The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  “And do what?” Dave asked.

  Dave was never less than eloquent when speaking about Johnny Carson, if not to him. He openly admitted to being “in awe” of Carson and how he felt that he literally owed his career to Johnny.

  Carson’s had been the vote that sent Dave off to CBS when NBC was still dangling the fever dream of The Tonight Show in front of him in 1993. It was Johnny who had told him that the eighteen-month hold in the deal made it sound bogus, and that he certainly would not have accepted it for himself. That was enough for Dave.

  Nobody, not even Jay, really doubted who Carson believed deserved to succeed him, but Johnny himself didn’t have a vote in that. He kept his opinion on the matter private, at least until it was revealed after his death that Carson had regularly submitted monologue jokes to Dave.

  That was the handiwork of Peter Lassally, the longtime executive producer for Carson, who took on the same role for Letterman after Johnny retired—first while Dave was still at NBC, and then for a time at CBS. Lassally, whose expertise in broadcasting stretched back to Arthur Godfrey’s days in radio, became Letterman’s chief counselor, advocate, and father figure during the turbulent days after NBC threw Dave over in favor of Jay. Throughout the late nineties and into the next decade, their relationship, like most others involving Dave, cooled and warmed, warmed and cooled. At the same time Lassally, to his delight, was growing much closer to the retired, and now more relaxed, Johnny.

  The separation from the show that had been his life and utter preoccupation for thirty years had proved jarring for Carson. Friends reported that it had taken at least six months after he stepped down before Johnny could have a normal day—one in which he didn’t feel the withdrawal pangs. Even after he settled in to his postshow life, however, Carson could not turn off the trenchant comic instincts honed over a lifetime. He would read the paper in the morning, watch the news, hear about some zany event taking place somewhere, and the joke would simply come to him, like music. And what good is a perfectly crafted joke if you can’t tell it to someone?

  Johnny took to calling Peter Lassally, sometimes once a week, occasionally several times, when he had one of the monologues down. Over the phone Johnny would read his collection of carefully composed, Carsonesque jokes—perform them, really, just as he would have if he had driven to Burbank, put on his suit, and walked out onstage to read them off cue cards. The performance was just as amusing and appealing as it had always been, the only difference being that now Johnny was not entertaining the multitudes but performing for an audience of one.

  Lassally would compliment Johnny of course. As the jokes rolled on, Peter developed another idea. “These jokes are wonderful, Johnny,” Peter would tell him. “You really should start sending these in to Dave.”

  Carson dismissed the idea. “No, I can’t do that,” he would say. “I don’t want to force Dave to do it. Dave would feel obligated.”

  Lassally could hardly dispute that, knowing how Dave idolized Johnny. Still, he urged Carson again and again. The jokes were too good to be wasting on one person. Let’s send them in to Dave, he repeated.

  Johnny, finally convinced, didn’t flood Dave with jokes, sending in only a few here and there whenever he felt they were worthy. Letterman could not help but be moved, but promised he would judge the material as he would that from any other writer. Later he would mention that Johnny had sent some jokes to him as early as the NBC days, when they were both on the network. But this was different. This was Johnny Carson, silenced by retirement, still using his comic voice, with Dave as the mouthpiece. Dave didn’t want to reveal the secret, and Johnny certainly didn’t want to offend NBC by having it publicly known that he was writing for the guy competing with The Tonight Show. So only a few insiders knew the source of the jokes, and which ones were Johnny’s when they got on the air.

  Johnny himself took to watching the show each night wondering if Dave would use one of his submissions. (And if he did, yes, Johnny would be paid his seventy-five dollars.) Whenever Dave did, Johnny’s joy was infectious, and he would call Lassally and excitedly tell him, “Oh my gosh. I got a joke on the air last night. Dave told one of my jokes.”

  Lassally could hear the pride in Carson’s voice. “He was like a kid in a candy store,” Lassally recalled.

  After Carson died, on January 23, 2005, Dave put together a special show with Lassally and Doc Severinsen, Carson’s old orchestra leader, as guests. He ended the opening monologue that night with an explanation: Every joke he had just told had been submitted by Johnny Carson. They all got laughs—and if you listened closely, you could almost hear the Carson rhythms.

  “Bad day in New York, today. The cab fare in New York has gone up from two dollars to two fifty. And as any New York City cabbie can tell you, that’s a twenty-two-rupee increase.”

  “John Kerry, you know, was criticized for throwing away his military service medals back in the seventies. So, not to be outdone, today, President Bush threw away his National Guard Spotty-Attendance Ribbon.”

  In 2007 David Letterman turned sixty, a fact he casually mentioned on the air, as he would when he turned sixty-one, sixty-two, and sixty-three. It was what it was. Dave was never going to change the way he looked or dressed or acted to try to counter the reality that he was now heading toward senior citizen status. The first and greatest sin for him remained phoniness. Dave would stand up and be who he was, no matter the consequences.

  If anything, Letterman seemed to embrace growing older; his jokes and remarks at the desk often made reference to his age, as when he would ruefully comment that people sometimes took him for Harry’s grand-father when they went out and about. Harry did bring out the youthful Dave, who seemed to delight in all the mysteries of childhood that were being played out in front of him.

  But on the show the cranky old guy that Dave had frequently assumed as a role throughout his career had now become a genuine cranky old guy—a development that, as usual, he often turned on himself. “I know a lot of people regard me as a snarky putz,” he said one night at the desk, joking about how he was thinking of replacing Oprah when she left her show.

  Many nights he threw out lines that were some variation on the theme of his barely putting in an effort anymore and largely just mailing it in. “I quit trying ten years ago,” he said during one show. “We just do the same old crap night after night.”

  His staff, however, saw that Dave was still tinkering, testing new ideas: obnoxious guests just showing up and sitting down next to him; bizarre phone calls from some angry guy to the phone on his desk; interactions with oddball characters like an actor playing Mike Singletary, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers. For fans who remembered the wildly inventive stuff of his early days (elevator races, show-us-your-pictures at the Fotomat, guests sitting in barber chairs), what Dave was presenting now might have seemed like thin gruel. But within the limits of the energy he was now willing to expend, he was still trying.

  “If the shows were bad, we would feel differently,” said one veteran writer-producer. “But Dave’s still very, very good at this. He has to pick and choose now the things that he’s going to work hard on.” And as always, the comparison came out: “Johnny did the same thing.”

  That adjusted energy level was something the longtime staff members noticed early in the aught decade. It was part of Dave’s genius, they told themselves, that he was always so smart about his own evolution. He knew when to stop wearing a Velcro suit and jumping into a wall, and when to shut down the remotes that were such a distinctive feature of the show and often inspired him to heights of brilliance. The truth was, Dave always hated doing those remotes—he didn’t like all that attention focused on him. When they simply got too hard on him, he eliminated them. So the remotes disappeared, as he did the cold opens with some shtick involving a guest in his dressing room. Even the regular bits of business with Rupert Jee at the Hello Deli were mostly dropped.

  Always averse to doing five shows a week, Dave had early o
n tried to build a three-day weekend into his life by eliminating Friday as a work-day. He took to taping a second show later on Thursday evening, a move that got him out, free to fly Friday morning to Montana or St. Barts or wherever he desired, for some R & R.

  In 2007 he decided that the two shows on Thursday were too taxing. The double assignment made it harder to enjoy fully the next three days off. So he shook up the schedule again, rejiggering the machinery of the show to make it possible to tape the Friday show on Monday. His energy would clearly be higher on Mondays after the three days off, and this way, he could get ready for his getaways after the single show on Thursday, which would be wrapped up by seven or so.

  Another network with a different relationship with a star might have raised an objection to this schedule. It meant, after all, that the Friday show would be canned like tuna; so the jokes for Friday would have to be written very carefully. If a joke was made on the air about a certain celebrity on Monday, for example, and by Friday that celebrity had been married, fired, jailed, or was—most horribly—dead, the show would have to be clumsily edited. The comedy, as a result, had to be stepped as far back as possible from topical. And of course, this freezer-burned item would be airing in competition against a show minted fresh that day on NBC with Jay Leno joking away on whatever events were in that day’s news.

  Although the advantage being conceded to Jay seemed enormous, CBS went along with the plan. They didn’t have much choice. Not only was Letterman likely to give them explicit anatomical directions for where they could stick their objections, but the network’s hands were effectively tied by its deal with Dave. Because he owned the show—and Craig Ferguson’s behind it—it was up to Worldwide Pants to make most decisions about it, including the production schedule. CBS executives could forward requests, of course, but they could not tell Letterman how to do his show—nor would they dare.

  Over time, the impact of the stale-bread Friday episodes became noticeable. CBS, from just about that point on, saw the numbers begin to drop slightly for the Friday editions of Late Show. A few years later, the falloff became precipitous. Jay would bury Dave every Friday, often pulling away in the ratings even during weeks when the other nights had been close.

  When CBSʹs researchers asked viewers if they reacted differently to the Friday Letterman shows, they answered no, but the ratings slide made it seem obvious that the perception had somehow gotten through that Dave’s Friday show was, literally, old news. Late-night viewers had likely grown accustomed to checking out the top of each of the programs to see if the opening joke was of the moment—and if it wasn’t, that usually signaled to them that it was a repeat. In time CBS would decide to tinker with the idea of simply offering a repeat on Fridays—at least in summer. The ratings seemed to come in at about the same level.

  Around the same time that he was turning Monday into Friday, Dave also stopped showing up for rehearsal. The established pattern for late-night shows was to work on material through the morning and early afternoon, take it to the stage around two in the afternoon, and do a run-through. Dave had followed that routine for years—until he stopped. In lieu of a formal rehearsal, he simply familiarized himself with the material, never going to the stage to work through it.

  One of his producers defended the practice, saying it was another way Dave pared down the demands of the job so he could keep doing it past sixty. In his own explanation, Dave referred to an interview with the former Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith, who had discussed, as he considered retirement, what it was about the job that he really couldn’t do anymore—the practices. Dave still liked the time on the field; what he didn’t like was the practices.

  In September 2008, Letterman told Rolling Stone, in describing how the show was different and much more “host-friendly” than it used to be, “I’m not working as hard as I used to. All I have to do, really, is pick out a tie and sit down.”

  The rope-a-dope strategy paid off almost immediately for Late Show. Viewers (the older ones) apparently started drifting away from Conan in his second week to catch some of Dave’s guest-loaded lineup: Howard Stern on Monday, Julia Roberts on Tuesday, Stupid Human Tricks on Wednesday.

  Julia provided the first breakthrough, the first night when Dave pulled in more viewers than Conan. She teased Dave about his marriage to Regina the previous March, asking him, “Did she take your name?”

  Dave said she did.

  “So she’s Mrs. Letterman?” Julia wanted to know.

  “No,” Letterman answered “She’s Dave.”

  The shows that week were all crisp, with Letterman firing off the monologue jokes with high confidence and sparring with his guests with energy and wit.

  Over at NBC, they were watching closely. One 30 Rock executive took note right away: “Dave is on his game.”

  Peter Lassally thought so, too. He checked out Dave’s performance each night that week with increasing pleasure. No one had more experience evaluating what it took to make a late-night show work than Lassally, and he always put Letterman at the very top in terms of pure talent. But Dave so often tossed off shows with less than full effort, or got disgusted with himself for long periods of time and displayed that disgust—or, worse, pure anger—that the show inevitably suffered.

  But when he committed, when Dave applied that potent mix of searing intelligence and scintillating wit, he could still take Peter Lassally’s breath away.

  “Brett Favre announced he was retiring again—but he vowed to keep fighting for the people of Alaska.”

  That week Lassally saw Letterman marching out each night and belting out a bravura monologue just as he had when he first came to CBS. “He’s got the fever!” Lassally said by midweek. The material also sounded more biting, punchier. It was all wildly above Peter’s expectations. Could it really be true? Could the old Dave be back?

  Lassally couldn’t resist calling Dave—and, of course, got the old Dave on the phone. When Peter told Dave how great the monologue had been every night that week, Letterman immediately deflected the compliment.

  “How’s Alice?” Dave asked, shifting the topic to Peter’s much-loved wife.

  No matter how hard Lassally tried, Dave continued to shrink away from his praise, finally saying, “I don’t want to talk about that.” He simply would not let Lassally express enthusiasm about his performance.

  The competition for the hearts and eyeballs of viewers under fifty, meanwhile, continued to be a mismatch. In week three, when Dave finally slipped ahead in the viewer totals by 143,000, Conan buried Letterman by half a rating point (almost 700,000 people) among the younger segment of the audience. If that pattern remained consistent, no one at NBC would complain, because Conan would clean up in terms of cash—and accumulating cash, not eyeballs, was the name of the game.

  What the Letterman people liked, though, was the trend. As the weeks of summer wore on, Dave’s margin in viewers grew larger; he began winning weeks by totals of more than 700,000, then 800,000—one week in August Dave won by close to a million viewers.

  The margin for those eighteen-to-forty-nine viewers was dropping, too—though the fact that Conan always won, even with those massive deficiencies among the overall viewing totals, spoke to the fact that some kind of sweeping generational migration was taking place.

  Neither host had any real structural advantage in the summer. In general, CBS’s ten p.m. repeats of cop shows provided decent lead-in audiences, but NBC had by far the biggest show of the summer months in the reality competition show America’s Got Talent, which several nights extended all the way to eleven p.m., giving Conan a presumed boost.

  One thing that was not happening was any sniping between the two shows. Conan had long since established his membership in the Letterman fan club, so his team wasn’t about to start throwing stones; Letterman had clearly laid his imprimatur on Conan with his visits to his show. Whenever the subject of Conan came up, Dave went right to the heart of the matter: “He’s a very funny guy.”

>   Not that he thought Conan always appreciated the full weight of the late-night cross. He noted that when Conan came on as a guest on Dave’s CBS show, about two years into his run on Late Night, and Dave asked him how it was going, Conan replied that things were great and he had done about eighteen tremendous shows in a row. Dave recalled thinking, Holy Christ, he’s either lying or insane. The obvious reason: Dave couldn’t think of eighteen tremendous shows he had done during his entire late-night career.

  A staff member who had been with Dave through most of his career broke down the comedy of the three big network talents. He said, “Conan’s comedy is whimsical, which was like Dave’s, but he’s moved away from that as he’s gotten older. I don’t know if Conan has evolved a ton since he was in his thirties. Jay doesn’t really have a point of view, other than ‘I’m a joke-telling machine and I’m a blue-collar guy.ʹ Conan is very smart. He has thoughts in his head. He’s got a point of view, but not like a broadcaster like Dave who just comes out and says stuff. I think Conan chooses not to have a point of view, unlike Jay, who doesn’t really have the mentality to have one.”

  One veteran member of Letterman’s writing staff had a question about whether Conan might be saddled with an inherent handicap: “Is there something about the look, the presence, the sound of his voice? The oldest credo in television is you need to have a big head to star on TV. As much as we want to get away from that stuff, we are humans and there’s something that goes on there. Conan is kind of gangly, pasty looking. He’s got a high voice.”

  Really none of that had anything to do with Conan’s talent, which was all that really should have mattered, as the Letterman staff members conceded. But as the summer weeks passed and the ratings came in, and Dave looked more and more competitive with Conan, confidence suffused the Late Show staff. By their reckoning the timing of the move to The Tonight Show—that five-year wait on the sidelines—had ultimately hurt O’Brien.