In Regis We Trust

Look at him now: pacing in his cramped office a few floors above the ABC studio in Manhattan where Live! With Regis & Kathie Leeimprovises its way across the airwaves each morning. Look at him now, just after the show: listening to a Dean Martin CD, strutting amid the clutter, and modeling the pants of a brown suit.

''This suit didn't make it!'' he says... or, more exactly, exclaims. Yes, the brown was fine for the daytime show he finished a half hour ago downstairs, but it was rejected by producers of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. ''They gotta have their dark suits!'' he booms. ''They want a rich look. They want a millionaire look.''

Look at him now: a millionaire himself. But until this moment of prime-time success when he's suddenly cool, it seemed the 65-year-old Regis Philbin would forever be the brown suit of American broadcasting. An appealing brown suit of strong fiber, having endured since his younger days as Joey Bishop's talk-show sidekick in the 1960s; and still well-tailored even after four decades in the trenches of televsion, including two defunct 1975 game shows (The Neighbors and Almost Anything Goes) and enthusiastic lapel grabbing by Kathie Lee Gifford five mornings a week for the last 12 years (''guerrilla television,'' he calls Live, where the lighting's never up to his standards and where the phone employed to ask viewers daily-trivia questions often disconnects at will).

There's no questioning his durabilty. ''Regis has that very rare ability to be himself on camera,'' says Live executive producer Michael Gelman. ''He can look through the camera and connect with the viewer at home.'' But even his most devoted followers — those who believe that Philbin stands among the most able of live broadcasters, right up there with Carson, Letterman, and Paar — might have reasonably assumed that Live would be Philbin's career zenith, that Philbin was a nice brown suit that would never be worn in the evening.