by Carter, Bill
“So would you have a meeting with Mike Ovitz?” Lassally asked Letterman.
“Yeah, I’d be kind of curious about that,” Letterman said.
Lassally contacted Jay Maloney, a CAA agent he knew well. Lassally asked Maloney if he would find out if Ovitz would be interested in speaking with David Letterman about the possibility of signing with CAA. Maloney agreed and called back with a message a short time later: Michael Ovitz had great interest in taking a meeting with David Letterman.
The two men did not really know each other. Letterman had once met Ovitz when he was a young agent with the William Morris Agency in the seventies. Ovitz had not followed the intricacies of Letterman’s career. But CAA’s empire had been built largely on Michael Ovitz’s extraordinary ability to forge relationships with the biggest names in show business.
Michael Ovitz was fascinated with filmmaking from a very young age, when he would occasionally sneak into the RKO Studios lot near his home in the San Fernando Valley. Born in 1946, Ovitz grew up as a first-generation California kid. He went to Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, where he was elected class president. (The same class included future star Sally Field and future financier and felon Michael Milken.) Ovitz’s parents sent him to UCLA to study premed. But medicine didn’t have his heart. Ovitz sought out summer jobs as a tour guide at Fox and Universal studios. When college ended, Ovitz found himself in one of Hollywood’s most famous career cradles: the mail-room at the William Morris Agency.
Within six months he was an agent. One of his first clients provided a bit of expertise in the world of television talk shows: Merv Griffin.
Ovitz quickly needed room to maneuver his outsized ambitions. In 1975, when he was only twenty-seven, Ovitz and four other agents split off from William Morris and started CAA. The key to the agency’s high-speed growth was Ovitz’s pursuit of a concept called packaging, in which one agency puts together the whole range of creative talents for a movie, from stars to writer to director. Ovitz began with writers, because he knew good stories always attracted stars and directors. Soon CAA was being talked about at the right tables in the right restaurants as the agency with the best vision for a changing Hollywood.
Ovitz himself was the key figure. He quickly gained a reputation for almost mesmerizing powers of persuasion and salesmanship. Always impeccable in his dress and irrepressible in his enthusiasm, Ovitz was tightly organized and unrelentingly intense. Compactly built, extremely fit, with strategically combed brown hair and a gap-toothed smile most reminiscent of a certain late-night talk host, Ovitz’s physical presence was not striking until he added his ideas and his passion. Then Ovitz became so dynamic that even experienced businessmen came out of meetings with him slightly giddy from the ride. Ovitz delved deeply into oriental culture. At work, he became an early adherent of the Japanese philosophy of management, which emphasizes teamwork rather than competition; and in the gym, he became a black-belt practitioner of the self-defense art called aikido, which turns an aggressor’s strength against him. Ovitz soon became the name most often whispered in Hollywood corridors of power—and not always with affection. He was seen as secretive and sometimes ruthless. But that image was tempered by his devotion to his wife of twenty years, Judy, and their three children. Movie deals often had to be scheduled around Little League games.
In the late 1980s CAA began to branch out, with Ovitz evolving into a more elevated breed of matchmaker. He brokered two of the most colossal Hollywood deals ever made, in both cases involving odd-couple marriages of Japanese electronics giants with movie studios. In 1989 he advised Sony on its $3.4 billion buy of Columbia Pictures, and the following year he was the middleman in the even bigger $7 billion purchase of MCA/Universal by Matsushita. Ovitz mixed other cultural crosscurrents in 1993 when he put together a plan for the French bank Crédit Lyonnais to salvage its investment in another studio, MGM. With the entertainment world about to erupt into hundreds of different technological directions, Ovitz positioned CAA as a player in everything from advertising, where he supervised CAA’s production of a new campaign for Coca-Cola, to sports marketing, where he teamed with the athletic shoemaker Nike to produce sports for television. Ovitz also developed joint ventures with computer companies like Apple, software manufacturers like Microsoft, and even AT&T, all in the interest of keeping CAA on the cutting edge of every coming spin in the entertainment world.
Ovitz made enemies along with money for his company, and some said he stopped being interested in any deal that didn’t further his image as a kingmaker. But most of his 700 or so clients had many millions of reasons to stand by their Hollywood samurai.
On a typical late summer morning in L.A., as David Letterman and Peter Lassally entered the spectacular three-story-high lobby of the I. M. Pei-designed CAA headquarters on the corner of Little Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards in Beverly Hills, Dave was still skeptical. His dominant experience with the concept of agent remained as he put it: “a couple of nights in Pittsburgh with Tony Orlando, and let me call and maybe we can get you $500.” Still, Letterman had to concede, this was a mighty impressive lobby.
They were escorted to Ovitz’s long, narrow corner office on the third floor. Ovitz greeted them with a rush of warmth and enthusiasm. Letterman was a client Mike Ovitz wanted for his agency. As soon as they were comfortable, Ovitz revved up to high speed, talking his way into a presentation that was as much soliloquy as sales pitch.
Ovitz said he saw Letterman as an enormous star with geometric possibilities and he had drawn up what he told them was a complete architecture for Dave’s future. CAA would deliver what Dave wanted, everything Dave wanted. Yes, there would be an 11:30 show for him, and there would be offers from each network. But the deal would be bigger than just that. Ovitz would be able to bid Dave around the entire television industry—networks, studios, syndicators, everybody. Dave would become a giant from this deal. It would all be open to Dave. And Peter? Peter would become a very big man in the business himself. What Dave should expect to achieve from this alliance was strategic, self-fulfilling growth in his career and his art, Ovitz told them. All these things would be delivered, because Dave was the biggest and the best. CAA would take care of everything.
It was virtuoso salesmanship, a performance so charming, so dazzling, that even the two show business cynics who were bathed in it for one hour could not help but come away dripping with excitement. In the car, riding back to Lassally’s beach house, they laughed like giddy schoolboys who had just witnessed the coolest show they’d ever seen. Letterman turned to Lassally and said: “That was too much!” And the two of them laughed out loud again. Back at Lassally’s house, they sat on the deck and recounted what had happened for Peter’s wife, Alice, and Dave kept saying over and over, “I’ve been to see the Godfather! I had a meeting with the Godfather!”
They both agreed it had been a dazzling performance by a master, but take away the hype and it was still Mike Ovitz promising the show business world at Dave’s feet. If anybody could bring that off, Ovitz could. Finally Letterman asked the only question they really had to answer: “So what do you think? Should we go with him?”
Lassally said he was still a little unsure. “We can’t know going in what signing with CAA would mean. But having Ovitz on our side would certainly make a statement to the industry. It would put the message out that you are looking for the next step in your career. And it would be awfully nice to have that power on our side. I can’t tell you it would all be good, but there is something to that kind of power. I think we should take some time to think about it. Let’s not make the decision right now.”
But the dazzle didn’t wear off. A few days later David Letterman called Michael Ovitz and told him he would like to make use of his services.
Ovitz’s first duty was to spring David Letterman from his NBC contract. Lassally and Letterman wanted to be free to seek an 11:30 show somewhere else. But NBC’s contract was more than a minor impediment. It was an unusually onerous contract,
with a clause that allowed NBC the right to match any future offer for a full year, leaving open the potential for NBC to keep Letterman off the air entirely for a year after he left the network Ovitz told colleagues he had never seen an artist abused and misrepresented so badly. Lee Gabler, the head of CAA’s television department, thought the contract had clauses in it that a prisoner wouldn’t have.
NBC also retained first negotiating position, which meant Letterman could not negotiate with any other party until NBC’s first negotiating period lapsed in February 1993. That added up to seventeen months from the time Letterman signed on with CAA that no other network or syndication company could offer any concrete proposal to him for fear of being in breach of the NBC contract. Gabler could not think of how Ovitz was going to set Letterman free.
Ovitz, who saw Letterman as a human being who’d been badly beaten up, also felt he first had to build back Letterman’s self-confidence. Neither job was going to be easy.
Some indirect approaches about Letterman were already being made. Howard Stringer, the president of CBS, began quietly cultivating a relationship with Robert Morton, who told him over several dinners how fed up the entire “Late Night” staff was with NBC. An ABC executive went even further, calling the “Late Night” offices on September 24, 1991, with the message that ABC was ready to deal for Letterman as soon as he became available. The ABC executive said he was convinced that the two top executives at Capital Cities/ABC, Tom Murphy and Dan Burke, were ready to give Letterman the 11:30 time period, scrapping Ted Koppel and “Nightline.” ABC had long been frustrated in its inability to get any kind of entertainment show launched after the half-hour news program. “We’ll take Koppel off and go crazy,” the ABC executive said.
Even though no one was allowed to discuss a deal for Letterman in any formal way, Ovitz believed he had to get the process moving. In the beginning of 1992 he started identifying the companies he thought would be the major contenders for Letterman; then he set down the goals he wanted from any offer for Letterman. For the next several months, Ovitz had conversations with NBC executives looking for a way to undo the contractual chains on Letterman. Mainly Ovitz tried to convince NBC that the network could enhance its good will with Dave by being conciliatory about the contract. That good will would eventually help bring the sides together for a deal, Ovitz argued. But there wasn’t anything concrete in that for NBC. Not surprisingly, Ovitz made little headway in freeing Letterman from the entanglements of his NBC contract. But he did think of a way to increase the pressure on NBC to deal, and to get a sense of what kind of packages Letterman could expect from other suitors, while also supplying a jolt of confidence for the star. He worked out a plan for the networks, studios, and syndicators to come and pitch for Letterman.
The pitch meeting had long been a staple of Hollywood business. Every day creators of one kind or another—writers, stars, producers—pitched ideas to network or studio executives, hoping for a development deal. Ovitz, who knew a parade would form the day he said David Letterman was available, wanted to reverse the process: Letterman was to be wooed. Ovitz told the various interested parties that he would hold two days of pitch meetings for Letterman at the CAA offices in July.
CBS got a chance to express interest publicly a little early. On June 1, 1992, Letterman appeared at the annual George Foster Peabody Awards luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. Letterman had won a Peabody, among the most prestigious awards in broadcasting, for taking “one of TV’s most conventional and least-inventive forms—the talk show—and infusing it with freshness and imagination.” As Letterman stepped to the podium and began his acceptance speech, the CBS president, Howard Stringer, sitting on the left of the dais, far back from Letterman, could hardly believe his ears. Here was David Letterman looking for a joke to play off the fact that everyone in the ballroom was aware he was the unhappiest award winner NBC had ever had. His opening line was: “Is Howard Stringer in the house?” Stringer waited for the laughs to die down just enough for him to be heard before he came back with a booming “Yes!” But getting his own laughs was hardly all that Stringer intended to make of this opportunity. Stringer concluded that Morton had surely clued Letterman in to CBS’s avid interest in him, and that the comment at the luncheon was not merely intended as a joke. So he quietly slid out of his seat as Letterman continued his thank-yous, dropped down off the dais, and slipped out into the hallway behind the ballroom, where he knew Letterman would emerge after his speech. He found Letterman a short time later, off in a corner looking sheepish, smoking one of his trademark cigars. Stringer rushed up to him.
Stringer said: “Listen, I’m delighted at what you said. I want you to know that everyone in the organization from Larry Tisch on down is eager to get you to CBS. I don’t want to hassle you or harass you right now, but I want you to know we have a tremendous enthusiasm to have you, and anything I can do to make it possible I will do.”
Letterman nodded politely and thanked Stringer. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said in his shy way. “That’s very helpful.”
Stringer thought Letterman didn’t look as if he wanted to continue the conversation, so he let it drop at that. But he had put CBS’s toe in the water, and it didn’t seem chilly at all. Howard Stringer was fully prepared to dive in.
At the same time, Letterman’s incumbent bosses at NBC found themselves still flailing. Their efforts to cauterize the wounds inflicted on Letterman’s psyche were limited. Warren Littlefield did take it upon himself to set up meetings with Dave to discuss some other options being dreamed up for him by his concerned and benevolent network—maybe some more primetime exposure, the ill-fated “seamless late night.” Littlefield talked with Letterman in New York several times, once for about an hour, just the two of them. Letterman asked if Warren had really flown into New York just to meet with him. Littlefield, who grew up just across the Hudson in Montclair, New Jersey, assured him that he was indeed in New York solely for the purpose of trying to explore these options with Dave. He wasn’t even going to see his family, Warren told him.
Letterman felt flattered to a degree that Littlefield was making such an effort, but the more Littlefield talked, and the more he pitched, the more Letterman realized Warren didn’t know a thing about him; he had no idea what Dave’s interests were, and he was obviously not watching the show much. Letterman didn’t have any basic animosity toward Littlefield; he figured he was probably a very nice guy. But Littlefield was simply not doing himself any good with his visits. Letterman came away from their meetings more certain than ever that his previous sentiments about NBC had been well founded: “I really am estranged here,” he thought.
Littlefield eventually reached a similar conclusion: “If this isn’t going to work, my response would be, ‘So I should give up.’”
That was the message conveyed back to Bob Wright in New York: The situation with Letterman was hopeless. It was a conclusion Wright felt he could not accept for the company. A frustrated Wright ordered Littlefield and Agoglia to go and find other options, either to keep Letterman where he was, or to find a truly viable replacement for him. “We have too much at stake here,” Wright told them. “For you just to say it’s hopeless and then offer no options is not an acceptable alternative in my chair. So you go off and find the alternative and I will determine whether it’s hopeless.”
Helen Kushnick had her own ideas about how NBC could deal with David Letterman. She volunteered to expand the “Tonight” show back to ninety minutes, its original length, if that would help fill the hole when Dave went out the door. She called Littlefield with this helpful notion. Don’t be concerned, she told him. If she had to stretch to ninety minutes, she could do it. Littlefield simply dodged answering the suggestion. Just in case word of her generous offer didn’t reach the Letterman camp, Helen decided to make it public herself. She fed the story to the Wall Street Journal. Helen then added to this little bit of mischief by putting together a tape of material featuring the comic Paula Pound
stone for NBC to look at. Helen viewed her as the female version of Jay Leno. Her point to NBC was clear: Paula would make a great complement to Jay if Letterman isn’t there anymore. NBC never warmed to the Poundstone option.
Kushnick marched through her first weeks on the “Tonight” show like Sherman going through Georgia. The booking pressure never let up. When Helen thought that Lori Jonas, the press agent for both Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen, was playing games with the bookings of these two comics as some kind of publicity stunt, she whipped off a stinging note telling Jonas, “We choose not to play your game,” and commanding that one of the comics be dropped. Later, another Jonas client, actress Sheila Kelley, had her “Tonight” appearance abruptly canceled, an act that Jonas interpreted as direct retribution, even though she had in no way been responsible for the conflict in the bookings of Seinfeld and Allen. It was one instance of dozens in the take-no-prisoners booking war Helen had declared. “It was an explosion five times a day,” one of her staff members said. “How dare they? Who the hell are they? They think they’re going to get on this show?” Press agents in town began to whisper among themselves about the ferocity of the booking rules coming from the “Tonight” show. Most of that ferocity was directed at keeping guests off “The Arsenio Hall Show” (and to a somewhat lesser extent “The Dennis Miller Show,” another syndicated effort that was already sliding toward oblivion by the time Leno got the “Tonight” show). But there was another show in New York that Helen apparently saw as competition.
The “Tonight” show and “Late Night” had coexisted for ten years without serious conflicts over booking guests. There were rules, of course; the shows had established an informal two-week window. If an actress such as Sigourney Weaver appeared on the “Tonight” show, she would then not be booked on “Late Night” for at least two weeks. The agreement was loosely enforced and exceptions were sometimes requested and almost always granted. But double bookings were rare, mostly because the shows had such different styles and because relatively few guests crossed over frequently from one to the other. That changed when Jay arrived at the “Tonight” show. Helen intended to bring in the hot, young performers, especially in music, that the old “Tonight” show never booked.