The War for Late Night (6 page)

Conan didn’t speak about it in public—his young fans, who didn’t know Carson from carpeting, would have been baffled by it—but Conan had the dream, the same one that had inspired and infected Letterman and Leno. As a serious student of the history of American television, and a devotee of its classic programs, he could not help himself. He was in thrall to the dream: He wanted
The Tonight Show.
He wanted to be the guy at the head of the franchise, the show that, when he was twelve, he had watched with his dad, taking in the things Carson said and did that his father laughed at and enjoyed so much late at night in their home in Brookline, Massachusetts. That shared memory had a powerful pull on Conan.

Ross himself could not deny the seductive appeal inherent in being the guy who produced
The Tonight Show
every night; for a late-night producer, that was still the mountaintop, as well.

And both men had such links to NBC that tearing themselves away, just as Conan was steering into the fast lane of his career, would be personally wrenching. Bob Wright, the NBC chairman, had built a true connection to Conan, who sparked to Wright’s genuine interest and human touch. Lorne Michaels, the impresario of
Saturday Night Live
, was show-business godfather to both of them; he had plucked the unknown OʹBrien and installed him in the
Late Night
chair, and he had opened the door to a big-time television career for Ross.

Then there was Zucker. Though O’Brien and Zucker had a Harvard connection that bonded them, the real relationship that mattered on a personal basis was between Ross and Zucker. Their friendship—again initiated by the shared challenges of producing daily television—had set down deep roots. The two men were frequent golf partners; more than that, they were just plain buddies.

Still, none of that was going to matter if NBC placed something puny on the table against the magnitude of what Fox was promising. Ross set out to make sure Zucker was aware of the danger NBC was in. He told Zucker he had heard that Zucker’s nominal West Coast boss, Sassa, had been assuring people at the network that they need not worry about Conan defecting because Fox could not clear enough stations to give the show a realistic chance.

“We gotta get this deal made,” Ross told Zucker, “because they’re fucking around with Conan and they’re gonna push him to Fox.”

“They can’t clear Fox anyway,” Zucker replied, having heard much the same intelligence as Sassa.

“Yeah they can,” Ross shot back. “I know they can.” And he laid out the research from the consultant.

Zucker took that information away with him, and NBC soon came back with a more realistic offer, extending Conan through the end of 2005 and bumping up his salary to $8.25 million a year. Although that was still only about a third of the Fox money, the NBC side was convinced it could risk the lowball offer, because it was dealing from strength: namely, the accumulated history of the network’s preeminence in late night—and of course, the ultimate prize, the gold standard,
The Tonight Show,
still dangling in the distance.

For Conan’s professional advisers, it wasn’t nearly enough. The Endeavor agency had no formal titles, but its acknowledged leader was Ari Emanuel. Ari, already establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most aggressive, energized, and plugged-in talent reps, pushed for the Fox deal. So did his Endeavor colleague Rick Rosen, though as Conan’s more day-to-day agent, and already growing close to him personally, Rosen wanted to be sure to read and serve his client’s intentions as best he could. As for Gavin Polone, Conan’s manager, he was about 80 percent of the way to “We gotta do this with Fox.”

The NBC side was well aware of how things stacked up. As Marc Graboff, the business affairs boss, analyzed it, the Endeavor team—and Polone—would surely be lured by the big dollar signs coming from Fox. If Conan defected to Fox, Endeavor would also be in position to claim the package. (A “package” is when an agency brings together several of the creative elements of a given project and receives a healthy fee for its efforts. One of Endeavor’s biggest rivals, the Creative Artists Agency, had held the package—and commensurate fat annual fee—on the Letterman show for almost a decade.) The NBC executives guessed that Endeavor must be “salivating at the opportunity to package Conan,” especially because the alternative, staying with NBC, offered no such shot.
The Tonight Show
was unpackageable—it was a franchise rooted so deep that no agency could enhance it by packaging other elements beyond the host. Conan’s professional representatives were up front with NBC about their intentions: They were advocating that Conan take the $21 million and a better overall deal at Fox over the measly $8 million NBC had put on the table.

Still, NBC was unworried. However ardently the management side was promoting the Fox offer, Conan and Jeff Ross had been equally candid about their reluctance to leave. Ross had heard his star’s analysis of the situation clearly, and personally he agreed: It wasn’t time. “I’ve only been at this for eight years,” Conan told Ross, adding, “You know what? This company has been good to me.”

OʹBrien had studied the tangled 1990s business with Letterman closely and taken note of how wrenching it had been for Dave to be separated from the body of work he had created during his eleven years at NBC. Conan had a passion to stay connected to his own body of work, work he felt he had “poured my bone marrow into,” work he was intensely proud of.

When the decision finally came, it was Conan alone who met with Peter Chernin. After telling him how impressed and overwhelmed he had been by the offer, and how appreciative he was for the time and effort Chernin had personally put into the courtship, he had to give an answer that Chernin was not going to like: “I’m not going to do it.”

Chernin and the rest of the Fox team, while disappointed, could not have been completely surprised by the outcome. They had reasonably calculated that their gambit might have come a little early in the game, but at least they were now in good position for whenever the late-night wheel spun again. Nor had Conan’s advisers, avid as they were for the Fox deal, been undone when Conan had told them his feelings.

“I’m still young,” Conan explained to Rosen and the others. “I’m not forty yet. I still have one more contract to see if they’ll give me
The Tonight Show
. So we can make one more deal with NBC, and then at the end of that they have to give me the show.”

Polone, as hard-assed as any talent manager could possibly be, nevertheless grasped that the essence of his client was his accommodating nature—and his straightforward decency. Conan was not only not cagy but was totally transparent and upfront, qualities that were no advantage in a negotiation. With Zucker and Wright, Conan felt he was dealing with friends as well as bosses. From Conan’s point of view, everything coming from NBCʹs direction was positive. Polone himself would never have had such faith, but he recognized that people had different ways of looking at life. A dedicated single man, Polone concluded that it would be impossible for him to convince a happily married man that it was better to be single—in the same way it was impossible for him to convince Conan not to want
The Tonight Show
. “We all have those things,” Polone concluded.

In January 2002, Bob Wright and his wife, Suzanne, were among the guests at Conan’s wedding to Liza Powel in Seattle. A month later Conan signed a new deal to stay on
Late Night
through 2005, a term that guaranteed he would host the show longer than Letterman, its legendary progenitor, had. The deal added a few goodies: Conan got some guarantees of program commitments for prime-time series that his production company might create.

Much more significant was the other commitment he landed. The new deal included an explicit Prince of Wales clause: If anything happened to Jay Leno—illness, accident, sudden desire to give up show business—Conan would step in as
Tonight
host. The official line of succession was now codified.

 

It was an issue of great importance to O’Brien that, whatever happened in the future with
The Tonight Show
, no one would ever accuse his side of using any kind of ugly muscle tactics to wedge out Leno so that he could slide into his place. Everyone in late night remembered the campaign that Jay’s former manager, Helen Kushnick, had waged to win the job for her client, which included planting some nasty stories about NBC wanting Carson out. Jay came to be ashamed of those tactics, and after he split with Kushnick, did his best to apologize abjectly to Johnny, insisting that he had not been a party to those moves, and if he had known about them he would have repudiated them.

In contrast to the always chilly relations between the Carson and Leno camps, Jay and Conan seemed to go out of their way to be cordial to each other—on the air and off. Every quote each of them gave during the years after Conan agreed to remain at NBC was respectful, without ever quite approaching affection. Both men used the “friends” word, but in the way that professional colleagues do, not true intimates. Jay invited Conan onto his show as a guest, and Conan always nailed his shot. Jay once made a crack about Conan’s coming in to measure the drapes, but that was no more provocative than Carson had been in the early eighties, dropping Letterman’s name in jokes about his being the presumptive heir: “If I quit, what would the succession be? Would it be Letterman, Bush, Haig? Or would it be Letterman, Bush, Tip OʹNeill, and then Haig?”

Beneath that warm surface current, however, frigid waters swirled—at least on one coastline. Some of the Conan brigades continued to vent their frustration on occasion about having to still ride in the caboose, when it ought to have been as clear to NBC as it was to the press and most of the entertainment world that their guy was the comer, the fresh act in late night.

If the Conan side did offer any credit at all to Leno for his continuing success during their honest moments, it was begrudging and tinged with flecks of outright disdain. As one important member of the Conan team put it: “He’s there for all those huge years of prime-time ratings for NBC, and he’s not doing anything to innovate, not doing anything interesting.”

Some on Jay’s staff suspected their host didn’t really “get” Conan or his quirky, non-joke-centric humor. But Jay never expressed that opinion openly; in fact, he never said much about Conan at all. As always, he concentrated on his show, with most of the emphasis on his monologue, which one writer on the show estimated absorbed 80 percent of Jay’s daily attention.

In September of 2002 Conan sent out the most resounding message yet about his growing strength as a performer when he stepped onto a huge stage in prime time as host of that year’s Emmy Awards. Award shows had proved more risk than opportunity for late-night hosts over the years. The most memorable case involved Letterman, when in 1995, at the pinnacle of his fame, he accepted—against his better judgment—an offer to host the Oscars; though he hardly bombed, he misfired enough to embarrass himself into telling the world for years he’d ruined the evening for everybody.

Still, O’Brien went into the Emmys feeling he had something to prove.

“When I went in front of that Emmy crowd,” he said later, “it was like they had marked my height when I was about four years old. Then it’s ten years later and six-foot-four Conan walks in, and they’re shocked. Because their frame of reference is always Letterman or Leno. I don’t think young people were shocked at all.”

Conan opened with a taped segment of him waking up at the house of Ozzy Osbourne’s family, then the stars of the hottest reality show on television. Realizing he was late for the awards event, he rushed out only to stumble onto the set of
The Price Is Right
instead. The bit scored huge laughs. Later he made killer use of the award-show fetish for finding annoying ways to play long-winded accepters off the stage, warning the nominees that he would cut them off by playing an acoustic version of the worst parts of Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung.” Which he proceeded to do, bringing down the house.

OʹBrien had been right: That evening he shocked anyone at the Emmys who thought late night still meant only Leno and Letterman. The host assignment proved to be a critical smash, a star-emerging performance for the TV historical record.

A year later, in September 2003, NBC cleared out two hours of prime time for Conan’s tenth-anniversary special. (Notably, Leno had always declined the network’s offers to mount big anniversary specials for him, with the comment “Ugh, no!”) Staged at the Beacon Theatre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the special was a litmus test for the erupting passion for Conan among fans under thirty years old. They lined the streets outside the theater for hours, chanting Conan’s name and buying Conan merchandise from enterprising street vendors. One college-age guy wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the message: “I took Conan for my Confirmation name!”

Up in the balcony, waiting for the show to begin and watching the raucous crowd file in, the whole Conan entourage was assembled: Rosen, Polone, and Emanuel, among others. In the row in front of the paid help, Liza O’Brien sat unobtrusively among her husband’s fans. The talk was of how crazy Conan mania seemed to be getting. One of the group shook his head in wonderment: “How on earth can NBC not give him the show? Jay’s used up. That old, stale stuff he does . . . Can’t they see what’s happening?”

For some of them, even Jay’s sustaining success in the ratings was suspect. NBC had long since come down from its heights of prime-time dominance, to a point where CBS frequently trounced it in the ten p.m. hour that led into late night—and still Letterman almost never topped Leno in the numbers. But the Conan supporters questioned Jay’s record, wondering whether it was Jay himself who was really attracting viewers or the reflexive habit of those viewers to tune in to
The Tonight Show
.

In one of the harshest assessments, a member of the Conan team dismissed Jay’s performance utterly: “He’s there, and for some of those years, if you had a cinder block in that time slot it would have done a great rating.” And for good measure: “What do you want
The Tonight Show
to be? Please go find me the person under forty-five who’s like, ‘I’ve gotta leave this party early ’cause I gotta go see my Leno.’ What the fuck are we doing here?”