TV's Luminaries Leap All Over the Veep

"Dan Quayle is like the assistant on the old Vegas TV show: you let him answer the phone, but he does not drive the T-bird." Thus spake Emmy emcee Dennis Miller in Pasadena, California, during TV's annual orgy of self- congratulation. Miller was one of the milder critics of the Vice President, Savonarola of the small screen ever since he denounced the "cultural elite" of Hollywood. In Quayle's eyes, the sins of that group are best exemplified by its embrace of single parenthood in the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown -- and now the Emmys as well, where stars reveled in striking back at Indiana's favorite son.

Comedian Richard Lewis observed in his stream-of-anxiousness style, "I have this recurring dream. Quayle is President, and he's doing Brinkley and he's panicked, and he's saying, 'Does Sweden have a king or a maitre d'?' " A Johnny Carson tribute included puckish Robin Williams' suggestion that the Vice President was "one taco short of a combination plate." But the heaviest hits came from Murphy Brown's heavies: actress Candice Bergen ("I would like to thank our writers for not only writing these great words but spelling them correctly") and creator Diane English ("As Murphy herself said, 'I couldn't possibly do a worse job raising my kid alone than the Reagans did with theirs' ").

Quayle insisted that he never disparaged single mothers and that anyone who said otherwise was lying. But his slam of Murphy Brown as a promoter of such a choice remains a matter of record.