by Carter, Bill
Jay Leno had always felt he worked best under pressure. In his own image of himself, he was a tricky, resourceful guy who got where he was on willpower, hard work, determination, and a willingness to stick out his ample jaw, even if it meant somebody occasionally knocked his block off. Once unleashed by the urging of his PR man, Dan Klores, Leno had turned the save-Jay campaign into an all-encompassing PR onslaught. The affiliates were energized, giving interviews to all their local papers about their support for Jay. The audiences on the show were primed to roar every night when he took shots at NBC; even the guest interviews were clicking better as guests had fun with the craziness surrounding Jay. Leno seemed to drop Letterman’s name whenever he could, telling stories about what he and his good comedy friends had done at some point in their careers and always including Dave in that group. When he was telling the audience one night about the goofy gifts he and Jerry Seinfeld and other comedy friends had given another comic, Larry Jacobsen, for his wedding, Jay dropped in how his friend Dave had sent the happy couple a set of snow tires and a pile of meat.
Leno wasn’t sitting back and letting his fate play out; he was taking action, fighting back, and that felt good. Jay felt as though he were on a roller coaster and the ride felt bumpy but exhilarating. As his Burbank allies prepared for the Boca Raton meeting, they congratulated him on how well he was handling the situation, especially on the air. Littlefield said, “Look, the world is reading about it and talking about it. You’re in the eye of the storm, so you’re taking some shots at us. You know what? That’s fine.”
Jay had concerns, of course. He thought about his writers and other staff members, many of whom had quit other jobs and moved their families out to L.A. to work on his show. Some had bought houses; Jay himself guaranteed home loans for some of them. He cringed at the prospect that his fate might put all these people under financially.
But he also thought about Helen Kushnick. If NBC dropped him now, Jay knew, Helen was going to be going around saying she was right, that the NBC guys and the other members of the Hollywood boys club had been out to get her and Jay all along, and without her there to outthink and outtough them, they had made it happen. Jay thought enduring a vindicated Helen would be the worst thing of all.
So it wasn’t all fun. There was a daily battering of doubts. But Jay knew he could take the blows. “I’m not particularly strong,” he liked to say. “I can just get hit a lot. I can get hit all day long. And you can keep on hitting me.” The fighter that Leno most admired was the legendary Jake LaMotta, made mythic by Robert De Niro in the film Raging Bull, because Jake could get hit so much and keep on coming at you.
As the Letterman deadline approached, Jay was ready to keep on coming at NBC. Working his phones, Jay tried to dig up useful information every day, something he might be able to use. Most of his calls started with the phrase: “So what do you hear?” And what Jay learned made him realize he had to keep on the offensive, not let up. His allies told him how hard Wright was working to find a way to keep Letterman, how uncertain they still were about the outcome, and how important the meeting in Boca was likely to be.
David Letterman had gotten a similar message about the importance of the Boca meeting from his executive producers, Peter Lassally and Robert Morton. Their contacts inside the NBC hierarchy were telling them much the same thing; The deal isn’t over; it’s going to be argued out at the GE conference. Lassally was hearing that things were shifting every day: Bob Wright was struggling to make the final decision; the East Coast was battling with the West Coast. When Letterman heard all this, it sounded to him like a Mafia meeting with the various families struggling for power. And it struck him how silly this had all become. All this over a television show—though in his heart he knew the television show in question was anything but silly to him. And he couldn’t help himself: He was caught up in the excitement. It was like a tight football game with the clock winding down. Letterman found it unbelievably tense and exciting to be in the middle of it.
Ovitz was providing reassuring words whenever Dave needed them. Something seemed to be cooking with NBC, he said. Still Letterman resisted the urge to get his hopes up. As he analyzed it, NBC had every reason to hesitate over this decision. It seemed like a knot much too tangled to untie at this point, after so much had been done, so much had transpired. How could NBC go back into it now and make it all come out straight and clean?
For Morton and Lassally the question of an NBC offer still came down to: How will it be engineered? Knowing that a perception already existed of David Letterman as a spoiled, arrogant star, they shuddered at the thought of fighting a defensive action against the PR campaign Jay Leno would mount if he lost the “Tonight” show to Dave. Every press story Jay did from that point on, they guessed, would be dominated by accounts of how the nice guy had been assassinated by the mean guy. So they were into engineering the assassination as carefully as possible—with no blood on Letterman’s hands. Morton worked his contacts in the press as best he could, emphasizing the NBC contract stipulations and how that contract, and not what David Letterman had demanded, would determine what happened. But that was a hard version to sell, because the story simply read better as star versus star.
Overall the two producers expected the decision to come down to dollars and cents. This was GE they were dealing with, after all, and a bunch of NBC executives who were making every decision with their heads twisted around to watch their own backs. To commit to Letterman now would require an enormous outlay of money, not only to match the pile CBS was promising to shell out, but also to pay off Leno’s contract. The deal could be worth $14.5 million in the first year to Letterman, plus another $10 million or so to Leno. Would GE ever authorize NBC to spend that kind of money on one guy? The idea struck the Letterman producers as almost too absurd to contemplate.
And they concluded that nobody could make the call to spend that much without thinking long-term, because it only made sense as a long-term investment. That’s how they had pushed it to Ludwin and the others: Think down the road. Johnny Carson had owned the time period for thirty years. Take Letterman, they said, and he’ll tower over any competition that comes along for at least another ten years, maybe twenty. But they were sure that argument would never fly with the NBC executives like Warren Littlefield, whose primetime schedule was so shot through with holes that he had to worry about where he’d be in ten weeks, never mind ten years.
A friend of Lassally’s had told him that all network heads of programming are short-term thinkers, just by the nature of the job. They have to worry about prime time every week, and every sweeps month, and every development season, and every new fall schedule. They don’t think about the next ten years, or even the next five. All that instant pressure was amplified for the programmer of a network with trouble in prime time.
Morton and Lassally also worried about the nature of the commitment to CBS: What exactly did the contract promise CBS, and what had Mike Ovitz promised? That issue had the potential to get messy if NBC didn’t come up with something that fit the legal definition of a match. The Letterman side still wanted NBC to come through, but they all had strong reasons to insist it be a deal that came substantially close to the ante that CBS had tossed on the table. Like all the others, they looked south, toward Boca Raton, and waited for the smoke to rise.
After taping his show on the night of Wednesday, January 6, Jay Leno dashed down to his dressing room to get out of his suit and back into jeans and a workshirt, his offstage uniform. The postmortem for the night’s show, usually quick, was especially perfunctory this night. Jay heard the staff talking as he changed. One of the producers observed that Rick Ludwin wasn’t there, as he usually was. Another staff member explained that Rick had said earlier that he had to take part in a conference call with Boca later that night. He had gone back to his office until he got word that the conference call was going to start. Then, Rick had explained, he and Eric Cardinal, the head of research for NBC on the West Coast, would mee
t up in Warren Littlefield’s office to take the call on the speakerphone.
As soon as Jay had changed clothes, he told Jimmy Brogan that he’d see him as usual back at the house later. Brogan, Jay’s good friend and a writer on the show, always came to Jay’s about midnight to help put together the next night’s monologue. Jay then told the other writers and producers gathered in his dressing room that he was taking off right away, so they could all split early. Saying some quick “see you tomorrows,” Jay grabbed his shoulder bag and bolted.
The “Tonight” show dressing room was one floor below ground level in Burbank. Leno dashed up the stairs, out into the broad hallway behind the stage, and then outside, down the ramp toward the alley between the studio building and the main NBC office building. At a little past 6:30, the January evening was still warm in the valley, the sun having set only an hour earlier. Jay didn’t need a jacket. He reached the black Chevy pickup he had parked that morning in the “Tonight” host spot located right at the end of the ramp, pausing only a moment to pull something out of his bag before he tossed it into the truck’s cab. Then he turned and headed across the alley toward the two glass doors that amounted to the back entrance of the NBC headquarters building in the Burbank complex. Jay pushed through the doors and into a short hallway that led to the elevators on the right. A few feet ahead were two more doors and the main security desk for the building.
Jay was carrying a notebook under his arm. As he entered the back entrance, he didn’t bother with the elevator, but turned sharply and took the stairs, making sure not to catch the eye of the guard behind the desk. He climbed the stairs quickly, up to the second floor, where the NBC entertainment division executives had their offices. Most of the office doors were closed. It was getting close to 7:00 P.M. and the place seemed completely cleared out. Jay didn’t pause to look for anybody. He moved quietly down the long hall toward the big heavy glass doors that blocked the entrance to the executive suite of offices at the end of the corridor. On the doors, etched into the glass in gold lettering, were the names: WARREN LITTLEFIELD and JOHN AGOGLIA.
Jay paused at the doors only long enough to scan the outer offices. The two desks behind the doors were unoccupied. The room looked empty and dark. Jay pushed his way in. Warren’s office, Jay knew, was off to his left; John Agoglia’s was to the right, past the area where John’s secretary sat. Jay moved almost on tiptoes to his right, past the desks of Warren’s assistant and secretary and into the room where John Agoglia’s assistant and secretary worked. Jay knew where he was going. He slipped past the secretary’s desk toward a door at the back of the room. Jay tried it; it opened.
The room behind it was small, dark, and crowded like a closet; it contained a photocopying machine, fax machines, a shredder, and all sorts of supplies stacked in boxes. Pushed up against the wall was a small desk where guests of the executives could come and sit to use a phone in private. Jay carefully pulled the door closed behind him, making sure it was securely shut. Then he eased himself down into the chair and arranged his notebook on the desk in front of him. He pulled a pen out of his pocket. His setup was complete. He had the phone in front of him to tell him when the conference call from Boca Raton was coming in; now all he had to do was sit in the dim light in this cramped closet of an office—and wait.
The official good-bye dinner for the GE group who was leaving the next morning ran later than expected that Wednesday night, so the NBC executives eager to get into the Letterman-Leno debate one last time were forced to wait until well past 10:00 P.M. Finally they began to gather in a much less accommodating business suite than they had for their Monday night meeting. This one had no windows, bad lighting, no airconditioning to speak of, a beat-up wood table in the middle of the room, and a small cache of warm Coca-Colas to drink. It was going to be a long, hot night.
Things got going about 10:30. Littlefield had contacted Ludwin back in Burbank and told him the conference call was about to start, so he should order in some pizza and call Eric Cardinal. They could sit around the speakerphone in Warren’s office and wait for the call. In the session in Boca were Littlefield, Agoglia, Rohrbeck, Ebersol, Hudson, Mapes, Cotton, Warren Jensen, the chief financial officer for NBC, and Bob Wright.
As the meeting began, several people asked Agoglia if he had heard anything from Ovitz that day. Agoglia had nothing new to report. Bob Wright then asked a few people to give their opinions of how they thought the network should go on late night. Various people began offering their perspectives on the two stars. The debate fell along familiar lines: Jay got points for his agreeable attitude; Dave got points for sheer talent. Leno still had the ratings on his side, however, while the Letterman backers had only their opinion that, head-to-head, Dave would overmatch Jay, especially in terms of pulling in the crucial younger viewers. Over a speakerphone from Burbank, Ludwin was extolling Jay’s improving performance and his increasingly cooperative attitude.
That raised objections from Ebersol and Rohrbeck, who questioned many of the choices Jay was making on his nightly show. Speaking partly to the others in the room and partly directly to Ludwin in the speaker-phone, Ebersol, referring to twenty years’ experience as a late-night producer, hit especially hard on the selection of musical acts and how they were placed in the show. How did this square, he wanted to know, with Jay as the totally agreeable prince of a guy, willing to cooperate with every suggestion, when he had been told repeatedly not to place musical guests in the first half of the show? Music tastes had become so stratified, with so many different styles broken down into so many groups of people, that few or no acts could ever hope to please all of the viewers at the same time—particularly when a viewer had a choice to turn off the set and go to bed. And yet, Ebersol and others pointed out, here was Jay on a recent night bringing on Neil Young as his opening guest, as though Young was a booking coup. This was in defiance of all the research, which said that people tune in late-night shows to see comedy, comedy, and more comedy. And what did Letterman give them? Comedy. An opening with a couple of jokes, an inventive comedy bit before the first commercial, and then the “Top Ten List,” a third comedy segment before even one guest was brought out. And that first guest was never a musical act and was always someone that Dave worked for more comedy, Ebersol said.
While they were at it, the pro-Letterman group wanted to know why Jay Leno had a band playing forty seconds of esoteric jazz after his monologue, bringing down the audience’s readiness to laugh right after Jay had done seven minutes of jokes. How was this going to affect the show, they asked, when the greatest competitor in comedy is on another channel doing something funny in those forty seconds? And what about this announcer, Edd Hall? Why couldn’t Jay have a sidekick on the couch, someone he could connect with and bounce jokes off?
In Burbank Rick Ludwin would not tolerate this kind of criticism of his star. He defended Edd Hall, saying with an edge in his tone over the speakerphone that if anybody had to sit on the couch with Jay, Edd certainly could. As for comedy, Jay had begun to work his “celebrity in a sack” routine to good advantage. And, Ludwin said, Jay’s opening monologue was the best seven minutes of comedy on television. Rick Ludwin was vociferous in his all-out defense of Jay Leno.
The meeting spun off into a more clinical discussion of the state of the Leno show and what its potential might be. Why couldn’t there be another comedy segment after midnight? someone asked. Sometimes after the first guest the show gets crashingly dull. Everybody agreed the monologue was the best part of the show, but even there Jay was criticized for his hokey air-guitar gesture and big leg kick as the band finished the theme song. Those affectations made him look like a bad Las Vegas act, one executive said. Next, the music was dissected, with some of the executives agreeing it was too rarefied for the contemporary mass audience, and others wondering why Marsalis always looked as though he regretted in some way being in the studio. Jay’s interviewing was the most widely slammed part of the show. He still looked stiff and distracted, sever
al critics said, as if he weren’t really listening to the guest but was instead checking his notes to see if he could find any funnier questions. Maybe they should hire him an interviewing coach, one executive suggested.
Back in Burbank, outside the office where Rick Ludwin and Eric Cardinal were engaged in this loud argument over the speakerphone, Jay Leno sat in his gloomy closet, listening in very intently, scribbling notes on his notepad. The whole thing struck him as wildly funny; he felt like Huck Finn overhearing the mourners at his own funeral.
Jay didn’t feel insulted by the criticism he was hearing. He told himself nothing could insult him, because it was all just product and nothing personal. To him the questions were all about what’s wrong with the product. Jay could deal with that. The experience reminded Leno of something he did when he was first breaking into the clubs as a comic. After he finished his spot in the Comedy Store or wherever, Leno would sometimes go to the men’s room, get in a stall, lock the door, and then sit on the toilet with his feet up so it appeared that nobody was there. Then he could listen to the comments of those who had just heard his act: What’d you think of that last guy? Jay liked the unself-conscious reviews, if not the accommodations.
In the suite in Boca Raton, Bob Wright turned to Betty Hudson to offer some comments for the group. He knew where she stood, of course, from the session over drinks on Monday night. But he wanted her ideas out for wider discussion. Hudson had given the situation a lot of thought. She had formed a strong opinion. Hudson told the meeting that she saw this question as one that would demonstrate what NBC stood for as a company. The company’s loyalty to an employee who had served it well was now the issue, she said.
“Against the criteria of success that we established at the time he got the job, Jay is achieving success,” Hudson added. “Could it be a better show? Probably. Would it be better with more time? I guess we’ll find out maybe. But we said to the whole world this is our guy. And we put him on the air. And maybe some of the problems are our doing and maybe some are his. But for us to suddenly decide to throw out the loyal dog and put in the guy who has been saying in any forum he can find that he can’t stand us, he is sick to death of us, what would that be saying about us? And against the public perception that we are opportunistic, venal shits, against that, what about the next guy you want to make a deal with? You think he or she is going to say: ‘I can certainly depend on NBC to stand by its people?’ ”