by Carter, Bill
Helen contacted the investment firm of Deloitte, Touche to obtain an estimate of the value of her company. When she got back a figure of just over $7 million, she first took it to Jay to make sure he didn’t want to buy her out himself. She told him it was a formality; she was sure he didn’t really want the responsibility of running a management company himself. The idea, she told Jay, was to sell the company to NBC to make the network happy that it had a clean deal with Jay. And there was something good in it for each of them as well: Helen would become a rich woman before the show even started; Jay would get his $6 million-plus a year without having to pay any commission at all.
NBC agreed to pay $7 million even for Helen Kushnick’s management company. Agoglia labeled it “the price of poker.” Even without the formal title, Helen had no intention of relinquishing the role of manager in Jay’s career.
The NBC executives did not have any second thoughts about giving Helen Kushnick all this money or all this power, even though her experience in producing television shows was drastically limited. All she had produced up to that point were a couple of specials with Jay. They knew she had a reputation for being volatile, but they had never seen that trait in her negotiations for Jay. In all their dealings with her, she was always totally focused. And what she was asking for wasn’t the slightest bit unusual in Hollywood. Managers frequently assumed the title of executive producer on their stars’ shows. Letterman himself had made his manager, Jack Rollins, his executive producer. And Garry Shandling, when he did his sitcom, made his manager, Brad Grey, his executive producer.
But beyond that, the NBC executives thought Helen had good, solid, creative ideas about the show. “She had given us notes about how the show would be changed with Jay, and they were very interesting and highly acceptable,” Agoglia said. “She also knew everyone in the business, in the music world, and everywhere else. And from an operational point of view, one of the more difficult transitions in network television we thought would be made much easier with her doing it than with a new person coming into Jay’s life.”
So Helen got her $7 million and NBC regained full ownership of the “Tonight” show. Of course, Helen had designs on that, too. She estimated that with the kind of ratings results she expected Jay to generate, it would take only five years before she and Jay got ownership of the show away from NBC.
As Jay Leno’s level of recognition grew, an image started to emerge. He was decent, honest, straightforward, disdainful of pretension, generous to fans, and a friend to almost every comedian in the business. Time magazine, in a cover story, called him “the most popular regular guy in America.”
But many people close to Jay said the portrait of an uncomplicated, Everyman comic was either superficial or totally inaccurate. “Jay is one of the most complicated human beings I have ever known,” a member of the “Tonight” show staff said.
For all his outward warmth with people and his easy approachability, Leno seemed to distance himself emotionally from everyone around him, even close friends. He even disdained the idea of having emotions. If people complained about being under stress, Jay said: “What does that mean, stressed? I’ve never been stressed.” When a comic friend, Carol Leifer, was going through a tough period in her life and told Jay she was depressed, she asked Jay what he did when got down. “Down?” Jay asked, as though the word belonged to a foreign language. “I’ve never been down.”
A “Tonight” show staff member said: “There is no term describing a psychological state that Jay relates to. He’s not in touch with his emotions at all.”
Helen often chided Jay for his desire to be liked, saying he should stop with “that ‘like’ shit,” as she called it. This all seemed very immature to Helen, who sometimes saw Jay as a big kid who had never really grown up.
Certainly Jay lived the life of a big kid, with his fondness for junk food and video games. Comics used to come to Jay’s house after the clubs closed and play a tank game on Jay’s Intellivision set far into the morning. The nocturnal play sessions continued even after Jay married Mavis Nicholson. He had met Mavis, a small, dark-haired, attractive, and intelligent woman, outside the ladies’ room at the Comedy Store in 1975. Though she was an aspiring comedy writer at the time they had almost nothing beyond comedy in common. She read ten to fifteen books a week; Jay did comedy and cars. But they hooked up. Mavis traveled the road with Jay for awhile; mostly they found they enjoyed their separate interests separately. For awhile, Mavis did professional astrology readings out of their home.
When they decided to marry in 1980, it was not a moment awash in romance. Jay told people he had talked a still somewhat reluctant Mavis into marriage when he realized it made sense because of his insurance policies. The wedding ceremony lasted less than ten minutes, and was held at Helen Kushnick’s house. A single roll of wedding pictures was taken, but Jay later told friends that he and Mavis never bothered to develop it.
They agreed they would never have children. As his career took off, they settled into what Jay called “a fairly unique relationship.” Though he never made “wife jokes,” out of respect for Mavis, and often talked about Mavis with great affection—calling her his greatest supporter—Jay was not devoted to his wife in the conventional ways of most marriages. He and Mavis didn’t go through life as an inseparable team. Jay spent much of his day working on his shows at NBC, then spent several hours each night working on his motorcycles and cars. About midnight Jimmy Brogan and occasionally some other comics would come over to Jay’s house and help him work on his monologues. On Saturdays the cars took up almost the full day. On Sundays Jay almost always appeared in a comedy club. None of this ever bothered Mavis, Jay said. It wasn’t exactly what most Americans would call conventional or regular, but Jay and Mavis were both comfortable and happy with the relationship.
“If spending a day off working on cars was the kind of thing that bugged her,” Jay said, “we wouldn’t have gotten married.”
To some who knew Helen Kushnick well, NBC’s decision to hand her the reins of their most important television show was an unfathomable mistake. But Helen was not about to be denied. “Helen knew what she wanted, knew what she was after, and Helen was going to get it,” one “Tonight” staff member who worked closely with her said. “She has the tenacity to go after what she wants. She had a style that was so offensive and grating that it was easier to give her what she wanted. More often than not people said, ‘Just do it.’ It’s easier to just do it. And this went way up the corporate ladder at NBC.” It was an attitude bred from intimidation, the staff member said.
This same staff member worked during the transition period from Carson to Leno. “The two camps grew to hate each other,” the staffer said. Soon everything about the show had to be handled separately. “It was truly a monumental error to put Helen in charge of the show. Not because she didn’t have some talent for it. She was thorough and organized, and you had to respect the intensity with which she worked. She’s very smart and very focused—but very dangerous.”
For the first few months after Carson’s Carnegie Hall announcement and the subsequent naming of Leno to the job, nothing happened. Helen went about her planning, Carson went on with his shows, and Leno filled in when he was assigned. But NBC said and did nothing about the transition itself. Finally, after some prodding from the press relations department, NBC held some meetings to discuss the transition. One of the participants at the meeting said that NBC executives seemed not so much concerned about how Carson departed the scene as they were about lifting off Jay Leno successfully. Helen tried to make sure that’s where the focus stayed. She always cited Jay’s great numbers with younger viewers when he guest hosted. “That was her style,” said the “Tonight” staff member. “Always keep the pressure on.”
As Carson continued his last-hurrah season, emotions grew more intense on the show. But NBC succeeded in keeping the two staffs separated for the most part. A farewell tour of guests streamed through the “Tonight” show each
night, each one getting to pay tribute to Carson. Helen took note of who was appearing, and like someone going to the mailbox every day to see if she had a valentine from that guy she couldn’t stand, Helen watched and waited for Jay’s invitation to arrive.
On the surface everything was smooth between Kushnick and NBC. But those directly involved in dealing with her began pointing out how rough she was being on anyone who didn’t do things precisely her way. A lot of people were starting to resent being called incompetent.
Arsenio Hall began making noise about having to fight the “Tonight” show over guest bookings within weeks of Carson’s announcement that he was leaving. Partly emotional, partly shrewd public relations man, Hall managed to set himself up, in the press at least, as a legitimate challenger to Jay Leno almost a year before Jay got the full-time job.
The truth was more complicated: Hall had actually been more of a threat to Carson, roaring onto the air in January 1989 and capturing a chunk of younger viewers who simply could not identify with a single element of the show Carson was still doing on NBC. Hall quickly grabbed the hip high ground; he booked music acts whose names the “Tonight” staff probably couldn’t even pronounce correctly. He had an audience of frantic, whooping acolytes. His on-air clothes ranged from button-down cool to outrageous funk, from designer suits to raggedy overalls. His show started to work because it truly had a different sensibility for late night: It wasn’t a talk show as much as a big, fun party, geared expressly for the young party crowd. Arsenio didn’t break the color barrier in late-night as much as he broke the hip barrier.
Born in Cleveland, the son of a Baptist minister, Hall had spent his childhood watching Johnny Carson and pretending to be a talk-show host. He learned magic and played drums because that’s what Carson had done. After quitting a sales job with Noxell to try standup, Hall worked comedy clubs in the Chicago area before being discovered by the singer Nancy Wilson. She brought Hall to LA., where he bounced around for years looking to break into comedy or television or movies or anything. Paired with a bald-headed white comic named Thom Sharp for a short-lived summer series on ABC, Hall emerged briefly in late night as the sidekick for Alan Thicke on his ill-fated syndicated show in 1984. Nothing budged for Hall until the collapse of the Joan Rivers show on Fox in 1986. Stuck for a guest host one night after Joan had been fired, Fox executives called on Arsenio, who had been a successful guest with Joan on one of her last shows. Hall was just getting back to his car from the dry cleaners holding a freshly pressed suit when he heard the car phone ringing. His manager told him to get down to the Fox studio immediately. Hall turned on the ignition and drove off. He never looked back. He got to the studio, put on the suit, and went on the air. He was a hit.
For a fee of $1,000 a night, Hall took over the show for the last eleven weeks of Joan’s contract, and the ratings built steadily. Fox, however, was already committed to a comedy news program, “The Wilton/North Report,” as the replacement for Rivers at 11:00 P.M. weeknights. As the network looked at Arsenio’s strong ratings, it decided it might have stumbled onto something. Fox initially offered Hall a show after “Wilton/North” at midnight. Then only two days after that show hit the air—accompanied by a loud, flopping noise—Fox came back with a better offer: Forget “Wilton-North.” Hall could have the 11:00 P.M. slot, his own talk show, and $2 million a year. Now Arsenio could smell leverage. He told his manager he wanted an Oprah deal, modeled on the huge syndication package that had made daytime talk host Oprah Winfrey the richest show business celebrity in the world. What Hall wanted more than money, however, was control. Having decided his career had suffered when he was forced to adapt to somebody else’s creative ideas, Hall wanted to own his show and be the executive producer. That was the deal breaker for Fox—and a huge mistake. In 1988 Paramount signed Hall to a deal that promised him $50,000 a week and a huge percentage of the profits in the show.
Hall was thirty-two when he launched his syndicated talk show, but his audience skewed much younger. He had a lock on the youth crowd, especially younger women. Within months Hall was a phenomenon, even if his overall ratings did not approach Carson’s. Hall was a smart, insightful student of late-night television; he knew how to position himself and how to take advantage of every break. When the Sajak show was dead on arrival, Hall went around to CBS affiliates making deals to replace Sajak. He had found the niche in the Carson ratings armor: viewers born after Johnny went on the air in 1962. It could be transformed into a lucrative niche for Arsenio. Paramount began banking more than $50 million a year from “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and the star’s take exceeded $12 million a year. Hall was so hot, and Sajak so hopeless, that CBS tried to work its way into the deal. Howard Stringer, the CBS president, seeing how many CBS stations were going with Arsenio already, offered to buy into Paramount’s deal as a partner. Paramount declined.
But by the time the transition from Carson to Leno started in 1991, Hall’s meteor ride was already starting to burn up in the atmosphere. Like many acts that start off sizzling hot, Hall’s was tough to sustain with the hip crowd, who never finds anything hip for the long term. Pressed by his fading position in late 1991, Hall decided to raise the ante: He went after Jay Leno like an attack dog. First he dropped hints about running off guests who two-timed his show with Leno’s once it got on the air. But then he opened up with the heavy guns.
In an April cover-story interview in Entertainment Weekly magazine, under the headline “I’m Going to Kick Leno’s Ass,” Hall said, among other things, that it was an insult to Carson’s legacy to say Leno was replacing him; that despite Jay’s constant references to Arsenio as a friend, he was not Jay’s friend; that he had earned his place in late-night, unlike Leno, who had a late-night silver spoon put in his mouth. Hall concluded by saying: “I’m going to treat him like we treated the kid on the high school basketball team who was the coach’s son. He was there because he was anointed, too. We tried to kick his ass, and that’s what I’m going to do: kick Jay’s ass.”
They were fighting words, but that only made them all the more bewildering for Jay Leno, a completely nonconfrontational personality. Like just about everyone else on the comedy circuit in the early 1980s, Leno had met and palled around with Arsenio. They had written jokes together and played endless video games together all night long at Jay’s house. To Jay, that sounded like friendship, though Hall was not the only person who believed it was better described by a term like professional acquaintanceship.
But Jay would not have to worry much about Arsenio kicking his ass; he had his own hired gun to fight for him. Helen Kushnick had a plan for Arsenio Hall. Even before they went on the air, Helen had a letter drafted for the show’s talent coordinators to send to people booked on the show. It told them in plain terms not to do any other shows if they expected to be booked on the “Tonight” show. Jimmy Brogan, among others on the staff, thought it was a mistake that would eventually get the show in trouble. He mentioned it to Jay, who simply said: “That’s Helen’s area. I do the jokes.” Later, Helen held a meeting with her staff and made the purpose of the guest policy more specific. She gave them all a message: Let’s get Arsenio Hall off the air. Now is the time. He’s ready for the kill. Let’s kill his show.
Like a Hall of Fame ballplayer making his final tour of the ballparks of America, Johnny Carson’s last weeks on the “Tonight” show took on the aura of an ongoing tribute to an icon. Stars lined up to get one final turn on the couch next to Johnny. The farewell tour included all the stars who had become regulars on the show, along with many big names who had not appeared in years. One star who was honored with one of the very last audiences with the king was David Letterman, who appeared on the “Tonight” show for the last time only one week before Carson’s finale. On the show, Letterman told Carson, “Thanks for my career,” and he meant it. He always gave Carson the most credit for his success.
Conspicuous by his absence on the list of farewell tour invitees was Jay Leno. Jay had never been clo
se to Johnny, had never even done very well as a guest with Johnny, and he certainly didn’t owe the success of his career to sitting on the couch with Johnny Carson.
Still, Helen saw the Carson staff’s decision to bypass Jay as an unforgivable snub. To Helen it was obvious that they were sending a message by not booking Jay: They did not want Jay on the show. Helen had her own ideas about the best way for Johnny to bow out. Late in Johnny’s last year on the air, she went to Peter Lassally with a plan for Carson’s final act on his final show. She wanted Carson to leave his desk, take his microphone, walk to the adjacent studio where they were preparing for Jay’s show, and hand over the microphone to Jay: “Passing the baton,” she called it.
Ridiculous, Lassally called it. He told Helen that he absolutely would suggest no such thing to Johnny Carson. It was not within the realm of possibility. As with all the slights she felt from the old Carson guard, this one would stick in Helen’s craw—and fester.
Carson’s last show was set for Friday, May 22, 1992. That was to be a retrospective show, with highlights from the past and only the regular “Tonight” crew: Johnny, Ed, and Doc. There were to be no guests at all. The final regular “Tonight” show the preceding night was the true stunner, a combination of antic, hilarious comedy from Robin Williams and a surge of genuine sentiment from Bette Midler, who sang to Johnny and with him, creating one of the rarest of show business moments: an exhibition of warm, honest emotion.
David Letterman certainly felt the emotion that night and the next, when Johnny closed shop for good. Sitting home watching the last few minutes of the Johnny Carson era come to a close, Letterman felt a woeful depression overcoming him. Carson looked so good and still had such a mastery of the format that Letterman couldn’t deal with the incongruity of Carson’s truly leaving that stage forever. After the final show ended Letterman tried to sleep, but found he couldn’t. He was up the whole night with an overwhelming feeling of sadness that lasted for weeks.