by Carter, Bill
“I can’t believe this was brought up as a major issue,” Lassally said to Ovitz.
Ovitz did not sound as mortified by it as Lassally and Morton were. They were almost coming out of their skins. Ovitz sounded as though it were an issue that had come up and had to be addressed before he could go forward with anything with NBC. It was Bob Wright saying there can’t be any more stuff like that party thing with Rick Ludwin if Dave is going to get the “Tonight” show.
All Ovitz could do at the time was assure Wright that with Lassally now on board—Lassally, the voice of reason—those kinds of things wouldn’t be happening anymore.
Peter Lassally wanted to dismiss the incident as too silly for consideration. But after he talked with some of his NBC contacts, he knew that Wright had indeed gone to Mike Ovitz and made an issue out of Dave’s snubbing Rick Ludwin at the party. The Letterman backers could only conclude that the Leno supporters in the West had gotten to Wright before the Aspen meeting and run all this stuff by him as a way to confuse the issue again.
For Lassally this was incredibly deflating news. Not only had Bob Wright not come to Ovitz in Aspen with a firm offer for David Letterman, he had come there with a laundry list of complaints about him. Instead of courting Letterman, Wright had all but insulted him. Lassally had hoped to return from vacation and hear from Mike Ovitz that a deal for the “Tonight” show was nearly wrapped up. Instead, he was hearing that a deal might be more distant now than it had been just two weeks earlier, when Bob Wright left the “Late Night” offices nodding in agreement that Dave should have the show. Far from being wrapped up, everything he and Dave had hoped for seemed about to unravel—thanks to the most ludicrously insignificant of threads: a party invitation.
10
CHOOSE YOUR PARTNERS
When he got back to Los Angeles from Aspen on Monday, January 4, Michael Ovitz, a patient, confident man, told his associates at CAA that he believed NBC would be delivering an offer for David Letterman sometime that week.
While it was true that Bob Wright had spent time at their meeting in Aspen exploring Letterman’s reputation for being difficult, seeking reassurances that Dave would be cooperative with NBC if it took the enormous step of removing Jay Leno and giving Dave the “Tonight” show, Ovitz came away from the meeting feeling that Wright was inclined to try to make something happen with Dave. Wright had surely been pleasant to Ovitz and thoughtful about the difficulties of finding a combination to the lockbox NBC found itself in. Ovitz had told him, “I’ve been dealing with talent for 25 years. When talent is rejected it requires special handling. You can’t give the show to Jay and then say nothing to Dave about it. That just isn’t done.” Wright said he understood. But nothing definitive had been settled.
Wright clearly still had reservations, as did Ovitz. The circumstances guaranteed that this deal could not be clean; no one was likely to escape unscathed if NBC decided to overturn its now eighteen-month-old decision to give Leno the “Tonight” show franchise. The question Wright was wrestling with was the same one that preoccupied Ovitz and his colleagues at CAA: How is it going to look if David Letterman suddenly replaces Jay Leno? Ovitz was simply petrified by the prospect of the story being interpreted as a display of arrogant power by Letterman: “Dave buries Jay Leno with his demand for the ‘Tonight’ show.” To have Dave perceived in the press as destroying his old friend Jay and driving him out of television for a year or two, or however long, was not just the opposite of a “value-added” deal; it was potentially a public relations disaster. Ovitz knew the press could be extremely unforgiving of stars who took on the image of bullies. He could envision how well it would sell newspapers if they promised details of the “Leno-Letterman war.” The press would have a field day with something like that, Ovitz thought. And he knew that Letterman himself was uncomfortable at the prospect of that outcome; Dave didn’t want the fulfillment of his dream to be accomplished only over the bleeding body of Jay Leno. Letterman said it explicitly: “I wouldn’t want somebody angling to get my ass out of a job. I wouldn’t want the job that way.”
So the issues were extremely delicate, and Ovitz came back from Aspen weighing them carefully. There was a way for Dave to get the “Tonight” show without accepting the blame for shoving Jay out of his chair. But it would entail NBC accepting the blame itself. The network, after all, still had specific language in Dave’s contract that allowed it the opportunity to match any offer. If an NBC deal for Dave could be fairly described as a direct match with CBS’s, then the interpretation would simply be that David Letterman had no option: He legally had to accept the NBC deal. But CBS was the unknown factor there; the network had negotiated in good faith and made a spectacular offer. If Dave accepted a proposal from NBC that truly did not reach the financial levels of the CBS deal, what might happen then? Nobody thought CBS would sue, because Howard Stringer and the network’s other executives would surely recognize that the only relevant issue in a talent deal like this is: Where does the client really want to be? But would CBS feel it had been dealt with unfairly? And how would that affect the press and public reaction to the Letterman takeover of the “Tonight” show?
Ovitz had been considering all of that, along with his own steadfast conclusion: CBS made more sense, and always had from Day One.
Ovitz felt especially good about one thing: The situation was working out precisely as he had predicted it would when David Letterman walked into his office in August 1991. He had been told he would get an array of offers from all over the industry to choose from and that they would include proposals from every network, including NBC. With less than two weeks to go before the NBC deadline, only the NBC offer had still not arrived; but Ovitz was fully confident it would. Bob Wright had indicated to him as they left Aspen after New Year’s weekend that he still wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do about Letterman, but, yes, he was going to do something.
Wright just needed a little more time. In the next several days he would be consulting with all his important executives in the same place: a meeting for the top managers of the General Electric Company held every year at the Boca Raton Resort Hotel in Florida.
The General Electric Company held two management meetings every year. One, the Partners’ Meeting, was always scheduled for the first week in October, and dealt with issues of concern to GE’s worldwide operation. NBC, one small division of the industrial super-conglomerate, only sent five or six executives—the heads of its divisions and Bob Wright—to the Partners’ Meeting. The other meeting, always set for the first week of January in Boca Raton, was much broader, with the 500 top managers of the company invited. NBC’s representation grew to include most of its senior vice presidents.
As they prepared for the meeting, the NBC executives on either side of the Leno-Letterman battle marshaled their arguments, anticipating one last confrontation over the late-night decision. The Boca meeting, which was designed to discuss the company’s large-scale business agenda for the coming year, was not an ideal place for a problem of singular focus to NBC. It certainly would not be on the official GE agenda. But the NBC executives knew they would all be in the same place at the same time, and could easily set up a meeting late at night, after the official business of the day had been concluded.
On Monday evening, before the first official function, the GE welcoming dinner, Bob Wright invited two executives to the lounge for drinks. Wright was fresh from his meeting with Ovitz and still on a quest to determine the best course for NBC. He wanted to talk to Pier Mapes, the network division president in charge of affiliate relations and sales, and Betty Hudson, the senior vice president of corporate communications and his top PR executive. Hudson had always impressed Wright with her trenchant comments about programming whenever new NBC pilots were screened for reaction from the full executive body. He valued her opinion as a nonprogramming executive with a sensitivity to how matters would play in the press.
Over drinks, Wright told Mapes and Hudson that he wanted to
hear what they had to say because he didn’t believe they were as invested personally in the Leno-Letterman outcome as many of the other executives. He went through a long, tortured explanation of where the situation stood and how it had reached this point. For the first time the other two executives heard confirmation that Leno had been formally in place to succeed Carson because he had signed a contract with NBC just days before Johnny’s official announcement to resign. They realized that that deal, signed because of NBC’s fear that Leno would jump to CBS, had set all these subsequent events in motion.
Wright took note of the beating NBC had been taking in the press for mishandling Letterman in the first go-round. Now, he said, all they could do was put blinders on and find a solution. If some way could be found, even at this absolute last minute, to keep both guys at NBC, the network could wipe out every bad late-night moment of the past two years. Wright revealed that he was hearing regularly from Ovitz that there was a way to keep this alive, that there was still hope. The door isn’t shut, Wright told Hudson and Mapes. They presumed Wright was getting some message from Ovitz that Letterman might be willing to compromise on his demand for 11:30, though Wright didn’t say so. For reasons that came down to loyalty for Hudson and keeping the affiliates happy for Mapes, both executives supported Leno.
Later that night, after the welcoming dinner, the NBC group that had arrived by that point met in a small business suite overlooking the Atlantic. Because he had to take care of some entertainment division business, Warren Littlefield was still back in L.A., due to fly in the next morning. They hooked him in to the meeting by conference call. He sat in his office in Burbank along with Rick Ludwin and joined the discussion on a speakerphone. In the suite in Boca Raton were Wright, Hudson, Mapes, Rohrbeck, Ebersol, Rick Cotton, the general counsel for NBC, Agoglia, and several other executives. The discussion began with Wright asking what the guys on the West Coast wanted to say. Littlefield very succinctly made his points: Jay’s our guy; we believe in him. And he added that over the long haul Jay would be a more stable personality than Letterman.
Ludwin jumped in to say that the Dana Carvey thing was looking good, which set off a violent disagreement between him and Dick Ebersol, who argued that anyone who would say that didn’t know anything about the reality of the Carvey situation. Ebersol said that they ought to pick up the phone and immediately call Lorne Michaels, who would tell them that Carvey, if he’s going to do late-night television at all, would only do a show behind Letterman, not Leno.
After that hot moment cooled down, the argument shifted to the persistent disagreement over which host would truly command the biggest—and the youngest—late-night audience. Rohrbeck had received his research study from the Magid Company just that week, and for the Letterman executives it was another round of ammunition. They described it as clearly stating that Letterman would be the favorite in the late-night competition if all other things, such as clearances and starting times, were equal—which, of course, they would be for Dave if he got the “Tonight” show on NBC.
But Wright felt the research was still unconvincing. It was as though one study said one thing and the other said the opposite, and they just seemed to cancel each other out. That night’s discussion ended without a resolution of any kind, but the executives agreed to meet again late Wednesday night, after the formal GE sessions ended. Then they would have a long meeting, Littlefield would be on hand, and the whole late-night issue could be totally thrashed out.
Inside CBS, the state of uncertainty had created a dizzy feeling of trepidation and excitement. Howard Stringer went through his days oscillating back and forth between confidence and pessimism. All through the holidays and into the first week of January, Stringer found himself suspended on tenterhooks, vulnerable to whichever way the rumor breezes were blowing that day. He knew that NBC was mounting a serious effort to keep Letterman. That, he expected. But when he talked to Ovitz and Lee Gabler at CAA, they never wavered in their calm stroking of his jangled nerves: Stay cool, they kept saying. You’re going to get him. It’s going to be okay.
Stringer appreciated the words and all their kindness. That same month, he and Jennifer adopted a baby boy, their first child, whom they named David (not after Letterman, Stringer announced; he wasn’t going that far in his wooing). Ovitz and Gabler sent their congratulations. But the reassurances from CAA didn’t reduce Stringer’s anxiety, because he knew Bob Wright always had the last card to play, and so all the reassurances in the world didn’t mean a damn thing. Stringer tried to buoy his own spirits by putting himself in the position of the guys he had come to know at the Letterman show, Peter Lassally and Robert Morton. And Stringer thought: “If I were the Letterman guys, I would not want him to go to the ‘Tonight’ show under these circumstances.” Stringer comforted himself by replaying how badly NBC had bungled its relationship with Letterman. Stringer had never seen such a cataclysmic failure of talent relations in his entire television career. That had to have had some impact on Letterman, Stringer thought.
But he knew he must be prepared for the worst. And in as upbeat a way as he could, Stringer tried to consider his options. From the start, Stringer had felt that CBS was in an ideal position. First he had gone after Leno, and that had forced NBC’s hand: They had to give Jay a contract to keep him at NBC, but that contract set in place the alienation of David Letterman. Stringer didn’t have a strategy from the beginning to win Letterman in that fashion, but it seemed to be working out that way.
At the start of the negotiations for Letterman, Stringer considered ABC to be CBS’s main rival, but only if that network was willing to give up on “Nightline.” Had that happened, Stringer would, have been ready with a CBS News version of “Nightline” within twenty-four hours. Now, with NBC dithering about whether to keep Letterman and jettison Leno, Stringer contemplated another possibility, turning around and handing the CBS late-night slot to Jay.
That scenario appealed to Stringer at first as a decent consolation for losing Letterman, because he could see advantages in positioning Leno as the unjustly aggrieved star. That might work out. Stringer pictured himself taking the battered Jay under his ample wing, relaunching him as the hardworking star who had been unfairly squeezed out in the power play at NBC.
Certainly Leno believed he could still turn to CBS. That was one of the threats he made public in his late-December interviews in the New York Times and elsewhere: He wouldn’t simply accept some sort of demotion at NBC; he would go immediately to CBS. Jay never added, “If they’ll still have me,” because he had reason to believe CBS most definitely would. By that time Jay had had indications of CBS’s ongoing interest.
The Leno option was viable enough at CBS that Rod Perth, the CBS executive in charge of late night and the one who had first made contact with Jay when CBS made its run at him two years earlier, suggested to Stringer that it might be wise to keep a line out to Leno, just keep a dialogue going. Stringer told him to go to it.
So Rod Perth called Jay Leno in the midst of the final uncertainty at NBC. Perth put the call in the context of the casual friendship they had struck up over motorcycles. “I’m really sorry you’re being put through all this,” he told Jay.
Jay responded in his usual “aw shucks, I understand” sort of way. He was so patient and understanding that Perth found himself wishing for Jay’s sake that the comic could come on a little stronger, at least be irritated enough to say: “This sucks, doesn’t it? It’s really bullshit and I’m fed up with it.” But that wasn’t Jay’s way.
Perth didn’t make any promises that Leno could count on a CBS offer, explaining that for obvious reasons the network had gone after Letterman and still hoped to get him. “But if it doesn’t happen,” Perth told him, “sit tight.”
Those words made Leno confident that he was still sitting pretty with CBS, confident enough that he could overtly threaten to jump to that network, taking his formidable ratings with him, if NBC were foolish enough to throw him over for Letterman.
<
br /> Inside CBS, George Schweitzer, the executive in charge of promotion for the network, felt the situation was cloudy enough that he needed to consider the Leno alternative as the final days of Letterman’s NBC contract dwindled down. Schweitzer found himself doing mental flip-flops about which outcome was better and which was worse for CBS. For Schweitzer it was like a game of mental Ping-Pong, thinking through the promotion campaigns. “Okay, say we don’t get Letterman,” Schweitzer thought, his conclusions shaping themselves almost identically to the arguments going on inside NBC. “We get Leno instead. How do we sell him? How do we position him? So he’s the underdog, he’s the good guy. He’ll do a lot more. He’ll be out there. He’ll do a lot more for you. But he doesn’t have the comic edge. He doesn’t have the image of the guy who’s more electric.” Like everyone else at CBS, Schweitzer was certain the network would be better off with Letterman, but he had to be ready if CBS wound up with Leno.
Howard Stringer did not want the backup consideration of Leno to reach anything close to a serious stage, however, because he had begun to have strong reservations about whether Jay could walk away unmarked after being ejected from the “Tonight” show in midflight. The question of whether Jay would carry around a “damaged goods” label became much more troubling. And besides all that, Stringer never wanted it to get out that he was sitting back like a Roman emperor waiting to pronounce as champion whichever gladiator came out of the ring. In thinking practically about helping CBS in late night, Stringer didn’t want to appear cynical. He also didn’t want the Letterman people thinking he didn’t care if Dave chose CBS or not. At this point Howard Stringer, who had thought out all the benefits a talent like Letterman could bring to CBS, burned with the desire to be able to stand up in front of a room full of reporters and make the announcement that David Letterman was coming to the network of Ed Murrow and Jack Benny.