The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  “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?”

  Early in 2004, with the issue of Conan’s long-term future unresolved, Jeff Ross got a call from Rick Rosen. Rosen
asked him to set up a quiet place for lunch in New York with an executive named Andrea Wong, who was in charge of reality shows and late night for ABC.

  This was the first time the letters ABC had appeared on the horizon, though Ross knew that nothing serious in terms of a new negotiation for his star could even begin until well into the following year. Still, having another network interested couldn’t hurt.

  Ross was aware that ABCʹs entertainment executives had been agitating internally for several years, looking for an opening into late night. The network’s long-venerated news program Nightline had seemed to be heading for the end of its run, with its anchor, Ted Koppel, less involved, and the show’s original premise—live interviews on the news of the day—overtaken by cable news programs. In 2002 ABC’s entertainment division had pulled an end run around the news division, secretly seeking to replace Nightline by courting Letterman with promises and birthday cakes as the CBS late-night star’s contract neared an end. The talks had gotten serious by the time The New York Times broke the story of the negotiations, and the news division, poleaxed, released an anguished cry of betrayal. Although ABC didn’t back off, Letterman soon did, thanking ABC for its interest but re-signing with CBS after some timely last-minute concessions by that network’s boss, Leslie Moonves.

  ABC responded by reaffirming its commitment to news in the eleven thirty time slot—even as it continued to chase entertainment talent. After making a run at Jon Stewart, hoping he might be induced to break away from his cable hit The Daily Show, ABC pursued a guy they thought represented a broader, more down-to-earth appeal, Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy, best known at that point for the raunchy Man Show on Comedy Central and witty appearances on the NFL coverage on Fox, jumped at the network opportunity. In early 2004, he had been on the air for less than a year in the 12:05 time period, serving as the follow-up act to Nightline.

  Conan was obviously not moving anywhere that wasn’t going to slot him at 11:35 (or 11:00 in the case of Fox). So when Andrea Wong asked for a meeting, Jeff Ross had every reason to conclude that Nightline wasn’t in the clear yet.

  The pair lunched at the Café des Artistes, something of an alternate (and much more upscale) ABC cafeteria on West Sixty-seventh Street, not far from the network’s Manhattan headquarters. Ross found Wong, a willowy Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties, personally appealing and impressively smart. (She might have been the only network entertainment executive in history with an electrical engineering degree from MIT.) He wasn’t sure she fully comprehended the late-night television “thing,” but then again, Ross didn’t think many television executives really got late night, with the exception of the guy Ross dealt with most often, the one with real history in the genre, NBCʹs Rick Ludwin.

  Conan’s advisers were unsure how serious this initial ABC approach really might be until, soon after the meeting with Wong, Ross got a call from Bob Iger, then number two at ABC’s parent, the Disney Company (and previously an ABC executive, including president of entertainment). Jeff knew Iger a bit from socializing in New York in earlier days, so they were comfortable with each other. Iger’s message was simple and direct: “This is for real.”

  When Ross reported on the Iger call to Conan’s career team, he learned that ABC was not the only network sniffing around. Fox had reentered the picture, making it clear in messages from executives to the Endeavor boys that they were keenly interested in another run at Conan.

  Ari Emanuel knew exactly what to do with all this valuable information.

  At NBC, the era of good feelings about late night was short-lived—as all the executives involved knew it would be. The peace achieved by hanging on to O’Brien for four more years couldn’t last, because the fundamental equation had not changed: Two still did not go into one. At some point the issue of when Conan would get his shot at The Tonight Show—or wouldn’t—had to be faced.

  Still, there was time to find some solution, and everyone at NBC knew that they could not afford a replay of the events of the nineties. The message was clear: Keep the consistently winning Jay as long as possible while also preventing Conan from taking his increasingly impressive talent elsewhere. Rick Ludwin, NBCʹs top late-night executive for more than two decades, had no doubts about these marching orders, or where they originated: “down from the top.” In numerous meetings early in the 2000s, Bob Wright, CEO of NBC, had asked the question directly: “How do we keep Conan O’Brien at this network?”

  Everyone knew where Wright stood with regard to Conan: He loved the guy. Bob had jumped on the Conan train early, at a time when other NBC executives still saw more awkwardness than brilliance in the young comedian, and he had never wavered. He had established a relationship with Conan that some NBC colleagues saw as a kind of professional paternity. “Bob would do that with certain people—become a father figure,” said one of Wright’s closest associates at the network. “He certainly did with Conan.”

  Suzanne Wright, who also embraced the role of matriarch of the network, adored Conan and Liza. Conan had had his ups and downs with various sections of NBC’s management over the years, but of Bob Wright he said, “I would walk over broken glass for that man.”

  But neither that warm relationship nor his long history with Zucker was going to be enough to keep O’Brien at NBC indefinitely. The earlier late-night slot of 11:35 beckoned, as Conan began freely to acknowledge. “I think it’s natural to at some point want to move earlier,” he said. “I think I’ve proved I can do a show that I don’t think has to exist at twelve thirty.”

  Starting in late 2003, Zucker and Ludwin, along with Marc Graboff, who as the executive in charge of business affairs dealt with the issues of money and deal making, held a series of discussions about what they saw as “the next cycle”—the coming choice between Leno and O’Brien, if they were going to be forced to make one. Zucker would often report on calls he had started receiving from Ari Emanuel about Conan. It was hardly unusual for Emanuel to phone Zucker—or any of the other major players in television—with ideas for his clients. That was his job, after all. He spoke more often with Zucker, though, because he genuinely liked the NBC boss, their relationship consisting of good-natured hostility. Ari, then in his early forties, steely eyed, built like a middleweight and rising fast up the power-agent rankings to a point where he was able to slug with anyone in Hollywood, would make demands, or promises. Jeff would resist or insist. They would yell a bit, tell each other to go fuck themselves, and then hang up laughing (usually). A couple of days later they would repeat the process.

  Ari had decided he would keep Zucker in the loop constantly about the precise nature of the danger Jeff faced regarding the future of Conan O’Brien. As Ari saw the process, he was “making sure he knew he would lose Conan if he didn’t get the Tonight slot.ʺ If Bob Iger checked in about Conan, Ari let Zucker know about it. “If we set a Peter Chernin meeting or a Les Moonves meeting,” Emanuel filled Zucker in on the time and place. (Moonves had cast out a little fishing line on behalf of CBS during his squabble with Letterman over the ABC approach in 2002, which Conan had instantly rejected out of respect for Dave. But Emanuel still counted Les—who everyone knew drove Zucker crazier than anyone else in the business—among the interested parties for Conan’s services.) Ari was sending these little messages to Zucker “just to utz him—make him realize that if he fucked this up there would be other places for Conan to go.”

  To Zucker, all of this amounted to standard practice from his buddy Ari. The calls came in; Ari was threatening him with something or other; that meant what—it was Tuesday? Zucker was neither surprised nor overly irritated. He knew how he was supposed to interpret these calls on behalf of Conan: “They wanted assurance that they were gonna get The Tonight Show or else they were gonna leave.”

  In truth, NBC didn’t need much utzing. Internally, there was little resistance to Ari’s nudging. Some way was eventually going to be found to keep Conan in house.

  The first real movement came from Jay’s direction, though
. He was a creature of habit so ingrained that he was rarely seen offstage in anything but the same denim work shirt, faded jeans, and $14.99 pair of black Payless SafeTStep work shoes. These, Jay explained, he bought “by the crate” because they were “impervious to oil and gas”—a feature important to him because of all the time he spent working on the fleet of vehicles in his automotive shop in a converted hangar at the Burbank airport. As he did with all his other habits, Jay had such a regular timetable for rolling over his Tonight contract that Marc Graboff could all but put the next negotiation on his calendar the day a previous deal was concluded.

  And the Jay negotiations were, without question, the easiest Graboff had ever conducted. It had been that way ever since Jay had fired Helen Kushnick and sworn off all representation for his future television career. That decision played to some as foolishness, arrogance, or parsimony on an epic scale: To try to manage a career involving so many millions without a formal agent or manager seemed ludicrous. But it was a source of pride for Jay, one more example—to himself if no one else—that deep down he was an unpretentious working man. An insanely well-paid one, certainly, but still a guy with a boss and a job and a salary.

  But beyond its symbolism, or whatever else the antiagent stance meant to Jay, there was a compelling logic to his position. What did he need an agent or manager (or their bills) for at this point in his career? He had no plans to do anything on television other than what he was already doing. What other job was a manager going to win for him? Helen had secured the Tonight position for him; now she was gone. (After splitting from Jay in 1993, Helen passed away from cancer three years later at only fifty-one.) He still had the job.