by Carter, Bill
“What? What do you mean?” he said. “Today, at the NBC thing in New York? What did he say?”
“He said he’s doing one more year and that he’s quitting next May.”
They didn’t have to fill in any blanks. Both of them knew what Carson’s decision meant for them: They would begin work on the “Tonight” show the following May, on the Monday after Carson’s exit.
Leno’s emotions, as usual, were muted. “It is official?” he asked.
“No, NBC hasn’t made it official.”
“So we still have to keep it quiet,” he said.
Leno had only told the news to his wife, Mavis. Helen had told nobody. Only they and the very top NBC executives knew what had happened just seven days earlier in the NBC corporate offices in Burbank: Jay Leno had signed a contract, worth more than $6 million a year, with the NBC television network that guaranteed him the job as host of the “Tonight” show as soon as Johnny Carson stepped down.
It was the biggest job in television, on the longest-running show in television. As of this day, Jay Leno had it; and Helen Kushnick had gotten it for him.
NBC eventually got around to authorizing an official statement a day later. Summoning up the collective eloquence of the company, the statement said: “Obviously the ‘Tonight’ show will continue. For now we’re delighted that our association with the king of late-night television will continue for another year. We will spend the immediate future reflecting on the statement Johnny made yesterday. No immediate announcement is planned!”
2
THE EMPIRE OF THE NIGHT
The producer of an upcoming late-night talk show ran into Johnny Carson, then late in his career, at a network party. The producer would never presume to solicit advice, but Carson knew and respected the producer, and he asked him how the planning for the new show was going.
Carson listened politely for some time to the mostly general ideas the producer tossed back at him—some suggestions about comedy sketches, how the music would be integrated, what kinds of guests they would try to book. When the producer was finished, Carson paused, cocked an eyebrow, and offered one sentence: “These shows are about the guy behind the desk.”
For almost forty years, millions of Americans had stayed up later than they intended watching a guy behind a desk tell jokes, comment on the news, and schmooze and banter with celebrities. The creation was an undeniable American original: the late-night talk show.
And it was the exclusive property of one network, NBC. The “Tonight” show began in 1954 when Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, the president of NBC, decided to expand the network’s programming past the 11 P.M. local news. Weaver wanted his nighttime entry to be something along the lines of “Today”: some news and light features with interviews. At that time a comic-musician named Steve Allen was doing a much-talked-about ninety-minute show on WNBC, the network’s flagship station in New York. After settling some disagreements about the format, NBC offered the “Tonight” job to Allen. The show went on the air September 27, 1954.
Pat Weaver had put it on the NBC network, but Steve Allen defined the “Tonight” show: It was a nightly mix of comedy, music, and show business chatter. Allen’s “Tonight” show had many conventional elements—the familiar celebrity faces, familiar singers singing standard songs. But what started keeping people awake past midnight was the star’s high-energy wit and his appreciation for how the emerging medium could lend itself to spontaneous, original humor. Allen put cameras on the street and tried to find unscripted comedy in random interviews with passersby. He was a comedy adventurer, jumping into vats of funny stuff like Jell-O, or dressing up in a suit of tea bags and lowering himself into a giant cup of hot water.
Success came fast, and once the show’s producer, Jules Green, successfully made a deal that paid all guests, no matter how big, the union scale (then $265.50 per appearance), the show quickly established the highly efficient economics of late-night talk. The star could command a massive salary—Allen got up to about $3,500 a week during his tenure—but the other costs were modest and mostly fixed. The total original budget was $11,000 a week. With the amount of commercial time in a ninety-minute, five-night-a-week show so abundant, “Tonight” instantly set itself up as the champion cash cow in the network pasture.
Live every night, the “Tonight” show was the freshest entertainment on television. It proved to be so fresh and entertaining, in fact, that NBC decided to try Allen in the bigger arena of prime time. Just a little over two years into his “Tonight” run, Allen picked up the show and moved it more or less whole to Sunday night at eight, where he did battle with some success against “The Ed Sullivan Show” on CBS.
After a quick, embarrassing flop with a new show called “America After Dark,” NBC decided to revive the “Tonight” format with a different host. Several were considered, but the network quickly settled on an offbeat monologuist and frequent game show guest named Jack Paar.
Like Allen, Paar, who took over the show in July, 1957, tooled the “Tonight” show to the specifications of his own talents. For Paar that meant stirring public opinion like an overheated cauldron. He took on causes, like Castro’s Cuba; took on censors; even fought his battles with his enemies right on the air. Paar’s show was constantly embroiled in controversy or silliness; he cried, he quit, he fired people. Paar’s show mesmerized the country; it was the first “water cooler” show, the first television program whose impact could be measured by the amount of talk it generated around the nation’s offices the next morning.
Paar made the “Tonight” show a phenomenon. After him, NBC would never again consider any other form of programming in late night. But Paar’s fragile emotions and the intensity of his nightly performances consumed the star long before the nation was tired of watching him. Paar announced he was quitting in 1962.
Possible successors had been rumored before, because Paar was so often close to quitting. Johnny Carson’s name would always come up because he had so smoothly filled in during occasional assignments as guest host. After a short winnowing process that included a tryout performance in which Carson’s standup act electrified an audience of advertising executives at the Greenbrier resort in Virginia, NBC had a clear choice.
Carson had already turned down the job once. He had earlier expressed doubts about comedians appearing too frequently, how that could wear out the public’s interest in them. He had also heard advice that following a figure of national fascination like Paar amounted to professional suicide. Carson had a good thing going. He was the host of “Who Do You Trust?,” a hot ABC game show, which had become a comedy show thanks to Carson’s rapid-fire byplay with his often absurd guests.
But NBC came back a second time: Carson was the “type” they were looking for: He was lightning fast with ad-libs (even though many of his game-show quips were scripted), he was boyishly good-looking, and he was clearly a Waspy midwesterner. No one ever articulated why that mattered. But much of television comedy was still the province of ethnic comics, and this was a national show being sent into homes where a sizable portion of the audience was either already in bed or heading that way. The intimacy that implied seemed to underscore the need to find a star who was comfortable to the mass of viewers—and their mass prejudices.
Carson’s contract with ABC committed him to the game show for twenty-six more weeks. NBC was willing to wait; the network was sure it had the right man.
Carson stepped onto the stage as the host of the “Tonight” show on October 1, 1962.
Johnny Carson conquered America from bases on either side of the country, but his roots were deep in the middle. Born in Corning, Iowa, in 1926, Carson grew up in Nebraska in a solidly middle-class family.
When he was twelve, Carson sent away for a mail-order magic kit—and he never had to think again about what he wanted to do with his life. Soon he was “The Great Carsoni,” performing for bridge clubs and church socials.
After the Navy in World War II and the University of Nebrask
a on the GI bill, Carson began his career on radio in Omaha. He paid his dues as a television broadcaster beginning in Omaha, and eventually moved to Los Angeles. After a series of failed attempts to break into network television, Carson finally found the right vehicle, “Who Do You Trust?”
Carson had a hit; he was in the right place, New York, at precisely the right time, when the television business was exploding. When Paar went on vacation, Carson got a shot behind the “Tonight” desk. No one ever glided more smoothly into his element.
From his first night on the air as the new permanent host Carson was a smash. His ratings quickly eclipsed Paar’s. Of course, Carson wasn’t doing Jack Paar’s show; he was doing Johnny Carson’s show, taking bits and pieces of his earlier TV work and fleshing them out with his growing talent for stand-up comedy. Like Allen and Paar before him, Carson put his own imprint on the show. In a short time, nobody talked about the “Tonight” show in terms of either of the old stars anymore. Johnny Carson was the “Tonight” show.
The nightly Carson monologue quickly became the most consistent five to seven minutes of entertainment on television. As Carson grew into the show, his comedy grew as well; he started dropping his early reliance on slightly risqué material for more substantial comedic commentary on the news of the day. Johnny’s monologue became the country’s most acutely observed political barometer. Johnny made fun of them all: anyone in politics or show business or public life. But the ones he made fools of were truly in trouble.
What stood out most clearly was Carson’s ability to communicate with his audience. He gave them exactly what they wanted in the minutes before they ended their day: good laughs, big stars, a little music, sometimes a kind of naughty pleasure. His strengths were his ear for language, his timing, and his uncanny sense of how far he could take the show and when he needed to pull back. He had such extraordinary skill at presiding over this odd form of entertainment that he made it look effortless. This was his ultimate magic trick.
On the air, Carson projected complete authority. Paar may have been called the “king of late-night television,” but Carson turned the show into an empire, the most powerful seat in all of show business. Guests paid homage. Nobody crossed Johnny; careers could be at stake. More than anyone, comics came to see Carson’s show as their main chance. To kill on the “Tonight” show was to be launched toward stardom. The “Tonight” show became the one altar at which everyone in show business worshiped.
Carson accomplished all this despite being often racked with self-doubt. The most confident, smoothest man on television, the idol of millions of young men—especially those who thought they too could make people laugh—would sometimes, among his closest associates, blurt out how terrified he was that it might all disappear at any moment.
For NBC, Carson was the key to the mint. The show poured out cash, many years grossing more than $100 million and providing as much as 15 to 20 percent of the profits recorded by the entire network. Carson’s own income quickly set the standard for television performers, reaching $1 million a year before he had finished a decade on the air. As his hold on the country’s bedtime habits grew, so did his hold on the NBC treasury. All the leverage in future contract negotiations lay with Johnny. In the mid-seventies he passed $3 million a year. But he never stopped validating his worth. The other networks noticed the profit machine NBC had built in the midnight hour, and sought to build their own prototypes. They tried, with Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett. Later, syndicators tried with Merv again, and also with David Brenner and Alan Thicke.
Carson swept them all away with the same apparent nonchalance he displayed in the middle of a monologue. He was a late-night gunfighter with a perfect record. The only time a network established any kind of success against him was when it deliberately moved away from challenging him at his own game. ABC found an audience for news viewers starting in 1979 with “Nightline,” a nightly news and discussion program. Ted Koppel’s matchless interviewing skills helped ABC grab a piece of late night, but mostly that piece came with new viewers. Johnny held his own.
In 1980, in a showdown with NBC president Fred Silverman, Johnny used his ultimate power: He threatened to quit the show. That was all he needed to wring an unprecedented deal out of NBC. In addition to more than $5 million a year in salary, Carson got series commitments from the network for his production company, and most important, he gained ownership over the “Tonight” show. From then on, everything Carson did on the “Tonight” show belonged not to NBC, but to him. In total, the deal was estimated at more than $50 million. No one in television had ever received anything close to that amount. And at the same time, Carson got something else he wanted: The show was cut down from ninety minutes to one hour.
By that time, NBC had started to build from the lush vine of the “Tonight” show the most fruitful garden in television. With its base in the unassailable Carson, NBC turned late night into an expanding industry. In 1973 the network added an eccentric interview show at 12:30 A.M. called “Tomorrow.” And in 1976 it created another landmark comedy show, “Saturday Night Live,” spreading NBC’s late-night dominance to the weekend.
With a hit six nights of the week, NBC decided that Johnny’s decision to cut out the last thirty minutes of the “Tonight” show created another opportunity: a new comedy/talk show to follow Carson. Silverman first had the idea to fill the slot with a name from the past: Steve Allen. But Carson was not enthusiastic about that idea. He didn’t see any reason to allow a show likely to be much like his own to come on the air right after he said good night.
But NBC didn’t abandon the idea. Its programmers, led in 1981 by Brandon Tartikoff, saw how effectively “Saturday Night Live” had proved the value of building on strength. Increasingly there was money to be made in the fringe periods of the television day, especially if a show could appeal to young viewers the way “Saturday Night Live” did.
And so it made sound financial sense for NBC to beat the other networks to the punch at 12:30, just as it had at 11:30.
But there was another reason for NBC to push for expansion in late night. This time period had become the clear cultural hallmark of the network. Just as CBS News once stood for tradition and greatness at that network, and ABC made its early name with innovative sports coverage, late night was the signature programming of NBC. From Allen to Paar to Carson and “Saturday Night Live,” late night was cutting-edge television—and only NBC had it.
For thirty years NBC had been unerring in choosing its late-night stars. In 1982 NBC found the next link in the late-night chain. His name was David Letterman.
When David Letterman was a boy growing up in Indianapolis, he grasped an essential truth about himself: He was funny. “I always knew I was a first-class wiseass,” Letterman said.
He later figured out the genealogy: His maternal grandfather, once a miner and later a farmer, always came across slyly funny, pretending to be mean, growling at the kids; only later did Dave grasp that it was “always done with a sense of irony.” There was also Letterman’s father, Joe, an Indianapolis florist. “He was goofy-funny,” as Dave described him. “Told a lot of corny jokes, did a lot of silly things, mostly calculated to keep the house in an uproar. I really only noticed after he died that my mother is the least demonstrative person on the planet.”
The Letterman house could have been captured in any Wonder Bread commercial from the 1950s: mid-American, middle-class, honest, shop-owning, white-bread-eating folks. Dave was born on April 12, 1947, the middle child between two sisters. When he was not yet ten, Letterman got a Tinker Toys set as a gift; the first thing he built was a microphone, just like the ones he saw Arthur Godfrey and Garry Moore use on television. When he watched Johnny Carson on “Who Do You Trust?” and later Steve Allen on his post-“Tonight” syndicated comedy show, the young Dave came to envision himself someday being a similar kind of wise guy on television.
At Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis, in the midst of getting mediocre grad
es and goofing around, Letterman enrolled in speech class. “It was the only thing other than girls that got my attention.” Letterman had found a major for college and a direction to pursue for life: broadcasting. “I knew from the time I was a sophomore in high school what I wanted to do.” He was single-minded and extremely disciplined in his approach toward building a career. That trait would never leave him.
At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Letterman practiced his craft at the campus radio station and landed a real job even before graduating. WLWI-TV, channel 13, the ABC affiliate in Indianapolis, hired him as a booth announcer for the summer. He was twenty years old and he was already a broadcaster. The experience was invaluable. Letterman read some news (“I knew that was all wrong for me”) and hosted a kids’ show and the late-night bad-movie program. He soon became the weekend weather anchor, always taking every opportunity to squeeze in a joke.
Letterman was in his hometown, married at twenty-one to his college sweetheart, Michelle Cook, and he was getting some recognition for working at a big-time television station. He was even making some decent money—about $17,000 a year, enough to buy himself a sweet, red 1972 Olds Cutlass, complete with black vinyl top and sports wheels ($4,300 new), and a 1973 red, half-ton Chevy pickup ($2,700 at a fleet sale). But none of that was satisfying; Letterman wanted more.
At night, at home with Michelle, Dave would sit at a typewriter and pound out scripts for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Bob Newhart Show.” He didn’t have a clue what he was doing; the scripts were long enough for a full-length movie. But he had to do it. What he didn’t tell anyone, not even Michelle, was that in writing sitcoms he was still submerging his real desire: to perform, to stand up in front of an audience and be funny, to be on television. “My family didn’t understand because I never explained it to them. I was too embarrassed to admit to myself that this is what I wanted to do.”