by Carter, Bill
The rest would be a show grounded in the same comic sensibility that Dave and Merrill brought to the daytime show, only with a bit more organization to it. Much of the staff carried over from the morning show. It was as though they’d had a nineteen-week out-of-town tryout for the real run in New York. And now they were ready.
No one would have confused the show that went on the air at 12:30 A.M. on February 1, 1982, with the “Tonight” show. It was fresher, livelier, more inventive—younger. It was also ragged and a bit unkempt. Letterman didn’t step into late-night stardom whole. Even with the morning show and all his “Tonight” experience—by then he had guest hosted twenty-nine times—hosting the new show generated much more anxiety. Letterman looked a bit spooked as he walked onto the stage at NBC’s studio 6A for the first time. Bill Murray filled most of the hour ranting around the stage doing calisthenics while singing “Physical” in his bad lounge-singer voice.
But “Late Night” had time, plenty of time, to find its own voice. At that hour there was no serious competition, other than a good night’s sleep. The network’s ratings expectations were extremely modest. And Letterman’s act, with its post-sixties ironic sensibility, was pitched to the right audience: the college crowd. As Dave put it: “Our audience doesn’t have to get up at eight in the morning.”
Murray, who had made his name on “Saturday Night Live,” fit into a category of young comics that “Tonight” simply didn’t book. Letterman would become the place to see such talent: Richard Lewis, Michael Keaton, Sandra Bernhard, Jeff Altman.
And the whole show was infused with attitude, Dave’s attitude; wry, cynical, goofy, smart-ass Dave. “Dave was saying, ‘We’re not part of the entertainment world,’ ” said one of his managers, Stu Smiley. “ ‘We’re part of you. We’re part of the viewer.’”
Dave, thinking like a broadcaster first and a comic second, found ways to use the fact that they were on television to invent comedy: He took the camera on a behind-the-scenes tour of the studio on the very first night. Two months later he introduced elevator races in the RCA Building. Later that year they held a real bar mitzvah on the show.
One night they did a show in which Dave and his guests had their voices overdubbed by British actors. Another night they decided to strap a camera to a monkey’s back and have him roller-skate throughout the studio (the monkey also bit Sandra Bernhard). On the 360-degree-rotation show, the picture of Dave on the screen rotated 90 degrees during each segment—halfway through, Dave and guest Peter Ustinov were exactly upside-down.
They never set out deliberately to parody the conventional talk show; they only tried to be different. But the result was something like the reverse image of a talk show (and yes, they did a reverse-image show, too).
Dave paid homage to Steve Allen in a series of stunts modeled after Allen’s jumps into tubs of Jell-O. In the most memorable one, Letterman wore a Velcro suit and stuck himself to a wall. In another he wore a suit covered in Alka-Seltzer tablets and jumped into a 1,000-gallon tank of water. In a suit of tortilla chips, he jumped in a tank of yogurt dip. He even tried a suit of Rice Krispies in a tub of milk so he could snap, crackle, and pop.
Each stunt was followed by a slow-motion replay. Letterman was playing the medium like a newly discovered instrument. Other stunts were just goofy, juvenile ideas made hilarious by Letterman’s pervasive anarchic attitude. He dropped watermelons off the roof; he squashed gooey things in a hydraulic press; he crunched a Smurf doll under a steamroller; he smashed the Energizer bunny to smithereens with a baseball bat. The show held dog races in the sixth-floor halls.
Letterman also displayed his growing verbal virtuosity by calling people on the phone and wringing comedy out of them, or sending remote cameras to places like photo stores and restaurants and starting conversations that somehow presented the mundane as hilarious. Letterman’s writers soon discovered that they didn’t always have to write material; they could just come up with a goofy premise, drop Letterman in the middle of it, watch him fix his brain on it, and turn it into laughs.
They started calling what they were doing “found humor”; it wasn’t scripted, it was just Dave finding something funny in whatever situation they placed him in.
Merrill also found strange places for Dave to go for pretaped pieces; stores that only sold lampshades, or only sold lightbulbs. He went to a store that called itself the Mattress King and asked if there was a mattress queen. (“Yes, and several mattress princes.”) He visited a dry cleaner with a fashionable address and asked how certain celebrities liked their dry cleaning.
In one memorable remote piece, Dave got a letter from a young female viewer who criticized his running shoes. He and a crew went to her house on Long Island. When he didn’t find her at home, he got out the lawn mower and cut her lawn. When her brother showed up, they all visited the sister’s room and Dave went through her closet. A burly, slovenly crew member sat on her frilly bed. Then Letterman went to Sears, where the woman worked. He talked a customer into taking over the young woman’s spot at the jewelry counter while he took her to the shoe department so she could pick out new running shoes for him.
Perhaps the most famous remote piece took place just after the General Electric Company bought NBC in 1986. Letterman and crew went to GE’s headquarters looking to drop off a welcoming basket of fruit. Rebuffed by guards outside, Letterman took advantage of a moment of confusion to get himself in the building, went up to the board of director’s floor, and then encountered a truly nasty security chief, who refused the basket and snatched his hand away when Letterman offered to shake hands—a moment that forever became known as the “GE handshake.”
These pieces created a new late-night form: journalistic humor. They were helped enormously by Letterman’s skill as an editor; he found just the right cuts in the pieces to give each one pace and punch. As Letterman described it, “We want viewers at home to look at each other and say: ‘What the hell was that?’ We want to pierce that flat TV screen.”
The program’s initial weakness was its last remaining link to the talk-show convention: interviews. Letterman struggled with them early on; with some guests he seemed not to care, and with others he seemed to try much too hard. The interviews improved when the show’s comedy vision carried over. Guests were preinterviewed and told that all that was expected of them was to have a funny story or two to tell.
In the search for laughs, Letterman often struck some viewers—and interview subjects—as mean-spirited. Cher called him an asshole on the air. He sent Jane Seymour packing, in tears. He went into full interview meltdown with Shirley MacLaine, who refused to do a preinterview, came spoiling for a fight, and got one. She said Cher had been right; he said sayonara forever.
“Late Night” started building its own repertory company of guests; they weren’t the traditional Hollywood stars, but sports figures and news anchors, offbeat comics and sometimes, obscure actors. Television names were much more likely to appear than movie names. “Late Night” wasn’t about plugging the latest movie; it was about comedy and, mostly, it was about David Letterman.
Thanks to the reliable laughs he generated, as well as the spontaneity of his interaction with Dave, one comic became the signature “Late Night” guest: Jay Leno. They had been linked from their earliest days together in the comedy clubs. Now they helped each other establish reputations as the two funniest guys with attitudes on television. Jay appeared almost forty times on “Late Night,” and the staff almost always felt these shows were the funniest of the season.
Praise arrived before ratings. Letterman was first called refreshing, and later brilliant. “Late Night” was labeled the show of the eighties. Emmy Awards rolled in. Dollars followed. Letterman’s audience grew modestly, but steadily, up toward 4 million viewers a night. And these were highly prized viewers: mostly young, mostly male, mostly people who were not being reached by many other television shows and certainly not in so dense a concentration.
NBC had built the idea
l franchise: two hit shows back to back, while no one else in television had even one entertainment show working in late night.
When Letterman first came to late night, NBC gave advertisers a deal that made them buy some commercials for his show if they wanted to buy into the “Tonight” show. That’s how they protected the new entry.
By the mid-1980s the positions had reversed. Many advertisers, especially for products like beer and running shoes, now wanted to buy into Letterman first. NBC began packaging the two shows to help “Tonight.” Advertisers could get a better deal if they bought some “Tonight” commercials in addition to the ones they wanted to buy in “Late Night.” By 1985, Letterman, starting at an hour formerly occupied by test patterns, had accomplished something truly remarkable: He was selling out every commercial in the program. Suddenly NBC’s $50 million-plus take in late night had become about a $70 million take.
The timing of the show’s growth coincided with an explosion in sales for videocassette recorders. The A. C. Nielsen Company always reported that “Late Night with David Letterman” was among the most taped programs on television.
Jack Rollins, Letterman’s manager, noticed all the stories. He went to Letterman and asked if the star wanted to renegotiate his contract, which was then paying him about $1 million a year. But Letterman, who still despised anything that smacked of show business sleaze or double-dealing, declined, saying: “I signed the contract. I’ll live up to it.”
The heat generated by the show only intensified the presumption that Letterman was at most one more contract away from the big chair in late night. On “Late Night” it was taken for granted. “We were the farm team, ready to be called up,” one staff member said.
By 1986 Johnny was undergoing one of his periodic reinvigorations. The inspiration: Joan Rivers. Rivers had negotiated a deal with the new Fox network for her own late-night show. In so doing she had committed the ultimate affront to the man who had given her the opportunity to shine on television: She didn’t tell Johnny beforehand. She simply made the three-year deal, which she said was worth $15 million.
Carson cut her off like a traitorous child. In a demonstration of just how powerful Carson still was, Rivers found herself one step removed from leper status in Hollywood. Guests had to risk the wrath of the “Tonight” show to go on with Joan. She did herself no favors by trying to turn into a hipster, booking rock-and-roll acts half her age and singing “The Bitch Is Back” with Elton John. The show was doomed and disappeared in six months.
Johnny Carson had prevailed again. The competition was humbled again. But the rationale for Fox’s assault remained. Carson’s show, to many observers both outside and inside NBC, was getting stodgy and out-of-date. Johnny himself still seemed strong, especially in his monologues, which were as sharp and contemporary as anything on television. But the guest list took on a rigid, old show-business cast. Some of Johnny’s own staff members wondered why he didn’t book new young actors like Kevin Costner.
One headliner comic told his friends: “When you go on that show, you can smell the polyester.”
“I blame Brandon a little bit,” one longtime producer of television comedy shows said of the NBC entertainment boss, Brandon Tartikoff. “He could have provoked Johnny, ’cause I think Carson is a real competitor. Brandon could have said, ‘I need you and you’re not going anywhere, and spruce up that fucking show. Get back into it.’ Instead it was always, ‘Whatever you want, whenever you want to leave, let us know.’”
The quick demise of Joan Rivers may have renewed the network’s confidence that Carson was impregnable. But with the show’s drift toward older audiences apparent to everyone in the business, it only encouraged the plotting of new challenges to NBC’s late-night fortress.
In 1988 a CBS late-night executive named Michael Brockman believed he’d hit on the most promising Carson challenger in years. With a smash hit in syndication, “Wheel of Fortune,” and lots of experience as a funny weather guy in Los Angeles, Pat Sajak struck Brockman as CBS’s first hope in a generation to get something started in late night.
The CBS strategy was simple and straightforward: Get Sajak on the air, let him settle in comfortably somewhere just behind Carson in the ratings, and then let him grow until the moment Carson finally retired. Then CBS would have the incumbent show in place, ready to take command of late night.
Some doubters inside CBS questioned the choice. Rod Perth, who was the manager of the CBS-owned station in Chicago, stood up at a closed-door session during a CBS affiliates meeting and asked, in a loud voice: “Why Pat Sajak?”
To Perth, Sajak was the host of a syndicated show watched primarily by ladies with blue hair who lived in trailer parks and went to bed early. Brockman suggested Perth check the ratings for “Wheel of Fortune.” Perth’s protests didn’t sway anybody. Pat Sajak had a late-night show on CBS, beginning in January 1989.
Sajak would present no threat at all to Johnny Carson, especially with those younger viewers that Carson apparently was losing. But Sajak didn’t jump into Carson’s talk-show ring by himself. At the same time, a syndicated group of stations agreed to begin running another entry, a Paramount Television production hosted by a young black comic from Cleveland named Arsenio Hall.
The changes in late-night television were only beginning.
3
THE CAMPAIGN
Rod Perth felt slightly ridiculous riding the Triumph Bonneville motorcycle across Sunset Boulevard in a suit and tie—and no helmet. But CBS’s late-night situation had gotten desperate—and it called for desperate measures.
Perth had sounded like the smart guy at the CBS affiliate meeting the year before, predicting how bad Pat Sajak would be as a late-night talk show host. Now, as the new head of CBS’s late-night programming, he was fighting a losing battle to keep “The Pat Sajak Show” show breathing. He was trying to stem a tidal wave of station defections away from Sajak to Paramount’s new talk show, starring Arsenio Hall. Having helped stir up that wave, Perth felt a special twinge of irony.
When he first complained about Sajak, Perth had been the general manager of WBBM, the station CBS owned in Chicago. As soon as Sajak’s ratings started their inexorable nosedive, Lucie Salhany, the head of Paramount Television, had called Perth in Chicago, telling him he had twenty-four hours to buy into the suddenly scalding-hot “Arsenio Hall Show.” WBBM had strong ties to Paramount, and Salhany was respecting those ties by giving Perth first crack at Arsenio Hall in the Chicago market. Perth had jumped at the chance, putting Arsenio on the air immediately after Sajak.
Having a station that CBS owned snap up Hall only gave the restless CBS affiliates more reason to sign on for Arsenio themselves. But most of them used Hall to replace Sajak. By December 1989, more than fifty CBS stations had made the switch, dooming Sajak even as they coronated Arsenio as the first truly viable challenger to Carson and the “Tonight” show.
Several months later, the top CBS management had complicated Perth’s life by promoting him to an executive job at the network. CBS wanted Perth to ride to the rescue and assume responsibility for the fiasco that the network’s late-night schedule had become.
When he arrived in LA that August, Perth’s first mission, whether he chose to accept it or not, was to try to fix and save Sajak. Perth quickly discovered he was not going to get much help from the star. Sajak seemed unaccountably laid-back to Perth. Before he’d agreed to take the job, Sajak had made just one, very L.A. demand: He had to have a billboard of his face on Sunset Boulevard.
CBS got most of its stations to agree to carry Sajak, promoted the show brilliantly, and sent the host off to a roaring start with a 6.2 rating, a full point higher than Carson’s. That didn’t even hold up for a week. Sajak was soon sinking through the 3 rating level. It got so bad that the show was having trouble getting audiences to come to the studio for the tapings. Yet Sajak didn’t change his demeanor—or his show—at all. Perth came to regard him as one of the least ambitious people in show business,
observing that Sajak would come in at noon, tape his show from 5:30 to 6:30 and be out the door by 6:45. The show was collapsing around him. With stations leaving every week, the distribution system was canceling him even before the network did. And yet Sajak remained unruffled.
Perth, on the other hand, faced an abyss: the end to any prospect of CBS ever launching a successful late-night show again. If “Arsenio” ate up all the CBS stations, Paramount would have a network show in late night and CBS wouldn’t.
What Perth desperately needed was a name, a talk-show name that would keep the rest of the CBS stations from joining the growing “Arsenio” juggernaut. Working with the kind of financial carte blanche that comes only with true desperation, Perth began drawing up a list of possible hosts, stars who could compete against Johnny Carson and Arsenio Hall in a talk format. But he quickly realized this was the shortest list in Hollywood. There was only one name on it: Jay Leno.
Perth had heard that Leno, then finishing up his fourth year as the permanent guest host of the “Tonight” show, was still working on year-to-year deals with NBC, which paid him only about $1 million a year. He believed NBC was taking advantage of Leno’s loyalty, or at least he thought he might be able to sell it that way.
So he called Leno’s manager, Helen Kushnick. They had dinner, a sort of feeling-out meeting, where Perth began to broach the idea of Jay jumping to CBS. He didn’t let it rest there, however. Perth knew of Jay’s passion for restoring and riding antique motorcycles, and in a sweet coincidence, that happened to be Perth’s hobby as well. He got to know Jay a little from meeting him on Sunday afternoon rides to the Rock Store, an old gas station turned diner that had become the L.A. gathering place for motorcycle enthusiasts. Perth began to tell Jay about his restored Triumph Bonneville, a bike he knew Jay didn’t yet own in his thirty-plus collection. Leno was impressed—and eager to get a look at this treasure. “You gotta bring it over to my house someday,” he told Perth.