by Carter, Bill
After some further prodding from Lassally, Letterman spoke to Ovitz directly. In a phone call to Ovitz, Dave said the words himself, simply and without complication: “Mike, I’ve had one dream in my life. All I want is the ‘Tonight’ show.” Ovitz, believing that Letterman was blinded by his childhood dream, made the inarguable points about why it made little sense: The “Tonight” show was now damaged goods; Dave had so little to gain by taking over a diminished franchise. But Dave was Mike’s client, and his client was telling him what he really wanted him to do for him.
And then Mike Ovitz knew that this long, intense, exciting negotiation would not be truly complete until David Letterman had an offer from NBC for the “Tonight” show.
Bob Wright was still waiting for his West Coast team to supply him the option he needed to make the gnawing in his gut about Letterman go away: the Dana Carvey option. NBC had announced in July that it had signed Carvey to what it called a “long-term” deal that made him exclusive to NBC. His name surfaced almost immediately in industry rumors as the likely choice to replace Letterman in the 12:30 slot, rumors that NBC did not waste any energy denying. As the hopes to hold on to Letterman grew dimmer, Littlefield played the Carvey card, telling Wright that the star was lined up to step into Dave’s late-night sneakers.
But almost from the time the rumors started, other NBC executives who knew the Carvey situation well told Wright that the star wasn’t going to accept a late-night show, not with his movie career soaring, and especially not a show to follow Jay Leno. Carvey had told people that he idolized Letterman and would probably consider doing a show following Dave, but he would inevitably be cool to the idea of trying to follow Dave’s act as the host of “Late Night” after Jay’s “Tonight” show.
In mid-December the Carvey subplot twisted off in a new direction. A leak to the press from people close to Carvey generated a story that NBC’s deal with him might not be what the network thought it was. Carvey’s agent, Brad Grey, disputed the idea that Carvey’s deal with NBC was long-term at all, saying it ended “after January.” Suddenly NBC didn’t even have a secure contract with the star supposedly lined up to replace Letterman. Worse than that, the press accounts of the botched deal included a rumor that Stringer was negotiating with Grey to bring Carvey to CBS for its own 12:30 show to follow Letterman.
Stringer denied that part of the rumor, and NBC tried to dismiss the entire story as a publicity stunt. But Wright, feeling even more acid filling up his already suffering midsection, started asking Littlefield and Agoglia much tougher questions about how firmly they had secured their option to take over for a departed Letterman. To Wright it seemed as if that part of the late-night transaction weren’t happening at all. The exasperated Wright said to his West Coast executives: “After all this, after ten years on the air, this is going to come down to whether I can convince Letterman to stay. That seems to be the company strategy.”
The frustrations seemed endless: Wright couldn’t get anything going with Ovitz; the option supposedly being supplied by his West Coast team was turning to dust on him; all anyone wanted to tell him about Leno was that the “Tonight” show would somehow hang on to first place in the ratings. The NBC president had few clicks left on the remote control. But at least he knew one channel was still open. Wright contacted Peter Lassally.
It was a conversation Lassally had been waiting for. But when Bob Wright got on the phone, he seemed to be looking for someone, anyone, to negotiate with. “What if we build something in prime time for Dave?” Wright asked Lassally. “We could try to expand Dave’s exposure to different parts of the schedule.” Lassally knew he was in no position to negotiate for Dave, and he didn’t want to make assumptions for him or Ovitz. He told Wright he couldn’t be sure what Dave would think of any of Wright’s proposals. Finally he said to Wright, “Well, why don’t you have a meeting with him directly?”
There was nothing Bob Wright wanted more. But time was extremely tight. They set a date just a couple of days away.
Lassally had heard enough from his NBC contacts about how Wright was desperate not to lose Letterman, that a deal was truly doable, that he felt the meeting he had set up between Letterman and Wright was the most positive step so far in the campaign to steal back the “Tonight” show. But Lassally knew he should run the idea of the meeting by Ovitz.
When Lassally reached him in his CAA office and told him the news of the meeting, Ovitz expressed immediate reservations that quickly shifted to strong disapproval. The client shouldn’t be meeting with the dealmaker, Ovitz said. CAA should do Letterman’s talking to Bob Wright. He asked Lassally to cancel the meeting, at least until Ovitz and Dave could talk about it.
The next day Lassally sheepishly called Wright and made up an excuse for why Letterman couldn’t make their scheduled meeting. “Dave’s just not going to be available tomorrow,” he said. Wright immediately looked on his calendar for another date, as Lassally dodged and weaved and tried not to commit. They made a tentative date for Monday, December 21, with Lassally cautioning Wright that Monday was the day Dave often had to leave the office to go tape a remote comedy bit.
When Lassally and Morton talked it over with Letterman, they weighed all the factors, including CAA’s understandable opposition to Dave’s meeting directly with NBC’s top decision maker. But Dave agreed when his producers made the point that in this case Bob Wright was more than that; he was also the guy who had been Dave’s boss for six years. “This is your boss. You’ve got to see him. He wants to talk to you,” Morton said. They decided to buck Ovitz on this point.
In a conference call with Ovitz, Letterman explained his reasoning, why he felt he should sit down and talk with Wright. Ovitz calmly explained his concerns that Dave might say something that was not consistent with what his representatives at CAA were telling Wright. But Dave pressed the point: It was the right thing to do to talk to his boss, and he was going to do it. Ovitz said he understood, and only asked for Dave’s assurance that he would not get into anything that constituted a negotiation. Then Lassally contacted Wright’s office and let him know the Monday meeting was on.
The week before the meeting with Letterman, Bob Wright expected to be fortified by the information gathered in the special research study he had commissioned. Both the Letterman camp, represented by Rohrbeck and Ebersol, and the Leno camp, represented by Littlefield and Agoglia, were avid for ammunition to apply to their cause, so the research study was a hotly anticipated item. Ebersol and Rohrbeck were tipped early by the New York research department that the raw results of the study were in. They jumped on the phone immediately. The researchers gave the NBC executives the raw interpretation of the results—and to the Letterman backers, it sounded like good news. Even accepting the predictable fuzziness in this kind of speculative research, they believed the results showed Letterman would win a head-to-head test with Leno. More specifically, the study showed that Negative reaction to Letterman, which NBC had picked up in earlier research, had significantly decreased. They wasted no time in barging into Wright’s office with the news.
The NBC study had elements of the research that CBS was conducting about the same time, but it was not exactly the same. It was phone-based research with viewers in cable television homes who were asked to watch the two stats and make a choice.
But the West Coast executives had not yet weighed in with their spin on the research numbers. When they did, they provided a read on the results that made the outcome completely confusing—or so Bob Wright thought. He found the research data as confusing as the executive-level discussion had been.
Wright concluded that the research could say whatever one wanted it to say, because the questions being asked were too speculative: “Who would you rather watch at 11:30?” implies both guys are available at 11:30, which was not then a reality. And it did not answer the question of whether the David Letterman that viewers were seeing in his 12:30 mode would be the same Letterman at 11:30. The pro-Leno spinners had an available d
efense for any argument that the numbers showed real strength for Letterman, saying Letterman’s results had to be affected by all the press coverage of his big CBS contract. There was also the possibility, said Robert Niles, an NBC senior vice president with a background in research, that Letterman’s strong support might be partly attributable to what always happens in attitudinal research: People choose answers based on attitude rather than what they would really watch. They give the answer they think is preferred instead of giving their own preference. Taking into account all the publicity Letterman was getting, his showing really wasn’t all that great, the Leno executives argued.
After all that smog had been blown across the numbers, Wright’s vision was just as blurry as it had been before the research arrived. But John Rohrbeck was infuriated. He told some colleagues that he believed the research was being deliberately muddied up, and that it was poorly conceived to begin with. He asked Wright if he could quickly throw something else together, something from the Frank Magid Company, one of the most widely used television analysts in the country. Rohrbeck had used Magid as a consultant when he managed KNBC, the NBC station in Los Angeles. Wright agreed to put up $100,000 for whatever hurry-up research Magid could provide.
In the meantime, with only days before he was to sit down with Letterman, Wright decided to look for help from some unscientific consultants. He started calling people whose opinions he valued. Brandon Tartikoff told Wright that he believed Letterman was better than Leno, but he questioned whether he was enough better to justify the price that NBC would now have to pay to keep him. One colleague outside the network whom Wright called was more blunt: “You can’t deal with David,” this colleague said. “Don’t lose sleep over this. It was bound to happen at some point; it just happened under your watch. Take it in stride.”
On Sunday, just a day before his scheduled meeting with Letterman, Wright made another call, one he had previously resisted making. He called his friend Johnny Carson.
Carson had become fond of Bob Wright; their wives had grown close and the four of them even scheduled vacation trips together. But Carson had no interest in stepping into the middle of the situation NBC had got itself into. When he had been at NBC, there on the scene, no one had asked him to give his opinion on who should follow him on the “Tonight” show. Now Bob was calling, asking what Johnny thought he should do with this Leno-Letterman dilemma.
“Bob, why are you asking me now?” Carson said. “Isn’t this a fait accompli? Doesn’t Jay already have the job?”
Wright said of course he did, but added: “We made a mistake. I should have asked you before.”
Johnny politely declined the invitation to cast a vote on who should get the “Tonight” show at this late date. “I’m not volunteering now,” Johnny said. But he did have one very strong opinion: “It’s going to be a shame if you lose David, Bob.”
On that point, Carson was preaching to the converted. All of Wright’s instincts as a businessman, and just as a regular viewer of television, told him that Letterman was a unique talent, the kind who could get people talking in the office the next day about what they had seen the night before. In very small circles at NBC, among the people he trusted with his private thoughts, Bob Wright had said it time and time again: If only this had been his decision all along, he would have picked David Letterman.
But now that a different decision had been made and was long in effect, it was going to be wrenching and hideously expensive for Bob Wright to undo.
Even when the pressure on Bob Wright was excruciating, he didn’t show it. Panic was not in his nature—he had dealt with a string of crises in his six years at NBC, and seldom lost his veneer of cool control. An extremely fit man of forty-nine, Wright surprised a lot of people who saw him as a bland corporate creature of the General Electric Company. He dressed with executive style but also with a touch of color and dash; he even seemed to go bald stylishly.
Wright had come to NBC as a total outsider, the “GE plastic” man who had started his GE career in the plastics division. The clash in corporate cultures was instantly jarring, as Wright seemed intentionally to ruffle every feather in the peacock after he was named president in September 1986. NBC had been riding high on a pile of profits of more than $500 million a year, thanks to its completely dominating prime-time lineup. But Wright walked in the door sensing trouble, announcing that the company had to change or be engulfed by the revolution about to splinter the industry into hundreds of much smaller slices. Soon rows of holdover NBC executives began heading for the exits, some in disgust over the new direction Wright declared for the company.
Gradually, however, Wright won over many of his initial detractors, at least on a personal level. He clearly had a talent for relationships; some of the biggest NBC names grew fond of him, including Carson, Bill Cosby, and Lorne Michaels. Wright, a native of Hempstead, Long Island, and graduate of Holy Cross College, had a Jesuit-trained mind, went to church on Sundays, was devoted to his wife, Suzanne, and their three children, and exhibited an unexpected sense of playfulness about his position.
Critics inside NBC accused Wright of being a non-broadcaster, because his training at GE was in the financial services division, and before that, in the cable business as president of Cox Cable. They also said he was no more than a yes-man for GE chairman Jack Welch. Wright had a truly close relationship with Welch; they were neighbors in Connecticut and sometimes vacationed together. But he resented the implication that GE was micromanaging NBC and that he was serving as no more than the on-the-job foreman. Wright saw himself as a forward thinker in a business encumbered by some calcified traditions. He had also begun to assemble a core of executives, including Ebersol in sports and Ed Scanlon in personnel, who were intensely loyal to him on a personal basis. If Wright had led the network into some mistakes, it was at least partly out of the need for change. And the changes, he believed, had positioned NBC much more advantageously to deal with the unpredictable media future. Even his sharpest critics did not doubt Wright had keen intelligence and perception into the big picture of industry.
But the facts were stark; NBC’s performance had been in a free fall since the day GE and Wright arrived. Absolutely nothing about NBC was in better shape at that point, except for its nonbroadcasting interests. Wright picked up a reputation as someone more interested in making good deals than making good television shows. The cable channels that NBC invested in were seen as distractions that kept Wright from focusing on the erosion all around him. NBC executives who liked Wright enormously on a personal level couldn’t help but question his management skills as the network’s position deteriorated in almost every area—daytime shows, its Saturday morning lineup, news programs, and worst of all, its prime-time shows. At the close of 1992, NBC, once the house of hits in prime time, was sinking fester than a sandcastle that misjudged the tide.
As he prepared to look for a solution with David Letterman, Bob Wright heard from one other interested party; Jay Leno called.
Leno was getting his information from his West Coast allies. They provided all the assurances they could that Jay was secure, but they described Wright as a wild card. He would not accede to their request for a straight-out statement of irreversible support for Jay. Wright was in New York surrounded by the Letterman cabal, they told Leno. Littlefield and Agoglia had met with Leno and told him how much they supported him. But they conceded it was going to be Bob Wright’s call. All they could report to Leno about what Wright was saying was that NBC was committed to him at 11:30—for now.
Leno was perplexed and anxious. Things had seemed to be going so well. His ratings, down as low as a 4.2 in the summer, had climbed back up to a 4.9. He felt suddenly unappreciated. He was committed to working forty-eight weeks a year, five nights a week. Letterman was doing a show only forty-two weeks a year, and he only produced four original shows a week.
Jay had seen his staff come together in the aftermath of all the craziness of the three months under Helen. Now they ha
d to put up with this sudden uncertainty, the fear that a New York executive might pull their jobs out from under them.
But Jay didn’t have a manager to intercede on his behalf anymore. Soon after Helen was fired, he had rehired one of the many victims of Helen’s rage, Dan Klores. Jay had read Dan’s ten-part memo on how to improve the show, which Dan had faxed to him even after having been fired by Helen. Now Jay wanted Dan and his ideas back on his team. Once back with Jay, he was having more impact. Jay was clearly coming to trust both Dan Klores and the account executive Klores had assigned to him, Hayley Sumner. When Jay discussed with them the mixed messages he was getting from inside NBC, the PR executives started to push Jay to take some action. Sumner, who visited Leno often in Burbank, never stopped urging him to be aggressive. So did Klores. “You have to make it clear to them,” Klores told Leno over the phone, “there’s going to be a problem with you if they keep up this thing with Letterman.”
Jay heard from his supporters in Burbank that Bob Wright was about to meet with Dave. As he often did when he wanted to solve a problem, whether with a critic he felt had rapped him unfairly or someone in the industry who had raised an issue about him, Jay picked up the phone himself. He called Bob Wright.
As always Jay was mild-mannered and polite. He asked Wright if he could explain the situation. All Wright could tell him was he supported him, that he was happy with his performance, but that this was a tricky situation. He told Leno he simply was not sure yet what the network would do.