by Carter, Bill
A week before the show went on the air, Letterman was in Chinatown having dinner. Two elderly Chinese people spotted him and came over. “Why you go to Channel Two?” they asked. Letterman was flabbergasted. How could even they know? They could barely speak English and they knew what was happening with him. He concluded, “It was all those silly, fucking promos—dah-dah-dah-dah, night and day and day and night. It was insane.”
Howard Stringer felt the pressure of the coming competition that he had helped so significantly to set up. He was slightly unnerved, as he put it, but totally excited. “I barely know there’s a fall prime-time season going on,” Stringer said. He was gratefully surprised that no last-minute crises seemed to have arisen. He had returned a week early from his summer home in the Hamptons anticipating some howl of horror to emanate from the corner of Broadway and 53rd. But when he called over to the Letterman offices, he found everything had suddenly become tranquil. The wave of attention that was engulfing CBS about the Letterman debut, all centering on the rebuilt Ed Sullivan Theater, confirmed for Stringer his conviction that this was the kind of nationally attended event that could only take place on network television. “This is all about keeping the broadcast networks alive,” Stringer said. “It’s about brand identity and public image and everything else. This is exciting.”
Then he thought about the long road he had been down in wooing and winning David Letterman, and all the times something else might have happened, something that would have denied CBS its part in the excitement of the Letterman opening night. “If I had had to pick up Jay Leno after NBC had dropped him,” Stringer said, “I can’t imagine we would be going through all this buildup to his opening at the Ed Sullivan Theater.”
On the afternoon of August 19, less than two weeks before opening night for “Late Show with David Letterman,” Peter Lassally was working in his twelfth-floor office when he had a totally unexpected visitor: He looked up from his desk to see the sunny, grinning face of Jay Leno. Jay had talked and charmed his way past the security desk and slipped up in the elevator. He used the same charm on the receptionist and got right into Lassally’s office. Peter greeted him warmly, though he was a bit put out at being surprised that way. Jay had no way of knowing how busy he might have been and what he might have been working on—maybe something that Jay Leno shouldn’t know he was working on. It just seemed awfully odd to Lassally that the competitor had dropped in to visit the opponent right before the big game. But that was Jay’s way: Defuse the competitive tension with a wave of pleasantries. Jay chatted amiably about all that was going on, a little about Conan, a little about Chevy. As they talked, Peter’s assistant, Julie Bean, got word to Susan Shreyar, Robert Morton’s assistant, that Jay had just walked in.
When Susan let him know Jay was in the house, Morton figured he’d be next for a visit. So he decided to get ready. On the wall across the room from his desk, Morty always posted index cards with guest bookings. He had several months of names already filled in, though many nights still had open spots. Expecting to hear Jay bounding down the hall any second, Morty grabbed a few blank cards and began scribbling out bogus bookings. He quickly filled out ten cards and stuck them up to replace names for shows during Letterman’s first two weeks on the air. He posted Madonna; he posted Frank Sinatra, with the notation “two songs”; he posted Woody Allen. But after Morton got all that done, Jay still didn’t show up. Morty couldn’t wait any longer to be in on this; he bolted down the hall toward Lassally’s office. As he reached the door, he could hear Jay Leno’s voice, chatting away. Morty then took a beat and burst into the office himself, saying with great excitement to Lassally, “Peter, we got Jackie Onassis for the first show!”
Leno laughed and said, “You asshole.” Then he greeted Morty with an enthusiastic hug. The three of them talked for awhile, with Jay mostly pacing around the office. Lassally and Morton thought Jay might ask to speak with Dave—though he almost never did, either in person or on the phone. Despite how often he cited his friendship with Dave, Jay mostly talked to Peter and Morty. He rarely even tried to contact Dave, saying, with accuracy, that Dave was usually reluctant to come to the phone.
Lassally was struck again by what a weird scene this was and what a truly unusual personality Jay Leno had. Later, after Jay had gone, he and Morty talked about the little visit and decided that Jay was probably going to find a way to get it into the papers that he had stopped off in Dave’s new offices. They were completely unsurprised when the item turned up in the television columns of the New York papers a day later.
The afternoon of David Letterman’s debut on CBS, crowds milled around the corner of Broadway and 53rd for hours. The chosen few with ticket vouchers had lined up hours early. There was a party atmosphere in the street, with many of the fans holding up little Dave faces made from paper plates. One fan from Minnesota turned up with a bust of Letterman’s head made out of butter and placed on a plate with hunks of bread for easy dipping. A couple of enterprising hucksters pushing wedding wear turned up in wedding gown and tux and tried to talk their way into the theater. They were bounced. Almost a dozen microwave trucks lined the sidewalk across Broadway from the big blue marquee that read “Late Show with David Letterman.” Many of the camera crews from CBS affiliates were there to report back to their early-evening newscasts the scene of the big New York premiere. Stations as nearby as Philadelphia and as far away as Phoenix had reporters on the scene.
CBS had arranged a private party at McGee’s Pub, a modest neighborhood bar that was part of the theater building itself—and so a new tenant of Larry Tisch. Tisch himself turned up, along with Stringer, Perth, Jeff Sagansky, the president of CBS Entertainment, and a whole cadre of CBS management. Ed Grebow had set up the bar with television monitors so the invited guests could watch the show live as Dave taped it. Dave was keeping to his rule against stocking the audience with VIPs. They made him uncomfortable during a performance. He preferred an audience of regular folks. Tisch had asked if he could watch the show from the control room, but no one there needed more pressure on this night. So Stringer convinced the CBS chairman to join him inside McGee’s.
Mike Ovitz turned up with his 13-year-old son Chris. He ducked into the bar briefly to say hello to Tisch and Stringer, but then ducked back out again just as quickly. Ovitz did sit in the control room.
Letterman had tried the stage out in two practice shows in front of audiences the week before. They had loaded up the first show with some special bits, including a ghost appearance by Ed Sullivan himself. They also had several jokes prepared to play off NBC’s legal threats about protecting its “intellectual property.” But the lawyers weren’t treating the threat as a joke; they had met with the writers and had carefully gone over what they had decided would be legally defensible. NBC’s main point seemed to be that the new show had better not be so close to the old one that it would be confusing for viewers—that would lead to a suit.
So “Late Show with David Letterman” opened its first show very deliberately with the image of a huge CBS eye, from which Calvert De Forest, no longer Larry Bud Melman, popped out with a booming message: “This is … CBS!” Paul Shaffer’s band was introduced as the “CBS Orchestra.” Letterman came out to a standing ovation, smiling like a man about to hand out cigars with an “It’s a Boy!” on the label. He was quite purposefully different-looking, and not just because he had a new flashy set in a grandly refurbished theater. Dave himself was perfectly turned out in a double-breasted blue suit, custom-tailored at Barney’s, and a smashingly elegant diamond-patterned tie. No more blazers with loafers and white socks. From his first moment on the air for CBS, this was the new Letterman, the grown-up Letterman, the 11:35 Letterman.
In the middle of the monologue, a quite noticeably longer monologue than Dave had ever done on “Late Night,” the show tweaked NBC’s nose with a vengeance in a walk-on by anchorman Tom Brokaw, who marched over to the cue cards, grabbed a joke, declared it NBC’s “intellectual property,” and w
alked off. Paul Newman did a cameo appearance in the audience. He simply asked, “Where the hell are the singing cats?” The Top Ten list had a new high-tech introduction, with graphics and numbers spinning around like the halftime stats on “Monday Night Football.” Again there was a method to the window dressing: No one could say this Top Ten list looked anything like the old one. Dave did one of his trademark remote pieces on tape, some hilarious interviews with the colorful folk of New Jersey. His first guest, as he had been eleven years earlier on “Late Night,” was Bill Murray. Murray, in an over-the-top performance, spray-painted Dave’s name on his new desk. And Dave did summon up the ghost of Ed Sullivan.
Letterman was swathed in laughs and affection from the audience all night. He would receive ecstatic rave reviews in the papers for his first CBS performance. But, true to his nature, he left the stage that night displeased. It wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t exactly what he wanted. After the show Letterman gathered with the CBS management up on the stage and sheepishly accepted congratulations for a moment before disappearing upstairs. When Ovitz came up to his office to congratulate him in person, Dave told him the show had been a disaster. Ovitz was slightly stunned; he thought the show was a smash, and said so. As people milled all around him in his office, Letterman shied away, taking refuge from all the adults in suits by striking up a conversation with the only kid in a suit—Chris Ovitz. They talked about sports. At one point, without suspending the conversation for a second, he reached into a humidor, and said to Chris, “Cigar?” The kid had never heard anything funnier in his life.
Later, a thrilled Stringer called. Lassally took the call, listened for a moment to Stringer’s effusive enthusiasm, and then put him on hold. He asked Dave if he wanted to speak with Howard. Dave couldn’t bring himself to listen to compliments at that moment—as he almost never could in the first minutes after a show. He always found it uncomfortable talking to “outsiders” right after a performance. “No, I can’t talk now,” Dave said. Lassally asked Stringer to call back later.
Howard did call a little later from the CBS celebration party. He told his star how great he was, how perfect the opening had been, and how the theater was surely a wonderful home. Letterman thanked Stringer for his kind words, even though he still wished he could have the first show back. He just knew he could make it great with just one more crack at it.
A week later Chevy Chase would wish for a second chance as well, but no one would think he was being overly self-critical. Chase came on with an opening show so excruciatingly awful that it became an instant television classic—of the wrong kind. With an opening that simulated vomiting and a mawkish display of mutual congratulations with his onetime costar Goldie Hawn, Chase lost all credibility as a talk-show host in just one night. Only masochism and massive investment induced Fox to keep Chevy on the air for six weeks.
Chevy’s humiliating flop provided helpful protective cover for Conan O’Brien, who made his own debut one week later. Michaels had done all he could to smooth the ragged edges of Conan’s first hours as a television star. They had squeezed in eleven practice shows to get Conan accustomed to standing and talking in front of an audience. Even then Michaels felt as though they could have used three more weeks of practice.
The premiere show opened with a superbly produced little video of Conan heading to work on his first day, laughing at everyone’s advice about getting nervous. The piece ended with O’Brien in his dressing room, standing on a chair with a noose around his neck. Conan met the live audience for the first time in a high-strung and high-pitched state. Much of what he did seemed manic and forced. But he got through the show without coming unglued; and his appeal with people seemed to come through on camera. One of his guests that first night, Tony Randall, said after the show that the new star was so appealing, Conan didn’t have to be funny—words that Conan didn’t exactly want to hear. But the mostly kind reviews the next day, almost all of which pointed out how much better Conan was than Chevy, emphasized the same point. It seemed that a nice young man, if not quite a star, had been born.
Later, at the opening night party, Conan was relieved and charged up—and then he was overwhelmingly lonely. There was no one else who could feel exactly as he felt at that moment, having made this improbable dream a reality, or at least the start of a reality.
David Letterman’s show became the talk of the television industry before the end of his first week on the air. It wasn’t just that he was drawing monster ratings; it was the show itself. The hype got viewers to tune in. Letterman himself got them talking about what they had seen. He had done what he told Bob Wright he would do: He had subtly reinvented himself for the larger audience available an hour earlier. With his sophisticated suits, his obvious enthusiasm for his new surroundings, his increased warmth toward his guests— especially his women guests—David Letterman was sending out the signal: He had moved to 11:35, and he was there to win. Letterman put it circumspectly but unflinchingly: “It would be very gratifying if we could prevail.”
NBC had lined up its arguments to dismiss Letterman’s early ratings—temporary, not as good as they should be, not really hurting Jay anyway. But NBC was fighting with credibility as much as with Letterman. The press reaction was nearly unanimous: Letterman was a great star with a great show. For NBC to deny that was futile, so nobody really tried. Instead there was some talk about Letterman being—as Pier Mapes, the network president in charge of affiliate relations and advertising sales, put it—“a flash in the pan.”
But the weeks went on, and Letterman won night after night. More than winning the overall ratings, he clobbered the “Tonight” show in the important demographic contest. Dave dominated in all viewers below the age of fifty. Leno’s audience was getting smaller and older. Its makeup, in a bit of truly unexpected irony, was beginning to match that of Carson’s most recent audience. The preponderance of older viewers had been one of the main reasons why NBC had wanted to nudge Johnny aside in favor of Jay.
The Letterman show was accomplishing this startling success, Robert Morton was fond of saying, “with one arm tied behind our backs.” The difference in clearances was almost never mentioned because Letterman was winning so decisively anyway; but it was still there. The “Tonight” show had a 30 percent advantage in getting on the air earlier. That should have given Jay a big edge. But Dave was erasing it night after night. People wanted to watch David Letterman. The broad-based audience wasn’t finding him edgy, or nasty, or off-putting. They were finding him appealing—and funny.
Jay himself stayed calm, as always. He watched the numbers carefully, just as he had before, and he thought he would be all right. It was a marathon, he reminded people, not a sprint.
“Dave is awfully strong,” Jay said after the first few weeks, acknowledging, in his gracious mode, that “Dave is awfully good.” Jay watched Dave just about every night and picked up immediately on how he was doing a longer monologue. That might help, Jay felt, because, in as modest a way as possible, he gave himself credit for winning the battle of the monologues. “We touch on more subjects, I think,” Jay said. “We’re doing okay,” he concluded.
But after Dave’s arrival on the scene, Jay found himself even more often the target of cruel cracks in the press. In pieces that declared Dave the outright winner of their late-night clash, Jay’s show was frequently put down for being stodgy and unimaginative. Typical of the nasty digs being tossed at Jay in the media was a cartoon in The New Yorker just two weeks after Letterman went on the air. The full-page cartoon labeled itself “Items from the Jay Leno Fan Club” and included a cap that said, “Jay Leno does not try too hard!”; a button that said, “Jay Leno: He’s not that bad!”; and a T-shirt that read, “I, for one, do not find Jay Leno painfully embarrassing to watch!” Much of the anti-Jay commentary crossed the line into unfairness. Jay, after all, was still drawing a respectable audience every night, and his show was in no way the embarrassment that Chevy Chase’s had been. But nothing like that had ever been
written about the previous host of the “Tonight” show. Never in thirty years on the air. But then never in thirty years had Johnny Carson lost month after month in the ratings.
Fair or not, the assessment was having impact. It was quickly entering the cultural consciousness. Letterman was cool; Leno was square. Dave was hot; Jay was not Letterman and CBS were winning; Leno and NBC were losing.
The empire of the night was under siege.
13
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?
In September 1993 Jack Welch sat in an NBC conference room surrounded by about twenty-five of the network’s top executives. The GE chairman always attended the NBC quarterly review meetings. The meeting, as always, was being run by Bob Wright, the NBC president, who asked for reports from his division heads. The entertainment division executives were tied in by speakerphone from Burbank. The review included all of the network’s recent activities, with a heavy emphasis on the prime-time season that started that month. The executives talked about what they hoped to achieve with their new shows and their expectations for the overall performance of the network in the fourth quarter.
Jack Welch listened to the conversation around him with his customary searing intensity. A finely chiseled block of a man, with thinning gray hair and steely blue eyes, Welch’s style was as blunt and straight as his posture. He ran a $60 billion-a-year company, which relegated NBC to the status of modest, if incredibly visible, investment. He did not pretend to be an expert in television programming, but he often had opinions, and he was not the type to be timid about expressing them.
As Warren Littlefield ran down the prospects for the fell programming over the speakerphone, Welch didn’t hear a certain subject being discussed that he felt ought to be discussed. So he brought it up himself.