David Tebet, who died Tuesday at 91, was the longtime director of talent relations for the NBC network, the man in charge of stroking some of the largest egos in show business with everything from a bed in a private jet (for Bob Hope) to a contract that specified 12 weeks of vacation a year (for Johnny Carson).

George Burns called him “the vice president in charge of caring,” and he did his unusual job well enough to lure stars as diverse as Michael Landon, O.J. Simpson, James Garner, and Redd Foxx into the NBC stable.

Blessed with a Runyonesque manner and glad-handing ways, he was known for his extravagant holiday gift list of 1,500 show business names. Each year at Christmas, Tebet would send out hundreds of color televisions, paintings, and other valuable gifts. Carson once told the Wall Street Journal that he had “this terrible feeling that when I die, there will be a color TV set at my gravesite. On it will be a ribbon and a note that says, ‘Have a nice trip. Love, David.’ And they will bury the TV set with me.”

From a Rockefeller Plaza office festooned with Oriental antiquities including a samurai sword and signed photos of hundreds of clients, including Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Roger Moore, Tebet, in trademark bug-eye glasses, dispensed favors and called in markers. He convinced William Holden to star in “The Blue Knight,” a 1973 miniseries, by getting the script rewritten to make the hero thinner. He lured Marilyn Monroe to NBC by purchasing the rights to one of her favorite plays, “Rain” by W. Somerset Maugham. (Her health problems sank the deal.)

Tebet, with his one-time roommate, the songwriter Sammy Cahn, was widely rumored to have been the inspiration for the fastidious Felix in Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.” In later years, Tebet insisted on living in hotels, first in New York’s Dorset Hotel. After he moved to Los Angeles, he maintained a suite at the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel. “When you come up the driveway and see the sign, to me, that’s coming home,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “There is no other home for me.” A brief marriage to actress Nanette Fabray ended in 1951.

Tebet grew up in Philadelphia. He found part-time work at the local Shubert theaters, which led to his move to New York, where he worked as a publicist on Broadway. In the early 1950s, he began handling publicity for “Your Show of Shows,” and helped handle talent for the show’s producer, Max Liebman. In 1956, Tebet joined NBC as a programming executive and was soon made vice president for talent relations, a job, he boasted, that made him “the only person in this company without a job description.”

What exactly his services to stars consisted of was not always apparent, but that was also what made him so good at it and was why the stars trusted him. The photo of Sinatra on his office wall was inscribed, “You’ll always be No. 1 with me. Francis.” Sinatra, often a guest on NBC at Tebet’s request, probably meant it.

“I know what actors are all about. I know their soft underbellies,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Doubleday wanted me to write a book. They wanted all the scandals. I told them to go jump. I take those to the grave with me.”

NBC may not have known what Tebet was doing, but after he brought Carson in as host of “The Tonight Show,” they knew he was doing it well. It was in 1962 that Tebet saw Carson, then host of the afternoon quiz show “Who Do You Trust?” on the ABC network, and campaigned for him as a replacement for Jack Paar, host of “Tonight.” Carson brought along his sidekick, Ed McMahon, and the rest is show business legend.

In 1980, when Carson set up Johnny Carson Productions and bought “The Tonight Show,” Tebet became executive vice president of the new company. He told UPI in 1987, “In those first years alone he [Carson] generated maybe 15 or 16% or NBC’s profit. And I’m not just talking NBC network. I’m talking the entire company.”

After he convinced Paddy Chayefsky to sign an exclusive deal with NBC, Chayefsky was so impressed that he based the character of the kindly television executive Max Schumacher in “Network” on Tebet.

Until the mid-1990s, Tebet produced an annual tribute dinner at the Friars Club, where honorees included Sinatra, Carson, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1993, the tribute was for his old friend – they were all his old friends – Neil Simon. Said Mr. Simon, “Tebet actually asked me to be the honoree for tonight back in 1956 – and prayed my career would work out. I was still booked through ‘Barefoot in the Park’ and ‘The Odd Couple.’ After ‘Star Spangled Girl,’ I was put on hold for two years – but when I won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Lost in Yonkers,’ I got a fax from David saying, ‘Dinner is looking very good.’ And tonight, Dave Tebet is walking around the room looking to pick out next year’s Man of the Year!”

David William Tebet
Born December 27, 1920, in Philadelphia; died June 7 in Coronado, Calif., at a nephew’s home of complications from a stroke. There are no immediate survivors.