by Carter, Bill
That night, NBC insisted Conan be introduced to America by Jay Leno on the stage of the “Tonight” show, even though Michaels thought it was a dumb idea. Jay brought Conan on right after his monologue, but Conan, looking faintly like a man pulled in from the street and told he’d just won $20 million in the lottery, was at a loss for words. He grinned and said he was “just thrilled” several times. Just nerves, the optimistic NBC executives said to themselves after Conan’s unveiling on the “Tonight” show.
One week later, on Monday, May 3, Conan turned up in New York for his own press conference. NBC staged it in the elegant Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of the GE Building. Amid generous servings of wine and canapés, about two hundred members of the press swarmed on the scene, waiting to hear the first bons mots from the new Letterman. When O’Brien strode in, flanked by Michaels and backed up by Ohlmeyer and Littlefield, he was surrounded by a dizzying circle of photographers who screamed “Conan” from every side, as though he had already entered the pantheon of show business stars identifiable by first name only—like Clint or Dustin or Roseanne.
But if all the lights, cameras, and action fazed the man in the middle of the swirl, he didn’t show it. Freshly turned thirty, Conan seemed to enjoy his first moment as a public spectacle. He fielded questions for about a half hour, filling in some blanks in his personal résumé (he cleared up any confusion about his height, saying he was six feet four), describing his intentions for the show by saying he would most like to do a show that his three brothers would think was funny, and trying to display wit when the opportunity arose. When someone asked how it felt to get such a prominent job as a “relative unknown,” Conan said in mock outrage: “Sir, I am a complete unknown!” Later he said that his fame was already spreading. He was being stopped on the street by people saying: “You’re that marginally talented guy, aren’t you?”
Michaels stood to one side, examining the proceeding as would a sociology professor studying an unusual show business phenomenon. In a brief opening statement, Littlefield had celebrated Michaels as a “great discoverer” on a par with Columbus and Magellan. At that moment he looked more like Stanley, wondering if this person in front of him might possibly be Livingstone. Lorne said he hoped Conan would succeed based on his talent for being “playful and intelligent.”
As Conan left the room, with some reporters beguiled by his gentle humor and winning charm and others still wondering if NBC had a lick of sense left in the network, Warren Littlefield said to another NBC executive, “This could work.”
12
CLASH BY NIGHT
The Asian-American family was packed into the tan Nissan Sentra as it pulled into the Exxon station in Burbank, near the entrance to the Pasadena Freeway; two adult women in the front seat, four children in the back. One of the women climbed out and walked to the pumps. As she dragged down the hose for self-service regular, she looked across the service station island and saw the enormous sky-blue vehicle draw up to the pumps on the other side, a car like nothing she had ever seen before in her life. As though watching a whale cresting the surface of the ocean, her eyes grew wide with wonder at the sight, even before she recognized the figure emerging from the driver’s side of the car. When she saw it was Jay Leno, host of the “Tonight” show, she smiled hugely and began gesticulating wildly to the others in the car. “Jay Leno!” she yelled to them, knocking at the back window, “Jay Leno! Jay Leno!”
Jay acknowledged her with a friendly wave and a “hiya, how’re you doing?” as he walked behind the massive car and stuck the premium hose into the tank. As he pumped the gas he waved at the others in the car, saying, “Hiya, you guys. Nice to see you.” The woman stepped over to him gingerly, as though unsure if she could interrupt the delicate operation of filling this blue monster with gas. She said hello. Jay reached out his free hand and shook hers. She giggled with excitement and got back in her car. Everyone inside it waved energetically to Leno as they pulled away. Jay waved back again, warmly. Then he stepped on the running board and plopped himself behind the wheel of his pristine, precisely restored 1930 Duesenberg and drove off, across the avenue toward the freeway entrance, then down the ramp and into the teeming traffic heading toward the hills of Pasadena.
It was a spectacular Saturday afternoon, and Jay Leno was taking the prize of his automotive collection out for a spin on his day off. Leno had spent most of the day as he spent every Saturday when he wasn’t booked somewhere on the road: working on his cars and motorcycles in the modified airplane hangar he owned adjacent to the Burbank airport. The hangar was arranged like a car dealer’s showroom, with the fruits of Leno’s success as a comic: more than forty bikes and about half as many cars, all of which had been worked on by him and the mechanics he employed. That day two mechanics and Jay had worked on a 1951 Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, tuning the engine to perfection as a younger assistant applied special wax dozens of times and polished the black hood that closed over the rear tire. The work and the camaraderie with the mechanics seemed to relax Leno like nothing else in his life. Under the bike tightening a screw, Jay had looked focused and serene in his grease-spotted coveralls, as though listening intensely to a musical instrument, while one bare-chested mechanic gently revved the motorcycle’s engine.
Now on the freeway, Leno could feel the wind racing under the elegant canvas-cloth roof that was unfolded and attached by polished bamboo braces from just behind the backseat to the windshield of the otherwise windowless car. He steered the Duesenberg like a battleship with wheels, its leviathan hood stretching out in front of him like a prow. The speedometer in the opulent mahogany dashboard edged toward eighty.
Heads jerked and spun inside every car the Duesenberg passed, the other drivers and passengers as stunned by this sight as if the starship Enterprise had taken to the Pasadena Freeway. They craned their necks up to see who might be behind the wheel of this apparition, and what they saw was the familiar, friendly face of Jay Leno. So they waved, and honked their horns; one passenger even pulled a camera out of a purse in the backseat and held it up to the window. Jay slowed just enough to stay even with the tiny Honda, waving pleasantly as the fan snapped away.
Jay had spent $350,000 to restore this museum piece to a state where he could periodically set it free to roar down an open road. He knew the car’s story: how a previous owner had used it to commit suicide in his garage and how a surviving brother had let it rot for forty years rather than use it after that. The story didn’t really give Jay pause; but the circumstances of the past eighteen months of his own life surely did. As his now-flawless machine flew by the Chevys and Mazdas and Buicks sixty years younger, Jay Leno sat in the afternoon breeze and looked down the road ahead of him. It still wasn’t easy to get away from where he had just been.
Friends had begun to notice how little joy Jay seemed to be getting out of his life. “I just don’t think fun is anywhere in his life,” one friend said, with real concern for him. Though Jay was still tightly reserved with his feelings and his innermost thoughts, these friends detected more self-evaluation from Jay than they ever had before. He seemed to be often replaying all that had taken place in the battle for the “Tonight” show, as though looking for a way to make it different, or at least less uncomfortable than it had turned out.
“Dave never had it in his contract that he would get the job,” Jay said in one of his detailed explanations of how the situation had played out. “I think what you had there was David, an extremely honorable person and a decent person, and I think he thought if he put anything in the newspapers, it would look like a slight push-Johnny-out. I mean, in retrospect I realize that’s probably what it is, and what he did is probably what I should have done. I mean, I think everything was handled totally wrong from my point of view and my side. I think that where all the hurt and anger on the other side came from is that David chose to do the right thing, the honorable thing, and he got slapped down for it.”
Months after Helen Kushnick’s depa
rture, the after-shocks were still rolling through Jay’s life. Jay felt as though everything he did were being filtered by the experience with Helen. Here he was, a man who had consistently presented himself in his comedy—and his life—as the nice guy, the good guy, and he was suddenly being targeted as a schemer, part of Helen’s reign of terror. “Now I’m the bad guy,” he said. “It’s so odd for me to wind up being the bad guy in a situation.”
Jay, who was generous with time and advice to every comic he had ever worked with, was now hearing himself put down on the comedy grapevine as only marginally talented and undeserving of being Carson’s successor. Jay, who was open and accessible to journalists in a way unmatched by any other major star in show business, was getting ripped regularly in the papers. He professed an ability to shrug it off, but those closest to him knew it was unfair—and that it hurt.
Jay vacillated between taking full responsibility for all that had happened under Helen and defending himself because he really didn’t know all that had gone on. “Helen wouldn’t argue. She’d yell. It was a nightmare, a nightmare,” Jay said. “It’s hard to believe it all took place in a three-month period.” Jay said he had always looked past the excesses of Helen’s behavior earlier in his career, “because she was there for me when nobody else was.” But as he asked himself why it had all come crashing down, he said, “I guess absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In the wake of Helen’s exit, Jay himself had assumed last-say power over the show, and set out to prove that he could be a success without any ugly backstage maneuverings. Now, he said, “there’s no problem on the show that can’t be fixed. There has not been one raised voice since Helen left, not one confrontational situation.” In his effort to purge every aspect of Helen’s influence and impact from his life, Jay sounded to some of those around him a bit like the born-again sinner driven to cast out the demons that had pulled him in the wrong direction. Every gift Helen ever gave him, he said, he had thrown away; every picture of her, every piece of memorabilia, all gone. And included in that broad sweep: every one of the shows they had done together.
“Those first three months of shows will never be rerun,” Jay said, taking his mea culpas as far as they could go. “That’s the deal I made with NBC. The shows Helen produced will never, ever be rerun. NBC can’t throw them away, I guess, but I’ve thrown away my copies of them. As far as I’m concerned, my anniversary show isn’t in May, it’s September 21—the first show I did without her.”
The power of the emotion he felt toward Helen was unusual for him, and it clearly was not in perspective yet. With some reluctance, Jay acknowledged that Helen had devoted herself to his career and that it might be true that he would never have gotten the “Tonight” show without her. But he said, “I never wanted it this way. If I knew this was being done for me in order to get me the show, all the dirty dealings, all that sleazy Hollywood stuff, I would never have wanted it.”
He decided he was like a guy who’s been in prison, and all he wanted to do now was forget about it and get on with his life.
As David Letterman wound down toward his final shows on NBC, he felt a surprising degree of nostalgia—or at least it might have been surprising to some at NBC who never understood how much he cared about the place. Letterman was worried enough about the emotion getting to him that he packed up most of the personal things from his NBC office three months early and had them stored for transfer to CBS. Letterman knew the leave-taking was going to be tough on him, not only because he was a nester by instinct, but also because being at NBC had always held special significance for him. It was the center of all the late-night comedy tradition in television, and that tradition had always had strong resonance in Letterman’s life. “I felt early on in my career that NBC would be the place I would go to,” Letterman said.
But the show was going on. In one of the odder television transition periods, Letterman did his show every night on NBC from January through June, even as he started planning his CBS show and often referred to the move to CBS on the air. His loyalties were truly divided. As CBS began its effort to woo its affiliated stations to add the new Letterman show to their late-night lineup, Letterman was pressed into service. On an off week from the show that March, Letterman made the rounds of a few CBS stations to press some flesh and politick for the cause of clearing his show. When he visited St. Louis he did a guest spot with the weather anchor, cut some promotions, and schmoozed with the general manager. In an interview with Eric Mink of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Letterman said, “This project is a huge gamble for everyone, and I will not be comfortable with myself unless I am able to say at the end of the night: ‘I’ve done everything I can do to help this thing along.’ If later I find out for some reason there’s a problem in St. Louis and I didn’t come, I’ll think, ‘Jesus, why didn’t I?’”
A few days after Letterman returned from St. Louis, Peter Lassally received a letter from Don Ohlmeyer. The always aggressive Ohlmeyer was not about to allow Letterman such free rein while still in the employ of NBC. He pointed out in the letter that Letterman was still being paid by NBC, and it seemed less than professional to be out in a market doing promos for a CBS station while he was still on the air on the NBC station in that market. He also noticed that Dave seemed to be having more and more guests from CBS on the show. The initial response to Ohlmeyer from some members of the Letterman staff: Screw him. But Dave didn’t visit any more CBS affiliates while he was still an NBC employee.
Letterman had other preoccupations anyway. Now that he had agreed to join CBS, he and the top people on his staff were wrestling with the problem of where exactly at CBS he was going to do the show. With the “Tonight” show there would have been no question; Dave would have done the show from Burbank. But CBS had no obvious place for Dave to set down his roots. At CBS there was no classy broadcasting hub like Rockefeller Plaza, with its rich television tradition. CBS produced its New York-based shows out of a sprawling, characterless broadcast center on West 57th Street in Manhattan. Howard Stringer knew the limitations of that facility, and he also knew that Letterman had some affinity for Los Angeles, where he had first built his career and where he maintained a residence and many interests. Dave, in another odd parallel to Jay, was also a car enthusiast and also had an airplane hangar full of vintage vehicles and extravagant sports cars—only Dave’s was at the Santa Monica airport.
But Stringer believed strongly that New York, in all its gore and glitz and glory, was a full-time player in David Letterman’s comedy. Stringer also had deep personal loyalty to the city he had made his home for almost thirty years. He wanted CBS’s Letterman show to stay in New York. And Stringer had an idea about where it could find a home.
Even before he finalized the deal with Letterman, Stringer began thinking about how CBS could replace the broadcast tradition and the New York ambience that came with working out of a studio in Rockefeller Center. He thought of one place the show could move that might bring with it some of those elements. And once he had the idea, he couldn’t let go of it: David Letterman at the old Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway. For Stringer it seemed like some kind of broadcast destiny.
To many on the Letterman staff, the idea seemed more like broadcast folly. The initial reaction was strongly negative: Dave was so accustomed to working in a television studio; he was a broadcaster, not a stage-trained actor. It seemed too grand, too out of scale and showy, too much a contrast to the basement club-room atmosphere of the 12:30 show on NBC. When Stringer suggested a tour of the theater, the Letterman staff went along with reluctance; they thought they were being nice to Howard.
Dave himself had an open mind. The idea of California was attractive, for the weather and the easier access to big-name show business guests. But he also knew New York had proved to be an endless source of comedy ideas. And much of his staff had put down deep roots in the city.
The Sullivan Theater had fallen into wretched disrepair. It was occasionally rented out for specials or industrial
shows, but most of the time it was another dark, decaying New York building. Dave thought it had a bit of nice theatrical feeling to it, but overall it simply seemed too big. He thought the relationships on the stage would be completely out of whack; he would be too far from the audience and from Paul Shaffer and the band. And while the stage seemed enormous, it didn’t seem as if much of it could really be used.
Most of the rest of the staff was even less impressed—with one exception. Director Hal Gurnee, who had always had the best visual eye on the staff, envisioned real creative possibilities working in an old theater. He liked the idea right away.
Robert Morton’s reaction was more typical. “David Letterman is not a proscenium performer,” Morton said. “You can’t put him on a stage. He needs to be around a working studio, somewhere that is rich with material.” Letterman had always made advantageous use of the adjacency of his show to NBC’s other New York programs. Letterman liked to break into news shows in progress or bring on the anchors as last-minute guests. Up at the Sullivan Theater, the show would be isolated, Morton felt, severely limiting the opportunities for interaction with other programs.
So the Letterman staff pressed Stringer to find studio space inside the broadcast center on West 57th, an idea Stringer thought was disastrous. The CBS broadcast center was a labyrinth of halls and offices and studios, so confusing and alienating that visitors often took wrong turns and wound up lost. The place seemed to have the fewest windows of any building in New York City, and it was already uncomfortably overcrowded. Even if a suitable studio could be found in the center, there was nowhere near enough office space for the writers, producers, and other staff. As an alternative, the Letterman staff examined the possibility of locating the office across 57th in a separate CBS building. They paced off the available office space and worked on the logistics: How would Dave get across the street every night to do the show without causing a commotion?