by Carter, Bill
Nobody specifically on the other side had to be mentioned. For years Jay had heard Helen rail about the Carson people and their opposition to Jay. Many times what she said seemed irrational or even hysterical to the mild-mannered Jay, but he never questioned her too strenuously. He was so thoroughly a nonconfrontational personality that he might not have pushed the issue with anybody. And he certainly couldn’t with Helen. She ate confrontation for lunch, and besides, he had little reason to question her. Helen’s choices had worked quite well for him so far.
But Jay surely recognized that the Post story was likely to upset Carson. As usual, he tried to do the right thing, so he called Johnny.
“Listen, Johnny, about that New York Post story,” Leno said. “I’m sorry it came out. I know you think it came from us, but I don’t know where it came from.”
“It came from you,” Johnny said. His voice was controlled, not hostile. He said it as a given fact.
“No, let me guarantee you,” Jay said, earnestly. “I checked with my manager about it and she said under no circumstances did this come from us. I feel terrible about this because I know your people think it came from us.”
Johnny didn’t prolong the conversation. He just told Jay that in show business you sometimes have to be wary of situations where other people speak for you.
Jay knew he hadn’t convinced Johnny that his side wasn’t responsible. But he had done what he could. He had tried to be a good guy about it.
For the executives at NBC, the unexpected headline in the New York Post was just the first sign that events were moving quickly out of their control.
4
STUPID NETWORK TRICKS
One morning in December 1990, the producers of the “Maury Povich Show,” the latest in a seemingly endless line of daytime talk shows devoted to subjects like “Overweight Women As Sex Objects,” took a tour of NBC’s studio 6A. The purpose of the tour: to determine if the Povich show would be interested in subletting the space.
When the news of this impending transaction reached the staff of “Late Night with David Letterman,” the full-time tenant of studio 6A for more than eight years, questions were asked immediately about exactly what NBC had in mind.
If the deal were made between NBC and Maury, it was patiently explained, stage hands would have to strike the Letterman set after its 5:30-to-6:30 taping each evening and put it back together the next day after Maury and his audience cleared out. That was enough information for Robert Morton, the “Late Night” producer. He pointed out that, among other things, “Late Night” really did use its set some mornings when there were complicated rehearsals to run through. And besides, moving an entire audience through the studio each morning was sure to affect the room temperature. Letterman had made it quite explicit that he wanted his studio air-conditioned down to a frigid 58 degrees to keep the audience awake and alert during his tapings.
In other words, if NBC proceeded with this half-assed plan with Maury Povich, “Late Night with David Letterman” was going to raise another stink.
Relations between Letterman and the management of NBC, never exactly sweet, had soured year by year, especially after the General Electric Company took control of the network in 1986. By the end of 1990, they had turned to acid. Letterman had come to view GE as a forbidding corporate monolith out to penny-pinch his little show into an early demise. On their side, some NBC executives viewed Letterman as whining, querulous, impossible to please, and probably not worth the bother.
The notion that his studio might be invaded by a cheesy talk show seemed to Letterman like the most egregious insult of all, a gratuitous slap in his face by the tightwad GE managers. As Letterman put it, “It was almost this: Dave, when you’re done with your ties, would you mind if we take them and rent them out to restaurants where you have to wear a coat and tie? We can make a little money that way.”
Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia said the idea of renting out the studio to Maury Povich was a blunder made by an unnamed “low-level executive in New York,” a mistake that never actually led to a firm rental offer to Povich. Littlefield said, of the incident: “We blew it.”
Still, Agoglia believed the Letterman staff reacted typically, with the “us versus them” peevishness that marked most of the interaction between the show and the network. Once this unnamed NBC executive went through the studio with the Povich people, the situation was instantly out of control, Agoglia said, and for a predictable reason. He believed members of the Letterman staff looked for excuses to “stoke the fire” against NBC. That’s how they kept their jobs, instead of simply by doing good work. They maintained their longevity with Letterman, Agoglia said, by “being friends with the guy they worked for and being enemies with everyone he’s enemies with.” He didn’t mention Robert Morton by name, only by unmistakable implication.
Morton, who enjoyed nothing more than a good fight, especially with the network, harassed NBC continually over such things as the nightly promotions for the show. Morton believed that the promos were essential to keep interest up in the show, and he pushed and pushed to get more. Not just for the sake of pushing, but because everything about the show was produced to very exacting standards—standards set by the star himself. “Everything we did was in keeping with David Letterman’s overall vision for the show and his desire to make the best show possible,” Morton said—a point, he added, that the NBC bosses never grasped. Nothing was too trivial to fight over, because NBC seemed incapable of even minimally stroking its star, the man helping to shove an extra $20 million into their pockets each year. Dave wanted a car phone; Agoglia said no. The bandleader, Paul Shaffer, wanted a new pair of glasses; Agoglia said no.
From the perspective of a network executive, the requests surely seemed preposterously presumptuous. Letterman was making millions and he couldn’t afford his own car phone? Shaffer expected a network to pay for his eyewear? But the reflex answer—“no”—was symptomatic of NBC’s disdain for the concept of talent relations. Partly it was GE’s belt-tightening at work; NBC had once had a full talent relations department charged with remembering birthdays, buying gifts, soothing sensitive egos and anything else that involved the care and feeding of high-priced stars. But that department had been gutted in one of the sweeping workforce reductions undertaken by NBC’s efficient, new GE-installed management team.
John Agoglia was a holdover from the pre-GE days, but he was smart and tough, and his hard-nosed negotiating skills were quickly admired by the new regime. Here was a guy who could stand up to the Hollywood cash-suckers, the stars and managers and agents who spun deals and took percentages and wrung out perks from the network as if it were some kind of freestanding beer tap. Agoglia took pride in shutting all that down. Tall, curly-haired, barrel-chested, and with a pencil mustache, Agoglia looked the part of a stylishly dressed California corporate executive in his perfectly tailored suits and crisp white shirts. But his voice had never lost the intonations of his native Brooklyn. The accent gave his words a bluntness that inflated their impact. Agoglia had a hearty Italian laugh, but the voice, the mustache, and a frequently cold, brusque demeanor left an overall impression that this was not a businessman to cross.
Agoglia had worked closely with Tartikoff in a system one producer described as “the accelerator and the brake.” Tartikoff (the accelerator) would talk up a show with a producer or star, would be expansive about the project’s possibilities, and then turn it over to Agoglia (the brake) to work out a deal. “There might be ten points at issue,” the producer said. “And at some point in the negotiation, John would slip point seven into his desk drawer. So if something happened and Brandon decided he wanted out of the deal, John could pull out point seven and say that’s the deal breaker. Agoglia’s job was to say no.”
Especially when NBC was riding high in the mid-1980s, Agoglia knew how and where he could squeeze the dollars in a deal, and he seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. One drama producer, who had once worked for NBC and then saw Agoglia in ac
tion on the other side of the table, said, “The thing about John is he’s a prick when he doesn’t have to be.” One comedy producer with years of experience negotiating fine points of contracts and star perks with Agoglia called him “the antitalent.”
Agoglia’s power increased after Tartikoff left NBC; he became the head of NBC Productions, NBC’s in-house production company. Within the company, suspicion grew that Agoglia had a bigger ambition: to take over the job of head of the entertainment division, which Warren Littlefield had inherited from Tartikoff. But Littlefield himself had functioned for some time as the guy who did the dirty work for Tartikoff, saying “no,” saying “not interested,” saying “canceled.” “With those two guys there, you had two brakes and no accelerator,” the producer said. “Neither wanted to give up any power.”
But another longtime NBC executive who was regularly involved in the late-night lineup said Agoglia was only part of an overall management style that saw everything as “just business,” never considering the implications of any action they were taking. “I always felt it was never being talked out,” the NBC executive said. “It sounds so fundamental, but I always felt people weren’t getting in a room and saying: ‘Well, what if? What if Dave is unhappy about this deal?’ ”
The Povich question was left hanging because a new issue involving David Letterman came up to occupy the attention of the NBC program department in Burbank. Sunday night had become a sinkhole for NBC programs. The network was pouring out millions in program costs subsidizing chronic failure. So NBC came up with an innovative, and cheap, idea: A show made up of highlights of other NBC shows. They called it “Sunday Best.”
Crucial to the concept was including clips of the best moments of popular NBC shows that were not that widely seen, at least by the standards of prime time: the best sketches from “Saturday Night Live,” Carson’s best monologue jokes, a selection from Letterman’s nightly Top Ten list.
On the afternoon of December 11, 1990, NBC initiated a conference call to the Letterman staff in New York. Garth Ancier, a former network executive at NBC and Fox who had been named executive producer of “Sunday Best,” was on the line along with several NBC executives. The NBC side tried to explain the concept of the show to Letterman’s manager, Jack Rollins, and other members of the Letterman staff in New York. They emphasized how crucial clips from “Late Night” would be, saying the show would ask Carson to participate, but if he did not agree they would still go on with “Sunday Best.” But if Letterman did not share his clips, they said, upping the pressure as much as they could, the new show would probably be dead.
Of course, there was also the little matter of the potential rental of the studio to Maury Povich. Should Dave agree to share his nightly performance with “Sunday Best,” it was suggested, the Povich deal just might go away. “This was the relationship we had with the NBC executives,” Morton said. “They were trying to bribe us that they wouldn’t put Maury Povich in the same studio.”
Later that day, pressure came from another quarter. Johnny Carson’s people called the Letterman show and strongly suggested they not participate in “Sunday Best.” Carson had his own reason for wanting to stick it to NBC at that moment. Just a few weeks earlier, “Saturday Night Live” had done a sketch in which cast member Dana Carvey, known for his devastating impersonations, had starred as “Carsenio,” a stinging takeoff in which an aging Carson, struggling to be one part hip Arsenio Hall, looked almost senile and totally out of it. The sketch enraged members of the Carson staff; Carson himself was furious that NBC had allowed Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” to air the sketch.
Carson’s stand helped steel the resolve of the Letterman show. No clips were given to “Sunday Best” by either late-night show, and it died a quick, totally unlamented death. No deal was made for Maury Povich anyway. But the incident gave David Letterman one more reason to make “pinhead GE executives” a running gag and rallying cry.
As tough as Letterman was on his NBC bosses, he made life much worse for one other victim: himself. The cancellation of his short-lived morning show had made Letterman even more vigilant about ensuring that his show was as good as it could possibly be—and that only guaranteed he would be even more searingly self-critical. He sensed failure every day, always because he believed his own performance was so inadequate. Letterman began rejecting more and more material from his writers. Five bits were tossed out for every one he accepted—then the ratio grew. To Merrill Markoe, the head writer, it felt as if she were submitting fifteen bits for each one Dave liked.
The postmortems for each show could be witheringly negative. Letterman wouldn’t beat up the staff; he would beat up himself. He was a guy who was hypersensitive to embarrassment in a job where potential embarrassment lurked in every line out of his mouth. On nights when he felt he’d totally screwed up the show and humiliated himself, he would sometimes lock the door to his office as he reviewed the show on tape. The staff would then hear crashing noises coming through the door.
On the set one night, during a commercial break in the middle of a show, the band was playing so loudly that it was impossible for Teri Garr, one of the show’s favorite guests, to converse with Dave. When she all but shouted at him: “How are you doing?,” Letterman grabbed a pad on his desk and scribbled a note that he passed back to her. The note read: “I hate myself.” When Garr tried to reassure him that he was, in fact, truly a wonderful guy and talented star, he grabbed the note back, underlined “I hate myself” twice, and shoved it back at her.
The best anyone would hear from Dave was: “Well, I guess it stuck to the videotape” or “Nobody got killed today.” For Merrill the postmortem would extend to their drive home to New Canaan, Connecticut. Every day, Dave would predict cancellation. The gushing reviews, the awards, none of that sank in for Merrill, because all she knew was that Dave thought they were failing every day.
Before every show, she would feel the terror. Dave would have predicted everything was going to fail, and Merrill would stand in the wings, heart pounding, telling herself not to faint before the first comedy piece started to play. Then the laughs would come washing over Dave on stage and she would feel a slow release from the pressure. The color would start to come back into her face.
She knew that terror, for whatever reason, gave Dave something to work with; but for her it was torture. She felt compelled to find new ideas, breakthrough ideas, because maybe that could keep them on the air, maybe that would please him. All she cared about was pleasing Dave, and maybe squeezing a drop of self-satisfaction out for herself and her writing staff. She didn’t want to feel as if their smart, charming star were carrying them along like dead weight.
Eventually the warfare was too intense for Markoe. Every day she went to Letterman with “what about this?,” and it was so often “no, no, no” that she decided for the sake of their personal relationship, she had to pull back, had to let someone else endure some of the rejection. She quit as head writer, staying on as a consultant. She was still feeding Dave ideas, still going a million miles an hour to please him. But it felt wrong. She realized that when you earn a position where you have to grow backward, you’re not in a good position. The situation began to feel ludicrous to her.
As much as she tried to make Dave happy, the work thwarted her. Work was everything in their lives. It wasn’t that Dave wasn’t happy at all, it was just that he had severely narrowed the range of what might make him happy. Most of the staff came to realize: This was a guy happy exactly one hour a day. The hour: from 5:30 to 6:30 on weekday evenings, when he was on stage taping his show.
Dave himself recognized it: “I’m just the happiest, the best I ever feel, from five-thirty to six-thirty.”
By the start of 1991, the relationship between Letterman and NBC was chillier than his own studio; soon it would ice over completely. That spring NBC set up yet another deal in search of additional revenue that Letterman saw as coming at his expense.
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nbsp; NBC initially decided to sell off reruns of “Late Night with David Letterman” to the Arts and Entertainment cable channel. As one senior NBC executive saw it, it was an easy way to impress the GE management. “You could generate up to, say, seven million dollars in quick profits and look like a real hero to GE,” the executive said. The Letterman reruns were an enormous, unrealized asset. NBC had an ownership position in the A&E channel, so the connections were in place already; the channel’s programmers were certainly interested in acquiring such an attractive package. The deal was easy to set up.
It was harder to execute. Letterman had no right of ownership to his old shows, but he was extremely protective of them. He believed overexposure could diminish the value of what he did every night. For that reason he resisted NBC’s requests that he do more prime-time specials. But his contract only gave him the right to consult on any NBC decision to sell the reruns of his old shows.
John Agoglia did consult with Jack Rollins and Letterman’s Indianapolis lawyer, Ron Ellberger. If they ran it by Letterman, he hadn’t grasped the full import of what the deal meant. By the time he did, NBC had an agreement in place with A&E—and David Letterman exploded. “They did it over Dave’s objections,” the senior NBC executive said. “Dave had consulting rights; that isn’t worth anything. Only a right of refusal is worth anything in a deal like that, and Letterman never had it.”
Agoglia said he never had a chance to talk the deal through with Letterman himself. “God forbid we had the opportunity to explain why we wanted to do it to Dave; we would never get that. His people signed off on it; they knew the terms and conditions.” Indeed, Agoglia said he amended the terms drastically from the original proposal to try to appease Letterman. Instead of a firm four-year deal for a lot more guaranteed money, the deal was scaled back to include options for NBC to cancel after only one year. That greatly reduced the money Agoglia could realize from the deal. Then the Letterman side demanded that they be able to select the shows available to A&E and that they have their own unit to edit the shows, at a cost of $250,000—another frivolous expense as far as Agoglia was concerned. The Letterman people took that reaction as more evidence of how Agoglia just didn’t get it. “We saw the show as unique and special, and we devoted our lives to keeping it that way,” Robert Morton said. “NBC never appreciated that.”