BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN (27 page)

In the midst of the frenzy, Kushnick admitted to Jay that she had planted the phony Carson story, insisting she had done it for Jay’s own good. Upon hearing this, Jay knew he could no longer support her. When she was fired, his first order of business was to apologize to Johnny, who accepted graciously. Jay also made many other calls to try to mend the fences Kushnick had broken, but much of the damage would neve
r be undone. Jay continued to be portrayed in press accounts as a guy who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

The two people in Kushnick’s life who meant everything to her were her daughter, Sara, and Jay, whom she discovered in 1975 at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. An intensely loyal person, Jay made a promise to her husband, Jerry, on his deathbed to take care of his wife and daughter. When she left
The Tonight Show
, Kushnick was beyond Jay’s help. Nevertheless, he reached out to her and Sara, going to their house for a dinner of chicken wings, a meal she had often served him. Sara told
Entertainment Weekly
the evening was like old times when Jay would hang out at the house. A few years later, on August 28, 1996, Helen died after a nine-year struggle with breast cancer.

In February 1996, HBO made a film about Helen’s beleaguered stint as Jay’s executive producer. Called
The Late Shift,
it was based on Bill Carter’s book of the same name. Actress Kathy Bates captured Helen’s troubled personality perfectly, winning a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. Her performance was so eerily accurate that to this day I wince when I look at her.

For all of her faults, Helen always believed in Jay, unlike NBC’s East Coast executives. In December 1992, CBS signed a late-night deal with David Letterman for $16 million a year. This led to a panic among NBC’s suits, who were beginning to have second thoughts about Jay despite his respectable ratings. NBC had thirty days to make a counteroffer to David, which they seriously considered.

On December 21, NBC president Bob Wright met in New York with David to find out what it would take to keep him. His answer:
The Tonight Show.
No surprise there. Wright would make no commitments, but he reportedly came away from the meeting with positive feelings about David. News of their meeting quickly got back to Jay in Burbank. That night, the staff was gathering in Studio 9 on the NBC lot for the first
Tonight Show
Christmas party.

Some saw Jay talking angrily with West Coast executives, and word quickly spread that he was reacting to news that Mr. Wright had decided to pick Letterman. No such decision had been made, but it didn’t matter. We thought it had happened. The festive celebration of our first successful year, in spite of the Helen Kushnick debacle, quickly turned somber.

At one point, the late Fred de Cordova, then a consultant for our show, attempted to cheer us up. Johnny’s long-time executive producer said Jay was proud of us and assured us that our show would go on for many years. But Freddie’s words fell flat. No one could have inspired the room that night. Like many of my colleagues, I was certain I would soon be out of a job. The memory of the evening was so distasteful that the staff would never have another Christmas party.

The next day Jay went directly to the press, citing growing ratings, happy advertisers, and satisfied affiliates. He didn’t understand NBC’s wishy-washy support: “I feel like a guy who has bought a car from somebody, painted it, fixed it up, and made it look nice, and then the guy comes back and says he promised to sell the car to his brother-in-law.” Nobody was better at automotive analogies than Jay.

He also said that he would go to CBS if they offered him a late-night show and NBC gave the 11:30 slot to David. Jay even used his monologue to mock NBC’s indecision, saying NBC stands for “Never believe your contract.” He would reuse this joke years later when NBC executives again displayed a lack of confidence in him.

On January 6, 1993, Jay slipped into a small, out-of-sight guest office in Burbank to listen in on a bi-coastal conference call among NBC executives set up to discuss who should host
The Tonight Show.
He later told
Playboy,
“My career was at stake. I had to know where I stood. Am I dead meat? Who’s on my side and who isn’t? I had my supporters . . . but it was also fascinating to hear my own eulogy.”

Jay’s eavesdropping incident was obviously wrong, and it was also a tactical error. He was taking a huge risk that had no practical payoff. The call simply confirmed what he already knew: The East Coast executives favored David, and the West Coast guys wanted Jay. To make matters worse, Jay brought up the event to
Playboy
without any prompting. This bizarre story has played into the hands of Jay’s many detractors and critics, who continue to use it to portray him as a ruthless schemer.

Not long after the call, NBC made an offer to Letterman that his team rejected. The deal would have required that they wait until Jay’s contract was up a year and a half later, which they weren’t willing to do. They reasoned that was too much time and would have allowed Jay to establish a solid audience, putting David at a disadvantage.

Then there was their attitude. According to Warren Littlefield, David’s team talked themselves out of a contract by taking the intractable, arrogant position that their guy was Johnny’s rightful heir. They were “so aggressive and so difficult in their negotiation assuming they had Johnny the King, and they didn’t,” Littlefield wrote in his book
Top of the Rock
, published in 2012.

Jay had dodged another bullet, bringing great relief to all of us. But it wasn’t long before the next crisis came up. On August 30, 1993,
The Late Show with David Letterman
debuted on CBS with huge numbers. The news got massive press, as Leno vs. Letterman had become the media story of the year.

David’s ratings triumph had legs, continuing night after night, week after week. After ten weeks it was clear: David was number one. Executives from NBC and GE, its parent company, called a meeting to discuss their late-night problem. They decided to stay the course after GE’s then CEO, Jack Welch, strongly supported Jay. Warren Littlefield, one of Jay’s biggest supporters from the beginning, agreed.

Welch, a tough, no-nonsense guy who transformed GE into an international powerhouse, was considered by many to be one of the world’s greatest CEOs. He was ultimately responsible for hiring Jay in 1991 and had stood by him through thick and thin. I was always curious why Welch picked Jay over David. Trained as an engineer, he had no background in comedy. I got my chance to ask him when he was a guest on the show to plug his book
Jack: Straight From the Gut
. He told me he didn’t pretend to know whether David or Jay was funnier. He made his choice based on gut instinct alone. He had met both men and liked what he saw in Jay. “Your boss was comfortable in his own skin,” he told me, “and the other guy [David] wasn’t.”

In 1994, when Letterman was at the zenith of his late-night run, Bill Carter’s influential book
The
Late Shift
boldly announced that the late-night war was over, and Letterman was the winner. He declared that Littlefield’s decision to support Jay over David was his biggest mistake, one which cost NBC millions. Carter then offered words of consolation
to Littlefield
, saying his strong family and sense of perspective
would help him accept his blunder. Carter then concluded his
well-researched but misguided book with a touch of melodrama about Letterman
: “And so the successor to Johnny Carson
packed up his office, his talent, and his vision and walked out of NBC forever, taking with him the last great franchise in the network television business: late night.”

It sounded so definitive, but there was just one problem: the self-appointed television prophet was dead wrong. The war wasn’t over. It was just beginning for Jay. Carter wasn’t the only scribe to jump to premature conclusions; he was just the most prominent one. There was Richard Zoglin of
TIME:
“Now that the dust has settled, it all seems too obvious. Of course, David Letterman was the logical person to take over
The Tonight Show
when Johnny Carson retired.”
People
magazine concurred: “For all its hype, the Great Late-Night
War of 1993 turned out to be something of a nonevent. .
. . An astonishingly revitalized David Letterman, 46, strode authoritatively to the head of the pack, without even breaking a sweat.”

But Jay had no intention of giving up the fight. His general in this battle was Littlefield, who came up with a plan to modernize the show, which was still using Johnny’s old format. Littlefield’s ideas included a new comedy segment after the monologue featuring recorded sketches by “comedy correspondents” covering actual events.

The number of guests on the show was reduced from four to three: two talking guests followed by a music performance. Most music acts had only niche appeal, so they were placed in the last segment where major tune-out would have the least effect on the ratings. Jay agreed with Littlefield’s new
approach, telling
Playboy:
“I was trying to do
The Tonight Show
exactly the way Johnny
had done it, and it didn’t work.”

Jay also decided it was time to move to a new studio. We had been using Studio 1, where Johnny
taped his show. Jay had never felt comfortable there, and, to be honest, neither did the rest of us. It was as if we were trespassing on hallowed ground. Of course, Johnny
was still alive, but it felt as if he was always there, watching. Johnny
’s cavernous studio, designed in the 1950s for black-and-white shows, had a huge audience capacity of 465 seats, and the monologue mark was set way back (about fifteen yards) from the audience. Studio 1 was cool and distant like Johnny
, not warm and friendly like Jay.

So we moved to nearby Studio 3, which was actually a mirror image of Studio 1. Still, it was Jay’s, and he had plans to give it a major makeover. Per his specifications, we built a new $2 million set based on the design of Studio 8H in New York, home of
Saturday Night Live.
With a sweeping stage built close to the audience, it was designed to look like a comedy club with fewer audience seats (360), more color, and wackier designs. The new stage had an extension, called a tongue, allowing Jay to do his monologue right next to the audience, just as he had done in clubs for twenty years. An overhead boom camera provided dynamic moving shots, while a handheld floor camera captured dramatic close-ups. We also got rid of the curtains as well as the pre-taped “video curtains” in our show open. Jay now made his entrance at the beginning of the show through a doorway in the set, which looked more contemporary.

Guitarist Kevin Eubanks also took over as music director, replacing jazz great Branford Marsalis, who never really worked out as Jay’s sidekick. Branford’s sophisticated jazz selections lacked the driving rhythms necessary to bring out guests and to go to commercial breaks. Kevin’s rock-and-roll was just what was called for, and he himself became a perfect foil for Jay’s monologue jokes, filling the void left by Ed McMahon.

Jay also brought a new edginess to his monologue. He decided early on the OJ Simpson trial was a circus and treated it that way with his jokes. Then he came up with the Dancing Itos, a group of professional dancers dressed to look like the trial’s judge, Lance Ito. The Dancing Itos quickly became a hit with viewers, including Judge Ito himself. They made numerous appearances, once with a dancer performing as prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark. Later, he added the Monkee Itos, the Dancing Lenos, the Dancing Unibombers, the Dancing Rodmans, the Dancing Belgium Waffles, and the Dancing Jerry Springers. By May 1995,
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
had reinvented itself, and the changes were making a difference. Nearly two years after the premiere of Letterman, Jay pulled within .1 of a ratings point of his competitor on CBS.

The
Los Angeles Times
took notice, running a piece with this headline: “The Nice Guy Gets an Edge . . . and He’s Gaining on Letterman.” The article described Jay as a guy who had finally hit his stride: “More than anything, Leno feels he has finally proven himself—to network executives, critics, celebrities—which frees him up to be himself.”

And then the talk-show gods blessed us. On July 10, 1995, British actor and heartthrob Hugh Grant made an appearance on Leno after his highly publicized arrest with a Hollywood prostitute. It attracted a huge number of viewers (almost eleven million), which launched Jay to the number-one spot and ended Letterman’s highly-touted late-night reign.
The Tonight Show
maintained its ratings superiority from that day forward, except during the seven-month period in 2009-2010 when Conan O’Brien hosted.

New challenges soon replaced old ones, and holding the ratings was never easy. The Writer’s Guild of America staged a strike in November 2007, forcing all the late-night shows to go into reruns. Two months into the strike, the WGA struck a deal with Letterman’s production company, allowing
The Late Show with David Letterman
to return to the air with its writers in January of 2008. No such deal was made with
The Tonight Show.
Jay knew that he would soon lose his ratings edge if Letterman was producing new shows every night while
Tonight
was in reruns as the strike lingered on. So he made the difficult decision to cross the picket line to save his show. Putting the show back on the air was messy; the WGA decided to get tough, accusing Jay of strike violations for writing his own jokes. But this was the least of our problems.

Even as Letterman was featuring a bevy of stars—including Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Katie Holmes, Diane Keaton, and Vince Vaughn—we were not able to book any big-name celebrities, as they refused to cross the picket line. The stars we contacted said they were getting calls threatening that they would never work in Hollywood again if they crossed the line. We wondered how the union found out who we were making offers to, but we soon learned we had a mole on the inside who was taking advantage of our open environment.