by Carter, Bill
The deal was finally announced on April 25, 1991. Letterman still hated it, still squirmed at the thought that three- and six- and eight-year-old versions of a show he was still uncomfortable doing every night would now be out there for people to see—not to mention the sight of the old versions of himself, sometimes much fatter, sometimes with a lot more hair, always imperfect to his unforgiving eye.
It was then that John Agoglia’s picture started turning up on “Late Night” as “GE Employee of the Week.” Later Warren Littlefield was similarly honored—and mocked. Even some of Dave’s defenders inside NBC believed Letterman was pushing the hostility too far. “The guy is so funny and great and always had the rhetoric, but that was really, really mean,” one NBC executive with ties to Letterman said. “That wasn’t funny to me. That was offensive. These are behind-the-scenes people. It was sort of unfair for Dave to trot them out like that.”
Agoglia and Littlefield were undeniably irked by the on-air attention. Agoglia felt like a poor slob in the audience who is getting picked on by the insult comic on stage with the microphone. “You’re helpless,” Agoglia said. “He had this microphone and he felt obligated to take shots at us.” As for Littlefield, “Oh, Warren really, really loved it,” Agoglia said, rolling his eyes.
Letterman’s shots had hit their targets; but the targets also happened to be the men in charge of the decision that would determine the future course of his professional life. And, unlike his competitor on the West Coast, he wasn’t exactly courting their votes.
David Letterman never made it easy to get a relationship going—for anybody. As decent and honorable as he was in all his professional and personal dealings, he was not easily approachable, not usually responsive to contact with new people, and the furthest thing from comfortable in social situations. “Everything starts with the fact that he is painfully shy,” said a longtime entertainment industry associate whose wife also came to know Letterman well. “That leaves so much room for erroneous analysis of what he’s all about, because the first thing, since he’s a talent, that he should be judged on is his talent.” This associate recalled an incident in which his wife wanted to give a dinner party at their home for their friend Marty Klein, who was then also Letterman’s agent. When his wife called and asked, Letterman declined. He said: “You know I never go out. I stay home and I just watch baseball games. I never go out. I never leave my house. I just pick up a pizza. How could you think I would leave my house to go to someone else’s house?” For ten years, Letterman’s extremely confined social life revolved around his relationship with Merrill Markoe. But after several rocky periods, the romance and professional partnership ended for good in 1987. The aftereffects of what Markoe felt was a very bad breakup lasted for years, at least for her. She could no longer even watch Dave on the show she helped create. For Letterman, who never failed to credit Markoe graciously for the show’s crackling originality (“We haven’t had a good idea since she left,” he once said), the process of living and working with Markoe grew too strained to continue. “She’s very disorganized about everything but getting ideas on paper. But the process that leads to that is just like an explosion. In her mind it’s quite clear. And it was the beginning of the end of our relationship because I just felt like I was being poked with a sharp stick every day.”
Letterman eventually began quietly dating a young woman named Regina Lasko, who had a job in the unit manager’s department at NBC. Soon they were living together in Manhattan and Connecticut. After they had been together for several years, he began predicting on numerous occasions that they would soon marry and start a family.
Given his shyness and the limitations of his social skills, it might have been easier for an NBC executive to thread a peacock through the eye of a needle than for anyone to get a relationship going with David Letterman.
“Both parties are to blame,” said Peter Lassally, whose relationship with Letterman went much deeper than producer and star. NBC executives would sometimes call to try to stroke Letterman in their clumsy way, but he usually found that intrusive. He resisted compliments from NBC because he believed they were probably insincere. If NBC sent a birthday gift and it was cheap and crummy, he would go on the air and make fun of it, describing how cheap the network was. The next year, if they sent him nothing at all because they wanted to avoid that kind of treatment, Letterman would tell his staff he couldn’t believe NBC was snubbing him that way.
Bob Wright, the NBC president, tried several approaches to find the right tone with Letterman. At first he steered clear, thinking that Tartikoff had a special relationship with Dave and that was enough. Once, for Letterman’s anniversary, Wright had a cute, playful idea. He got a GE toaster, filled it with flowers, covered the whole thing up, and rolled it in to Letterman’s anniversary party. Letterman did get a laugh out of the gift, and as a gag made toast with it on the air for guests for a couple of nights.
But nothing developed from that approach. “I tried, but Dave made it difficult,” Wright said. He did not encourage anyone to just drop in and see him. Even Wright had to make an appointment, and frequently when the day came, Letterman would cancel the appointment.
“When you tried with Dave, he made you feel stupid,” said one NBC executive. “It was: Leave me alone but love me. You got to the point where you would think: If I go in there to see him, it’s going to be so awkward. And so then you don’t do it, and you hear Dave wondered where you were.”
Some encounters were excruciating or embarrassing. Sissy Biggers, the NBC entertainment executive assigned to the show, would sometimes have an exchange with Letterman outside his office, and he would cut her off with a remark so sarcastic and rude that it shocked her into total silence. She might try to muster up her best sarcastic bravado to respond in kind, but the remark would be too hurtful to her and she simply walked away. She always quickly forgot what the incident was about and even the remarks Dave made, but she didn’t forget that he had made fun of her that way. He once gave Biggers an on-air slam as well, dismissing her as the show’s program executive, “if you can call that a program executive.”
It did not occur to Letterman that this testy estrangement from his NBC keepers might be sabotaging his own dream of winning the “Tonight” show. His was a different sort of naïveté from Leno’s; but it left him no less vulnerable. Letterman still believed that he would earn the job or lose it based totally on how good he was on the air every night.
For many reasons, which boiled down mostly to respect and caution, Letterman always strenuously resisted the heir-to-Johnny talk that started almost as soon as “Late Night” became a hit. In one early magazine interview, he protested way too much: “Hosting the Tonight’ show was never my desire, dream, or purpose.” As late as 1986, Letterman was still dismissing the possibility: “There is no way I’d want to compete with his record.”
But by then Letterman was aware of some rumbling behind the scenes: In mid-1986, he got an unexpected call from Dave Tebet, the Carson Productions executive who worked with “Late Night.” Tebet said that he and Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson’s extremely powerful attorney, friend, and business partner, wanted to meet with Letterman—by himself, totally confidentially. Letterman had no idea what the meeting could be about, but agreed to show up.
The three men had breakfast at the Dorset Hotel in Manhattan. Letterman was stunned when he heard what they had come to propose: They were offering him the “Tonight” show; they wanted him to take Johnny Carson’s job. Bushkin, in his role as head of Carson Productions, said that the company intended to maintain ownership of the “Tonight” show after Johnny stepped down, and now was the time to line up Letterman to slip into Johnny’s chair. The details were vague, and to Letterman they sounded deliberately so. He said he was flattered, he listened politely, but his radar was signaling a warning. Neither man told Letterman how or when this ascension would be accomplished, a problem that started sounding even worse when Bushkin advised Letterman that no one at NB
C or anywhere else knew of the plan yet—not even Carson.
Letterman, already nervous, now started to feel as if he were getting close to a fire he didn’t want to be in the same campground with. Bushkin and Tebet told him that once the plan took effect, Carson might work some vacation weeks or special occasions, but the show would be Letterman’s. They asked Letterman not to tell anyone, not even his management. They would get back to him.
The more Letterman thought about it, the more it sounded like a palace coup. His immediate instinct was to stay out of this, because there was going to be warfare of some sort. He feared Carson would interpret this maneuver as plotting, and he guessed what might happen next: Johnny’s best friend Bushkin wouldn’t take the fall. Nor would his old crony, Tebet. It would be the punk who got blamed for engineering this.
Letterman broke his promise and called Peter Lassally, Carson’s producer, who had booked Letterman on his first “Tonight” show and who had become a close, fatherly friend in the years since. Lassally was shocked by what he heard. He suspected that Bushkin was involved in all sorts of machinations that might or might not have benefited Carson. He thought about telling Johnny, but other attempts to alert the star to questionable activities by Bushkin had been harshly rebuffed. Lassally decided to see what developed and advised Dave to keep Bushkin and Tebet at a distance.
Letterman had a couple of more phone calls from Bushkin and Tebet about the deal; they discussed it with Ron Ellberger, the Indianapolis attorney that Letterman still employed. Tebet blamed the lawyer for muddying up the deal, and eventually said that Carson knew of the plan and had approved of the idea of lining up Letterman for the future.
But Carson had never heard a word about it, and when he did—long after the approach had taken place and Bushkin and Tebet were both long gone—Carson exploded with rage at the thought that this plotting had gone on behind his back. He knew exactly what he would have done if he had learned of it at the time: He would have fired Bushkin and Tebet before another day elapsed. Letterman had guessed right in steering clear of the coup. When he learned that Carson hadn’t known what was going on, Letterman was deeply thankful for his cautious instincts.
When the offer from Bushkin melted away, Letterman tried not to give it any second thoughts. Only for the briefest time did he think that he might have walked away from an offer to host the “Tonight” show. The next time, it would not be nearly so easy to take.
Helen Kushnick had no concern about how an offer for the “Tonight” show might arrive. By early 1991, all she cared about was when.
As John Agoglia was battling with Letterman and his representatives over the A&E deal, Helen was pressing for an answer. Kushnick wanted Jay Leno signed once and for all to a contract that guaranteed him the “Tonight” show.
Helen was simply tired of waiting for NBC to put their signatures where their promises were. Agoglia and the others seemed to be stalling. They had countered the CBS offer with real assurances that the show would be theirs, but nothing was on paper yet. Beyond that, Helen wanted some assurances purely of her own. She intended to take over as executive producer of the show, and she wanted to see that on a piece of paper, too.
The same explanation kept coming back from NBC: These things take time; this is simply how long it takes. Meanwhile no one knew, or at least no one was saying, when Johnny Carson was going to quit. But Helen thought that if Johnny were to announce his exit before she got Jay officially signed, NBC could still have found a way to fool around with the deal. In mid-April, she had had enough. She called Agoglia with a simple message: “I want Jay signed.”
NBC knew the CBS offer was still viable if Helen wanted to take it. As the months had gone by, the NBC executives had become even more convinced that Jay was now a superstar in late night. Having built him into that, they couldn’t let him go across the street to CBS, bringing all those younger viewers with him and leaving them with Johnny’s aging audience. The moment for action had arrived.
The lawyers went to work. On May 16, Helen, Jay and their lawyer, Ron Berg, drove to NBC’s West Coast headquarters in Burbank. They spent much of the day going in and out of various offices in the legal department of NBC Productions, conferring with lawyers and executives, hammering out the details. In one of her trips to one of the offices, Helen ran into Bob Wright, who said hello in the hall. The process seemed exhaustingly long to those on Helen’s side. But finally the papers were in order. Jay Leno signed the deal that formally set up the mechanism to hand him the “Tonight” show upon the departure of Johnny Carson. It was a done deal: Jay Leno would be the successor to Johnny Carson, and Helen Kushnick would be Jay’s executive producer. John Agoglia noticed that the mercurial Kushnick was completely focused and composed as she sat there signing the documents. “It was the impossible dream coming true for two people,” Agoglia said.
After a brief round of congratulations, Helen said her good-byes and went outside to the parking lot. She had left her gold Mercedes in a “Tonight” show space, and as she walked to it she noticed a piece of paper stuck under the wiper. She opened the note and saw it was from Bob Wright’s notepad. “This is a very expensive car,” the note read. “Call me. Bob.”
Exactly one week later the terms of the contract would be in effect.
Before the deal with Jay Leno was closed, NBC’s executives held no discussions about whether David Letterman should still be considered for the “Tonight” show. They all knew that he had a clause in his contract that required NBC to pay a penalty of $1 million if he did not get the job. But like the others, Wright had the impression that “this was more of a negotiating comment offered during times of negotiation, and it wasn’t a demand or something he personally aspired to.”
For Wright, this seemed to be a wonderful situation for the network: Letterman would stay at 12:30 and NBC would get a new person in the “Tonight” show—the best person to come along, a person with a different sensibility, who would also hold on to the Carson audience. They didn’t want to start some approximation of “The Arsenio Hall Show.” They weren’t looking for some totally hip turnaround from what Johnny had been doing. NBC felt it had established over thirty years an audience that expected certain things, and Jay Leno looked like the perfect successor to that, while David Letterman remained the ideal performer for the 12:30 show. “David was so good convincing us that he was good at twelve-thirty that I don’t think a lot of time was spent figuring out how good he would be at eleven-thirty,” Wright said.
Warren Littlefield, however, had given the choice of Leno versus Letterman at 11:30 a bit of time and thought. Littlefield believed that Leno had an accessibility that the audience embraced, and that even though the 11:30 show was considered a late-night franchise, this audience really was broad-based. When push came to shove for Warren Littlefield, Jay Leno was just more broad-based than David Letterman. Littlefield approved of Leno’s work habits, the fact that he was a team player, and what he called his “attitude about what he’s willing to do to succeed.”
Attitude had come to be a crucial factor in NBC’s evaluation of the two stars. For Littlefield, Leno had a club in his bag that Letterman lacked. He defined it as “I’ll work all day and night. I’ll work around the clock. I’ll go to every affiliate that you want me to go to. I’ll do anything it takes. I’ll work with advertisers. I’ll work with our affiliates. I’ll work with you guys in the network. I’m not afraid to hear any research data. I’m not afraid to do what it takes.”
Jay had done his groundwork exceptionally well. All that campaigning through affiliates and advertisers, every appearance at an NBC event, and everything that Helen had recommended had made an impression. Jay was the go-to guy for NBC.
And then there was Dave—recalcitrant, irritable, uncooperative Dave. That is unquestionably how some executives inside NBC viewed him after his years of “us versus them” comedy. Littlefield was perfectly willing to concede Letterman’s brilliance as a comedian, but he was looking for that full
bag of clubs. And one club Littlefield thought Letterman did have was hardly a recommendation: the club Dave had used to beat him over the head with on the air, the “nasty Dave” club.
Littlefield thought that Letterman’s penchant for what he called “ambushing the guest” would never play with the broad-based audience that came to the set at 11:30. “That sense of nastiness,” as Littlefield called it, was only for the college boys who stayed up late and waited for Dave to nail some fool actress, or zing some pinhead from GE, or mock some poor NBC executive as “Employee of the Week.” Whether Dave was really nasty to his guests or just funny with them wasn’t an issue that Warren Littlefield or John Agoglia had to. commission special research to determine; they didn’t even have to watch the show to see if it was true. They already knew Dave was nasty, because he’d been plenty nasty to them.
David Letterman always spent the Memorial Day weekend back home in Indianapolis; he had choice seats every year for the 500. But in 1991 he was far from up for the race. A flimsily sourced New York Post story had inflicted itself on his life this time. By the time Letterman got to Indianapolis that Saturday, May 25, only two days after Carson’s retirement announcement at Carnegie Hall, he had read a Post story that declared that Jay Leno already had the “Tonight” show, that it was a done deal, that David Letterman didn’t have a chance to get the job. The Post didn’t even have Helen Kushnick feeding it the news this time. But even if it was nothing but a shot-in-the-dark story, it troubled Letterman. He thought: “Really? Did it happen this quickly?”