by Carter, Bill
NBC had been under pressure for some time from stations that wanted to delay the start of “Tonight” until midnight so they could plug in one of those syndicated shows. The syndicated programs were enticing for a couple of reasons: The stations got to sell all the time in those shows, while NBC gave them only half the commercial minutes in the “Tonight” show; and the stations had noticed that the audience for Carson was starting to gray along with the star.
That was a potentially fatal trend. The television business had become so youth-oriented that viewers over the age of fifty were all but worthless. Advertisers bought commercial time almost exclusively on the basis of the demographic makeup of the audience. A show needed good young “demos” to make big profits because advertisers had concluded that only young customers were likely to switch brands. Carson still had the biggest audience in late night, but the game had changed: The point was no longer to have a big audience, but to have the right audience.
NBC’s entertainment executives had been nervously eyeing Johnny’s demos for several years. The Gulf war provided a somewhat graceful way to take a little piece out of Johnny to placate the station managers, who were starting to wonder what sort of young female demos they could get with “Love Connection” at 11:30.
As Carson saw it, the stations were simply eating up the first five minutes of his access to the public, and he didn’t like it. It was certainly a slap in the face to Carson, who had always resisted every network effort to tamper with his show. If it had happened earlier in his career, Carson would have threatened to quit and stopped this encroachment dead in its tracks. He understood the television business as well as any executive who had ever worked in it. He knew you could never permit the stations to start nibbling at your show, because the next year they might decide they’d like to nibble you back to an 11:45 start. And after that it would be an easy jump to dropping in a rerun of a sitcom at 11:30, pushing the “Tonight” show back to midnight. Carson would never have allowed himself to be nibbled to death that way if he hadn’t concluded his time on the show was growing short anyway. That made the threat to quit a bit pointless. So Johnny decided not to bother; though he let NBC know it surely didn’t make him happy.
But Carson had not come to New York to win back his five minutes; he was there to deliver a special monologue, and a special message. And he had more jokes to attend to before he got down to business.
He took a few shots at Paramount, then more at GE for not having a clue about the entertainment business. He noted all the pregnancies at the “Today” show and suggested that even Willard Scott had morning sickness.
Then, without breaking his comic rhythm, he shifted gears. “We’ve been doing this show many, many years. I’ve had a few problems. I’ve never talked about them on the air, but since this is my last year, I might let you in on a few things that have happened.”
He had dropped the line in so smoothly, so seamlessly, that it stirred not even a ripple of reaction in the big audience—except down in the front row, where the NBC executives sat. There quizzical looks fogged over a few of the faces. To Betty Hudson, the head of corporate public relations, it was like a faint buzzing in the ear that you couldn’t quite identify.
Johnny was onto stories about advertisers he’d offended over the years: the Sara Lee bakery, with his suggestion on the air one night that Sara was actually a “little hooker from Cleveland who made those cookies on the side.” Later he learned from the president of the company that Sara Lee had been named after the man’s daughter.
Carson was most amused by the reaction of Forest Lawn, the famed Hollywood final resting place, to his comment about their $39.95 funeral: “They take you our, stand you on tippy toes, and drive you into the ground with a croquet mallet. You don’t even get a headstone. They just leave your hand up, holding your Diners Club card.” The call the next day from the director of Forest Lawn was delivered in an especially otherworldly voice. “Mr. Carson: We shall have the last laugh.”
That drew Johnny’s biggest laugh of the day. He might have stopped there and saved the row of NBC executives from further squirming, but the responsive crowd and the setting and the emotion of the moment seemed to be making him nostalgic. So Carson rolled amiably on, reminiscing about the seven presidential administrations he’d made fun of, reserving some special thanks that Dan Quayle had come along to provide so much monologue material. Then he recalled a recent bit he’d done on the show about “least-uttered expressions in the English language,” including: “That’s the banjo player’s Porsche,” and “Oh, you’re a Jehovah’s Witness. Come on in!”
The audience was totally his now. Every line went off like a fireworks shell. Finally he came around to his point:
“I know you’ve had a long afternoon, and I would like to say for one thing here, as you well know, this is the last year that I am doing the ‘Tonight’ show, and it’s been a long, marvelous run.”
Now the rumble rolled through the audience, not a single member of which knew that this was supposed to be Johnny Carson’s last year on the air. Heads began to turn, one to the other, in the row of NBC executives. Just offstage, Warren Littlefield could suddenly feel his shirt sticking to his back.
Backstage, Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports and a longtime friend of Carson’s, heard the words and remembered that Johnny, sitting around a table with Ebersol, Danson, and Cosby a while earlier, had said something about going out and telling them all he was leaving soon. Ebersol had no idea he’d meant that soon.
John Agoglia, the executive vice president of NBC and the man who conducted every major talent negotiation for the network, sat up and leaned forward in his chair.
Carson went on: “Brandon came to me as he has for the last ten years, and we had our annual talk.”
The murmur in the audience started to spread.
“He wanted me to go into the thirtieth year, and I said I would be delighted. I said, ‘Can we make it a year from now?’—meaning this month of May.”
Carson had quietly been leaning toward his thirty-year anniversary in October 1992 as a logical endpoint. But he knew that NBC would be preempting the show for its late-night coverage of the Barcelona Olympics for two weeks in July 1992 anyway. Viewing levels were always down in summer as well, and it was always hardest to book guests in the summer months. He always considered June, July, and August the show’s dog days. So he simply looked backward on the calendar and realized May was the next closest “sweep” month, a special ratings period of most importance to the local stations—and thus to the networks as well. And if he stepped down in May, he could relax the rest of the summer and take his wife, Alex, to the French Open and Wimbledon.
The full meaning of what was happening was sinking into the intently listening NBC executives: The king was about to abdicate.
“And so we’re going to go into next May,” Carson said, “and my last show is going to be May 22, 1992.”
Agoglia’s face went totally white. He saw the head of Bob Wright, his boss, the president of NBC, jerk around to look at him. Wright had become a good friend of Carson’s; they’d scheduled a dinner together that night. Yet Carson had said nothing before about this. All Agoglia could do was shake his head at Wright and look as surprised as everyone else.
This wasn’t in the script. Agoglia had been at that same luncheon meeting with Tartikoff, Carson, and Carson’s agent, Ed Hookstratten. As always it had been at the Grill restaurant in Beverly Hills. For some time Carson had been working year to year, making his own call every time about whether he wanted to go on with the show. NBC actually sold the show to advertisers on a two-year basis, so Carson was technically signed for two years. But that was just a paper clause. He had an option every year if he wanted to get out.
What Agoglia had heard at the lunch didn’t sound to him as if Johnny was definitely setting the date for his finale. It sounded more like another “maybe next year should be the last year, maybe we should call it quits at that” from C
arson, lines that Agoglia had heard several times before, always leading to another year on the show. Nor had Tartikoff said anything different to Wright in the months since the lunch. If he and Carson had really agreed on May, Tartikoff hadn’t let his boss in on the secret.
Though some NBC executives had been anticipating for some time that Carson would soon make the call to step down, he had not revealed to anybody at NBC his intentions to use the Carnegie Hall appearance to break the biggest television news in years. Nor had he told any of his “Tonight” show staff. Only Alex Carson knew what Johnny was going to do before he left Los Angeles the night before. The guest of honor had decided to stage his own farewell surprise party—and had pulled it off with his customary effortless mastery.
Now Johnny wrapped up his comments, with a strong endorsement of the continuation of the “Tonight” show, because young performers needed a place to make their mark on the nation. Then he thanked the advertisers and station managers for their support through the years.
The row of NBC executives was now completely agitated. They had no press release to hand out; they had no official comment ready; they had no prepared words of praise for their outgoing star. And they knew this story was going to explode across the country.
Warren Littlefield was suddenly struck by the fact that he had just heard one of the biggest announcements in the history of broadcasting. He thought: “And it happened on my stage, at my party.” But there was no one close to him in the wings to talk to about it.
On stage, Johnny had come to the end: “So I just wanted to thank you, and I am very grateful and I bid you good-bye. Thank you.”
After just a few seconds acknowledging the applause, Carson walked briskly past Littlefield, who returned to his podium for a single, desperately anticlimactic remark: “That’s our show. Down the hall and to the right, you’ll find the bathrooms …”
Agoglia was the first one out of his seat. He went vaulting up the steps to the stage, determined to catch Carson. Johnny knew he had touched off a media frenzy, but he had another appointment, so he wasn’t about to stick around explaining himself. Backstage, Carson took just a moment to confirm the news for any doubters in the NBC hierarchy. “This is real, this is real,” he said. “I just said it; the world just heard me. It’s real.” And then he headed for the exit.
Agoglia headed for the nearest phone. The other NBC executives were moving, too. Littlefield and Perry Simon had cars waiting to take them to the airport. They would be making the same presentation to advertisers in Chicago the next day, and the show in New York had run late. At that moment, getting to Chicago to sell “Pacific Station,” “Man of the People,” and the rest of the fall season shows seemed much more important to them than dealing with the implications of Johnny Carson’s announcement.
Susan Binford, NBC’s PR vice president for the West Coast, was quickly conferring with her boss, Betty Hudson. Even if their executives were heading out to the airport, they knew what would come next for them: The press reaction would be a roaring fire, besieging offices on each coast for information. “My office phones are going to light up like a Christmas tree,” Binford told Hudson.
But neither of them had anything they could tell the press. Before they could even move out of the hall, the two women were surrounded by the suddenly energized reporters who had sat numbly through the long event. All the reporters were yelling the same question: “Who’s getting Johnny’s job?”
Neither Binford nor Hudson had the answer to that question at hand; and the guys who were in charge of that decision—Littlefield and Agoglia—had already disappeared from the scene.
Agoglia was on the phone to Ed Hookstratten. “Did you know about this, Ed?” he asked the agent. Agoglia was steaming. He asked Hookstratten why he hadn’t called to tell him so the network could have been prepared. “We all have egg on our faces here, Ed,” he said. Hookstratten told him that Johnny had kept the decision to himself.
The announcement had put Agoglia in a spot he had not planned to be in—and hated being in. It was not that he was about to mourn the passing of Johnny Carson from the late-night scene. It was the messy surprise he objected to. Agoglia was a man who prided himself on going about his business mechanically, making sure each part of a deal was in working order before it left his hands. This announcement would surely force to the front the question of succession; Agoglia knew all it meant was going with the still secret plan that was already in place. But he was irked because some complications remained unresolved.
The main complication, he knew, was going to be David Letterman.
Letterman was NBC’s other late-night star. His 12:30 show, “Late Night,” had been on for a decade, turning into a critical triumph and a financial bonanza for NBC, extending the network’s dominance of the late-night landscape. Letterman had once been the only logical choice to succeed Carson. But that was before Jay Leno replaced Joan Rivers as the show’s permanent guest host.
Agoglia hadn’t faced the Letterman issue head-on yet—and he wasn’t about to at this moment either, because he simply felt he didn’t have to. He hadn’t thought an announcement by Carson was imminent, and besides, he had Letterman locked into a contract for another two years.
As for Bob Wright, the only information he’d ever got on David Letterman was that he had never really pushed to be considered for the “Tonight” show job. So Wright simply didn’t think of calling Letterman to discuss the news of Carson’s announcement with him.
No matter how much press this story was going to generate, the entire executive hierarchy of the NBC entertainment division felt it had better things to do at that moment than worry about the ruffled feathers of some late-night star.
Ten blocks away, in studio 6A of the GE Building, David Letterman was in the middle of taping his “Late Night” show, talking to his lead guest, actress Susan Sarandon. When the show opened ten minutes earlier, Carson had been finishing up his remarks at Carnegie Hall and Letterman didn’t know what Johnny had said.
But during the next commercial, Letterman got word from the control room of the developments at Carnegie Hall. He didn’t have time at that moment for the full impact to sink in. As he came out of the break, he began to speak again, pretending to introduce his next scheduled guest. He had been aware since the day before that a special walk-on was scheduled for immediately after this break. Letterman knew who it was, too, and now he had an extra reason to be excited.
As Letterman addressed the audience, he looked to his right, and out from the blue exit doors next to his desk walked Johnny Carson, holding an enormous piece of cardboard. Letterman feigned surprise at the walk-on, but his delight was genuine: Carson meant more to him than any other figure in show business.
Carson’s prop was a big check, the kind his bumptious sidekick, Ed McMahon, gave out in his Publishers Clearing House commercials.
“Ed couldn’t be here, so he asked me to deliver this,” Johnny said to a wide-eyed Dave. “Oddly enough, it seems you are the million-dollar winner.”
It was the first time Johnny Carson had walked into the studio since he last broadcast the “Tonight” show from New York in 1973—and he had just announced his retirement date from the “Tonight” show. But Letterman didn’t dwell on the nostalgia of the moment. He took his lead from Carson, who he thought looked haggard. If Johnny wanted to address the retirement issue, he would. So the two men chatted amiably.
After a few jokes, Carson said he’d come to New York “to do some business with the affiliates.” Then he again dropped in the news almost casually, saying, “It’s all coming to an end next year. I’ve always wanted to be a shepherd.”
After the show, Letterman sat in his office ready to review the show with his producer and friend, Robert Morton. He told Morton how amazing he thought Carson was, how Carson had just announced that he’d be retiring after thirty years, and even after doing something that emotional, he was able to come over, do his guest spot, get laughs, and be so at ease. Wh
en they replayed the tape of the show and got to the moment where Carson said he was in town to do some business for the affiliates, Letterman couldn’t contain his amazement. “You quit!” he shouted at the screen. “That was the business you came into town for: You quit!” Letterman marveled at Carson, but then he had always marveled at Carson, the man whose career had inspired him—and whose job he had always dreamed of getting.
That evening, David Letterman had no calls from the management of NBC.
Halfway to Nevada, Jay Leno’s plane dropped down on a runway at a refueling depot near Kansas City.
In Los Angeles, Helen Kushnick, Jay Leno’s manager for seventeen years, had already received a call at her office from a contact who attended the affiliate meeting in New York. She now knew what Carson had said, and what it meant. Kushnick first tried to see if Leno was reachable in flight, and was told the private plane was scheduled to make a refueling stop in Kansas City.
While Kushnick waited for Leno to land, she was more apprehensive than excited. The phrase she’d heard so often from her mother kept running through her head: “Be careful of what you wish for; you might get it.” Still, she was not wasting a second in trying to reach Jay with the news.
As he got out of the plane to stretch his legs, Leno was told he had a call in the depot office. When he picked up the phone, he expected to hear Helen’s voice.
“Johnny announced he was quitting today,” she told Leno the second he was on the line.