by Carter, Bill
And it wasn’t going to be. After they had talked through some more details, Agoglia got to the substance of the NBC proposal. He read it through in detail over the phone. When the Letterman people, who had been taking notes, threw out a few more questions, Agoglia cut them off. He told them that they really had it all by that point, that they knew what was available, what was out there, and they could massage this along from there. You know where we are, Agoglia told them. You know how to try to make this work, and there isn’t going to be anything sent. Nothing is going to be faxed.
The CAA team did not object to that position. They had waited several hours for this fax to come in, and now Agoglia was saying, no, nothing in writing. They concluded that Agoglia felt NBC was in a delicate position, what with Jay Leno’s fate hanging in the balance in these talks, and that the network wanted to preserve a level of deniability. NBC could not feel secure about that deniability if they knew somewhere out there a piece of paper on NBC letterhead documented that the network had offered Jay Leno’s job to David Letterman in an explicit, term-by-term offer. Frankly the CAA executives didn’t mind helping NBC out to spare them possible further embarrassment with Jay, because they themselves didn’t want CBS to get word of this and think they were about to be cut out.
Without paper, the offer was what it was: a promise of the “Tonight” show down the road. The promise at least seemed solid. The Letterman negotiators came away from the Sunday conference call convinced NBC had made a substantial commitment to give Letterman the job at some point in the future; they simply hadn’t put it in writing.
The Sunday negotiations did nothing to change the equations, or the uncertainty. Letterman, who was being informed of the developments almost hourly, had not been handed a Get Out of Jail Free card; he had no new information to make his agonizing decision easier. It was going to come down to just how strong the dream still was.
The sentiment opposing the NBC proposal was unanimous from the staff members of the show and Dave’s agents at CAA. Ovitz and his CAA partners pointed out that even taking into account what Dave wanted emotionally, what was being offered by NBC was not really going to satisfy those emotions. He would get to do a television job for NBC in Burbank—eventually—but it certainly wasn’t a job that would make him the successor to Johnny Carson. Was NBC really offering him Johnny Carson’s job? No, they were offering him Jay’s former job, and they weren’t even doing that for some period of time. Unfortunately, they told Letterman, it was too late to get Johnny’s job. It was not available now or ever anymore. It was forever changed and gone.
But Dave had come to a point where he couldn’t deal with all that rational analysis. “I can’t say no,” he said.
When Lassally talked to Dave that evening after the meeting with Agoglia, he knew that there was now a very good chance David Letterman was going to accept the NBC offer—against the advice of everyone around him. He was going to say yes. Dave’s conviction was clearly growing. He didn’t care what everyone else was saying. “I want the show,” he said to Peter.
Lassally was in a panic. He had brought Letterman to this point where he was about to jump back into NBC, into a position Lassally now considered disastrous for his career, and somehow Lassally had to pull him back from the edge before he leaped. His own influence seemed to be waning; so did Morty’s and even Ovitz’s. They were powerless against the dream. Lassally needed reinforcements. He knew that the list of people who could have any real influence over David Letterman was exceedingly limited. But he could certainly think of at least one name.
Johnny Carson had been reading the papers; he knew that NBC was up against a deadline to keep David Letterman and that the top NBC executives had been meeting in Boca Raton amid much speculation over what they would do. Johnny had nothing but good feelings about Dave; he considered him a true entertainer, someone with style and attitude, all of which made him invaluable on television. He also just liked the guy. But Johnny had no ill will toward Jay Leno, whom he considered a very nice young man, and he was very good friends with Bob Wright. When Wright had called three weeks earlier looking for advice about what do with the Letterman/Leno situation, Johnny had said he wasn’t jumping into the middle of that dispute at that late date, though he urged Wright to find a way to keep Letterman.
Now Peter Lassally was on a different mission. He called Carson at his Malibu home and filled him in on NBC’s last-minute offer, the differences between what NBC and CBS were proposing, and why it was so wrong for Dave to throw away everything CBS was offering for the inferior, specious deal being put forward by NBC. Lassally told Johnny only a few details, including the fact that ownership would not be involved. He never even got into the money. He just communicated that it was a half-assed, unworthy offer. He asked Johnny if he’d talk to Dave about it.
Carson reacted as Lassally expected. He agreed that the offer sounded weak. But this wasn’t an easy spot for him. He didn’t like to get involved in sticky deals like this. There was no upside for him. Lassally pressed him, stressing what a crucial moment this was in Dave’s career, and how much Dave respected Johnny. Johnny said he’d think about it.
When Lassally got back to Letterman, the star hadn’t changed his intentions. He was leaning strongly toward taking the NBC offer. Lassally called Carson back. Johnny was still thinking about it. Then he called a third time, and finally, after a tough fight, Johnny said he would talk to Dave about the deal. “But I don’t want to volunteer,” he said. Dave would have to call him.
Lassally thought he had to have an alternative if Dave felt too uptight to call Johnny about something this personal. The only other name he could think of was Grant Tinker, the former chairman of NBC, the leader in the network’s great glory days, who had been in charge of NBC when Dave started his late-night show. Lassally knew that Dave respected Tinker, as did he. So he called Tinker and filled him in on what was going on. Tinker agreed that NBC was playing games with Letterman. Lassally asked the former chairman if he would tell Dave that, and Tinker, without hesitation, said of course he was prepared to talk to Dave if he wanted to call.
Then Lassally went back to Letterman. Call Johnny, Lassally told him. Ask him what you should do. Dave was reluctant. Then call Grant Tinker, Lassally said. He thinks it would be a mistake to take this deal. And he gave Dave the number.
That was too much for Letterman, who started to believe that Lassally was loading the deck, searching out people who would counsel him to turn NBC down. This was an effort to spoil his dream, Letterman thought, to muddy the facts as he understood them. He would never question Peter’s loyalty or that his motives were good. He was sure Grant Tinker would be sincere. But he simply didn’t want to hear it. It was just torture for Letterman because he felt as if he might have blown one opportunity to get the “Tonight” show, and yet here it was, back again. “Am I dumb enough to blow it again?” he thought.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he snapped at Lassally. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care. I cannot lose the ‘Tonight’ show twice, once to Jay Leno and once because I’m not accepting the second chance.”
Lassally said he really did understand Dave’s feelings. “But you have to understand,” he said. “The conditions are not right.”
Letterman had never been so conflicted in his life. He knew he had to tell Ovitz which way he was going. He had very little time left. He was running out of new ways to analyze it. But he still needed help.
So he called Johnny Carson.
Carson took the call and listened for awhile to Letterman and the jam he was in, then he asked if he could think awhile about it and call Dave back.
All the other votes were in; the impact of all those recommendations that he reject NBC and pick CBS was slowly eroding some of Letterman’s holdout emotions. It was getting late on Sunday night and Dave was starting to waver. Then Johnny called back.
“You have to do what’s best for your career,” Carson told Letterman. “Do what’s in your heart.
” The problem for Letterman, of course, was that in this instance those two sentiments didn’t precisely coincide. He asked Carson what he really wanted to know: “What would you do if you were in this situation, Johnny?”
Carson didn’t dodge the question. “I’d probably walk,” he said. “I’m not telling you to do that, David. But if you’re asking me what I’d do if I had been treated like that, I would probably walk.”
Letterman was always terribly nervous when he spoke to Carson, and he had rarely in his life been as nervous as he was at this moment. So Carson’s words didn’t completely register. What he came away from the conversation with was the same message he had heard from everyone else: Go to CBS. Even Johnny wasn’t saying the “Tonight” show was everything. If anybody knew a little bit of what this was all about, it had to be Johnny.
It was time to make his decision. Letterman had started to see how imbalanced the two offers were: The CBS deal was just so much better. It had to be CBS. And he knew he had to put away the dream. It was there for him to grab, but he had to put it away.
When it all calmed down, Letterman made one more call that night. He dialed the Indianapolis number and got his mother on the phone.
“Mom,” he said, “NBC has offered me the ‘Tonight’ show, but I think I’m going to go to CBS.”
“Well,” said David Letterman’s mother. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
When NBC heard nothing in reply to its offer that Sunday night, a bit of fear set in. No one wanted this deal to leak to the press, and certainly no one wanted to be used by the other side for a public relations coup. By the next morning, even as CAA was ready to inform NBC that David Letterman had rejected the offer, John Agoglia called Steve Lafferty at his CAA office and told him NBC was withdrawing the offer.
That morning David Letterman came into the “Late Night” offices and found Peter Lassally. Dave was bent nearly in half with the weight of second thoughts. “I think I’ve made another huge mistake,” Letterman said, over and over. “I’ve made a huge mistake. I took my dream as a kid and fucked it up once, and now I’ve fucked it up again.” For Lassally, it was, as it so often was with Dave, a back-and-forth, up-and-down experience. It was to be expected that he would be overcome with buyer’s remorse.
Then Letterman talked to Ovitz again. And Ovitz told Letterman a story about how he went out and bought a house—and he really couldn’t afford the house, and so he was miserable in it for the first month, for the first two-months. His kids were miserable, they were all miserable. And then he said: “I’m still in that house. It’s the best house I ever lived in. It’s the best thing I ever did in my life. Don’t look back,” Ovitz said. “Just keep going.”
And David Letterman decided you can either be brave or pretend to be brave, but it’s pretty much the same thing.
11
THE SECOND FRONT
In New York, David Letterman had hours and hours of anguish all day Monday over the decision he had made to surrender his dream of hosting the “Tonight” show; but those around him knew that was Letterman’s nature. He would replay the decision again and again, the same way he replayed the tape of his show every night, checking every nuance, rethinking every line, kicking himself over every lost opportunity. But in the end the show was going to air. And Letterman’s decision to go to CBS was going to stand.
In Los Angeles that same Monday, Jay Leno felt a surge of relief. He had gotten a call from Bob Wright telling him that he should relax, things were going to work out. It immediately struck Jay’s comedy instincts: He was supposed to celebrate because he was getting a job he already had. “It was a question of hey, either you’re going to be fired or else you’re going to be the guy to lead us into the next century!”
Jay’s nature was not to replay shows or events in his life—especially bad ones. He always tried to stay buoyant, look forward, not back. This was show business, he told himself, and he was coming to expect the hard knocks and inanities that went with this line of work. Not that Jay could totally shrug off the way he’d been kicked around. In the aftermath, Jay saw it as another sobering show business experience. “Show business is a bit like guys that say, ‘You know, that hooker really likes me,’” Jay said. “When you’ve been in it twenty years and you’ve gone through things, you get slapped down a few times. After a while you don’t mind getting hit anymore. It’s just part of the business. But it does take a part out that doesn’t come back. It’s a bit like: You’d do anything for the woman but love her again. There is some of that in there. You lose a piece of heart.”
Just after noon Pacific time that Monday, in the middle of a lunch he was sharing with a tableful of newspaper reporters at the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica, Howard Stringer got a message to call Michael Ovitz. Stringer, who was in L.A. to address reporters taking part in a press tour to publicize upcoming CBS shows, had been fending off questions about the Letterman deal all morning. He excused himself from the table and went to the nearest pay phone, where he heard the word from Ovitz: The last-minute NBC effort looked as though it had fallen through. NBC had not relinquished its rights yet, and so nothing could be announced. But the network’s negotiators were already talking about coordinating times with CAA so NBC could hold a press conference with Jay that Thursday, the 14th—one day before the official Letterman deadline expired. Ovitz was suggesting that CBS hold its own press conference in New York the same day. Stringer hadn’t planned on that, but he was agreeable. He was in the mood to be agreeable with anything Mike Ovitz said. What Stringer was hearing was that it was all but certain CBS had Letterman—and he was trying to figure out how to stand at a public pay phone in the middle of a hotel lobby teeming with reporters and resist the urge to bellow: “Yes!”
Later that day Stringer met with other CBS executives in his room at the hotel and discussed the network’s plans for the official Letterman announcement Thursday. The only thing NBC seemed interested in negotiating with CAA now, he told them, was the timing of the press conferences; they wanted to go first. CAA had said that would be okay. Some of the CBS executives were concerned that NBC might use the press conference to trash CBS or put down Letterman. But Stringer told them not to worry, because both he and Ovitz knew that NBC had made a serious run at Letterman. “If they get ornery about this,” Stringer told his executives, “we can say that NBC was out there just days ago making offers to keep Letterman and dump their own guy.”
For the NBC executives who had supported keeping Letterman, the news that Monday of the collapse of the negotiations brought frustration—and questions. From what they were hearing inside the company, John Agoglia might not have gone as far as his charge from Wright allowed him to in his negotiations with CAA. As they understood it, Wright would have allowed Agoglia to move up the “no later than” starting date for Letterman on the “Tonight” show from May of 1994 to December of 1993. Had Agoglia really been flexible in his offers? More than that, they asked: Why was Agoglia, known to be as committed a Letterman foe as there was inside NBC, the man charged by Bob Wright to go out and reel in Dave at the last minute? Why couldn’t Wright have designated a different negotiator for this delicate deal? Maybe Rick Cotton, the general counsel—or anyone who. could have gone to the table without the baggage of hostility the Letterman supporters felt that Agoglia brought because of past dealings with Dave.
But they also wondered about what had happened on the Letterman side, because they had heard the word that was spreading from the NBC negotiators: that NBC couldn’t get anywhere that weekend because of opposition from those around Dave who stood to gain much more financially from a deal with CBS than from an offer to stay at NBC.
Agoglia had made the same point to Bob Wright. Agoglia’s take was based on his own long experience as a Hollywood negotiator. When looking to scope out why a negotiation takes the turns it takes, he said, “My answer is: Always follow the trail of the dollar bills.” The NBC executives looked at Mike Ovitz and saw an agenda: What was
in it for Ovitz to keep Dave at NBC? But they looked at the others close to Letterman and saw the real impediment to holding on to Letterman. The CBS deal, Agoglia and the others concluded, was going to pay Letterman’s key staff members so much more money that, as Agoglia put it, “there was no incentive for his people to convince him to stay. It was like: ‘Hey, Dave, look at CBS.’”
Littlefield and Agoglia speculated specifically about Peter Lassally and Robert Morton and what the CBS deal was allegedly going to be worth to them. “Think what this means to them,” Littlefield said. “Doubling their incomes.” And Agoglia added, “More than doubling.” They suggested that the top production salary on the show would grow from about $1 million a year at NBC to about $2.5 million in the new CBS deal.
What made NBC even more convinced that Peter Lassally was a prime obstacle to the network’s bid to keep Letterman was the presence at the CAA offices, during what Agoglia came to call “the Lost Weekend,” of Jim Jackoway, the attorney for Lassally. Bob Wright made it clear in his own postmortem of what had gone wrong with NBC’s last-minute offer that “lawyers for all kinds of third parties entered the picture.”
What Agoglia and Wright apparently didn’t realize at the time was that Jackoway was present at CAA that weekend as David Letterman’s lawyer, not as Peter Lassally’s lawyer. Jackoway had quietly replaced Jake Bloom that fall when Letterman and Lassally decided Dave should have someone with more television experience, someone who could almost function as an in-house lawyer. Jackoway had extensive experience in the television business and was prepared to devote a large percentage of his time to Letterman’s interests. Bloom was one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded lawyers, but he was mainly a top-echelon film industry attorney.