by Carter, Bill
Jay made a pledge that he would win the competition with Dave. “I’ll win by a lot or by a tenth of a point, and if I don’t I’ll go,” Leno told Wright. But Wright explained that winning wasn’t the issue. “My issue is whether there will be enough audience there to sustain the kind of support you need to support these two shows.” He explained that his concern was that CBS would, in its typical fashion, go out and destroy the time period. It would be another baseball deal. They would make a huge mess out of NBC’s perfect late-night world.
Leno thanked Wright for speaking with him and for his candor, but he ended the conversation feeling even more strongly that Bob Wright was on the fence—and that his future at the “Tonight” show was in true jeopardy.
On the afternoon of December 21, Bob Wright walked into the warren of offices on the fourteenth floor that housed the “Late Night” staff. Without a show to do on Mondays, it was always quieter down there. In the late afternoon of the shortest day of the year, all the windows were dim with the faint daylight. Wright came alone. He ran into Robert Morton in the hall and greeted him warmly. Then Wright dropped by Peter Lassally’s office. He told Peter he would prefer that he not sit in on this meeting with Dave. “I really would like this to be just the two of us,” Wright said. Lassally thought that was appropriate. And then Wright went off to Dave’s big corner office, the same office where Dave had orchestrated his walkout on Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia eighteen months earlier.
Letterman had no agenda this time, other than to listen to whatever Bob Wright had come to say. He welcomed Wright pleasantly but seriously. Letterman had worked for Bob Wright for six of his ten years at “Late Night,” but he did not know the man at all. Much had happened between Dave and NBC, and Dave and GE, and Dave had never felt any sense of humanity coming down from above. But Bob Wright had turned up prepared to talk to Letterman as a man with a problem so troubling that he hardly knew how to approach dealing with it. It wasn’t NBC or GE talking, it was the guy Dave worked for—a decent guy in the midst of a real dilemma—and Dave found himself connecting with Bob Wright.
Wright asked in a very straightforward way for Letterman’s help. Not because he was worried that the business he worked for was going to suffer terrible financial losses if he left for CBS, but because Letterman had made himself a part of the NBC family and Wright really wanted to find a way for him to stay.
“Is there anything we can do to keep you here?” Wright asked.
In his guts Letterman wanted to say yes. He wanted so badly to stay at NBC. He truly liked it at NBC, despite all the pettiness and the second-class treatment and even the crushing snub when the “Tonight” show went to Leno. He loved the building, and the way the other NBC shows were close by, and especially the NBC late-night tradition, which had such an intoxicating effect on those who had become a part of it. But Letterman had to tell Wright the reality of his position. “I don’t really think there is,” Letterman said softly. “I don’t want to mislead you. I have to say I don’t think there is.”
Of course, there was one thing NBC could do and Letterman had to get it out on the table. “You know,” he said. “I would stay, but your 11:30 show is taken. And so beyond that I can’t stay.”
Letterman did not hammer Wright with a demand that he offer him the “Tonight” show. The perfect solution might have been to have Wright declare that NBC had acknowledged its terrible blunder and was redressing it immediately by removing Jay and installing Dave. But Letterman didn’t expect to hear that. He could tell that Wright was tormented and wrestling with the frustration of the situation, and he respected him for the effort.
And Bob Wright tried. He moved the discussion away from the 11:30 issue as best he could, toward the assurances he could offer that the network truly did appreciate Letterman’s talents. Wright knew damage had been done, that talent relations in Letterman’s case had been destructive instead of supportive, and he wanted to assess just how bad the damage was. Wright could sense from Letterman’s sympathetic tone that he was eliciting a favorable response to his fence-mending. So he tried to move on to an exploration of what NBC could still do for David Letterman.
“There are things we can put on the table,” Wright told him, “to improve your career, your image.” But the packages that Wright had in mind for Letterman, with all their prime-time exposure and other opportunities to appear all over the network—while retaining his 12:30 base—missed the point. Letterman had never looked for more prime-time appearances; it made him nervous to have to try and compete in prime time even once a year with an anniversary special. He saw himself as a late-night performer, a specialist.
And so Letterman kept coming back to his desire to move to 11:30—not to be petulant, but simply because that was what this whole, long waltz around the floor had been about. Dave felt he had to go to 11:30 now because it was time, time to play in that bigger arena, the biggest arena in his chosen field. He didn’t belong in prime time or anywhere else on the network; and he certainly didn’t belong at 12:30 anymore. He had done that; now it was time to move up. He belonged at 11:30.
And then Letterman told Wright just how carefully he had thought about the move to 11:30, how he recognized that being on an hour earlier would require some subtle adjustment in his performance. It was exactly the thing that Wright had wondered about himself, the thing some of the NBC West Coast executives had said Letterman would never be able to do. But the explanation certainly sounded impressively lucid to Bob Wright.
“I know I can’t do my show at 11:30,” Letterman told him. “I have to change the show and I am completely able to do that, and I want to do that. And I would only do the 11:30 show if I could change it.” Letterman laid out his philosophy of smoothing out the edginess from his 12:30 show: using more mainstream guests, doing a more traditional monologue, adding more class to both his own look and the show’s. The flexibility that Letterman was displaying, the savvy, the confidence that he could drop part of one audience and add part of another, left Bob Wright a total believer that Letterman would be able to pull it off.
Wright heard what Letterman was saying about his need to be at 11:30, and how he would change his act to accommodate that time period, and it all was pretty convincing. As the hour-long conversation came to an end, Bob Wright started to feel his heart sink. It was never more clear that there was only one thing that was going to keep David Letterman at NBC.
As he left, Wright didn’t promise Letterman he would deliver what Dave wanted; but he didn’t tell him it wasn’t going to happen, either.
Dave didn’t know if anything positive had been accomplished, but he certainly felt good. It had been a warm, surprisingly emotional exchange. Letterman saw Wright as a guy not all that different from himself, a guy with a distressing problem who was behaving about the way Dave felt he himself would have behaved. This wasn’t a cold-fish executive from GE at all; there was real humanity there, Letterman thought. He was touched and very impressed by Bob Wright.
Sitting nervously in his office, Peter Lassally could not imagine how this talk could be taking so long. He could not help wondering how it was going, what Wright might be telling Dave, how Dave was handling himself. Lassally was simply glad it was happening; surely it meant that NBC was planning to do something to keep Dave.
When Wright left Letterman’s office he walked directly down the hall to Lassally’s. “Got a minute?” he said, as he closed the door behind him. Lassally said sure, and motioned for Wright to sit.
“I had a very nice talk with Dave,” Wright began. “It was a really good conversation.” And then, after a pause, he said, “What do you think I should do?” Peter Lassally could not have asked for a more direct invitation. If Bob Wright wanted to hear what he thought, he would tell him what he thought. This was Lassally’s opportunity to go to bat for his boy, and he wasn’t going to hold anything back.
First he told Wright that he should know just how meaningful the “Tonight” show had been in David Let
terman’s life. How much of a dream it was, how far back it went, all the way to Dave’s childhood when he watched Johnny Carson on the show. He explained how Dave had steered his career in this direction and what patience he showed, how gracefully he had tried to handle the idea of being in position to succeed Johnny. Much of this had already been fed to Wright, Lassally knew, by his allies among the other NBC executives. But it surely wouldn’t hurt for Wright to hear it again.
But then Lassally related the dilemma Wright faced to his own professional experience, his forty years in working with talk shows on radio and television. He explained how that experience had made him realize just how big a talent David Letterman was—especially when compared to Jay Leno.
“I know what works and what doesn’t work,” Lassally told Wright. “Whatever people are telling you at NBC, Jay Leno is a very limited talent.”
Wright nodded and said, “I know.”
“I don’t care what producer you’re going to bring in,” Lassally said. “Jay Leno will never get any better than he is today. If you think he’s going to learn and he’s going to improve, from my experience I can tell you, this is as good as he’s going to get.”
Again Wright quietly said, “You’re right. I know.”
Lassally could hardly believe he was getting no resistance. Nothing but total agreement was coming back at him. He had one last point to make: the main difference, the crucial difference he had always seen in Dave Letterman and Jay Leno. “Jay’s not made for this,” he said. “He’s not a broadcaster. Dave is a broadcaster.”
Wright told Lassally he agreed with him again. The points seemed to raise no protest from Wright whatsoever. Every critical word out of Peter Lassally’s mouth, Bob Wright took in and said, “I know. You’re right.”
For Lassally this development was nothing short of astounding. Wright’s reaction seemed so totally in assent that Lassally could feel a surge of excitement building inside him. As soon as the twenty-minute meeting with Wright ended, Lassally bolted from his office and down the hall to confer with Dave. As they compared notes Morty joined them. Dave related how well he and Bob had gotten along, but predictably he took no optimism at all away from the meeting. Lassally, however, was totally up from his own conversation with Wright. He told Dave and Morty how incredibly well it had gone and how he had given Wright every reason to question Jay and support Dave—without once hearing Wright say he was wrong. “I’m convinced this man left that room saying, ‘That’s the decision. Stand clear.’ ”
In his mind Peter Lassally was sure: The decision had been made at the very top of the network Dave was going to get the call to replace Jay.
The next day, Bob Wright made a series of phone calls to several of the New York executives who had been supporting Letterman. He described his meeting with Dave the night before, how well it had gone, and how it was going to affect his decisions. The Letterman supporters all came away from the calls with the same impression. What Dave had said, what Peter had said, it all meshed with Bob’s own gut feeling about what was best for NBC’s late night. Wright was telling them he saw no other way out for NBC other than to go with Letterman. But it’s going to be very difficult, he said.
Bob Wright had no idea how difficult it was going to get.
On Tuesday morning in Burbank, the news of Wright’s meeting had reached Jay Leno. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, other than the fact that he knew it wasn’t likely to be good for him. Here he was, still having trouble getting anything out of Bob Wright, any words of encouragement at all, and Wright goes and meets with Dave one-on-one for an hour. Leno called Dan Klores when he arrived at the “Tonight” office and went through his whole litany of disbelief again. He couldn’t believe what was happening at NBC in New York. They had a host who had come in, replaced a legend, and was doing well. Advertisers were happy with the ratings, affiliates were thrilled; the guys in Burbank, the guys supposed to know about entertainment programming, were completely supportive; But the big bosses in New York were thinking about overruling them. It was crazy, Leno said.
Klores agreed and gently suggested it was time for Jay to do something about it. Maybe call some affiliates, mount some support. The problem, Dan knew, was that the NBC people in Burbank had to be careful about what lengths they went to in supporting Jay; they had their own backs to protect. If New York was going in a different direction, it made no sense to start sticking necks out for Jay.
But Klores knew from talking to Susan Binford, the head of press relations for NBC on the West Coast, that the frustration level was rising among the executives there.
Binford, as strong a professional as any publicity executive working in television, had been involved in the transition from Leno to Carson and all the fractiousness with Helen Kushnick. She had hoped the upheaval at the “Tonight” show was over with. But now she told Klores that she sensed that the momentum was shifting away from Leno. That concerned her deeply because she guessed that a decision to choose Dave over Jay would trigger a bloodbath in Burbank. Leno, she knew, would be out the door the day of the announcement.
When Binford went down to Jay’s office for a visit that week, she saw the boxes placed around the room with Jay’s few personal effects loaded up in them. To Binford, the message was clear: Jay had already packed up his things and cleaned out his office to make it quick and easy. He told her point-blank: The minute that decision comes down, I’m out the door; I just won’t show up that night. Binford knew Jay had delivered the same message to his allies in Burbank, who had relayed it to New York, just to lay one more brick on the pile of predicament sitting on Bob Wright’s shoulders. It was another consequence he had to consider before pushing the button on this action.
But Jay wasn’t likely to be alone in the rush for the exits. One of Binford’s main duties was to keep Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia as clean as possible in the press, and she knew their reputations were mortgaged to Jay. If Jay went down, she thought Littlefield and Agoglia would be dead men. Warren would be so damaged he almost would have to quit, she concluded. She didn’t know about Agoglia. Nor about herself; but it crossed her mind that she herself might have to go. Then there was Rick Ludwin, the whole “Tonight” staff, the band. It would be a massacre.
Personally Binford backed Jay for many of the same reasons as the others in Burbank: He had been steadfast and responsive; he had pulled through when he had to break with Helen. He had stepped up and done the job. He was squeaky-clean personally. And the performance was there; the strong ratings proved it.
Binford found herself feeling annoyed from the moment she walked in the building in the morning to the moment she left at night. She had rarely been so infuriated. New York had meddled in a set situation, and now, no matter what happened, NBC had a mess on its hands. She acknowledged that the company had to protect an asset like David Letterman as best it could, but it seemed like the latest of late decisions to wake up suddenly and realize: We can’t afford to lose this guy. By this point nothing besides the big prize was going to satisfy Letterman, she concluded, and the same had become true for Leno. There might have been a time earlier in the process when a different offer, a shot in prime time, something else, might have been workable with Jay. Now, as Binford assessed it, Jay was looking at every glass as being half-empty. Anything NBC suggested was going to strike him as just a way to nudge him toward the door.
Real damage had been done already, as far as Binford was concerned. After all this, how could Littlefield and Agoglia still have credibility with the Hollywood community they had to make deals with? They seemed to have no power at all. That was the saddest part for Binford herself: What Warren and John thought on this issue didn’t seem to count for much.
Binford wanted to take some action, but she felt constrained by concern that she might find herself on the wrong side of the official NBC corporate position. She also didn’t want anything Jay might do for himself to be interpreted as a campaign by the Burbank executives to pull it out for Leno
. Then it would surely have no impact. So Binford avoided talking to Jay directly about the situation. She chatted with him in the mornings about the ratings, referred him to anything that came up in the press clips that day. But she had to make it clear to Jay that she had to step back from any advocacy position—though she told him she would always be in touch with Dan Klores.
Binford got on the phone with Klores to give her assessment of where things were going. Klores thought Binford was the smartest person he dealt with at NBC. She had a sense of humor about the craziness of this business, and the smarts to think it all through. To Klores, Jay seemed like a sheltered guy, a little naive. He was smart intellectually, Klores thought, but he didn’t think Jay was blessed with the kind of street smarts he needed to deal with the cut-and-slash side of the business. Klores, whose accent sounded as though it had its roots in an argument over stickball in Bensonhurst, put a lot of stock in street smarts. He could picture Jay walking down the street at 12:30 A.M. in Chinatown with four threatening kids coming his way, and Jay wouldn’t even think of crossing the street.
In the wake of Letterman’s positive meeting with Wright, Klores felt Jay needed to go on an all-out offensive. When Binford called to check in with him, Klores told her the plan. Binford, who had been advising a certain degree of caution to that point, had a much stronger reaction this time: “Dan, do it!”
Klores called Jay. He got the usual response: Jay sounded more forlorn than truly upset. Klores had had enough of that.
“Stop whining,” Klores told him. “Get a little angry, for God’s sake. It’s okay. Do it. You’ll feel better.”
Jay acknowledged that he was angry, but Klores felt he had to truly stoke him up. He told him the meeting with Letterman just proved that “wrong-way Wright was at it again.” Jay had a case to make for himself, Klores said. Wright wasn’t giving Jay any signal that his work was appreciated. “You’re getting a real fucking here,” he told him. Look at those ratings: a 6 rating in one recent overnight figure from the big cities. The advertisers loved those numbers, and the affiliates knew what a solid job he was doing for them.