The War for Late Night

by Carter, Bill

  This particular salvo from Dave apparently got under Jay’s skin enough for him to return fire the following night with as aggressive an attack on Dave as he had ever launched in public. At the top of his monologue Jay turned to his bandleader, Kevin Eubanks, to note how the show had been appearing in the press every day—and how Letterman, especially, had been hammering him every night.

  “Hey, Kev, you know the best way to get Letterman to ignore you?” Jay asked.

  “No, what?” Eubanks replied.

  “Marry him! He will not bother you! He won’t look you in the eye!”

  The well-crafted joke drew an enormous laugh, though it would also generate an unusual amount of backlash against Jay among some (including, later, Oprah Winfrey) who thought the gag crossed a taste boundary, because it dragged a civilian—Dave’s obviously hurt wife—into the battle.

  (Jay later defended the joke as being both [a] funny and [b] the only time he really went after Dave during the entire January late-night convulsion. The latter point was not precisely true, however; Jay had sprinkled a number of other Dave-centric jokes into his routines, such as “Remember the more innocent days of late-night TV, when the only thing people cared about was which intern the host was nailing? What happened to that? What happened to those days?” And later in the week of the “marry him” joke, Jay did a bit with guest Chelsea Handler, pretending to be putting the moves on her by taking her to a sleazy motel, where he plugged in a vibrating bed and said, “Actually, I got this idea from Letterman.”)

  Perhaps because of the backlash from his one pointed Jay joke, Conan did not join Letterman in any Leno bashing as he started what was now virtually certain to be his last week at NBC. He had never really engaged in personal invective—even when his anger was at a peak after what had transpired—and he wasn’t about to change that now.

  Instead Conan and his writers came up with one inspired idea after another to express their outrage—and to tap into the outrage of his fans. He first put The Tonight Show up for sale on Craigslist (“Guaranteed to last for up to seven months; designed for 11:35, but can easily be moved!”) and then himself (“Tall, slender redhead available for nighttime recreation; currently homeless, must meet at your place”).

  Then they came up with a plan to make it look as though they were spending outrageous amounts of NBC’s money during the show’s last days on the air. “We’re going to introduce comedy bits that are not so much funny as they are crazy expensive,” Conan declared. One night they tricked up a Bugatti Veyron (supposedly the most expensive car in the world) with mouse ears while playing the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—music rights being notoriously costly, especially if a clip containing the music is downloaded over and over online—a bit that Conan announced would cost NBC $1.5 million. The next night they brought on the alleged Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird, decked the nag out in a mink Snuggie, and let him watch restricted Super Bowl clips. Price tag: $4.8 million. On his finale, Conan went all out with an absurdly mobile fossil of a rare ground sloth spraying Beluga caviar on an original Picasso. That one cost $65 million, Conan proclaimed.

  But a minute later he felt compelled to explain that all these had been comedy bits. Credulous folks all over the Web (and some even in the press) had been either celebrating this act of sticking it to The Man or decrying this horrifyingly wasteful extravagance in a battered economy, not understanding it was all a gag. (The Bugatti was on loan from a museum; the horse was not actually Mine That Bird; the Snuggie wasn’t mink; the Picasso and the caviar weren’t real.)

  Conan continued to pound NBC in his monologues, but he also made fun of his own situation:

  “It’s been a busy day for me today. I spent the afternoon at Universal Studios’ amusement park, enjoying their brand-new ride, the ‘Tunnel of Litigation.’ ”

  “Some papers are reporting that I’m legally prohibited from saying anything bad about NBC. But nobody said anything about speaking in Spanish. NBC esta manejado por hijos de cabras imbeciles que comen dinero y evacuan problemas.” (Translation: “NBC is run by brainless sons of goats who eat money and crap trouble.”)

  Even as he was urging everyone from writers to other staffers to fans to make the last week all about fun, Conan found himself tortured by the endless delays in getting the final settlement accomplished. The broad parameters had been in place for days. All the picayune details of what he could say on the air, which guests he could and couldn’t book, on what date he could return to television, and when and to whom he could grant interviews only underscored the pettiness of it all. He wanted it over.

  But Sunday’s anticipation melted into Monday, then Monday’s into Tuesday. His people kept telling him they were on the one-yard line, or right at the goal. At one point Conan just shouted to his group, “If one more person tells me we’re two inches from the goal line, I’m gonna fucking kill them, because I can’t hear it anymore.”

  All he wanted at that point was to be able to announce in public that Friday would be his last show. Then they could lock the bookings they wanted and ready the show they wanted to produce as a farewell.

  Wednesday began like the previous seven or eight before it, with the message that this again would almost surely be the day. Then more rumors swirled about holdups; Conan learned for the first time of GE’s qualms about the settlement.

  Showtime came with no resolution, so Conan could not go out and tell his audience the definitive answer; he had to keep saying, “This looks like the final week.”

  After the show, the lawyers told him this time they were very close and urged him to stick around the office. Conan got some food and hung out with Jeff Ross and Mike Sweeney and some other writers. By midnight all the staff had left—except Ross, of course, always by Conan’s side. Leigh Brecheen was holding down the legal front in the conference room along with an associate of Glaser’s. At loose ends, Conan started wandering the halls alone, playing his guitar. Occasionally he would jump up and sit on cubicles, strum a few notes, jump down, lay flat on the ground, then jump back up and continue on his way.

  He stepped outside onto the deserted Universal lot. There he stood, in the dark, entirely alone, waiting to hear if he had successfully given up The Tonight Show. He had his cell with him, and as he ambled aimlessly he took some pictures with the phone. At one thirty a.m. he held the phone out and took a picture of himself. Behind him was one of the tiny cafés on the lot. It was closed but there were some lights on inside, just enough for the picture and enough to see a poster for some long-forgotten movie, indecipherable in the photo, illuminated behind his head in the foreground.

  When he looked at the photo, Conan thought, This is just me at one thirty in the morning, on the Universal lot, waiting to hear this news, and looking like: What the fuck?

  Conan had no way of knowing it, but at just about the time he was snapping that photo, Ron Meyer was on the phone at his home, conferenced in with Jeff Zucker and Jeff Gaspin, to let them know that at long last he had everybody agreed on a final deal. But he also had a message he wanted to convey to the two Jeffs:

  “You’ve got about ten minutes here before I call back to say we’re closed—ten minutes to say, ‘We’re staying with Conan, we’re going to get rid of Jay.’ ” Meyer had witnessed the national display of Conan mania during the previous ten days. “There’s a big outcry out there,” he told Zucker and Gaspin. “Think about it. I’m not suggesting it. That’s not my job. I’m just suggesting you think about it. There’s a moment here.”

  Both Zucker and Gaspin had such regard for Meyer’s counsel that they did pause—or at least, out of deference to Meyer, made a show of pausing—and took the opportunity to consider, one last time, the implications of sending Conan O’Brien on his way.

  Then they told Meyer: No. They believed they were making the right decision and they were committed to it.

  Meyer made his call.

  A few minutes later Conan finally got back to his office. It was a little aft
er two a.m. The lawyers were still there. They had the papers for him.

  From NBC’s point of view, Conan got a great deal. His salary had been set at $12.5 million a year; the settlement paid him for about the two and a half years remaining in his contract, with the final number coming out at a little over $32 million. Then there were payments to Jeff Ross for his own guaranteed contract, and severance for the staff, which Conan’s side had held out for NBC to improve beyond standard GE levels. In total, the settlement deal cost NBC about $45 million, which, in one of the seemingly endless coincidental twists in the saga, was exactly what it would have taken for NBC to pay off Conan had the network decided at the last minute to keep Jay in his top-rated late-night spot and forget all that ten o’clock nonsense.

  That scenario had been brought up again and again internally in the wake of the self-inflicted drubbing the network had been through that month—if only someone had said, “Let’s just keep Jay in The Tonight Show and write the check to Conan.”

  Conan himself had come to wish they had done just that.

  What NBC got for its money was a period of nine months during which Conan could not mount a competing show. Their legal strategists figured that would be long enough to get Jay reestablished at 11:35, though they obviously had a few shudders about the prospect of Conan’s riding back in triumph to lead his young troops in a Fox army, storming the late-night citadel. But given the limitations that loomed at Fox, NBC did not take that as a serious long-term threat to what they expected would be—sooner or later—a return to supremacy for Jay Leno.

  In addition, Conan and his minions—most pointedly Gavin Polone—could not disparage Jay Leno, NBC, or its executives in any way during what amounted to a graduated series of monthly periods. By September 1, however, Conan could say with impunity that Jeff Zucker wore women’s underwear, or anything else he desired to.

  Those restrictions—and especially the ones NBC imposed on O’Brien’s final shows—continued to amaze the group around Conan, because to them these concerns only proved again how little NBC really knew about the man who had starred for them for seventeen years. Rick Rosen could see how someone might not respond to Conan’s humor, but as a person, who was classier?

  Conan himself labeled his final show “a Viking funeral.” He wrote the phrase many times over on the blotter on his desk, which was always filled with his cartoon doodles and little turns of phrase. He had the guest roster he wanted, a dream lineup: Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, and Neil Young, who had called Conan to volunteer to be on the last show and to sing, appropriately, “Long May You Run.” And, of course, Will Ferrell, Conan’s signature guest, closed the show, with Conan onstage as well with the whole band—including guests Beck, ZZ Top, and Ben Harper—playing a long version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.”

  By then Conan had delivered his eulogy for his brief Tonight Show run, and, consistent with his approach throughout, he took the high—and well-written—road. He tried to clear up any misconceptions, saying that, despite rumors, he really could say anything he wanted in his closing remarks, and what he most wanted to say was that despite his recent differences with them, he needed to thank NBC for making his career possible.

  “Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” Conan said. “Despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show, and for seven months I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I’ve had more good fortune than anyone I know, and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we’ll find a way to make it fun.”

  He thanked his staff and his fans, and he closed out his time on late night’s biggest stage by saying:

  “To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism—it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MAKE LAUGHS, NOT WAR

  They used the Conan O’Brien Tonight Show studio one last time, for a party—of sorts—to mark the leave-taking. It was hardly festive; one participant likened it to an Irish wake, but only because Conan was Irish, and his show was dead. Nobody did shots to salute the corpse.

  Mainly the staff wanted one last chance to applaud a star most of them respected and were genuinely fond of. Someone had pulled up his monologue spot from the floor and had it framed; almost the entire staff signed it. They presented it to a clearly touched O’Brien.

  He stayed late, posing for pictures with anyone who asked—every camera operator, every intern. His brother Neal had flown in to stand with him; he’d been there for the closeout of Conan’s Late Night show less than a year earlier.

  Finally, totally spent, Conan got in his car with Neal, allowing his big brother to drive home. Though Conan had not drunk an ounce at the party, given the state of his emotions, it seemed wiser for someone else to be behind the wheel. When he got home, he still felt slightly in shock.

  That night, before he settled to a point where he could sleep, a memory flashed by. When Conan had been unemployed for a brief time in 1987, after his first writing job at Not Necessarily the News had ended, he found himself sitting in a Du-pars coffee shop in LA. His writing partner Greg Daniels had already found a temporary source of income coaching an SAT prep course. Conan had no immediate prospects.

  So he sat at the counter, taking an inordinate amount of time to eat his pancakes, because what the heck else did he have to do that day? Just thinking about what might become of him next, what was around the next corner, he suddenly uttered out loud (though not very loud) a little expression of personal conviction—a sort of quick, nondenominational prayer:

  “I don’t care what happens in my career as long as it’s interesting.”

  Back home in his elegant home in Brentwood on this night, freshly out of another job, this time accompanied by national headlines, Conan could certainly make a case that his long-ago prayer had been answered. Though, thinking it through, he realized he could tick off a long list of accomplishments that counted as just as interesting as being the guy who walked away from The Tonight Show after seven months. He’d made it as a performer, leading a show on a major network for sixteen years; he’d played guitar next to Bruce Springsteen; he had a picture of himself standing on his set next to his idol, David Letterman; he’d spoken to Johnny Carson; hell, he was even a national hero in Finland.

  What had just happened to him in January 2010 had surely shone a revealing klieg light on who he really was and what he believed in. Conan was OK with that. He didn’t think he had a damn thing to be ashamed of.

  Which was nice—except he still felt shattered to his last bone.

  Over in Burbank an NBC executive visiting Jay Leno’s show for the evening could feel the emotional undercurrent rippling through that set as well. It was obvious that the star and his closest staff members had been badly bruised by the experience and were hurting. They all knew Jay was being cast as the bad guy, a role he found distressing and uncomfortable, but that seemed to dog him despite what he considered his own best efforts to play nice with everybody. Even though some in the press had always taken shots at him, Jay had not experienced this level of venom since the darkest hours of the Letterman face-off, when he was charged with snatching the show away from the friend who had done so much to elevate his career.

  But nothing in that episode came close to the heights of malediction he was now experiencing. The Team Coco troops accused Jay of being a liar, a traitor, and worse. Jay was truly rocked to read a piece in The Wall Street Journal by Joe Queenan—a satire, certainly, but on a level of viciousness Jay simply could not fathom. Queenan compared Leno to Hitler, saying he had made “secret demands for te
rritory” (that is, the 11:35 show) just as Hitler had with the Sudetenland, and that just as Adolf saw himself as the second coming of Frederick Barbarossa, Jay wanted to be seen as the heir to Johnny Carson.

  Jay was astonished that this version of events—with him cast as evil genius—got any credence at all. He thought the story could just as easily have played as a feel-good movie of the week, laying out a totally different scenario: A guy in his fifties is told he’s doing a good job but gets fired anyway. Then, six years later, the boss comes back and says, “We were wrong; we’d like to give you your old job back.”

  Despite the exaggerated cartoon being presented by Letterman, Kimmel, and others, Jay simply could not believe people actually accepted it as true that he had walked up to NBC, snapped his fingers, and said, “My show failed; I want that show back.” Still, he got e-mails every day from Team Coco supporters making accusations like “It was Conan’s dream and you took it. Just ’cause your show failed.” He wanted to ask them, “What are you talking about? Do you have any idea how business works?”

  Did it really make sense to people that he should step aside even when NBC clearly made the call asking him to return? Was it wrong that at fifty-nine he still wanted to work? How different was this, really, from a situation where two actors are up for the same role? Tom Cruise gets it instead of Brad Pitt—should Cruise say, “No, I’m not taking this job because Brad was up for it?”

  Jay looked to do repair work where he could. He called Michael Fiorile at the NBC affiliate board and abjectly apologized for failing the stations with his ten o’clock show. Fiorile, who remained a steadfast Jay backer, said, “The affiliates are still supportive, and the fact that the show didn’t play at ten really wasn’t your fault.”