The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  That meant standing up in pubs and trying to get irascible drunks to laugh—fierce but useful training. Ferguson had a Scottish comedy model in Billy Connolly, known in Scotland as the Big Yin (the Big One). He was “like Elvis” to Ferguson. “I’d never seen people from my socioeconomic group make it big, and suddenly there was this guy.”

  And soon after, Bing Hitler was born. Bing was a product of the terror Ferguson felt getting up there as himself in front of those drunks. “I had to create a voice, because then if you fail, it’s not you who fail.” He also wanted a name with marquee shock value. And he got it. Just twenty-four, Ferguson debuted Bing Hitler at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1986 and for a time became a Scottish sensation, filling three-thousand-seat theaters in Glasgow. Wearing too tight jackets, his hair teased up into a Scottish fro, Bing bellowed at his audiences, a crude caricature of an angry, obnoxious Scottish jingoist. Bing railed furiously about everything that annoyed him in life, from people to insects. “I may have gone a little too far with that name,” Ferguson conceded. “But there was no crooning or fascism.”

  What the character did was provide the confidence for Craig to emerge as a stand-up on his own terms. He was club toughened and ready for a big comedy career, but the combination of drink and his restless nature pushed him in different directions. The drink led all the way down to contemplation of suicide; the restlessness, out onto the stage, first as Brad Majors in The Rocky Horror Show and then as Oscar Madison in an all-Scottish version of The Odd Couple. (With the simple substitute of soccer for baseball, it all worked.)

  Tall, with piercing blue eyes and a head of dense dark hair, Ferguson morphed from slightly pudgy to moodily handsome as he hit his thirties. He had little trouble landing roles—or women. He was in and out of a string of relationships and a couple of marriages. The drink and drugs sabotaged most of his personal dealings, but he still got work. Finally, in 1992, the sheer enormity of the degradation he was visiting upon himself overwhelmed him, and he got sober, once and forever. “I proved to myself to my own satisfaction that I am madder than I think and I just can’t do that. I really can’t. It was a realization that there’s a darkness in here that’s bigger than you. I just don’t go to that part of the house.”

  Ferguson moved to the United States two years later, a lifelong dream after having visited an uncle in Long Island as a boy. Work followed in short order: a role in a sitcom, Maybe This Time, with Betty White and Marie Osmond, that busted out quickly. But a year later he was back in a sitcom, and this one lasted. He put in seven seasons as the eccentric British boss Mr. Wick on The Drew Carey Show. “I liked the money, but, man, was it boring,” Ferguson recalled. He was bored enough to write movies he could act in during his spare time, one of which, Saving Grace, about a proper British widow who escapes debt by growing marijuana, turned into a rosy little hit.

  Craig went along chasing his muddled muse (he also took up writing a novel at around this time) when he got a call out of the blue from a producer named Peter Lassally, who worked for David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants. Ferguson had no idea that this was the same man who had guided Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show before serving as professional father to Dave himself. The offer Lassally was floating sounded utterly preposterous to Ferguson: Would he like to take part in a series of tryouts for a new host for CBS’s 12:35 talk show?

  Craig knew the talk-show gig solely from having been a guest on them. His best appearances had been with Conan, whose comedy Craig greatly admired. (The admiration was mutual; during at least one appearance Ferguson set OʹBrien to laughing so hard he had to throw to a commercial.) But hosting? Did this guy know Ferguson was from Scotland, not Cleveland?

  Lassally assured him there had been no mistake. “This is what I do,” Lassally told him. “I find people like you. And if I’m right, you’re it.”

  To Ferguson, that sounded like so much showbiz blather—nothing would come of it; but why not do it for a laugh? That was his prevailing feeling until approximately five seconds after the red camera light came on—and then it all changed for Craig Ferguson. “It was like show-business crack. I was hooked. I was like, This is it. This is what I do. I’m a talk-show host.”

  His two-night stand sold Lassally cold. The producer found this lanky Scotsman completely fresh and original, just as he had hoped he would. “And he was a grown-up,” Lassally concluded, something out of the ordinary for would-be late-night hosts, who mostly were arrested youths, playing to audiences of similar young men. Lassally was convinced this guy could build an audience around women, and maybe change that late-night advertiser preference.

  Ferguson loved the job extravagantly from the start, even though he felt at sea for a while. The ratings were passable almost immediately, but Craig felt “weirded out” for at least six months, trying to find his own voice in late night and sensing that he needed to do something to make the show his own. A symbolic turning point came in an apparently unconnected circumstance. With the show on a break, Craig was in New York visiting a movie actress he was then dating. “She was a fucking pain in the ass,” as Ferguson described her. “She wound up a great friend, but she was a rotten girlfriend. I found myself in bed about three o’clock in the morning. I sat up and I said out loud, ‘I think I’ve got it. I’m not going to wear a tie anymore!’ She looked up and said, ‘OK, that’s great.’ And I remember thinking, And you’re fucking toast as well.”

  What the tie business was about—Ferguson skipped a tie for about a year—was “not just doing what was available,” Ferguson decided. A period of time went by before he put that urge into a real innovation: He chucked the whole idea of scripted monologues. They sounded forced and pedestrian to him, and most nights he wandered away from the jokes anyway. Instead, he would put together a list of topics, gather his own thoughts on them, and then riff away on the air—comedy as improvisational jazz. Risky as hell, yes, but the move had the potential to generate rhythms no other late-night show had ever had. Some nights the notes might not fit together as a melody. But when they did, the laughs had a music of their own.

  Attention and better ratings followed, and then came a deal from CBS—one no other late-night host, first at NBC and now at CBS, had ever had. Ferguson won a guarantee that he would be the successor to David Letterman, should there ever—heaven forbid—be a sudden need for a new host of Late Show. It wasn’t anything like a five-year ticket to the big chair, but it was the CBS version of the Prince of Wales clause. Or in this case maybe, the Prince of Scots.

  On another April day in that spring of 2008, Dick Ebersol invited Jeff Ross to lunch. The NBC Sports chief told O’Brien’s producer that they ought to start kicking around some ideas for how Conan could be incorporated into NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage from Vancouver, which would be taking place about six months into Conan’s new Tonight Show.

  The suggestion sounded reasonable to Ross, who, if he thought much about Dick Ebersol at all, regarded him as part of the long-established Bob Wright team, which meant he was likely a Conan supporter. Nothing coming from Dick had ever caused Ross to think otherwise. And a regular shot for Conan during the Olympics certainly sounded like a promising idea.

  Ebersol had never hesitated to jump into situations involving NBCʹs late night because for long stretches of his career he had had serious skin in the game. In 1975, as the NBC executive in charge of late night, he pushed to get Saturday Night Live on the air and hired Lorne Michaels to run it. After that he left the network and became an independent producer, heavily involved with late-night programming. That began with a show called The Midnight Special, which ran on Friday nights after Carson in the late 1970s. In 1981, Dick’s closest friend at NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, recruited Ebersol in desperation when SNL, in its first year after the departure of Michaels, was collapsing under a producer named Jean Doumanian. Ebersol stepped in and righted the SNL ship, running it successfully for four seasons—when the cast included Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, and Martin Short—until Michae
ls returned. After that Ebersol created another late-night series, Friday Night Videos, which became a hit in the Letterman time period. (Dave’s show ran only four days a week on NBC.)

  Early on in Conan’s then tenuous tenure, Michaels, whom Ebersol loved like a professional brother, approached him and explained, “Conan is under siege. He needs friends. Will you talk to him?” Ebersol did, mostly advising Conan to listen to Lorne as much as he could and to trust himself. When Conan asked if there was anything about the show he would change, Ebersol said there was just one thing: Andy Richter. Playing around too much with Andy was preventing Conan from connecting with the audience. He should dump him. Conan had obviously not taken that advice, and Andy emerged as a fan favorite later. But Ebersol came away generally thinking Conan was a terrific kid, smart and hardworking.

  At his lunch with Ross, Dick had some other advice he wanted to impart. “You’ve really got to be careful at eleven thirty,” Ebersol told him. “You don’t want to have him dancing around, flopping the hair, and touching the nipple and all that stuff.” Of course, the “string dance,” which Conan performed many nights, shifting side to side and then cutting an imaginary string on one hip while touching a finger to a nipple with a sizzle sound, amounted to his signature move on the Late Night show.

  “This is the time to experiment,” Ebersol said. “The twelve thirty audience is never going to desert him. They adore him. But eleven thirty is a whole other game.”

  To illustrate his point, Ebersol launched into a story about the starting days of Saturday Night Live. Because the show would be sitting in a time period owned by Carson during the week, he and Michaels were summoned to meet the King.

  In Burbank, in the same cavelike office that became Leno’s dungeon, Carson greeted them, not yet dressed for the night’s show—he was in a sleeveless white undershirt of the kind Brando wore as Stanley Kowalski. Carson mainly wanted to feel out these two kids to make sure they weren’t planning something too radical. But Johnny had words of advice that Ebersol wanted to repeat for Ross.

  Johnny urged that whatever else SNL did, the guest host should come out early and have something funny to say. And he emphasized that playing at eleven thirty you had to always be aware that in the center of the country the show would come on at ten thirty. More viewers would be awake and available, and so “you better be able to play in Chicago and St. Louis or you won’t have a chance.”

  What Conan should take from this story, Ebersol explained, was to emphasize the opening monologue and make sure he pitched his show to appeal to middle America.

  Ross received the advice equably. He said that everyone on the show knew they had to adjust when they got to eleven thirty and predicted Conan would adapt organically, cutting back on the jumping around because he would recognize this was new territory. “Did you have a problem with how he did the Emmys?” Ross asked.

  Ebersol said he hadn’t, but Ross wondered if Dick had actually seen Conan that night. In the end, the men felt the lunch had gone just fine. It was completely friendly. Like everyone else, Ebersol found Ross open, smart, and generous of spirit. They both went back to work.

  That spring, on one of his usual trips out to the West Coast, Jeff Zucker called Jay Leno and said, “Hey, I’m coming out and I want to come by.”

  By now Zucker knew two things for certain: Jay was being fervidly wooed by ABC and Fox, and time was starting to get short if he was going to dredge up that brilliant idea that might induce Jay to stay. Not that Jeff lacked confidence that he could do so; he just had to find a way to breach Jay’s resistance to any kind of change in his life or routine.

  What Zucker meant to propose that spring was actually a relic from his trunkful of unused notions. As early as 2002 Zucker had stood on the sidelines of Letterman’s negotiations for a new contract, looking for an opportunity to spring if Dave showed the slightest sign of being willing to bolt CBS. When he did, with ABC entering the picture, Zucker leapt into back-channel action and logged in a call to Rob Burnett at Letterman’s shop.

  Zucker pitched an intriguing concept: a comeback for Dave to NBC—only not in late night. What Zucker proposed for Dave was an hour each night of prime time, at eight p.m. (except for Thursday, because in 2002 NBC still had the hit Friends there). The plan had several beautiful angles for Zucker. Besides removing Letterman as a late-night competitor, it would address what had become one of Zucker’s bêtes noires since taking over the entertainment side of NBC: the network’s chronic issue with finding eight p.m. shows. Friends, he had to admit, had little life left, and after that it was a lot of questions for NBC at eight.

  Zucker believed that NBC’s core audience of young professionals brought with them certain limitations—namely, they weren’t really available to watch much television at eight p.m. (seven p.m. central). Instead they were just getting home from work, or having a late dinner in town, or putting kiddies to bed. What was needed, Zucker decided in one of his first potential game-changing solutions for network television, was a less expensive show that could be slotted in at eight p.m. multiple nights of the week. But it had to be a reliable show that would generate steady if not necessarily spectacular ratings at that hour. Zucker might have publicly written off Letterman as an old-hat loser in late night, but he wasn’t blind to his talent, or to his smart, sophisticated following, which had always fit NBC’s profile better than it had CBS’s.

  Had he studied Dave closely, Zucker might have also discovered that Letterman had a lifelong aversion to prime time, believing his act was strictly a late-night animal. Some forays in prime for anniversary shows at NBC had done well, but not so well that Dave was likely to risk his career on so great a gamble at age fifty-five.

  Still, Burnett listened to the pitch with interest. At the time he was in business with Zucker on a side project, a prime-time hour-long comedy drama he had cocreated called Ed—which, ironically enough, was then parked at eight p.m. on NBC’s Wednesday night schedule. Burnett knew the economics of trying to survive at eight as a costly hour-long series, so he could have been convinced that moving elsewhere was better in the long run for Ed, which was close to his heart. Burnett concluded that Zucker had come up with “a very smart idea” and was impressed by the NBC boss’s “outside the box” thinking.

  But he couldn’t help tweaking Zucker with a little counterproposal: Suppose NBC moved Jay to eight; then surely Dave would come back and take over The Tonight Show. Zucker dismissed that idea as the joke both men knew it really was.

  A short time later Burnett did run the NBC proposal by Letterman, and they discussed it briefly. Mostly, Burnett reported, “Dave had a good laugh over it.”

  Zucker had never completely abandoned the eight p.m. strip idea. He later even ran it by Oprah Winfrey, trying to lure her away from syndication and onto NBC. She hadn’t been tempted, either, though she let Zucker down gently, telling him that if the offer had come ten years earlier in her career she might well have jumped at it.

  Now it was Jay’s turn.

  When Zucker sat down with Leno in Burbank, he started out with an earnest expression of the network’s undying commitment to keep their biggest star in the NBC family.

  “Why do you want to keep me?” a skeptical Jay replied. “I already got canned.”

  Zucker had heard that kneejerk response before, whenever he had casually suggested to Jay that NBC still loved him and wanted him to stay in the family; he regarded it no more seriously than he did the jokes Jay was telling about NBC every night on the air. Zucker plowed on, telling Jay the network would come up with something right for him, something that would keep him happy.

  “I mean, why?” Jay shrugged off the solicitous words. “You should have kept me before.”

  Zucker assured him that NBC still had big plans for Jay. He pitched Jay his new wrinkle on the five-night-a-week show at eight: not an hour-long show, but a half-hour one. Jay could do his monologue every night, maybe even a slightly longer one, then go to commercials, then a seco
nd comedy piece, another commercial, followed by a short piece, either an interview or, even better (since the interview portions were not Jay’s strong suit), something with a corps of comedy correspondents, and then—we’re out. Done. No forced chat with some starlet hawking one of those movies Jay didn’t like having to see anyway; no music act that never pulled in viewers because music tastes had become so stratified.

  Jay listened politely; even though still carrying a grudge for what NBC had done to him, he was unfailingly polite to management. But his instant reaction to the eight p.m. idea was that it was “way wrong.” The idea of just doing the monologue and a second comedy bit may have seemed to play to Jay’s predilection for those parts of the show, but Jay actually did worry about trying to make each individual show stand out. That’s what the guests were really for. You brought in different people on different nights because audiences wanted to see the hot young actor, or the latest American Idol winner (or loser). On a guestless show there would be no chance for a Hugh Grant moment, that famous guest appearance in 1995, right after the British film star’s arrest for doing business with a prostitute. Grant’s willingness to show up for his long-scheduled appearance and take Jay’s questions—most famously, “What the hell were you thinking?”—turned things around in one big night for Leno.

  As Jay analyzed it, ʺIʹm not vain enough to believe that people want to watch a fifty-eight-year-old guy every single night. There have to be other elements in the show.”

  At the end of this meeting and all his conversations where he expressed his commitment to finding a new place for Jay at NBC, Zucker would always ask if Jay had any suggestions for what might tempt him to stay with NBC; what else did he want to do? Jay always had the same reply: “I tell jokes at eleven thirty at night.”

  Back in New York, Jeff Ross kept in touch as usual with his friendly counterpart on The Tonight Show, Debbie Vickers. Debbie would never go over any of the details of Jay’s meetings with Zucker, but both producers knew the NBC boss had begun his campaign to throw at Leno anything he could conjure up to see if Jay might bite. Neither of them could imagine a scenario where Jay would.