The War for Late Night (15 page)

Now it was a matter of Conan’s putting in the hard work and somehow finding some magic—along with a dose of good luck—as he churned out shows night after night. Whether Conan had studied a little Samuel Johnson in a British Lit class at Harvard and knew the famous quote or not, he was certainly living it:

“Depend on it sir: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Ross had good enough contacts inside the network to know that if Greg Kinnear decided he wanted a long-term career as a late-night star, they were toast. Then he heard Kinnear was reluctant. Maybe he wouldn’t do a test for a 12:35-style show; maybe he wanted to be a movie star instead. It could all be posturing, but whatever it was, it seemed to be buying them some time.

The ratings demand set by Ohlmeyer was the looming noose. Get there or they were done. Conan pictured himself as a farmer who had been told, “If it doesn’t rain within a month, we’re taking your farm.” So what was the farmer supposed to do? “Work hard and pray for rain.”

 

The drought went on, through late 1994 and into 1995. But good things were happening elsewhere, namely in Kinnear’s movie career. He won the third lead in a Harrison Ford movie,
Sabrina
, leaving NBC without another obvious option in late night. And there was luck on another front. Letterman, who in his CBS deal controlled the 12:35 time period as well, passed on choosing a young comer for the slot and decided on one of his personal favorites, Tom Snyder.

As good—and often unpredictable—as Snyder was as an interviewer, he was no comic. And he was twenty-seven years older than Conan O’Brien. Dave might have opened the trapdoor still trembling under Conan’s feet by selecting someone like Jon Stewart, who would have challenged him for young viewers. Instead he gave Conan free access to them. The under-forty-year-olds who watched Jay or Dave had little reason to watch Snyder. More and more of them tried out Conan—and if they did, they at least started to see some truly original and often bizarre comedy ideas.

Conan had a guy come on as “the Lenny Bruce of China,” a beat comic who told jokes in Chinese accompanied by a translator. Conan was given advice in a “Devil-Bear” sketch, which placed the devil on one shoulder and a bear (for no good reason) on the other, giving him useless opinions. Fulfilling another of his early promises to Ohlmeyer was “Polly, the NBC Peacock,” a puppet version of the NBC logo, who came on and trashed shows on the other networks in especially vituperative terms. And Conan found increasingly offbeat ways to involve just barely not-obscure showbiz vets like Nipsey Russell and Abe Vigoda.

A hint of favorable buzz began in mid-1995, but NBC wasn’t listening to the buzzing. Conan stayed in place, but he was still rolling over the absurd thirteen-week renewals.

And then, suddenly, it rained.

 

On June 18, 1996, Tom Shales officially recanted. With a headline that read, “So I Was Wrong,” Shales switched sides with a vengeance. Acknowledging that “some critics, present company included, were excessively mean,” Shales declared that OʹBrien had gone through “one of the most amazing transformations in television history.” He quoted Letterman’s recently fired executive producer, Robert Morton, saying that Conan was doing “the most innovative comedy in television,” and cited numerous recent O’Brien bits that had scored. In perhaps the most startling turnaround, Shales even revised his “nitwit sidekick” appraisal of Andy Richter, saying Andy now was a “key to the success of the show.”

The conclusion of Shales’s reassessment could not have resonated more plangently in the heart of a lifelong Dave worshipper. “Conan OʹBrien is more than just an adequate Letterman substitute,” he wrote. “He’s his own secret ingredient, and his show an inspired absurdist romp.”

Forever after, Conan would cite that piece as the moment that heralded the turnaround. By September he was on the cover of
Rolling Stone
, and then the cover of
Entertainment Weekly
. Ratings were climbing, to Ohlmeyer’s designated level and then well past. Among the young-adult audiences he began to soar, doubling the ratings Snyder was attracting in that group. Multiyear pickups—with actual raises for Conan and his staff—were on the way.

Warren Littlefield called and impressed Ross with how manfully he stepped up. “Guys, I want to apologize,” Warren told them. “I was wrong.”

The lesson seemed clear to Conan and his support group: When the network and the rest of the outside world step in to push you around, tell them what is best for them to hear, but don’t flinch. Just shut them out. They don’t get it, they never really would, and they don’t belong with those who do get it.

As Jeff Ross worked it out, “We learned at that point: You just ignore everybody and do your own show. Do the polite thing—and then you ignore them.”

I
n the days after Jay Leno’s September 27, 2004, announcement that he would be leaving
The Tonight Show
in five years’ time, Debbie Vickers knew the most important part of her job would be to calm her star down. Jay’s mood, always so unruffled by almost any real-life development, was darker than she could ever remember seeing it. She understood. NBC’s decision to designate Conan OʹBrien the official future of
The Tonight Show
had left Jay incredulous—and reeling. Within days of his announcement—on the air, no less—Jay was overcome with what one colleague labeled “postpurchase anxiety.”

One NBC executive, only slightly an acquaintance of Leno’s, passed him in the hall just three days after the official word had gone out. Upon greeting him with a “Hey, Jay, how’re you doing?” the executive was met with a punch line response:

“I’m fine for a guy who’s gonna be out of work! Put out to seed!”

It didn’t help when guests came on the show and naturally made reference to the big recent news, almost always expressing shock that Jay, of all people, the man who considered vacations—or time off of any kind—even less appealing than green vegetables (which he never ate), had agreed to turn in his talk-show badge.

“Yeah, I’m retiring,” Jay would say, in a half-mocking, half-pained way. And then he would quickly change the subject. How could he discuss it? He didn’t really understand it.

Nor did other people. Around Hollywood, many in the industry found themselves mystified by NBC’s move, which just seemed inexplicably bizarre. Who in show business made calls five years in advance about
anything
? The status quo changed every five minutes. One agent with clients connected to late-night said, “Who the fuck let this happen? This guy is so proud that he doesn’t have an agent. Let me tell you something, any agent with a heartbeat would have told NBC, ‘Go fuck yourselves. This guy is winning. He’s going nowhere.’ Who makes a move like this?”

Another executive with long connections to late-night programming observed, “I thought they were out of their minds. Conan had to say yes if he had that drive that most comics have regarding
The Tonight Show
. I also thought it might explode in his face that he was gunning for Jay’s job. Jay’s politeness toward Conan seemed thin to me. But you don’t take someone who’s doing very well in the ratings off the air—I’m sorry. What is the life expectancy of an executive like Jeff Zucker? Five years? Seven? So he’s really worried what the company is going to be like in five years? Hell, he’d be lucky to be in that position in five years.”

One outside—but familiar—voice checked in almost immediately with both Debbie and Jay. Don Ohlmeyer, now five years out of his leadership position over the network’s entertainment division, had developed close working relationships with both the
Tonight
star and producer during his time at NBC’s Burbank headquarters. While he no longer had authority over any decisions at NBC, Ohlmeyer certainly had opinions.

He got to Debbie first—and she had no doubt about where he stood. He was furious.

Ohlmeyer put NBC’s decision in some historical television context. In the mid-eighties a top programmer at ABC named Lew Erlicht had gained everlasting fame (or infamy) for having turned down a proposal from a couple of producers named Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner for a new sitcom starring Bill Cosby. (Later, Erlicht became the subject of one of the most lasting and likely apocryphal stories in TV lore. Supposedly he was approached in the street years afterward by a homeless guy looking for a handout and said, “Hey, don’t give me
your
sob story; I’m the guy who passed on
The Cosby Show
.”) “I think this is a bigger mistake than Lew Erlicht passing on
Cosby
,ʺ Ohlmeyer declared. ʺWhy do they want to force out the guy with the first or second most profitable show on the network?”

And the way the situation had been handled made Ohlmeyer livid. Compelling Jay to announce the Conan deal on his own show, he believed, was the most demeaning thing he had ever seen done in the television business. Ohlmeyer had a characteristically colorful metaphor for it: “It’s one thing to stick a knife in a guy’s heart. It’s another thing to stick it up his ass and
then
stick it in his heart.”

Ohlmeyer did not even believe NBC’s motivation had any credibility. He suggested that the supposedly imminent offer for Conan from Fox was a fantasy—just Ari Emanuel conning gullible executives. In that view he had some supporters inside NBC, including one major one: Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports and longtime close friend of Don’s from their early days as protégés of the great ABC sports impresario Roone Arledge.

Though Ebersol was by this point serving as mentor to Jeff Zucker, Zucker had not consulted him on the Jay move, but Dick didn’t like it. Don, crazed about the decision, called Dick to kick it around. Ebersol’s sense was that Conan and Jeff Ross, whom he knew to be savvy guys, would surely perceive Fox as the wrong place for them. And he wished Zucker had asked him or somebody else—like maybe Lorne Michaels—about the decision.

Ohlmeyer also called Jay directly, basically to tell him, lovingly, that he was an idiot—that he should never have accepted this affront from NBC. He was dominant in late night; nobody should be telling him when to leave the stage.

However much Jay appreciated the sentiments, it still seemed to him that resistance would have been futile—“You serve at the pleasure of the king,” as he put it—not to mention out of character.

Jay’s public image had always been that of the blue-collar, work-hard, don’t-expect-much regular guy, so that had to be his for-the-record stance in the wake of NBC’s move. When the topic was raised, he would say things like “There’s nothing worse than whining in show business,” which he frequently compared to the lowest form of commercial enterprise: “You don’t fall in love with a hooker.”

Love was a prevailing theme of these shrugged-off remarks, and he mockingly equated NBC’s decision with being dumped romantically. “I’ve never been one of those guys, when the girl says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other anymore,’ who says”—and here the vocal pitch would reach a falsetto of mock anguish—ʺʹWhy? Why not? What can I do?’ No”—with his voice returning to its usual register—“I don’t do that. It’s ‘OK, babe, I’m gone.’ ”

The relationship metaphor had not popped into Jay’s head by chance. Even in his private conversations with Debbie Vickers and others, Leno came off sounding a bit like the jilted lover. He’d been loyal; he’d been true. And yet NBC had picked somebody else. Jay was, by his own description, “brokenhearted.” He sat in his dungeon thinking,
We could not have been doing better. We were the only show making money after eight o’clock at night. It doesn’t make any sense
.

It made sense to Jeff Zucker. With Fox breathing down his neck, Zucker—who fully believed that the offer from Fox was real because his trusted friend Jeff Ross had told him so and Ross was no spinner of self-interest-based yarns—seemed to have little choice. If he wanted to preserve his late-night lineup intact for as long as possible, he had to summon up enticement for Conan while locking in Jay. This plan had done it—and, in the bargain, avoided a replay of the Leno-Letterman train wreck. So Zucker was more than pleased with how efficiently it had all gone down.

But the strategy of “don’t lose Conan” also bred detractors. A veteran producer of entertainment series said, “Conan wasn’t Letterman. That was the difference. I don’t know if anybody looked at Conan and said: That’s the next host of
The Tonight Show
. He was hot, but, you know, the host of
The Tonight Show
? It was shocking.”

So shocking that from the moment of the announcement this producer had doubts about whether Conan should count on it happening. “I wondered that. A lot of people did. I never thought Jay Leno would give up the chair so easily. Jay Leno is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A big bad wolf.”

Up in the Burbank offices of
The Tonight Show
, that was not the animal Debbie Vickers was seeing. She was looking at a guy who felt like a lame duck—and a wounded one.

Jay was also angry—though he tried to keep that submerged. When Kevin Reilly, the new president of entertainment for NBC, came by asking if Jay wanted to talk about any of this, Leno suspected Reilly had been dispatched by the NBC hierarchy to massage his bruised ego. “Hey, I don’t want a therapist,” Jay told him.

Vickers felt caught in the middle, serving as mediator between Jay and NBC. On the one hand, she got the network’s point, in theory at least. But she thoroughly understood Jay’s reaction. Why not wait until he at least showed signs of fading before stepping up to erase him?

Debbie also knew shows had to get produced every night, no matter what was going on inside Jay’s head—and heart. So day after day she did what she could to keep Leno from going to a bad place. And when he questioned again why all this had happened, she would tell him, “Jay, look. It’s about transitions.”