Last night, Matt Lauer seemed unconcerned by his injured shoulder, which rested in a sling as people bumped by him in the crowded parlor of Daily Beast founder Tina Brown and writer Harry Evans’s Sutton Place co-op. He and Rupert Murdoch, Al Roker, Liz Smith, Tom Brokaw, Phil Griffin, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Barry Diller, Carl Bernstein, and Jack Welch were assembled to celebrate the release of Welch’s wife Suzy’s new book, 10-10-10. But we’d just seen Kathie Lee Gifford absentmindedly clamp down on Lauer’s deer-damaged arm on the Today show on Monday, so we asked whether having people in close proximity still posed a jostling problem. “It doesn’t usually happen when I’m wearing this [sling]. People see it and they usually make the connection,” he said. “Kathie Lee felt worse about it than I did.” Lauer told us that his surgery scar was healing, and we fretted about his famously fit beach body. “You know, the doctor said, ‘You’re gonna see this,’” Lauer laughed. “And I said, ‘You know what? I’m 51 years old, I’m not doing swimsuit layouts anymore.’” Too bad! But the Today show host admits, it wasn’t just his summer golf games that prompted him to get the corrective surgery. “The only reason I even had it done was actually vanity. You know when you separate your shoulder, the one bone sticks way out above the other, so you have this huge bump that doesn’t go away,” he explained, waving his finger in the space over his collarbone. “If you had to buy a suit, it would go like this on one side.” At his age, that kind of bump wouldn’t go away. “So I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous!’ and I got it done.” Makes sense to us.
Earlier: Matt Lauer Injured in Freak Bicycle-Deer Fight Accident
