remembered being invited to a 100th birthday party for Norman Lear a few years ago. Reiner was also there as a former star of Lear’s show All in the Family. “Norman was 100 years old and he was still very with it,” Meyers recalled. “I was sitting next to him and he could hold a conversation. He was incredible to behold.”
He continued, “And at the end of the night, there were about 40 or 50 people there. The host of the party said, ‘Does anyone here have anything to ask Norman?’ And somebody said, ‘Norman, how did your career start? How did you know you wanted to do what you did?’”
Meyers said that Lear struggled to come up with a way to answer the question. “And then Rob just yelled out from the back of the room,” Meyers said. “He said, ‘Norman, tell them the story about how you once hid in a birthday present.’ The host said Lear told “the most wonderful story” and Reiner continued to prompt Lear for more stories.
“I know this sounds like a story about Norman, but it’s also a really great story about Rob,” Meyers said. “Because Rob had this reputation for getting the best out of people. And if you watch his films you know that is something he had the skill with. But to see it in person and to know that’s what it was like in his real life as well, it was just so truly special to see.”
“He loved being an audience and he loved making things for an audience,” Meyers noted, emotionally. “And he was just a person who was so full of love, and so was Michele. And you could tell how much they loved each other.”
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Meyers also addressed Reiner’s politics and Donald Trump’s response to the filmmaker’s death yesterday, in which he called Reiner “deranged.” The host noted that within 12 hours of the Reiners “being murdered in their own home” Trump wanted to take the opportunity to “go on social media and post his thoughts about the tragedy.”
“I feared this was something he was going to do and I was pretty certain that it would cast a shadow on what was already a really dark day,” Meyers said. “But it was even worse than I could imagine. The president made it about himself because he’s incapable of making it about anything else.”
Meyers criticized Trump’s response and said he didn’t there was anything “more deranged” than watching the president’s supporters try to defend his words. He noted that he had some hope that some of Trump’s usual defenders might admit that “this is beyond the pale.”
“We don’t know. That’s their choice to make. It’s not ours,” Meyers said. The host also reflected on the difficult time we’re living in currently and affirmed “what a good time it would be to have a leader with a moral compass.”
Meyers concluded by sharing how Reiner’s work impacted his own comedy. “He was a man who set an example,” Meyers said. “There’s such a value in that. And we have to do everything we can to not make setting an example a lost art.”
Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home in Los Angeles on Sunday. Shortly after, their son Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested for allegedly killing his parents. Nick was taken into custody Sunday night after his parents’ bodies were found. He was booked just after 5 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 15, according to online jail records. No official charges were listed, but Nick is being held on suspicion of felony murder, and his bail is currently set at $4 million.
From Rolling Stone US
