DAVID LETTERMAN decided to retire from his long-term “Late Show” gig only after confronting the secret fear that’s haunted him all his life.
Dave desperately wants to protect his only child – 11-year-old son Harry – from the same anguish he suffered when he nearly lost his father at a young age, sources told The National ENQUIRER.
“It’s a heartbreak Dave doesn’t want visited upon Harry after he spent so many, many years living under the shadow of this terrible anxiety,” said our insider.
“Dave wants to give Harry that emotional security, to spend as much time as possible with him while he’s still young enough to enjoy it.”
The 67-year-old “Late Show” host named his son after his beloved father, Harry Joseph Letterman, who worked as a florist. Dave once told an interviewer: “He was the circus. He was the show. When he walked through the room, the lamps would rattle.”
When Dave was only 4, his dad suffered a heart attack at age 36. He survived, but the crisis left Dave with a terrible dread of loss.
“When he got over it, in the back of my mind was this fear that it could happen again,” Dave said in an amazingly candid interview almost 15 years ago.
Sadly, a second heart attack claimed Harry at age 57 in 1973. Dave said: “His death was horrible for me. Just horrible. It was awful.”
After the trauma of losing his father, Dave suffered strikingly similar health woes.
In 2000, he underwent emergency quintuple bypass surgery, and later struggled with a bout of shingles.
When asked about retirement, Dave would often joke: “When this show stops being fun – I will retire 10 years later.”
His final show is set to air on CBS on May 20, after more than 6,000 shows with both NBC and CBS.
But he’s rarely done more than hint about what sources tell The ENQUIRER are his true motivations for calling it quits.
In 2012, during an interview with Charlie Rose, he blamed his obsession with his talk show for his reluctance to be a father, saying: “I just thought, ‘I can’t do both.’ I was wrong about that. I have a little boy now. I wish I had a little girl [too].”
