The Late Shift

by Carter, Bill

  The Late Shift

  Letterman, Leno, & the Network Battle for the Night

  Bill Carter

  To Beth, with love always

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 NO MORE TO COME

  2 THE EMPIRE OF THE NIGHT

  3 THE CAMPAIGN

  4 STUPID NETWORK TRICKS

  5 BRIDGES BURNED

  6 GOOD COP, BAD COP

  7 PSYCHOLOGY 101

  8 THIS IS … CBS

  9 THE EAST/WEST GAME

  10 CHOOSE YOUR PARTNERS

  11 THE SECOND FRONT

  12 CLASH BY NIGHT

  13 WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?

  POSTSCRIPT: SHOWDOWN IN MIDTOWN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  David Letterman dashed across the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater in preparation for his introduction on his CBS late-night show one last time on the evening of May 20, 2015.

  It was the 4,214th show he had hosted on CBS; his 6,028th late-night show, including his eleven-year run on NBC. He wore glasses on the air now, his hair was close-cropped and wispy white, but he was trim and fit and ramrod straight as he strode out in a dark suit, white shirt, and blue, design-flecked tie.

  The audience stood to cheer and applaud as announcer Alan Kalter read out the uniquely Letterman-esque intro one last time: “And now … from a small town in Indiana …”

  The applause peaked at the sound of his name, washing over him with the kind of unrestrained devotion show business figures attain after they have transitioned from star, past icon,and on to being an irreplaceable part of millions of lives. The ovation soared and refused to ebb, as though the audience could not willingly relinquish this last opportunity to give voice to their affection, until Letterman himself, typically self-conscious and uncomfortable with excess, all but begged for it to end: “That’s it; stop it right there.”

  Finally, he got them to sit, ready for closing night to begin. With a monologue of course. And here’s how he opened his final show:

  “I’ll be honest with you. It’s beginning to look like I’m not going to get the Tonight show.”

  Jay Leno had his own farewell to late night fifteen months earlier. He was accompanied by a similarly rapturous greeting from his audience, which, in his case included many friends and family of the show and its crew.

  Leno, in his own dark suit and blue tie, his hair still richly thick but now a cumulous shock of white, had his moment at center stage with a standing crowd unwilling to let the final show commence. And he did his own self-referential opening joke:

  “I don’t like goodbyes—NBC does, but I don’t care for them.”

  This was his parting shot at his inconstant network for sliding him out of the Tonight chair five years earlier in the effort to install Conan O’Brien as successor. Having clawed his way back into the job he had not wanted to surrender, and back to the top of the ratings, as had been the overweening raison d’être of his Tonight tenure, Leno had every reason to revel in a career-long success.

  But reveling was never Leno’s way. He liked to say he didn’t believe in looking back. He had never even allowed NBC to produce a prime-time special of his best work. (CBS did four of them for Letterman.) So he didn’t do a slew of retrospective jokes, except for an allusion to one of his favorite themes:

  “So much has happened. You know the saddest part? O.J. never found the real killer.”

  The night did not pass without the inevitable reference, however. It fell to a guest, Sheryl Crow, to deliver it in a parody of the song from The Sound of Music, (a new version of which had been produced live on NBC two months earlier):

  “So long, farewell, I give a little wave,” Crow sang. “But not for Jay—I want to get on Dave.”

  In the twenty-plus years after David Letterman did not get the Tonight show—and Jay Leno did—the world changed of course, in too many ways and too profoundly to easily assess. For the television business the two men served so enduringly, the changes were convulsive. Not only did fewer people watch the shows the two stars had headlined for two decades, but fewer and fewer people even watched a thing called television.

  The show that had been the centerpiece of their endlessly intersecting lives, NBC’s Tonight show, rolled on under its talented new star, Jimmy Fallon. But it had become surrounded by a flock of clone-like creatures arrayed across the late-night landscape. Almost all of them owed something to Letterman and Leno—not to mention Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, Jon Stewart, and, of course, Johnny Carson.

  Virtually all the new hosts still told opening monologues, sat behind desks, talked to celebrities, introduced music acts, and said goodnight. And they were almost always men.

  But the thing that had distinguished the Tonight show enough to inspire metaphors of royal succession and a king on a throne was lost to time. An entire generation had entered the world and experienced American culture not knowing why the Tonight show was a “franchise,” any different from all those other shows with hosts and guests and couches. They had not seen Johnny Carson, had no idea of the towering impact he had had on the entertainment world, and especially on every comic of Letterman and Leno’s generation.

  Nor why the pursuit of his vacated chair behind the host desk would become the consuming enterprise in the lives of two hungry, driven men, one that neither of them were to ever fully let go of.

  And because the chase was so public between two guys who had grown up in comedy together, contemporaries, friends, inspirations for each other’s success, and because they were each so talented and appealing, it was all but impossible for much of America to look away, to be disinterested in either the outcome or the psychological fallout.

  The link between them was simply indelible. During the 2010 Super Bowl, early in the second quarter, a fifteen-second promotion spot rolled: Letterman sitting on a couch, curmudgeon-faced, eating chips, complaining about being at the worst Super Bowl party ever. Next to him on the couch, revealed as the shot expanded, Oprah Winfrey was shaking her head. And as the shot expanded further, there was Leno, eating his own chip and declaring, “Oh, he’s just saying that’cause I’m here.”

  The gobsmacked reaction reached all the way to the White House, where an amazed President Obama had asked his close aide David Axelrod to see if he could find out if what they had just seen was for real. He emailed Jay who told him, yup, he and Dave had gotten together for a little surprise in the middle of the biggest TV show of the year.

  Did Dave ever get over it?

  His achievement was indisputable: Before Letterman left NBC to set up shop at CBS in 1993, no late-night show had ever seriously challenged the supremacy of Tonight, let alone beat it, as Letterman did for his two opening years at CBS. Nor had any other network ever established a late-night franchise that endured past its original host. Dave established two: his own, passed on to Stephen Colbert, and the 12:35 edition, passed on to James Corden.

  More than that, Letterman put a personal stamp on late night that was no worse than second to that of Johnny Carson. A generation of viewers—and comics—idolized Dave for his innovative comedy and, in the later stages of his career, his often-brilliant interviewing. He was sui generis; an American original.

  Still, in public he disparaged his contributions, labeling his show as frivolous, meaningless, “a little dog and pony show.” Late in his run he gave rueful-sounding interviews where he acknowledged that Jay had simply beaten him on the official scoreboard: the ratings. Why had that happened?

  “The answer is me,” he said. “Jay has wider appeal than I do.”

  Privately, Letterman was immensely proud of his body of work, and the people who worked for him knew
it.

  But every spring, Letterman told more or less the same joke: “Passover is a Jewish feast—and it’s also what happened to me at NBC.”

  As NBC’s late-night plans with Jay and Conan were dissolving into chaos, Dave joked: “I got a call just before I came out here from NBC. And they said: ‘Look, look, we still don’t want you back.’ ”

  Could Jay let it go?

  The enduring portrayal of Leno as a usurper who had schemed to claim the Tonight show out from under his friend Dave never stopped hurting; it was like an open wound on Jay’s psyche.

  In public, Leno would often reminisce fondly about his early days with Dave, how they worked the clubs together in the ’70s, how they both got breaks appearing with Carson, how Dave basically saved his career by bringing him on as the most frequent and well-received guest on Late Night. Jay would characterize their rivalry as two guys with separate strengths: “I think I was more the stand-up and Dave more the broadcaster.” And that was indeed how they were often divided in terms of appraisal.

  But Leno would also make another observation: “I think it worked out for both of us. I got the ratings; Dave got the critics.”

  Though Jay would make that evaluation matter-of-factly, as though it was a truth universally acknowledged, there was a certain haunted echo in his voice when he would say it, ever more noticeable as the post-Tonight years rolled by.

  Not unlike the little bit of wistful self-recognition in the joke that opened Letterman’s final monologue.

  In a way, the rivalry that began the day Johnny Carson announced at an NBC upfront presentation in Carnegie Hall that he was stepping down after thirty years at the Tonight show, ended up the only way it could have for two comics with not much in common except their talent and their ambition:

  Jay got the ratings; Dave got the critics.

  Everybody else got a front-row seat for a hell of a show.

  1

  NO MORE TO COME

  Tucked behind a podium on the far left of the deep, elegant stage of Carnegie Hall, Warren Littlefield was finishing up his debut as maestro of NBC’s entertainment programming. It was May 23, 1991, a sparkling spring afternoon in Manhattan. In front of a full-house audience of advertising agency executives and station managers from NBC’s affiliated stations, Littlefield was bringing onto the stage the full roster of NBC stars—Ted Danson, Jane Pauley, Bill Cosby—trying to complete with a flourish his first presentation of the upcoming fall television schedule.

  NBC’s ratings fortunes had, in the previous television season, started a steep plunge after six years of dominating prime time. (Or, as Preston Beckman, an NBC research executive, described it: “Our ratings took a bungee jump off the Empire Stare Building.”) Now NBC’s executives had assembled their most important constituencies in the grandeur of Carnegie Hall and, in an effort to impress, they were reaching for rabbits from every conceivable form of headwear.

  More than two hours earlier, the session had started with a rambling satellite interview between NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw and President George Bush, who, a year prior to the start of a new presidential election season, was pressing a little flesh electronically with the managers of local television stations. This group was one of growing importance to politicians seeking access to local newscasts. Littlefield, at that point pacing offstage, found the interview interminable and unfathomable. He relished the chance to introduce the next act: Jay Leno, permanent guest host of the “Tonight” show, who in the last several years had polished his reputation as the best backup to Johnny Carson NBC had ever had on its “Tonight” show depth chart. Leno came out and did ten minutes of crackerjack stand-up.

  Danson did a warmly received walk-on, minus his hairpiece, which few in the crowd seemed to notice. And Cosby, NBC’s leading man since the mid-eighties, turned up to voice his appreciation for all the support his “Cosby Show” had received, helping make him a millionaire another couple of hundred times over.

  Littlefield had the stage to himself as he introduced these stars and others from the new shows he had picked for NBC’s fall schedule, shows like “Eerie, Indiana,” “Pacific Station,” and “Man of the People,” all of which were being celebrated as the new wave from the House of Hits.

  As the long ceremony wound down toward its close, it was a moment of some triumph for the thirty-nine-year-old Littlefield, one he had been aiming for all his professional life; not because he had ever longed to walk out into the spotlight at Carnegie Hall, but because he had waited a decade to walk out from under the tall shadow of Brandon Tartikoff. Tartikoff, who had been named chairman of Paramount Pictures a month earlier, had led NBC’s charge from doormat to king of the prime-time hill in the mid-eighties, piling up annual profits of up to $500 million for the network. Along the way Tartikoff had charmed the powers of Hollywood— and even more importantly the press—to carve for himself a legend as the premier showman of the living-room box.

  Littlefield, shorter, redder-faced, with a neatly trimmed, carrot-colored beard and a taste for conspicuously colorful ties, had been Tartikoff’s principal lieutenant, standing like the dutiful little brother at Tartikoff’s side at previous fall season presentations. What had once been a close relationship had grown fractious toward the end, with the two men often disagreeing on program and casting choices. At one Hollywood party, Tartikoff was overheard calling Littlefield and another NBC programming executive, Perry Simon, the “Milli Vanilli of programming,” after the singing duo who were exposed for lip-synching songs sung by other people. Littlefield, who had always had a vulnerability and sweetness about him, tried to shrug the insult off, saying, “Brothers fight, and brothers at times want to inflict a punch that hurts.”

  Fearing his big show had drifted on too long and that he might soon lose a large part of his audience to long-delayed trips to the restroom, Littlefield urged a final round of applause for the whole “NBC family of stars” he had introduced that afternoon. He promised a “final special visitor from the West” as the last celebrity member of the NBC prime-time family exited the stage.

  “I’ve waited my whole life for this,” Littlefield said, revving up his thin, somewhat high-pitched voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, the king of late-night television, soon to begin his thirtieth season on NBC … here’s Johnny!” The theme song, “Da-Dat-Dat-DA-DA,” as familiar to anyone who owned a television set as the National Anthem was to anyone who’d gone to a ball-game, rose to match the applause. Johnny Carson strode in his elegant, stiff-legged style to center stage. The audience kept up the applause, rolling it toward the stage in waves, as though trying to embrace him in warmth and enthusiasm. They were genuinely surprised; Carson’s appearance had been totally unbilled and effectively kept from the press by the few NBC executives who’d planned it.

  As much as American television audiences had come to love Carson, the managers of NBC’s television stations had several million stronger reasons for their ardor. Almost thirty years into his nightly role as the nation’s chief cultural color commentator, Carson was the single biggest money generator in television history. He was also the greatest individual star the medium had ever created.

  Carson smiled broadly as he drank in the applause, touched by its evident sincerity. “Thank you very much,” he said. “That’s very nice of you and I’m very grateful.” And then after a perfectly timed pause: “Gee, what a fast-paced afternoon!” As the huge laugh was just dying down, Carson stretched it: “You folks must be just short of a coma.”

  And he was off and running, tossing off quick-hit jokes about Ivana Trump, the cheapness of NBC’s corporate parent General Electric, even the afternoon’s host: “You get a little awestruck being on this stage, to think of all the great men who have graced this stage at Carnegie Hall: Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Isaac Stern, and today (pause) Warren Littlefield.” He tacked on a rebound laugh with: “Kind of knocks hell out of Darwin’s theory, doesn’t it?”

  Then he shifted to Jay Leno, the latest in a seemingl
y unending line of presumed successors. “Jay Leno kept driving me nuts backstage, coming up every few minutes: ‘How you feeling? Feel okay? How’s your thyroid? Your thyroid okay?’ I like Jay Leno, and as a matter of fact, he is very concerned about my health. In fact, he insisted that I jog through Central Park about midnight tonight.”

  Leno didn’t hear the cracks. He was long gone, having bolted the theater immediately after his own standup spot to grab a limo to the airport. There, a private plane commissioned by NBC would take him back to Lake Tahoe and the gig at the hotel he had interrupted to open the NBC festivities. As Johnny was speaking, Jay was already somewhere over Pennsylvania, working, as always, on more jokes.

  Carson’s next target was also absent: Brandon Tartikoff, the NBC entertainment executive Carson had come to like best and respect most. “I love Brandon Tartikoff,” Carson said. “He talked me into staying and then he jumped ship.”

  For some who knew Carson well, the last statement didn’t sound entirely like a joke. They believed that Carson felt somewhat abandoned when Tartikoff decided to leave NBC for Paramount, though Johnny himself never said that was the case. But with Tartikoff gone, Carson was sharing his Burbank headquarters with a group of executives that he was not nearly as close to.

  Carson did have some reason to be disenchanted with NBC: The network had seen fit, for the first time in his run as sovereign of late night, to challenge his hard-earned prerogatives. The previous February, during the Persian Gulf war, NBC had responded to its stations’ requests for more local news time by pushing the starting time for the “Tonight” show back five minutes, to 11:35 P.M. in the East. It was a convenient excuse for the stations to start squeezing more commercials into their newscasts.

  NBC could have fought the stations to hold the line at 11:30, but the network didn’t want to take the risk. NBC’s executives believed the move to 11:35 was necessary to maintain the loyalty of the stations to the “Tonight” show. With syndicated shows like “Entertainment Tonight” and reruns of “Cheers” churning out big profits for non-NBC stations in the late-night time period, it was becoming increasingly difficult for NBC to hold together the lineup of stations that provided full national clearance for the show. That 100 percent clearance rate was the backbone of the “Tonight” show’s dominance of late night.