The Late Shift

by Carter, Bill

  He had grudgingly admitted to himself that it was probably going to happen: Jay was likely to be handed the job without his even getting a chance to speak for it. But Dave didn’t believe it was foreordained; he couldn’t believe NBC would really have put it in a previously signed contract, which is what it would have taken, he thought, for the deal to be done this quickly.

  That Saturday was Warren Littlefield’s first day at home with his family in Los Angeles after the long siege of putting the new prime-time schedule together, topped off by advertisers’ presentations in New York and Chicago. He had decided to make the announcement about Jay Leno as new host of the “Tonight” show early the following week. Whether from fatigue or just a consistent case of shortsightedness, the idea that he should first break the news to David Letterman simply did not occur to him. The Carson-to-Leno transfer of late-night power seemed like a fait accompli. Littlefield, like so many of the other NBC executives, viewed this as a transition that had already begun months or even years earlier, when Leno started scoring big in his guest-hosting spots.

  But a colleague’s call that weekend gave Littlefield some pause. The colleague asked point-blank when the announcement of Leno would be made. Littlefield said early in the week. “Have you talked to David Letterman?” the colleague asked. The weary Littlefield said he simply hadn’t had time between all the fall season preparations, the travel, then the unexpected announcement by Carson. He said he would call Dave that afternoon.

  “This guy has auditioned for this job the past ten years,” the colleague said. “He’s made like hundreds of millions in profits for the company. Don’t you think you should tell him face-to-face?” Littlefield said he’d just got home from the presentations; this was his first chance to be with his family and relax in weeks. It just didn’t make sense to fly all the way to New York again to break the news to David Letterman, news Letterman surely expected to hear anyway.

  Still, the call got under Littlefield’s skin. He was too decent a guy to be able to shrug off concern about Letterman’s feelings. But besides his empathy for someone about to be hit with a powerful professional disappointment, Warren had to consider the prospect of Letterman’s escalating this event into full-scale, on-air warfare with the company. That loomed as an unpleasant probability. Littlefield made a call to Jack Rollins.

  When Rollins reached Letterman in Indianapolis later, he couldn’t conceal his glumness. “David, Warren Littlefield wants to see you,” Rollins told him. “Are you going to be in California during your vacation?”

  “No,” Letterman said. “I’m here for the race and then I’m going to the Hamptons for the rest of the week.”

  “Well, could you go to California?” Rollins asked him.

  “I’d really rather not,” Letterman said. “What does he want to talk to me about?”

  “I think it’s about the ‘Tonight’ show,” Rollins said.

  “Yeah, what about it?” Letterman said. He knew from the tone of the conversation that Rollins wasn’t likely to tell him Warren was about to offer him the job.

  “They’re going to give it to Jay,” Rollins said.

  “Are you sure?” Letterman said.

  “Well, they didn’t say so, but it was made pretty clear to me that that’s what this is all about.”

  The deflated Letterman talked over with Rollins whether he should call Littlefield back. And then the meaning of what was going on swept over him. Here he was on vacation, getting a call and hearing the news he had been dreading for months—the worst possible professional news short of “You’re fired.” Now they wanted him to interrupt his vacation and fly off to California just so they could dump this on him in person. And Letterman instantly decided: No way am I going to California. If they want to do this to me, they can fly themselves to wherever I am and tell me.

  That was the message he gave Rollins to deliver to Warren Littlefield. But it didn’t make Letterman feel any better. Because the full realization of what had happened was just starting to sink in. He was not going to get the “Tonight” show. Jay Leno, his contemporary, a comic who had honed his style on Letterman’s own show, was going to be the heir to Johnny Carson. David Letterman, forty-four years old, going on ten years on the same show, was going to be … what? More of the same? The cult hero to the college crowd? The followup act to Jay Leno? It was one thing to be the guy who came on after Johnny Carson, the master, the king; but to follow Jay, whose show was not a generationally different one, that seemed like a prospect with no future at all.

  David Letterman started to believe that his time in television was drawing to a close.

  Peter Lassally had been Letterman’s closest professional mentor since the day he booked Dave as a guest host on the “Tonight” show in 1979. A producer with deep television roots going all the way back to “The Arthur Godfrey Show,” which he worked on in the 1950s, Lassally was a man of unusual grace and sensitivity—unusual certainly for the world of show business where those virtues existed almost exclusively in fictional characters. A trim, compact man approaching sixty, with a shock of sandy brown hair that was just beginning to gray, Lassally spoke in sonorous, cultured tones, his words almost always delivered slowly and thoughtfully. Lassally’s bearing was so dignified, it didn’t seem to fit the world of television comedy; that incongruity was only intensified for most people when they learned that Lassally, born in Hamburg and raised in Holland, had survived a concentration camp as a teenager in World War II. Characteristically, Lassally didn’t trade on that personal history in any way. But it certainly helped shape his serene perspective on the foolishness of show business.

  Lassally had worked for Johnny Carson for more than twenty years, gaining a reputation as the steadiest hand in the operation. Letterman, who shrank from the fraudulent emotions that saturated most show business relationships and strove to build his career on principles like honesty and integrity, was understandably drawn to a figure of real substance like Lassally. And Lassally saw a performer of real substance in Letterman. He grew fond of sitting back and watching Letterman display the full range of his verbal and comedic gifts. Lassally would beam and unashamedly say, “I’m like a proud father with him.”

  Lassally’s greatest hope was to finish out his own professional career as the executive producer of a “Tonight Show Starring David Letterman.” And as much as he understood Letterman’s respect for Carson and the circumspect way Dave approached lining himself up as Johnny’s successor, Lassally felt that Letterman waited for too long to drop the necessary hints of how badly he wanted to inherit Carson’s chair. Lassally accepted Dave’s resistance to having managers and agents surrounding him, chipping off little pieces of his self-respect. But Lassally also knew the show business world well enough to recognize that Dave was leaving himself open to being undone by the very types of people he so disdained: the poseurs and schemers who saw a prize and would do whatever it took to grab it. People, Peter Lassally thought, like Helen Kushnick.

  Lassally wanted Letterman to come right out and say he wanted NBC to recognize the great job he had done by giving him Johnny’s job when Johnny retired. He wanted Dave to demand it as his right. At first Lassally despaired when Letterman dodged the question in every interview with a remark like “I don’t know how anyone could follow Carson.” But as the eighties ended he began to see more pieces in the press where Dave would step up to the question and declare that it would mean a lot to him to have a shot at the job. That encouraged Lassally, and he would call Dave and tell him to keep it up. But then Dave and NBC started feuding; he didn’t seem quite as hot in the press, and there seemed like a long silence when David Letterman had nothing to say about wanting the “Tonight” show.

  Like everyone else, Lassally saw how NBC responded to Jay Leno’s performance as guest host for Johnny. Since Lassally himself produced those shows with Jay, he had his own take on Jay’s abilities, and he wasn’t overly impressed. Jay seemed too much the joke machine and less the completely rounded
talent that Carson was, that Letterman was.

  At the moment of Dave’s deepest despair in Indianapolis, Peter Lassally called. He had seen all the press about the likelihood that Leno would get the “Tonight” show. They talked about the way it seemed to be going. Dave was responding laconically as usual. Finally, Lassally couldn’t take it anymore. He blurted out: “Dave, don’t you want the Tonight’ show?”

  Letterman seemed a bit stunned by Lassally’s emotion. But he had the answer Lassally wanted. “Yes, of course I want it,” he said.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Lassally asked. “You can’t just want it; you have to do something about it.”

  Letterman seemed at a loss. All he said was that Jack Rollins had mentioned that maybe he should have a dinner with Bob Wright and start a relationship.

  The line shocked Lassally. He realized the full consequences of Dave’s effort to distance himself from the NBC suits. The “Tonight” show was about to fall into Jay Leno’s arms, and David Letterman’s side didn’t even have a relationship going with the NBC bosses. Lassally knew that Dave had always believed he would get the “Tonight” show for the righteous reason: because he deserved it. But now he had to clue Dave in: It doesn’t work that way in show business.

  Lassally asked Letterman if he had anything in his contract that guaranteed him a shot at Carson’s job. Letterman said no, he only had the $1 million penalty payment.

  Lassally knew right away that a million-dollar penalty was meaningless in a deal like this and that Letterman, for all his efforts to keep high-powered show business lawyers away from him, needed one now in the worst way. But at least he had taken the most important step. He had said the words out loud: “I want the ‘Tonight’ show.”

  Now it was up to him and Dave to figure out a way, at the twenty-third hour, that they could go out and get it back from Jay Leno.

  5

  BRIDGES BURNED

  As he talked to Peter Lassally on the phone on the night of June 3, 1991, David Letterman was putting up the usual resistance. There was no time left to play with; the appointment had already been made. Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia were flying in from California and would be in Dave’s office the next evening following the taping of “Late Night.” And still the idea of needing some sort of slick Hollywood dealmaker representing him in a meeting with the NBC bosses made Letterman’s skin crawl. But Lassally kept pressing his points: If you want the “Tonight” show, you have to fight for it. And that means getting yourself someone who’ll protect you.

  Letterman thought he had steeled himself for months to accept the inevitable. “It’s gonna be Leno, it’s gonna be Leno, it’s gonna be Leno,” he had told himself. Yet when he faced the prospect of actually hearing those words spoken officially by NBC executives, Letterman got totally rattled. He had spent his week’s vacation in the Hamptons letting the finality of it all sink in, and it hadn’t gotten any easier to take.

  Now only one night separated him from hearing that the “Tonight” show was irretrievably gone. Lassally, at home in Los Angeles, called one last time to Connecticut trying to push Letterman into some kind of action. “We have about twelve hours to get you a lawyer,” Lassally told him. “Will you accept a show business lawyer? Because I don’t want you going into that meeting with your Indianapolis lawyer.”

  Letterman wasn’t sure what good having a show business lawyer would do at this point, but he and Lassally had started talking over a plan. It was a pretty desperate plan, true, but at least it involved taking some form of action instead of passively nodding like a condemned prisoner when the NBC guys said the job had gone to Jay.

  They worked out exactly what Dave should say in the meeting and how he should say it. At the least, being a little aggressive might make this encounter a bit more difficult for Littlefield and Agoglia than they were expecting. That finally got Letterman’s juices going. He allowed himself to think maybe there was the tiniest chance that he could connect on a Hail Mary pass and pull out the game in the final seconds.

  After fighting Lassally to the last possible moment about hiring a new lawyer, Letterman gave in. Taking charge of how he would orchestrate the next day’s meeting, Letterman left the lawyer business in Lassally’s hands. At 11:00 P.M. West Coast time, Lassally finally reached Jake Bloom, probably the most powerful show business attorney in Hollywood. Lassally knew Bloom’s expertise was in movie deals, not television deals, but all he really wanted was a name that might scare Littlefield and Agoglia. “All we want right now is to be able to use your name to the NBC guys,” Lassally told Bloom. Bloom agreed verbally to take Letterman on as a client. Everything was in place for the confrontation.

  It had not been a great week for Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia, either. They had to deal with nonstop calls harassing them for an answer on when an official announcement would be made about the “Tonight” show. Many of these calls were coming from the press, but plenty of them were coming from Helen Kushnick. Helen said that Jay was jumping out of his skin wondering why he hadn’t been pronounced the winner yet. The NBC executives weren’t sure whether that was really Jay getting antsy or Helen covering her own agitation by referring to Jay, but it didn’t really matter. They knew they could hold out on Helen and Jay a little bit longer. They already had their deal; Jay wasn’t going anywhere. Littlefield now felt he had to get to Letterman first, before Jay Leno was officially coronated, a point that Helen didn’t especially buy: Even if that was Warren’s plan, she wanted to know, why not get on a plane, find Dave in the Hamptons, and get the dirty deed done? Littlefield tried to be patient with her, explaining his plan to see Letterman in his office with Agoglia the following Tuesday. But he certainly didn’t need the extra aggravation from Helen.

  On the plane flying in to New York, he and Agoglia discussed what Letterman might really want. As usual, Agoglia boiled it down to dollars and cents. As he saw it, Letterman might be upset “from a negotiating point of view,” which might mean he would hold his breath until his face turned blue, or until he got his price, whichever came first. But then there was the ego aspect, Agoglia thought, which was a different level of upset and one that wouldn’t go away so easily if money were tossed at it. NBC was prepared to take any of several approaches to try to make Letterman happy.

  Not that NBC was about to abandon its strategy, which could be reduced to three words: Keep both guys. Agoglia, thinking mechanically, his chosen method, had planned the situation down to its basics. The decision they had made—Jay in for Johnny, Dave staying put at 12:30—was the smart play. Agoglia had a contract, signed by David Letterman, that committed the star to NBC for another two years. So it was guaranteed: pick Leno and get the two guys back-to-back until at least April 1993. As Agoglia saw it: “It was a short-term gain with a long-term problem. And we thought in two years we could solve the problem.”

  Agoglia did not perceive that settling up with Letterman, even with his fragile emotional state, would prove insurmountable. After all, there had been no pressure on the network from Letterman’s representatives all these years, no threats to move to another network, and there were no provisions in Letterman’s contract stipulating he get a shot at the “Tonight” show. So how serious could the issue really be? NBC’s position had only been enhanced, Agoglia and Littlefield thought, by the newspaper TV columns that had appeared in the week since Carson’s announcement. Virtually every television columnist in the country had written pieces saying how the logical choice was Leno.

  Littlefield did anticipate a frosty reception in New York from his combative star, but he felt he had come up with some intriguing proposals to run by Letterman. He didn’t foresee the encounter turning into much more than an initially tense meeting that would eventually get around to business and what was best for everybody involved. Warren had been through plenty of those before.

  In his office on the fourteenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Letterman spent the early part of his day choreographing the me
eting. He was joined by his manager, Jack Rollins, who also held the title of executive producer of “Late Night,” and his producer and friend, Robert Morton. Letterman assigned each of them a specific seat in the little scene he was creating: Rollins was to sit in a chair on one side of the desk; Letterman would sit in a chair on the other side; and Morton would sit in Letterman’s chair behind the desk. Letterman also told them where he would place Littlefield and Agoglia when they arrived—across the room from the desk, on either end of the office’s battered couch.

  Letterman knew Littlefield reasonably well, because he had had occasion to meet him at NBC functions several times in the past decade. But Agoglia worked for the network in more mysterious ways, negotiating contracts, making business decisions, saying no from afar. Letterman had had no reason to become acquainted personally with Agoglia.

  Following that night’s taping, the Letterman side gathered in the star’s office and waited. After a few minutes, Dave’s assistant, Laurie Diamond, buzzed them with the information that Littlefield and Agoglia had arrived. The men all stood as the two NBC executives entered the office. Letterman stepped toward the door to greet them. In his gut he was seething; he thought the two of them looked like such worms. He shook hands with Littlefield first, saying a perfunctory, “Hi, Warren, how are you?” Then, in an exaggeratedly formal way, Letterman turned to Agoglia, reached out his hand and said: “And you are …?”

  Agoglia tried to laugh the insult off as he shook hands with Letterman. “Oh, come on Dave, John Agoglia.” The other men forced out a small laugh. The tone had been set.

  After just a few other strained pleasantries, Letterman steered them all to their assigned seats. Littlefield stepped up the task at hand; he knew it was his responsibility to do most of the talking. So he started off the conversation they were all expecting to hear: The network had analyzed the late-night situation. They knew the day was coming when Johnny would step down. For the last several years they had watched Jay Leno grow into the role as guest host. Obviously NBC had every reason to be proud of what Dave had accomplished on the “Late Night” show. But the choice had to be made. And they all felt Jay had proved he could succeed with the 11:30 audience. And so, Warren said, summing it up in the form of a pronouncement, they had decided to name Jay Leno the new host of the “Tonight” show.