by Carter, Bill
The word was around everywhere. Helen Kushnick was out of control. Acts were being canceled out of pique or because of the vendetta against Arsenio. NBC was hearing all the stories. And yet, even after the Seinfeld incident, nobody was doing anything about them.
In July, when the Democrats were holding their national convention in New York, Helen had an ambitious idea to have Jay milk some comedy out of the events of the convention every night. That meant the show would have to be done live for the East Coast at 11:30 P.M., which was 8:30 in Burbank, three hours later than the usual start time for the “Tonight” show taping. Helen had assigned Paula Poundstone to work the convention floor as a comedy reporter. She also arranged with NBC News to have anchorman Tom Brokaw come on for some brief banter with Jay. As Helen saw it, it was a way to solidify Jay’s reputation as the leading political satirist on television.
But political conventions are unpredictable events that rarely run precisely on schedule. The Democrats did a good job the first night and NBC News got off the air near 11 P.M. That got the live version of the “Tonight” show on the air close to its usual time. But on night two, the convention started to bog down. By the time the night’s final speaker, Barbara Jordan, got to the podium, NBC knew the night would run at least a little late.
In Burbank, Helen Kushnick stood in the wings offstage, watching Barbara Jordan speak, her face clenching tighter as the minutes drifted by. Standing around her, a few members of the staff warily observed her running commentary as Jordan spoke. Every time Jordan stopped for a breath, Helen would leap in and point out that she was pausing. Helen was screaming at the set: “Another pause, fade out right here!” she would shout.
A few minutes before eleven, Michael Gartner, the president of NBC News, got a call in the control room in New York. It was Helen Kushnick. She was stoked up and ready to fight.
“You promised you’d be off the air by eleven,” Kushnick shouted at Gartner, the bile barely contained. “She’s got to go off the air, right now. I’ve got a whole audience here waiting to see a show.”
Gartner’s response: “Well, I’ve got a black woman in a wheelchair making a speech.”
The fight escalated. Kushnick spat out obscenities at Gartner. Then she said: “Well, I’m taking you off the air.”
Gartner, who had his own reputation for flintiness, didn’t flinch. “There’s only one person who can take me off the air. That’s Bob Wright. Here’s his number; call him.”
Kushnick bellowed a few more foul sentences at Gartner and hung up. She didn’t call Bob Wright. The speech stayed on. The “Tonight” show went on the air late in the East.
After the blowup in July, NBC tried to make the system work better during the Republican Convention in August. Mainly that consisted of Warren Littlefield and Rick Ludwin, the head of late-night programs, staying around late to make sure the transfer from NBC News was accomplished quickly. Gartner had a friendly relationship with Littlefield, whom he considered one of the good guys at NBC. But other NBC executives were pressuring Gartner to get the convention coverage off the air at the first opportunity. NBC had made a deal with PBS to share coverage, the latest in the streamlining moves made by the networks in the face of what they perceived as declining interest in the conventions as a television event. So NBC’s commitment to the convention coverage seemed a lot looser than ever to many of the nonnews executives.
The first night of the Republican Convention, the “Tonight” show was again in place to go live in the East at 11:30. The Republicans generally ran their conventions on a tight schedule. But this night had an x factor: the closing speaker was Ronald Reagan, the former president of the United States. He was greeted by a tumultuous demonstration, and his speech was often interrupted for adulatory applause. It was soon obvious that the show was going to run late again.
Helen knew that Warren was in his office monitoring the situation. She called, screaming about getting Reagan off the air. Littlefield pointed out that they couldn’t realistically cut off an ex-president in midspeech. Helen said the news division better sign off its coverage as soon as Reagan was finished or she was sending her audience home and NBC wouldn’t have a show. Warren tried to calm her down, telling her the network was ready to act quickly as soon as the speech ended.
Reagan kept talking. The clock passed 11:00 P.M. In a fever, Kushnick dialed up the NBC News control room in Houston and demanded to speak to Gartner again. This time she had a different threat.
As soon as Gartner picked up the phone, he heard the shrill voice saying, “If you don’t get this guy off the air, I’m not going to use Brokaw on the show tonight.”
That was hardly a prospect to make Gartner quake. “I don’t give a shit if Brokaw does your show or not,” he told Kushnick. “But I’ll tell you something. If you don’t use him tonight, you’re not using him another night. And let’s get one other thing straight. I’m the president of NBC News, and you don’t have anything to do with what I do.”
Kushnick was emotional and threatening and just as profane as she had been the month before. But NBC News stayed with Ronald Reagan. In fact, for Warren Littlefield’s taste, the news division stayed just a bit too long with its wrap up after the speech concluded. But finally as the news coverage ended, Warren began to relax, thinking the crisis had passed. That was when Rick Ludwin walked into his office, a look on his face as though he’d been smacked across the bridge of his nose with a two-by-four.
“The audience has gone home,” Ludwin said.
The dumbfounded Littlefield could only respond, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know the seats?” Ludwin said. “They’re empty. Got the picture?”
Littlefield still sat there looking at Ludwin across his desk with a vacant expression of shock on his face, saying, “I don’t understand.”
“The plane has left,” Ludwin said. “You know, there’s nobody there.”
Helen Kushnick had just killed a scheduled NBC show, a show for which advertising had already been sold, a show the network had been promoting all night long. With the local newscasts already running in the East, the network had to scramble to rush a repeat on the air. Worse than all of that was the embarrassment of having the network held hostage to the wrath of one producer.
NBC could have fired Helen Kushnick after that night, citing a failure-to-perform clause in her contract. But again no one acted. On the East Coast, the amazement that a “Tonight” show had been killed on the whim of a producer was exceeded only by the amazement that nothing in particular seemed to be happening as a result of it. Bob Wright’s level of tolerance was completely used up. He told Littlefield and Agoglia that this person was out of control. Warren told Wright that that was clear to everyone now. But he explained that Jay would be injured, perhaps beyond repair, if they tried to make a move on Helen right away. Littlefield said for the time being that it would be better to try to limp along.
One senior East Coast executive felt that Littlefield and Agoglia should know how Wright and others in the East really felt about the deteriorating “Tonight” show situation. So the executive called and told them how it was playing there: “You guys look pussy-whipped,” the executive said. “You look like weenies in the show business community. This woman is behaving in a totally unacceptable way. When is the come-to-Jesus meeting? When is somebody going to grab her by the throat? You’re not handling this, and you’re making Wright have to think about it. He’s getting drawn into this. You’re going to get caught in a wringer with him.”
And still the West Coast executives didn’t act. One of Helen’s staff members said that the NBC executives were simply intimidated by her. “She beat the shit out of them. She controlled them. They were afraid of her. She’s a screamer and she’s abusive; she’s a fuck-you person. She was such a different woman than they were used to dealing with, and she was just tougher than those guys.”
For Littlefield, the barrier to moving immediately on Helen was still Jay. What would Jay do
if they tried to remove her? Warren couldn’t be sure. He had not established strong personal ties to Jay, largely because Helen always got in the way. But he felt he needed to get through to Jay first, to convince him of how poorly she was serving him, before they could go after Helen. So he started calling Jay directly, gently prodding him about the growing problem with Helen. No matter how intolerable the Helen situation had become for him, and despite the impending loss of David Letterman, Warren Littlefield still wanted to preserve Jay Leno on the “Tonight” show. He gave no serious thought to solving both late-night problems by removing Jay and inserting Dave—for one simple reason. Warren had not stopped believing that Jay was the right choice for the job.
Late in August, with Helen still producing and the show still limping along, Bob Wright went to Los Angeles to attend the annual Emmy Awards telecast. After the ceremony, Wright attended a party at the star-infested Spago restaurant. He ran into Robert Morton there. Wright knew Morton had long experience in late-night television, so he asked him a question that had been on his mind for weeks. “What do you think of Jay?”
Morton got right to the point. “As long as you have that woman running the show, she’s not going to handle talent very well and you’re not going to have a good show,” Morton said.
Wright nodded in resigned assent and said, “I know, and I’m going to have do this myself.”
Ken Kragen never expected to wander across the “Tonight” show firing range. A longtime manager of country music stars, headed by Kenny Rogers, Kragen was low-key, well respected, and noncontroversial. He also just happened to be a guy who had no reason to allow himself to be pushed around.
In April, a month before Jay Leno took over the “Tonight” show, Kragen got a call from Bill Royce, one of the producers, who wanted to book a Kragen client, singer Trisha Yearwood, to an early date with Jay. Kragen consulted Yearwood’s schedule and said she unfortunately wouldn’t be coming to L.A. until October. Royce said he wanted to book her anyway, so they set a date of October 16. Kragen put it down in Yearwood’s datebook.
Kragen had booked his artists on the “Tonight” show before, though not all that frequently. Kenny Rogers had done a date with Arsenio Hall a couple of years earlier, and he hadn’t been booked back on the “Tonight” show since. Another of Kragen’s singers, Travis Tritt, had once done an appearance when Jay was guest hosting, after Kragen felt he needed a TV appearance for Tritt to plug his new album. Kragen had specifically called Carson’s producer, Fred de Cordova, and asked for a date, and Freddy had kindly booked him with Jay. The show had gone especially well, Kragen thought.
But since that appearance, Tritt had gravitated to Arsenio, simply believing his rock-oriented style of country music was more appropriate for Hall’s show. Kragen booked Tritt for another date with Arsenio in September 1992. That date had been locked in the previous May. Again Tritt had an album coming out, so Kragen and the record company were pushing a major promotion campaign, which included large billboards all over L.A.
Soon after the billboards went up, Kragen started getting calls from the “Tonight” show. Both Royce and another “Tonight” producer, Debbie Vickers, called and asked if Kragen could deliver Travis Tritt in September. Kragen politely explained that he’d be happy to bring Travis on, but only after he had done his previously scheduled spot with Arsenio. They said that wasn’t going to work for them. Even Fred de Cordova, now a “consultant” for Helen, called again, trying to get Kragen to break Tritt’s appearance on “The Arsenio Hall Show.”
Debbie Vickers also tried one more time, but Kragen hadn’t changed his mind. Vickers then told him that Kushnick was probably not going to take this well. She was right. Kragen’s next phone call was from Helen herself, who lost no time starting in after him. “Arsenio’s show is over with, he’s in the toilet,” Kragen heard Helen say. “His advertisers are deserting him; by the end of the year there won’t even be an ‘Arsenio Hall Show.’” An ever more belligerent Kushnick told Kragen he had to break the Tritt date on “Arsenio” if he ever wanted to book Travis Tritt on the “Tonight” show again.
Kragen, a calm person to begin with, let himself gear down and get even more tranquil. With no rancor at all in his voice, he simply told Kushnick that threats never worked with him. That seemed to flip a different switch in Helen. She lowered her own voice, and her tone became instantly pleasant. Suddenly she was explaining patiently how she and Jay had accommodated him a year earlier when he needed a TV date for Tritt. This would only be returning a favor, she said. Kragen found this tack reasonable, so reasonable that he said he would see what he could do about the “Arsenio” booking.
Naively, Kragen, who had not paid much attention to the increasingly bitter competition between the two late-night shows, went right ahead and called Sharon Olson, the booker at “Arsenio,” relating in a straight-forward way the story of Kushnick’s request that he cancel the booking because he owed them a favor. The reaction from Olson was instantaneous: a litany of the horror stories of “Arsenio” guests dropping out of the show after being threatened with retaliation from the “Tonight” show, and how crazy this feud had become. Kragen listened and understood why the “Arsenio” show would be adamant about keeping a booking they had had first. He told Olson nothing more needed to be said. He would stand by his Tritt booking on “Arsenio.”
Kragen called back and laid it out for Helen, trying to be as accommodating as he could under the circumstances, because he didn’t want to torch his singers’ relationships with the “Tonight” show. Kragen told Helen he couldn’t get Tritt out of the “Arsenio” date but that Travis was going to be back in February to promote a movie he was doing with Kenny Rogers and Naomi Judd, and probably Kragen could deliver all three of them together for Jay.
“We don’t do theme shows,” Helen snapped. And then she unloaded on Kragen, telling him how it was going to be: Not only was Travis Tritt not going to do the “Tonight” show ever again, but she said, “You and I will be in this town for a long time and we’ll see each other, and we’re never going to talk again. It’s your loss and the record company’s.” And then, with an audible slam, she hung up on him.
Even before he put down the phone, Kragen thought to himself, I have to go over there next month with Trisha Yearwood; boy, is that going to be uncomfortable. He didn’t have to live long with that thought, however, because only thirty minutes later, the phone rang again. It was Debbie Vickers of the “Tonight” show. Vickers told Kragen she was sorry to have to tell him this, but that Trisha Yearwood’s appearance had to be canceled. Vickers didn’t sugarcoat the message. Though Helen would later say Yearwood had to be canceled to make room for another singer, George Strait, Vickers told Kragen it was because Helen was simply furious about the Tritt booking. The clearest sign of that: No other date was offered to Trisha Yearwood.
And so Ken Kragen went public. He told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times his story of how his artists were being blackballed from the “Tonight” show. The paper had been hearing all sorts of horror stories about the booking wars in late night and had wanted to do a story about it. The reporter asked Kragen if he would go on the record. Kragen saw no reason not to.
The story, which ran on the front page of the newspaper’s “Calendar” section, exploded all across the television industry the next morning. Kragen was the first artists’ representative willing to go after Helen Kushnick, and it set off a frenzy of stories about her scorched-earth booking practices. Kragen himself was deluged with calls and letters from people who felt they had been victimized by Kushnick’s tactics; they thanked Kragen for having the guts to take her on in the press.
Another group of grateful parties were the executives at NBC. For Littlefield it was “independent verification” from a source whose motives could not reasonably be questioned. (Kushnick would question them anyway.) Littlefield believed the Kragen charges would put to rest any effort by Kushnick to link subsequent actions by NBC to sexism.
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sp; The L.A. Times story about Kragen appeared on Tuesday, September 15. Littlefield, expecting action was coming soon, spent much of that week trying to shore up his relationship with Leno. Warren did not think it made sense to go after Helen with guns blazing, not with the doubts he still had about how Jay would react. The goal was to have Jay stay and Helen leave. In order to achieve this, Warren felt he had to lift the veil from Jay’s eyes that prevented him from seeing how Helen was destroying his show. But Jay resisted; when Warren would suggest to him that Helen was wrecking the show, Jay would invariably return to the refuge of the ratings. “Aren’t we getting the numbers?” he would ask Warren. And Littlefield would tell him: “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. You’re approaching disaster.”
Neither Littlefield nor Agoglia believed they understood at all the true nature of the strange, interdependent relationship between Jay and Helen. But they both agreed that Helen and the uproar surrounding her handling of the “Tonight” show were eating up huge chunks of their time, dominating the business of the NBC entertainment division. During that week Warren spoke with Jay alone, and Helen and Jay together, and by Thursday he and Agoglia finally made the decision. They called Bob Wright and told him they were ready to fire Helen Kushnick. They still didn’t know whether Jay would break with Helen, or back her and quit in sympathy; but they felt there was a good chance that Jay was clued in enough now to what had been going on that he wouldn’t do something that self-destructive.
Helen never flinched from taking that approach. She took her case public on Friday morning, September 18, in a phone interview with Howard Stern on his national radio talk show. Helen contradicted Kragen’s story and blamed the male conspiracy in Hollywood for undermining her efforts to run the “Tonight” show. The interview only outraged NBC further. Later in the day, Helen had her lawyer, Ron Berg, send out a letter to Wright, with copies to every member of the General Electric board of directors, threatening to sue the network on the basis of sexual discrimination. NBC decided it couldn’t wait any longer. Helen had to go.