by Carter, Bill
Emotion of a different kind had begun to engulf the relationship between Helen Kushnick and the NBC management in the days before Jay’s premiere on the “Tonight” show. The tension seemed to have raised the temperature in every conversation she was having with Warren Littlefield, John Agoglia, Rick Ludwin, and any other NBC executive she came into contact with. Ludwin, who was on the set every day, was reporting back that the level of anxiety had increased. Littlefield got mostly secondhand reports, until Helen decided to press him directly about her plan for NBC to welcome Jay to the “Tonight” show.
Helen told Littlefield she wanted NBC to buy a two-page ad in the “Life” section of USA Today—and she wanted it to run on Friday, May 22. Helen had the design worked out. The ad would be a map highlighting every city in the country where Jay had appeared doing his stand-up act, and each city would be sending the same message of welcome to Jay. The Friday placement was vital to Helen because Jay’s first day on the air, Monday the 25th, was Memorial Day and USA Today would not be printing on the holiday. Friday also made sense to Helen because it was the weekend edition of the newspaper, which was meant to stay around the whole weekend.
There was only one problem with this grand plan: NBC had already committed itself to buying a full-page ad that day as its send-off thank-you to Johnny Carson. Littlefield politely explained to Helen that the newspaper was doing its own full page of stories in tribute to Carson, and NBC had bought the opposite page for its ad. “We’re not going to crowd that with a ‘welcome, Jay’ ad,” Littlefield told her. He added that Jay would get plenty of press, and all these things could happen on Tuesday.
But that wasn’t fine with Helen, because Tuesday was Jay’s second day in the job, not his first, and that simply didn’t sit right. So Helen had another idea: What if she could get USA Today to print on Monday? she asked Warren. Would NBC buy the ad then?
Littlefield, a bit incredulous at what Helen thought her powers of persuasion might be, said sure. If she could get a whole newspaper staff to work a holiday weekend just to get her ‘welcome, Jay’ ad in, fine, go for it.
That was the last he heard of the ad crisis for awhile. But as the deadline for locking in an ad in USA Today approached, Helen made a last stab at getting what she wanted. Warren was driving to Burbank on the Ventura Freeway when his car phone rang. Helen’s voice was at high pitch as soon as he picked up the line. She wasn’t asking anymore. She was telling Warren: If she had to put the fucking ad in with her own money, it was going to get in USA Today on Friday, Carson ad or not.
Warren had used up his store of both politeness and patience on this issue. “No, it’s not going in, Helen,” Littlefield said, his own pitch rising to meet hers. “And it’s not going to be your money and you’re not doing it, because we won’t allow it. We’ve thought about it, we’ve considered it, we’ve listened, and we have made a decision, and that decision is final.”
Helen didn’t back down. She told Warren that he had never been supportive of Jay anyway. Warren had opposed offering Jay his original contract with NBC, she said. She poured on the invective, the timbre of her voice rising with each charge she made against Warren, until it was all swearing and cursing at him and NBC—one long burst of screaming spewing out of the carphone speaker.
And Warren Littlefield, driving amid the morning rush-hour traffic on the Ventura Freeway, a man who lost his temper very rarely, and then almost always at home and not at work, waited, and held his breath deeper and deeper in his chest until Helen had finished. And then he exploded. “Hey, fuck you!” he screamed into the phone. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! You’re wrong. We’re not going to do this. I will not allow it. And you know what? You’re out of your mind! I have been extremely supportive of Jay Leno. I have done everything in my power to see that this man is embraced by this network, supported by this network, and I resent hearing this from you. And enough. It’s over. Done.”
Kushnick put up no further protest. As Littlefield hung up, he was almost to the entrance of NBC’s Burbank headquarters. He pulled into his parking lot, his breathing still shallow, his vocal cords raw from exertion. He looked at the clock on the dashboard and said to himself: “Holy shit! It’s not nine yet. It’s not even nine o’clock in the morning yet. And we haven’t even premiered this show.” Littlefield didn’t want to exaggerate what had just happened, but he could see a bright red flag coming up over the “Tonight” show horizon. NBC estimated that 50 million people watched Carson’s last “Tonight” show, more viewers than had seen any previous late-night show in television history. Helen knew she and Jay weren’t going to do as well on Jay’s first night, but she was confident they would be strong, and in the long run they would easily justify NBC’s faith in them. For the first show, she had lined up Billy Crystal, a surefire attraction only two months after another sensational performance as host of the Academy Awards show. Crystal happened to be another of Leno’s old comedy crowd, so the chemistry promised to be perfect. The show would also be on the air live in the eastern and central time zones to accommodate NBC’s schedule of NBA play-off games that night. Live shows had some risk, of course, but they also helped pump up the excitement.
If Jay Leno was excited he didn’t show it. Mostly he seemed a little bored and impatient all that day. A guy who acknowledged that he had the attention span of a ten-year-old, Jay wanted to get on with it. The new staff had worked out whatever kinks were going to arise in two dry-run shows. It wasn’t that Jay was really doing anything new, after all. This was just an extension of the work he’d been doing for five years, with some refinements to make the show, as Helen saw it, more hip and contemporary.
That afternoon, when Jimmy Brogan, Jay’s writer and friend, stopped in to see if he was nervous, Jay said he just wanted to get it over with. He thought he might take a nap. Brogan was not totally amazed at how calm Jay was because he was always that way—the steadiest, most even temperament Brogan had ever seen. They talked a little while about the show that night, the monologue they had planned. Brogan had one more suggestion. He said he thought it would be appropriate at some point early in the show to say something nice about Johnny.
Jay answered impassively: That decision was the executive producer’s to make and she had decided not to do it.
Helen and Jay had already had this discussion. Helen said that she was just taking the lead from Johnny. Carson didn’t do anything to mention Jay in his final show, so. why was it necessary for them to do something for him? And just in case Jay was about to have some misgivings, she reminded him of the way it always was at the Comedy Store, where the weak comic who followed the hot act would try to steal some of the departing star’s applause, by calling for one last round for the great man they had just seen. As Helen saw it, Jay wasn’t going to be any kind of kiss-ass suck-up. Not for anybody.
Two hours before airtime, the phone rang in Helen’s office. Bob Wright was on the line. This was no real surprise: A wish of good luck from the boss just before the network’s great new venture with its new star was to be expected. And Wright did want to wish them all well. But he had something else on his mind.
“How are you going to open the show?” he asked Kushnick. Helen said Jay would do his standard monologue. “Well, what is Jay going to do to thank Johnny?” Wright asked.
“We’re not going to do anything,” Helen said bluntly. She simply didn’t know how to do something just to curry favor with the boss.
“I’d like to hear why,” Wright said, just as bluntly. Johnny Carson, after all, was not just NBC’s former icon. He was Bob Wright’s current friend.
Helen spun out a long explanation of how the new show was going to be different, how they didn’t want to look as if they were beholden to Johnny’s old audience. She brought up the Comedy Store analogy to Wright as well, saying Jay wasn’t going to go out and look as if he was pandering to the audience that had just seen Johnny bid farewell.
“I think it’s a terrible mistake,” Wright sa
id. To him the issue was clear and uncomplicated. There was only one way to handle it. It came down to simple politeness. It was just what people would do in their own homes. He tried to press Helen. “I would really appreciate it if you would go out and tell Jay to do something and to say, ‘Thank you, I wouldn’t be here but for Johnny.’ Do a real connection. It’s your show now, but you owe Carson and you owe the audience a real connection.”
If this speech did anything at all to Helen Kushnick, it made her even more sure of herself. She said no, again. She was not going to ask Jay two hours before a live broadcast to insert something about Johnny Carson. That decision was over. Absolutely not, she told Bob Wright. Then she said good-bye.
As he hung up the phone in his Connecticut home, Wright turned to his wife and said, “This is the beginning of the end.”
Back in Burbank Helen Kushnick was only wondering what Bob Wright was calling her for. What the hell did Bob Wright have to do with the “Tonight” show? She remained completely unimpressed with the entire NBC executive hierarchy.
About an hour later Helen called Wright back. She thought he might want a little more explanation. So she called back to say she had carefully considered everything he. said and what he had asked for, and that she and Jay were still rejecting it.
For Wright the second call only made their position even worse. It was like telling him that they didn’t take his suggestion lightly. They took it seriously—and still rejected it.
Wright never considered trying to order Jay to say something about Johnny. That wasn’t his style of management anyway; he tended to look for consensus, not rule by fiat. But in this case he also felt that if a performer was told to do something he didn’t want to do, he was likely to do it poorly. Wright didn’t believe it would be the end of the world for Jay, though he was convinced it was an insensitive thing to do and would be read that way by both the audience and the press. But it certainly sealed his opinion of Helen Kushnick. From the very first day she put on a “Tonight” show as executive producer, Wright believed it was not a question of if but when: Helen Kushnick was heading for a meltdown.
The first “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” (Jay had steered clear of “starring Jay Leno” out of concern that he would look too presumptuous claiming a star title on his first day on the job) went off mostly as planned. Jay performed his monologue, firing off jokes at a withering pace. Then he introduced his new bandleader, Branford Marsalis, an accomplished jazz saxophonist who could work easily in other musical formats. Landing Branford had been Helen’s proudest coup. It meant something to her to have the first black leader of the “Tonight” show band. Branford had put together a mix of talented jazz artists. NBC felt the band had the potential to be a hot act in their own right.
When Billy Crystal came out as Jay’s very first guest ever, he pushed the show in a direction Jay was clearly trying to steer clear of: He sang a song to Jay, just as Bette Midler had sung one for Johnny four nights earlier. Crystal did an Ed McMahon joke, saying he’d seen Ed out on the street with a sign: “Will announce for food.” Crystal made several other references to the Carson era, none of which Jay picked up on to say something generous about Johnny.
Wright would be proved right. In the reviews the next day, every critic would cite Jay’s gaffe of not saying something about Carson and question how the show could have made such a poor choice.
But for Helen and Jay and most of the others on the new “Tonight” show, the evening soared on gossamer wings. Helen could charm even her rivals at times with her engaging enthusiasm. And she had never been more enthused than the night when it all really happened for them, when Jay Leno took over the “Tonight” show, which she herself was producing. People could question the opening she had approved—a batch of phony stage curtains opening as the names of the night’s guests were posted, or the beach-scene backdrop she had placed behind Jay’s desk, or the sometimes esoteric jazz that the band chose to play in the commercial breaks. But they had put their version, their vision of a new “Tonight” show on the air. They were off and running.
As the first show wound down to its close, Helen Kushnick stood on the stage behind the cameras, waiting as the band played through the credits and Jay came out from behind the desk to shake hands with his guests. As soon as the tape stopped rolling, Kushnick walked near center stage, and as several of the show’s crew members later reported to their old Carson allies, she was heard to say: “Fuck you, Johnny Carson.”
6
GOOD COP, BAD COP
Even before Peter Lassally moved east to take his new job as executive producer of “Late Night with David Letterman,” a job he was to share with the newly promoted Robert Morton, he had a lot of work to do trying to shake the mood of his despondent star. Lassally knew that for months after the announcement that Jay Leno would succeed Carson, Letterman was still shattered by disappointment and was increasingly depressed about his prospects for the future. Letterman kept telling Lassally that his market value had sunk to zero. When Lassally would try to laugh off that exaggeration, Letterman would point out that he didn’t hear people coming to him offering new and exciting directions for his career. Dave kept telling Peter that he felt he was reduced to one of two choices: stay at 12:30 on NBC after his contract ended in April 1993, or quit the business. No matter what Lassally said to try to convince him otherwise, Letterman thought he was dead in the water.
On several earlier occasions, Dave had asked Lassally to move from his “Tonight” show job to New York to take over on “Late Night,” but Peter felt such a commitment to Johnny Carson, after working for him for twenty-two years, that he promised to stay on until Johnny’s last night on the air. But he spoke almost daily with Letterman by phone, and he knew that a huge percentage of Dave’s despair was his penchant for self-denigration; no matter what was going on in his career, Dave always thought he was a disaster. This time the feeling clearly went deeper. He had had a lifelong goal, and when the time came for that dream to be fulfilled, Letterman had been rejected. As Lassally saw it, Letterman had to make a move as soon as possible to defy that rejection, to reestablish his career, or else he would be confirming the wrongheaded judgment of him by the NBC executives.
The answer, Lassally believed, was to find a true Hollywood killer to work for David Letterman. He had pulled Jake Bloom’s name out of the air at the last minute, when Dave absolutely needed a legal threat to throw at the NBC executives in their June meeting. But that wasn’t going to be enough to kickstart a new direction for Dave’s career. Lassally knew Letterman needed a new manager, somebody more aggressive than Jack Rollins, or else a new agent. But those two words were still poison to Letterman. Lassally certainly didn’t want to be his manager. He wasn’t trained as a businessman; that wasn’t a job he felt comfortable with. Years earlier Lassally had steered Dave to Marty Klein as his agent, paired with Rollins as manager, because of all the agents in Hollywood that Lassally knew, Klein was the most decent human being. Still, that chemistry had never worked. Klein’s biggest move was to negotiate a movie deal for Letterman with Disney. But Dave never stopped thinking that the idea of making a movie was silly, and none in fact was ever made. Letterman wound up settling the contract with Disney and giving them a chunk of money back. So Lassally had no reason to believe that Letterman had built up a lot of confidence in Klein. But he had to find confidence somewhere. The very idea of moving his show or himself anywhere new was so scary to Letterman that whenever Lassally brought it up, Letterman would retreat back inside his shell.
But in his frequent calls from the West Coast, Lassally never stopped bringing up the need for Dave to get out of NBC. There was no other option, as far as Lassally was concerned. That was the point he kept hammering at Letterman; he had to go somewhere else because staying meant remaining the follow-up act to Jay Leno, a humiliation that Peter Lassally could not accept for David Letterman. He had enormous faith in Dave’s talent, and not very much in Jay’s. Lassally had worked with Jay fo
r all the years he was guest host on the “Tonight” show, and he had concluded that Jay was simply a limited talent, too much the stand-up comic and not enough the broadcaster. And the Mr. Nice Guy image seemed cloying and unappealing to Lassally.
Late in the summer of 1991, Lassally pressed the issue with Letterman: “You must not follow Jay Leno,” Lassally told him over the phone, “because you will hate yourself the rest of your life. It will drive you crazy. You will go home on the weekend and say, ‘Why? Why am I, David Letterman, following Jay Leno?’ You’ll be unhappy and miserable the rest of your life.” The process of persuasion was difficult and draining for Lassally, because Letterman’s moods could be so blue that the constant effort to tell him that he shouldn’t doubt himself so much, that he really was okay, could be utterly exhausting.
Carefully, in the months after NBC passed Dave over for Jay, Lassally started suggesting names of agents or managers who might be helpful to Letterman. Dave’s reaction was invariably instantaneous: No way, they’re all sleazes. Almost out of desperation, Lassally finally brought up a name he knew Letterman would recognize, a name that had so many inside-Hollywood connotations tied to it that he really didn’t have much hope that Letterman would go for this one either. Lassally mentioned Mike Ovitz.
To his complete surprise, Letterman’s spirit perked up immediately. “Now that kind of intrigues me,” Letterman said. Michael Ovitz was an agent, yes—the chairman of Creative Artists Agency, which represented a roster of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Connery, and Kevin Costner. But he was also the acknowledged master of the show business power game. Having that level of power on the same team was a prospect even an anti–show business zealot could hardly resist.