The War for Late Night Read online

  One of the other reasons Zucker was reluctant to sit down with Jay that afternoon was that they were meeting him in the private sitting room, the place where Jay would hold occasional postmortems about the show with his writers, the place Zucker called “the dungeon.” Just outside his dressing room, deep in the bowels of the Burbank studio, it had the quality of a dank, well-worn rec room in a frat house. Pizza boxes with a few congealed slices left might be taking up floor space. Bowls of salsa or graying guacamole along with some stray chips might be on the coffee table, along with half-finished bottles of soft drinks. Zucker, who had been there only on a few previous occasions, thought it was disgusting. Jay found it relaxing and homey.

  After the usual greetings, Zucker and Ludwin sat on one of the lumpy couches opposite Jay. Debbie Vickers had decided not to tip Jay off as to the purpose of the meeting—it was NBC’s call; let their guys take the heat—and if Jay had any expectation of what he was about to hear, he didn’t betray it.

  Zucker began by saying that he had come to talk about the contract extension, and the news on that front was good. But he also had some other news. The network was going to extend Jay’s deal just as Ziffren had proposed, Zucker explained, so it would add up again to five years total—the bulk of the two remaining years and three more, taking Jay to the end of 2008.

  But the network had decided that at that point it would be time to make a move. They were going to give the show to Conan.

  In the best of times and the worst of times, Jay Leno wore a mask of impassivity. That’s all the two NBC executives saw now. Inside, however, Jay was as stunned as if he’d been hit with a Taser shot.

  Zucker immediately emphasized how long they wanted to keep Jay on the show, almost five years from that point, an eternity in television time. Ludwin added the obvious: The network didn’t want to lose Conan.

  Jay said, solemnly, “I don’t want to lose Conan, either.”

  There was history behind that concession. The realists about how show business works didn’t have a problem with any of Jay’s tactics during the contentiousness over replacing Carson. That included one close associate of Letterman’s who, years after the tumult, said, “It’s what you do in this business. You gun for the job.” In some circles of the television industry, however, Jay’s tactics during the succession battle had gained him a reputation as a Machiavellian schemer who had played dirty and screwed a guy he really did think of as a friend—Letterman—out of a job that was by rights owed to Dave first.

  That was also the opinion frequently expressed in the press—and by Letterman, who, in his increasing mentions of Jay on the air (sometimes accompanied by a squeaky-voiced Jay impression), often did so in the context of NBC’s having rejected him in favor of Jay. Almost every year at Passover the Letterman joke was the same: “Passover is a Jewish feast—it’s also what happened to me at NBC.ʺ

  Zucker and Ludwin had intended to reference the concern that Leno surely didn’t want to get caught up in another PR bloodbath, and how this solution would preclude all that. But Jay himself quickly spoke up: “I know I don’t want everybody to go through what Letterman and I did. I don’t want to go through all that nonsense again.”

  Zucker found himself appreciating again Jay’s solid professionalism. He was throwing no tantrums; he was expressing no antipathy toward NBC, or Conan, or anyone else, for that matter. Ludwin felt the same. Jay seemed to understand the situation completely and was showing support for the idea. Of course Ludwin realized there could be a difference between how a person reacted and how he felt inside.

  Inside Leno was in pain. This was a guy who in fourth grade had been hit on the head with a hammer by a kid who thought anyone with a head that big must surely have a skull made of granite. Bleeding, Leno assured the class he was fine—though it hurt like hell. He got a big laugh, which made the pain pass more quickly.

  Beyond the crushing disappointment of hearing this news—which to Leno sounded awfully like he was being fired—his other dominant feeling was befuddlement. Why was this happening now? What sense did it make, with him still so strongly in first place?

  But he didn’t raise those questions; he was in good-soldier mode. So instead he asked about the particular details: Why, if they were really saying he was going to have five more years on Tonight, did the deal run only through the end of 2008? That sounded more like four years, not five.

  The explanation was mundane: That was the extension Jay, through Ziffren, had asked for. But maybe they could make it the full five years and extend it to the end of 2009. Maybe.

  Leno knew they would have to get Conan’s side to agree to that. But he also had another question: Would it be possible for NBC to announce his extension first, totally separate from any formal declaration of the deal to install Conan? That way there could be a period of time when it was still only about Jay’s getting more years on Tonight and not that he was being readied for the exit.

  The NBC executives saw the reasonableness of this request, and they agreed to it. NBC would announce that Jay was signing a new deal as the host. Months later—say, six months—they would make public that Conan was getting the show in 2008 or 2009.

  As he left the dungeon, Jeff Zucker felt relieved and satisfied. His trepidation had been misplaced; Jay had taken the news just fine. In Zucker’s gut this felt like the right move. By the time this deal was over, he calculated, Jay would be almost sixty and would have been on The Tonight Show since 1993. Those stats made an impression on Zucker: Close to sixty and seventeen years on the air sounded like the appropriate time for a change. All they had to do now was smooth a few things over with the Conanites, including that little extra year Jay was asking for. And all sides would have to agree to keep secret for six months that Jay’s extension carried a big asterisk, one that led to a footnote saying, “And no more.” Normally Zucker would expect that it might be asking a lot of Ari and the boys to remain silent about big news like this for so important a client. But NBC would make that part of the agreement. It wouldn’t become official until Jay had his six months of grace.

  Jay, meanwhile, climbed out of the dungeon and made his way upstairs to Debbie Vickers’s office to let her know that he felt as if he had just been fired—and to tell her, “The only reason they are doing this is because they made a deal with someone else.”

  On March 30, 2004, NBC announced it had reached an agreement with Jay Leno to remain as host of The Tonight Show until the end of 2009. In an interview, Jay observed, “It seemed pretty simple. NBC came to me and said, ‘We’d like to sign you for about five more years,’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ ” He had only one specific comment about the terms. “I’m still not making Dave money.”

  Zucker said the deal had been negotiated “strictly between me and Jay” and added, “We decided to do it now because Jay is now the perennial leader in late night and he only shows signs of getting stronger.” At the time, late in the 2004-2005 television season, Jay, with an average of 6.2 million viewers, had been posting increases in both his overall ratings and his lead over Letterman, who was averaging about 4.4 million.

  NBC made no comment about Conan OʹBrien that day, but of course the speculation was all over the press. What did it mean for Conan, whose deal was to end on December 31, 2005, now that Jay was locked in until the end of the decade?

  Conan and his professional posse went along with the charade, acceding to the terms that had been agreed upon. After all, there was always the chance that the thing could blow up again, at least until Conan formally signed a contract that contained the phrase “Tonight Show.” That may have been why they didn’t shrink from flimflamming the situation a bit. Less than a week after the Leno announcement, in an extensive profile, Conan, speaking of his future, said, “A big question is looming. It’s the elephant in the room that no one is talking about: What’s next?”

  He also pointed out, “No one at NBC has said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s the offer.’ It’s hard to figure the
se things out in a vacuum.”

  Gavin Polone laid it on even thicker. “I was a little surprised by what NBC did with Jay,” Polone remarked in his own interview, overtly expressing surprise about how NBC had made this long commitment without first locking in Conan. “Conan has a lot of great choices ahead of him. NBC has probably only a lot of anxiety ahead of them.”

  And even though all outside contacts had been shut down per the arrangement with NBC, Polone went on to describe those alleged choices: “I think Fox has to offer. I believe CBS might have to offer. And ABC obviously has to offer. You might have three companies that need new jetliners at the same time, and we’ll be the only company actually building a jet. Other people may be building washing machines. But why go to a company offering washing machines when you need a jet?”

  All of Conan’s people made their uncertainly about the future sound real, since it was either that or dodge the questions entirely. If they said nothing, Jay would get six months solo on the PR stage, which might make it look as if Conan had gone cold and the quest for an 11:35 slot had become moribund. So they fudged and dissembled.

  Speaking about the deal that NBC had announced with Leno, Conan said, “It’s hard for me emotionally to say, ‘How can Leno deserve to be there, when I deserve to be there?’ I don’t feel that in my bones.” But he also stepped back, trying to distinguish his own position from that of his representatives. “My agents can say that—and they do. But I have no control over them. They’re Rottweilers that I bought. Their job is to attack. My job is to say, ‘Dear me.’ But I don’t expect things that are unrealistic.”

  As for Jay’s longevity, Conan played the game, making it sound as if he had no reason to expect his Tonight commitment wasn’t open-ended. “Jay may decide he wants to do the show until 2025,” Conan joked. “Jay could say, ‘My brain will be in a jar and we’ll wheel it out and I’ll do the monologue.’ ”

  But at the same time he took pains to express fondness for the man who at that point seemed—outside of the small circle involved in the deal, in any case—still to be in Conan’s way. “I like Jay and I wouldn’t want to do anything with NBC that I wouldn’t be able to tell Jay I was doing,” Conan said. He was being entirely sincere. That had never been his intention and would never be his intention. “I do not want to manipulate my way into this job.”

  Of course, even with every issue of potential contention apparently settled—in private—the situation was worth another innocent joke: “Let’s just hope it gets ugly, and then we’ll all have fun,” Conan said.

  On the morning of September 27, 2004, almost six months to the day after the formal announcement of the Leno extension, Conan O’Brien stepped into the NBC executive offices on the fifty-second floor of 30 Rock, picked up a pen, and signed his name to the document that promised to make him the next host of television’s most storied entertainment show: NBC’s Tonight Show. He returned to his Late Night offices, gathered his staff, and broke the news, beaming through the sustained applause.

  At about ten a.m. in Burbank, Jay had his own staff meeting. Betraying no hint of reservation, he revealed that word was about to break in New York that he would be leaving the show at the end of 2009, with Conan taking over. The Tonight staff reacted with some shock, but Jay assured them 2009 was a long way off and they all had plenty of work to do in the meantime.

  Soon after Jay made his announcement, NBC pushed the button on its prepared press release. It was official: Conan would be Leno’s (and Carson’s) successor in 2009, following the expiration of Jay’s contract. The only quote in the release was a crafted statement from Jay: “When I signed my new contract, I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor, and there is no one more qualified than Conan. Plus, I promised my wife, Mavis, I would take her out for dinner before I turned sixty.”

  NBC deliberately shunned answering any press questions, wanting to allow the first public comment to come from Jay on that night’s show. Nothing emerged from the OʹBrien camp, either—not even a pro forma statement from Conan—again permitting Jay to take the lead. This concession was not made out of deference to Jay’s status as late-night’s leading star, however, but rather was linked to the fulfillment of one of the demands that had come from Conan’s representatives during the negotiations over the details of the Tonight Show contract.

  One deal point that Conan’s reps had insisted on was that NBC announce the deal publicly. The network would have much preferred to make the arrangements quietly, and then leave them in place for a couple of years before going public. To Graboff, Zucker, and the other NBC executives, it seemed far too soon to be creating a lame-duck situation, which they knew was going to happen the second the world heard a guaranteed succession was in place. But the network team had little choice. Even if they resisted and pushed to keep the agreement secret for some substantial period of time, they guessed it would be only a matter of days before somebody on the Conan side—most likely Gavin Polone—would plant a story saying O’Brien was staying at NBC because he had been given The Tonight Show. So NBC assented to full disclosure—and Jay presumed he should be the vehicle for that disclosure, a position Zucker supported. Zucker concluded that Ari and his group believed it was essential to put NBC on record as issuing an official notice that this was really happening—a gesture they would call proof of good intentions. And nothing could be more official than Jay himself announcing his departure on national television.

  There had been one other demand from the Conan side, tied to their desire for some guarantee of good faith from NBC. It was all well and good to be told Conan was getting The Tonight Show in five years, but as even one senior NBC executive conceded, “You can’t trust network executives; they go back on their word.” The Endeavor agents were hardly going to take at face value NBC’s assurances that they would go through with the deal, no matter what the coming five years would bring. They required a bit more value.

  What was needed, Ari and his team concluded, was a penalty payment so crushing, so overwhelming, that nothing would ever induce NBC to put itself in the position of having to pay it. They consequently asked for $80 million. After the usual haggling, both sides settled on $45 million. Conan’s agents plugged in various bells and whistles, accompanied by recitations about how Conan could have taken another offer to go to a different network, and how he was staying only because NBC was promising this show, and if he didn’t get it, the damage was surely worth $45 million—plus his attorney’s fees after he sued.

  Simplified, the terms meant that if NBC decided to renege on Conan for any reason—other than Conan’s refusal to work or some transgression of moral turpitude—the network would be compelled to sign a check of truly imposing magnitude. It was even bigger than Dave money.

  That night, with a larger audience than usual watching—it included, after all, everyone who had been involved in this protracted deal, including Conan’s lawyers, who would be checking to make sure that whatever Jay said satisfied the stipulations—Jay stepped up to his assignment.

  Looking sharp in a fresh haircut, Jay sat at his desk after the first commercial and, displaying something that looked like enthusiasm, laid out the tale. Like Conan and his backers, Jay clearly dissembled on the details, making it sound as if the two NBC decisions—extending Jay, anointing Conan—had been agreed to at different points in time. He certainly implied that he had agreed with the notion that his doing the show past 2009, when he would turn fifty-nine, was untenable, because “there was really only one person who could have done this into his sixties, and that was Johnny Carson—and, I think it’s fair to say, I’m no Johnny Carson.”

  Leno acknowledged that Conan was funny and “the hottest late-night guy out there.” What was unquestionably true was the rationale for the move that Jay explained, which was the same one he had expressed to Zucker and Ludwin: He didn’t want Conan to go anywhere else. Jay cited the animosity between him and Letterman that had marked the previous turnover in the job and regretted th
at “good friendships were permanently damaged. And I don’t want to see anybody ever have to go through that again.”

  Leno ended his statement by linking the move to NBCʹs late-night doctrine of temporary stewardship. “’Cause this, you know, this show is like a dynasty,” Leno said. “You hold it, and then you hand it off to the next person. And I don’t want to see all the fighting and all the ‘Who’s better?’ and nasty things back and forth in the press. So right now, here it is—Conan, it’s yours! See you in five years, buddy!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CONAN OF IT ALL

  On a brisk evening in September 1981, hanging around his cluttered room in Holworthy Hall, an eighteen-year-old Harvard freshman from suburban Brookline—near enough to Cam-bridge that he could have been a commuter—had no special plans.

  He had spent his first weeks wandering the impressive and imposing campus, trying on different hats, looking for a place where he might fit in. Fitting in had always been an issue for the spindly young man, who had reached six foot four but at that date weighed just 150 pounds. He was also a startlingly red figure, a mass of coppery hair and matching freckles that would have screamed Irish even if his name hadn’t been O’Brien.