The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  Then question six: “Did you ever order anything off the TV?”

  “Like NBC ordered your show off the TV?”

  Question seven was about the most number of lap dances Kimmel had ever ordered in Vegas. Jimmy first said his mother was watching, then clarified, “Wait a minute. The show’s canceled, right? Nobody’s watching the show.” Then he added, “Strippers I don’t like in general because you have this phony relationship with them for money—similar to when you and Conan were on The Tonight Show together? Passing the torch?”

  Jay was saying, “Right, right,” to play along. Next question: “What do you fear most?”

  Kimmel went through volcanoes and tidal waves before he added, “I fear the network will move my show to ten o’clock.”

  “I had that nightmare!” Jay threw in.

  At this point, number nine looked like an invitation to open hunting season: “Is there anything you haven’t hosted that you want to host?”

  “Oh, this is a trick, right?” Kimmel asked. “Where you get me to host The Tonight Show and then take it back from me?”

  The final question was a multiple choice on why Jimmy came on the show (with stupid choices like “You like satellite technology” except for the last, which was about keeping Jay happy in case he decided to switch to ABC). Kimmel turned it into an all-Conan fest: “Listen, Jay. Conan and I have children. All you have to take care of is cars!”

  “That’s right,” Jay muttered, still playing along but looking to end this thing as amicably as possible.

  “We have lives to lead here,” Kimmel said. “You’ve got eight hundred million dollars! For god’s sakes, leave our shows alone!”

  Jay, smiling as best he could, finished it up. “A plea from Jimmy Kimmel! Jimmy, thank you, my friend.”

  Kimmel had been nervous beforehand, but he was now elated. It had the feel of winning a ten-round fight. Jay’s producers seemed stunned. Kimmel waited until he got out of earshot of the Leno crew, then erupted with his writers. “Oh my god, that was so uncomfortable,” one said. Kimmel thought Jay might drop the whole thing, because it had gone so badly for him and there was essentially no way to edit it.

  Jimmy had no remorse. As he saw it, he took what they were trying to do to him—make him Jay’s boy—as a hostile act that justified rough treatment. But he had not expected Jay to just stand there and take it, never deviating from his script. Surely Jay would say something back, Kimmel had thought. But he just let Kimmel pummel him without really throwing a punch in return.

  Of course, that posture had defined Jay from the earliest of ages: He’d actually tried boxing once and found all he could do was let the other guy hit him. And then, of course, there had been that incident in school with the kid and the hammer.

  Back at Jay headquarters, the discomfort was acute. Jay knew he’d walked into a door being pushed in his face and could blame no one but himself. He’d let it happen, so he wasn’t going to cut it from the air.

  Debbie Vickers was furious. Jay accepted it as comedy, so he could not allow himself to be angry. Debbie believed it was bad manners; Kimmel had stepped over some kind of line into sheer rudeness. Jay ascribed Jimmy’s motivation to a small-time guy looking to get publicity from taking on a big-time guy. Not quite the fly who lives off the back of the elephant, but something like that. For Kimmel, Jay figured, this was like the best publicity he could get.

  In that, Jay was certainly right. Kimmel climbed aboard a wave of reaction the likes of which he had rarely experienced before. For three days afterward he felt like Rocky on the steps in Philadelphia. For every one who accused him of being an invited guest who’d peed on his host’s carpet—and there weren’t that many who did—he had thousands of claps on the back. The Internet went wild with kudos for how ballsy he was to take Jay on that way face-to-face.

  Kimmel couldn’t believe how it had worked out. Instead of giving him a question or two to bat this around, Leno’s forces had tried to avoid it, and he’d batted Jay over the head with it. That question about his greatest prank? That was so perfect, it was almost as though God had told him he had to do it.

  He still could not believe that Jay had not expected it. If anyone had paid attention to Jimmy’s career, they would have seen he could be vicious if he needed to be—and that he lived for this kind of setup.

  The reaction Kimmel appreciated most came from the other late-night voice reveling in the Jay-Conan saga. David Letterman sent him a brief note to tell him that his Leno bit had been really funny.

  Through his steadfast massaging of each side, Ron Meyer had broken through on the main financial issues, determining the most NBC was willing to pay and the least the Conan side was willing to take. The math he could handle.

  On Thursday, the day of the Kimmel “10 at 10” ambush, Meyer called Rick Rosen, who was still in Palm Springs, to inform him that he believed a deal could be made on the numbers—about $32 million to pay off Conan. Severance for the staff, which Conan had stressed as a condition as well, still had to be resolved. Meyer told Rosen they needed him back in the conference room in LA to finish things off.

  When Rosen spoke to the Conan negotiating group, they agreed it was time for him to return, so he chartered a plane and flew back. He met first with Conan and Ross, then joined the group in the conference room at Universal.

  There the framework of a deal seemed to be in place; the contract would be settled after one more week on the air for Conan, a concession the host had pushed for in order to set up a proper farewell for his Tonight show. But the NBC group needed a break to run things by New York. At that point, the forward movement slowed down. The counsel for GE got involved; GE would need to figure out how to structure the payout over a number of quarters.

  NBC also had a few fine points it wanted to discuss, a primary one being an assurance that Howard Stern would not appear as a guest during Conan’s last week. This struck Rosen as a comical request—Conan had no interest in booking anyone as incendiary as Stern—so it was easily accepted. There were also demands that Conan not sit down for interviews with Letterman, Oprah, or Regis Philbin until months had passed. NBC also requested to see the show’s scripts for the final week, but that was never going to happen.

  Nothing was finalized on Thursday, and the Friday talks got bogged down as well. Nobody wanted the negotiations to carry over into the weekend, but NBC still had issues to resolve.

  On Saturday the New York Post ran a story saying that Conan’s staffers felt betrayed. They couldn’t believe Conan wouldn’t at least try to live with the 12:05 idea for a while to see if it worked out, so that they could keep their jobs. They had moved across the country to work with him and now, because of his ego, they would be out of work while he basked in some big $30 million settlement.

  The story, which O’Brien had no doubt was a direct plant from NBC, infuriated him, because he had worked so hard to ensure some financial security for the staff, and they had seemed to respond with nothing but support—as evidenced by the near unanimous vote of the writers that he should walk. (In truth, there was a small minority of staff members who expressed some anger about Conan’s giving up the show and their jobs with it.)

  Again Conan found himself appalled. The NBC people had observed his work for seventeen years and yet they had no clue about his character? Did they really think he had no regard for his staff? Even after he had paid them out of his own pocket during the writers’ strike? Did they really think he would use his last week on the air to go on a trash tour of NBC? Or book himself onto some other shows to assail Jeff Zucker?

  When he saw Patty Glaser at one of the meetings, Conan asked her, “Why are these guys so obsessed with this meaningless stuff?”

  “These are very small people,” Glaser replied.

  On Saturday Gaspin called Rosen and informed him there was a new problem: NBC could not sign off on certain terms in the deal.

  “You can’t be doing this now,” Rosen complained, but Gaspin insisted that i
t couldn’t be helped. A conference call was set for Sunday, the day of the Golden Globe Awards (to be telecast by NBC), and would begin at eleven, early enough for everyone to get into their tuxes in time for the show.

  On Sunday Rosen reached out again to Ron Meyer, telling him he needed his help one more time, because things seemed to be going off the rails. Meyer told him he was being iced out a bit by the NBC team, which had come to believe he was too favorable to the Conan side.

  Rosen remained in his new home in Santa Barbara, communicating with Glaser and Brecheen, who were in a conference room at Patty’s firm in Century City. The eleven a.m. start time went by, then noon. Gaspin called Rosen saying the call had to be delayed even further. The afternoon dragged on.

  Gavin Polone had scheduled a date for that evening. He thought about canceling; but what were the odds something was getting done with the Golden Globes going on? Besides, it was a second date, and he was interested in this new woman.

  Rosen called Meyer again; from Ron he learned that GE had now become a bigger factor. Jeffrey Immelt, the GE chairman, had suddenly started to question why they were paying so much money to a guy they were going to allow to run off to another network.

  The call was put off until six p.m., meaning the meeting would surely spill into the middle of the Globes show. (It would be nine p.m. in the east.) It also meant that a gaggle of the highest-priced legal talent in LA would be sitting around doing nothing but piling up billable hours.

  By six, Polone had picked up his date and was headed for the movies. He wanted to see Avatar in 3D. By the time he got to the theater, it was sold out. The only thing they could get into was The Young Victoria. Twelve minutes into that movie, his BlackBerry buzzed: an e-mail from Jeff Ross. They wanted him to call in. Gavin excused himself and fled to the lobby.

  The Conan group discussed the latest developments on their own conference call. Now NBC was asking for concessions they saw as totally crazy—among them, the unilateral right to pull the show on any night of the following week if they didn’t like the content. The Conan forces signed off quickly on that one; they could only imagine how it would play for NBC in the press if they decided to pull Conan off the air one night because they didn’t like a joke he told.

  Polone remained on the phone in the theater lobby throughout the haggling. The movie ended; his date emerged. He was still on the phone. (The relationship didn’t last.)

  At the Globes, amid a pelting downpour in LA, NBC threw a grand party on the roof of the Beverly Hilton. Gaspin dropped in and out of the festivities. He spent much of his time in a private room trying to get the deal finished. Issues of severance and details of what Conan could and couldn’t do the following week remained unresolved. It wasn’t happening.

  Meanwhile, on the air, Ricky Gervais was introducing the show with the line “Let’s get on with it before NBC replaces me with Jay Leno.” Tom Hanks, presenting an award, remarked, “NBC said it was going to rain at ten p.m., but they moved it to eleven thirty.” And Tina Fey, accepting an award, said of the rainy night, “It’s God crying for NBC.”

  For the increasingly besieged NBC, the online support for Conan had eclipsed the term “viral”; now it was more like a plague. Groups sprang up all over the Web and across the country in individual cities. The Facebook group “I’m with Coco” organized Conan rallies in New York, Chicago, and Seattle, as well as LA for that Monday, the eighteenth.

  Along with Conan’s suddenly sizzling ratings, which continued to grow by the night, the rise of Coco mania served as additional annoyance for the pressed executives at NBC. Jeff Gaspin had an idea about what was happening. He theorized that when Conan moved to 11:35, he had stopped being Conan. He tried to be something he really wasn’t—a somewhat broader Conan without really abandoning the antic style that had branded him. The result was too soft for the hard-core Conan fans, but still not comfortable for the Leno fans.

  But once he rose up to take a stand against NBC’s meddling with his career, once he went on the attack, Conan raised his game to a new level. Gaspin didn’t think this phase was something that could last, because it was built around a specific event, but while Conan was caught up in it, his show had clearly improved. Conan was now producing an irreverent show, a dangerous show, and the kids in the audience loved it. Gaspin could not help but ruefully admire the irony of the situation: NBC had given Conan his mojo back, just in time for him to take it somewhere else. That didn’t mean Gaspin had decided he’d been wrong, however. On the contrary, it seemed to him to prove that NBC’s evaluation that Conan had lost his mojo was exactly correct.

  That Monday afternoon a crowd gathered outside the entrance to the Tonight studio, despite more rain, a deluge of the kind that usually paralyzes LA. Like something out of a sixties protest march, the fans came out carrying signs (“Conan Saved Me from Scientology”) and chanting slogans (“Jay Leno Sucks”). The star himself showed up and shook a few hands outside before making an appearance on the roof to wave to the fans, his famous pompadour doused thoroughly.

  Conan was touched to his soul by the rally, which had hundreds of fans soaked to the skin chanting his name. As he stood on the roof, dripping, it struck him that this might be—appropriately enough—a water-shed moment, the first giant schism between the old broadcast world and the new electronic media dominated by the Internet. He believed NBC had tried in the old-fashioned way to undermine him, in the attack by Ebersol—whom Conan dismissed as one of the “silverback gorillas” still trying to rule television—and in the story about dissension on the staff.

  The outpouring of support made Conan feel as if he was starring in his own version of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, both because he was allowed to see a Tonight Show where he never existed and because the support made him realize he really was “the richest man in town.”

  Beneath his feet, Conan sensed the ground moving, shifting finally from a baby-boom-centric culture to one controlled by Gens X and Y. Messages on sites all over the Web were rife with sheer anger at the boomers—symbolized by Leno—refusing to cede the stage and the culture.

  By the end of Monday no deal had yet emerged, but widespread reports claimed that an agreement was close. Jay remained under assault everywhere, nowhere more so than over at CBS, with Letterman banging away at him relentlessly. He featured a faux ad for Leno, citing how Jay stood for middle America, for traditional American values like “killing Indians because you want their land.”

  By that night Jay had had enough and decided to deliver a manifesto (of sorts) of his own. After finishing his monologue he took his seat at the desk and announced that he wanted to give “my view of what has been going on here at NBC.ʺ It was, especially for Jay, an unusually long personal statement, not much of which was played for laughs. He recalled how NBC had come to him in 2004, even with his position as top dog in late night unchallenged, and told him to make way for Conan.

  “Don’t blame Conan O’Brien,” Jay said. “Nice guy, good family guy, great guy.”

  But he did seem to assign blame to other parties—“managers . . . who try to get something for their clients.” That said, Jay agreed that he had announced he would retire, mainly to “avoid what happened last time”—when he and Letterman had jousted for the crown.

  He then recounted the history of the ten p.m. idea, which he explained he had resisted but ultimately accepted in order to keep his staff in their jobs. Meanwhile, he said, Conan’s show “was not doing well.” The hope that Jay at ten would help Conan didn’t work out.

  Then NBC told him it wanted to make a change. Jay said he asked to be let out of his contract; NBC refused. He outlined the half-hour plan, with Conan sliding back, and described how NBC had all but guaranteed him that Conan would accept the proposal. But then, he said, he saw Conan’s statement declining to go along with it. NBC came back, Jay said, and asked, if Conan decided to walk, would Jay take The Tonight Show back? Jay agreed, he explained, again out of consideration for his staff.

/>   “Through all of this, Conan O’Brien has been a gentleman,” Jay said. “He’s a good guy. I have no animosity towards him. This is all business. If you don’t get the ratings, they take you off the air.”

  He concluded by telling the audience that the resolution might come the following day.

  It didn’t, of course. The haggling over financing employee severance and the details of the limitations on Conan kept the issue unsettled yet again. But Jay’s statement—as so often with his efforts, viewed as forthright by friends and Machiavellian by foes—seemed to confirm he would return to his old Tonight spot when the Olympics came to an end on March1.

  Given the heightened attention on everything relating to the NBC late-night tumult, Jay’s statement could hardly escape comment. And once again it was David Letterman doing the most commenting. The following night Dave devoted his own desk segment—the entirety of it, despite a scripted comedy piece resting on his desk throughout—to an apparently extemporaneous analysis of Jay’s “state of the network speech.”

  Letterman began by saying he had known Jay for thirty-five years, and used to “buddy around” with him in the old days. “What we’re seeing now is sort of vintage Jay,” he observed, without defining what that was exactly. “It’s like, there he is; there’s the guy I used to know.”

  The part of the Leno statement that really piqued Letterman’s interest was Jay’s urging to the audience: “Don’t blame Conan.” Dave found this especially worthy of comment, “I said to myself, ‘No one is blaming Conan.’ ” Later he begged the audience not to blame Conan. “I know a lot of you people think Conan pushed himself out of a job,” Letterman said. “He’s not that kind of guy. He wouldn’t do that to himself.”

  In his fake sincere way, Dave jumped into advice mode. “You call Fox. You don’t say”—slipping into the high-pitched Jay voice—“ ‘I’ll be in the lobby if you need me.’ You don’t hang around. You go across the street and you punish NBC. . . . It’s an early Darwinian precept,” Letterman concluded. “You get fired; you get another job. You don’t hang around waiting for somebody to drop dead.”