by Carter, Bill
But Jay was still holding out. He asked the NBC executives to draw up a proposal with acceptable terms for NBC on what Helen could and couldn’t do. NBC came up with a list of conditions of employment. These included forbidding Helen to book guests and cancel them and to talk to the media. Littlefield was convinced this was a worthless stopgap because Helen could never have lived under any restrictions.
During a meeting held that afternoon, Agoglia and Littlefield witnessed as Helen changed from a cool, controlled, rational person to someone screaming and out of control in a matter of seconds. Agoglia started getting nervous as he saw Kushnick fold herself into a lotus position and start rocking. When she left, Littlefield told Leno that he had to make the break; he had to see that Helen needed help, that she couldn’t stand up to this kind of pressure anymore.
By Saturday Warren was telling Jay over the phone that NBC’s list of restrictions on Helen’s activities wasn’t even an issue now. “We’re trying to put Band-Aids on a mortal wound,” he said. “You’re in denial, Jay. You’ve got to see this. The woman needs help. She desperately needs help, and whether she acknowledges that and wants to do anything about it, whether you want to do anything about it, that’s not my job. That’s just my opinion. But I’ll tell you one thing: We’re not continuing the show with this woman.”
Littlefield and Agoglia went to Leno’s house on Sunday night for a final confrontation. Littlefield, who had majored in psychology in college, dredged up some of that undergraduate expertise and told Jay that what he and John were staging was an “intervention.” They had to break Jay of his “addiction” to Helen Kushnick, Warren said, starting to equate Jay’s relationship with Helen to a chemical dependency. This was psychological dependency, as Littlefield saw it. Then he revved up the rhetoric.
“She is either going to take you down or you are going to separate from her,” Warren said. “But she is not going to take me down. She is fired. She had to be fired. She’s gone. She is not allowed back on the premises. She will have nothing to do with the show.”
But Jay wasn’t buying into this “intervention” talk easily. Even after all that had gone on, Jay still resisted. He had been with Helen for seventeen years; he knew that she had gotten him the show that every comic in America dreamed of getting, and besides, he was still carrying around that promise he had made to Jerry Kushnick on his deathbed.
Warren thought Jay was acting weirdly, passively commenting on much that was being said, dodging the ultimate question: Will you show up tomorrow after we fire Helen Kushnick? Jay just couldn’t seem to say yes to the question.
Littlefield felt he had to press the ultimate button, the nuclear button as far as Leno was concerned. He said to Jay: “If you can’t separate, then I think it’s a mistake. I regret it, but we at NBC do have choices. And the choice we have is to tell David Letterman that it’s time to take over the ‘Tonight’ show. And I have to tell you, Jay, I suspect that he and Peter Lassally would be in Burbank on twenty-four hours’ notice.”
That got Jay’s attention. “Would you do that?” Jay asked.
Warren said, “We will absolutely do that. We will not hesitate to do it. That’s how strongly we feel.”
In reality, Littlefield didn’t feel strongly at all about that alternative. He still wanted Leno, not Letterman, though that feeling was not shared by the full staff of people in Burbank who had endured the bedlam of the previous three months of a “Tonight” show under Helen and Jay. As one NBC Productions employee said to an NBC executive that weekend: “The really right move would be to fire Jay at the same time. They really should have known by now that it isn’t working with Jay.”
But that move was never in Warren Littlefield’s plans. He had so much invested in Jay, he was willing to fight for him to the limit. Warren pressed Jay for a commitment that he would work Monday if Helen were let go—and Tuesday and Wednesday and the days after that. All Littlefield wanted to hear was some kind of commitment, some hint of assent from Jay.
Instead, Jay began asking over and over, “So you’re going to fire me? You’re going to fire me, right?” Every time Warren would say, “Well, Jay, we want you to stay, but not with Helen,” Jay would come right back with, “So that means you’re going to fire me? I’ll be fired, right?” And then Jay would sort of dip his head and use body English as though trying to signal Littlefield and Agoglia that he was trying to convey something in code.
The NBC executives were totally bewildered. All they could think of was that Jay’s winking and nodding about being fired must be for the benefit of his lawyer, Ron Berg, who was also Helen’s lawyer. Jay seemed to be trying to set up some sort of odd legal justification for separating himself from Helen, as though he feared she would sue him, too. And then his response would be: I would have been fired otherwise. But Jay wasn’t saying anything like that directly; he was just laying out these bizarre feints and clues. With much prodding, Littlefield eventually elicited a comment from Leno that indicated he was going to go off and work on his monologue because he had a show to do the next night. Littlefield pushed the point one more time: “And you will not do a show with Helen Kushnick.” When Jay repeated, “Well, I have a show to do,” that sold Littlefield. He concluded that Jay was ready to continue with the show—if only he didn’t backslide when Helen called him after Littlefield and Agoglia went out the door.
Helen did call, of course. She and Jay were on the phone all weekend, many times with other members of the show’s staff or outside executives and associates who knew both of them. All of these people were being drawn in, asked to describe their own opinions on whether Helen should go or stay. On some of these calls Jay asked others on the phone point-blank if they thought Helen was crazy. The questions put these people on the defensive, because they were never sure if Jay was still working with Helen and the answer was going to get right back to her. At least once that weekend Helen called a staff member herself and asked what the problem was with how she had been running the show. When the staff member tried to dodge the question, Helen got Jay on the line and pulled him into the discussion, saying, See, this person has no problem with me.
“I tried to clarify what I said,” the staff member said, “and then they started to go at each other. Then Sara is on the phone crying, saying Jay is hurting Mommy, and Helen at this point is flying back and forth between anger and a sort of childlike vulnerability at being rejected, looking for approval. I had to get off the phone. Later I heard that at some point Mavis stepped in and said, No more of this.”
Dan Klores, a New York–based public relations executive, was also dragged into the drama that weekend. Klores, who had been working for Helen and Jay, felt himself tugged between these two clients—and realized he had to choose up sides. Helen had hired him to do publicity for Jay; she paid him and insisted that he deal with her directly, and not with Jay. But at this point Klores didn’t see how Helen was going to survive this showdown. He decided to try to give Jay some advice; he thought Jay needed it desperately. Klores was another who tried to bring Jay to the light, get him to recognize what this woman was doing to him. But that weekend, Jay asked Klores to repeat for Ron Berg, his lawyer, the things he had been saying about the show being damaged by all that was going on. Klores complied, even though he knew his comments would be getting straight back to Helen.
During one of their own phone conversations that weekend, Jay even suggested that he and Helen go see a therapist together. Helen laughed at the idea, saying it was the NBC guys who needed help, not her—all you had to do was look at the programs they were putting in prime time to see that. But Jay suggesting therapy was in itself a shocker to associates who heard about it later. Therapy was an idea completely alien to a guy so disdainful of stress, emotional excess, and all forms of psychological mumbo jumbo. Jay would often lump therapy in with things like EST. But he was terribly torn between feelings of gratefulness for what Helen had done for his career and guilt for possibly adding to the misery that had des
cended on her life.
Still, Jay’s mood turned darker during one of these conversations when Helen blurted out that she had indeed planted the story in the New York Post the year before, the story about NBC wanting to dump Carson that had stirred up so much bitterness. About this, Jay was finally appalled. Helen tried to tell him how it was done for his own good, how she had always acted in his best interests, but Jay rejected that excuse. He had called Johnny and sworn that his side had nothing to do with the Post story. Now he knew it was all Helen’s doing, and he was ashamed and humiliated.
But the drama wasn’t over. On Monday morning, when Helen arrived at her “Tonight” show office with Berg, she was handed an official letter of dismissal from John Agoglia. She scoffed, told him Jay wouldn’t stand for it, and went about the business of producing that night’s show. Somehow, through all the Sturm und Drang, Jay had managed to keep up his own routine. He and Jimmy Brogan had put together Monday’s monologue as usual in the middle of the night at Jay’s house.
Soon after he arrived that morning, Jay trooped up to the executive offices with Helen’s letter of dismissal in hand and told Agoglia he couldn’t agree with the firing. Then he walked out. NBC decided to let events play out. Agoglia and Littlefield considered sending armed guards to the “Tonight” offices to drag Kushnick out of the building, but then they thought better of that. That scene was too ugly to contemplate. Littlefield simply said to Agoglia: “She leaves the building of her own volition at some point at the end of the day, and then she’s fired from the lot.”
Ron Berg showed up to talk to Littlefield. He was still trying to negotiate something for Kushnick, but Littlefield simply cut him off, saying, “Time out. This is nonnegotiable. She’s off the lot. She never returns. She walks out the door whenever she walks out the door, never to return.”
A few scenes were left to play. Dan Klores got his termination letter, faxed into New York from Helen through Ron Berg. Boom, just like that. Fired. Klores decided to draw up a memo for Jay anyway, with ten ideas for changing the show after Helen left.
At midday, Bob Mazza, a replacement press agent Helen hired on the spot that Monday, announced that Jay would be releasing a statement. In his office, Littlefield was ready to explode with exasperation when he heard the news of a statement coming from Leno; but before he could, Jay called. He told Warren the statement would be coming out but that it had no bearing on the agreement they had reached. Everything he had said the night before was still in effect, Jay promised. “I’m moving forward with you. I’m doing the show. Help me get through this. She’s not the executive producer anymore. I’m doing the show.”
Warren recoiled at the idea that Helen had enough hold over Jay still that she could manipulate a statement of support out of him, but he was relieved to hear Jay hadn’t lost his senses completely and put his job on the line for her.
The brief statement seemed to contradict everything Jay was saying to the NBC executives: “I regret the actions of NBC today. I feel NBC’s actions are unwarranted in light of the success of the show to date, and I continue to support Ms. Kushnick.” The statement went out even as NBC executives were telling reporters to pay it little heed because Leno was still on board and would continue with the show.
Jay Leno, who had to go on a stage that evening and make 300 people laugh, sat amid chaos in his office all day. He had one arm out in each direction and was being pulled both ways at once. He was not going to give up his job, but he was still trying to avoid confrontation with Helen as she went down in flames. If he had hoped to skate by her one last day, it wasn’t going to work.
She confronted him in her office. She was raging, pushing his buttons, screaming so loud that she could be heard by the rest of the staff outside. Finally they heard an enormous crashing sound. All day they had heard the sounds of Helen throwing things around the office, so they assumed she was now completely trashing the place. But Jay later said he had slammed down a glass mirror and shattered it on her desk in an effort to get Helen under control. In this last attempt to get him to stand by her, Helen came at Jay with her every emotion, eventually telling him he had to quit the “Tonight” show for Sara’s sake. “Well, why is it for Sara’s sake?” he asked her, though no rational answer to the question was even remotely possible.
Some of the other staff members were physically afraid of what Helen might do that day. By this point Helen had targeted one of the producers, Debbie Vickers, as a principal in the plot against her. Vickers was one of the few holdovers from the Carson days, but she had long since earned Jay’s complete trust. Helen had screamed Vickers’s name all day long Monday, how she never trusted Debbie, how Sara had told her Debbie was a snake. When it came time for Vickers to go out on stage and work the show with Jay, Kushnick approached her. She told her Jay was going to fire her in two days, and as Vickers walked onto the set to put Jay’s notes for the night’s interviews down on his desk, Kushnick continued after her, saying that Vickers was never going to get away with what she had done to her. In front of the camera crew and 300 of Jay’s fans sitting in the audience, Helen Kushnick was screaming at the show’s producer on the set. Finally the producer turned on her. The crew heard Vickers yell back at Kushnick: “When are you going to learn to take responsibility for your own actions? You are now being held accountable for your actions.” Then Vickers escaped to the control room. A young production assistant was left with the responsibility of leading Jay through the show, though he stayed in constant contact by phone with Vickers in the control room.
Less than five minutes after the blowup between Kushnick and Vickers, the band hit the theme and Jay Leno walked out onto the stage. He punched out another monologue, with all his usual authority. He interviewed his guests and got through the show with no outward signs of distress. Warren Littlefield watched the show unfold on the monitor in his office, thinking Jay had done a great show that night. Warren was in awe of Jay’s ability to perform under such duress.
Helen left the NBC lot that night for the last time. As soon as she was off the premises, NBC had the studio guards post little photos of her at every entrance, with a message that this woman was banned from returning. The “Tonight” staff thought they looked like wanted posters.
When he arrived Tuesday morning, with Helen no longer a looming presence, Jay had changed his demeanor completely. At the noon staff meeting, which he previously had not attended, Jay gave a speech and apologized for all the madness that had gone on. He swore that a new day was starting that everyone would now pull together. Jay took full responsibility for everything that had gone on, saying he should have known all that was happening, that terrible things had been done—things he didn’t know about but should have.
Jay spent the next several weeks apologizing to almost everyone he assumed had been subjected to Helen’s wrath. That included Johnny Carson, whom he called to admit that he’d been wrong to deny Helen was responsible for the New York Post story, and to apologize abjectly. Carson was generous to him, saying this was an incident to learn something from, that sometimes the people speaking for you are doing you a disservice.
Ken Kragen was generous as well when Jay called him. Kragen told Jay that if Helen was a friend, he really ought to try to get her some kind of help, but he concluded that Jay didn’t really want to hear that. Kragen decided that Helen and Jay’s relationship came down to “abuser/abused.”
The “Tonight” staff felt a pall lift from the show immediately. Some of them sensed, for a couple of days anyway, that Jay was still talking to Helen on the phone. When he would make some off-the-wall suggestions about the running order of the guests, or some other detail of the production, they guessed that the suggestions were coming from Helen. But before the week was out, Jay told several staff members that he had made a final break with Helen after one last call. In the call, Jay said, Helen had tried everything, from telling him she had a guaranteed $25 million deal for him that he surely couldn’t walk away from, to leveling a thr
eat to have her own daughter hold a press conference to tell the world what kind of person he really was if he didn’t quit the show. Helen did threaten to sue him, he said, if he did not pay her $25,000 a week. Fearing legal entanglements, and worried about the fact that Helen still controlled all the stock he owned, Leno even made one $25,000 payment the first week after Helen was fired. After that, he said enough.
Later Jay said the revelation that she had planted the Post story was truly the last straw for him, because for all the insanity that had gone on, he had never felt he was lied to before. Their final conversation was so heated, Jay said, that he cursed Helen out, told her she had tried to ruin his career, and that he was never going to speak to her again.
Soon after Helen’s departure, as Jay went about his campaign to pick up the pieces of the wreckage left in her wake, he tried to describe his motivation by referring to what he called his all-time favorite story: “A Christmas Carol.”
“I always remembered the last line about nobody keeping Christmas better than Ebenezer Scrooge,” Jay said. After all that had happened in his first three months in the job, Jay went about trying to keep the business of running a talk show better than anybody else: ending all the booking restrictions, rehiring people who’d been fired, putting up money for staff parties, apologizing for all offenses, righting all wrongs.
“I mean, I’d like to think the door is still open and eventually you can get into heaven somehow.”