The War for Late Night (23 page)

 

One week in April 2008, just over a year from the expected date when Conan O’Brien would take over
The Tonight Show,
the late-night ratings arrived as usual, and a few eyebrows popped up inside offices at two addresses on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

At CBS, on Fifty-second Street, they looked at the numbers and saw a headline:
Craig Ferguson Beats Conan O’Brien.
At NBC, down the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets, they looked at the same numbers and saw a need for a rapid response:
Big Deal, Conan Trounced Him Where It Counts—As Usual.

Both versions of reality had the virtue of truth. For one week, for the first time ever, Ferguson, the third and latest CBS 12:35 a.m. host to take on Conan during his fifteen-year run, had got his Scottish nose ahead of Conan’s Irish pompadour in the category of most viewers. That this meant less than it seemed was a quirk of the television business, where having the most almost always mattered less than having the most
select
. So the fact that Ferguson had more viewers than O’Brien—1.88 million to 1.77 million—was thoroughly mitigated by the fact that Conan still ruled big-time with the under-fifty crowd.

But still . . .

NBC had already broken ground on the Universal lot in LA, commencing its capital investment of tens of millions on a grand new studio for
The Tonight Show
with Conan O’Brien. It still had no answer to the oft-repeated question “Are you really going to allow ABC to steal Jay Leno?” other than “We believe in Conan.” Craig Ferguson’s just happening to have more people watching him in a week than the guy NBC had that massive a bet riding on had to be worth at least a
Huh?

The official line from NBC was: No worries. A blip.

Craig Ferguson had been called a lot of things in his turbulent life, including “Bing Hitler,” but “a blip”? Not bloody likely.

The path of most late-night hosts traversed familiar terrain: watched a lot of Carson/Letterman; decided “I could do that”; found an agent/manager /producer who could open the right door; jumped on a break and made it happen.

Craig Ferguson’s path touched none of those mileposts—except the last. Instead, his course followed no familiar pattern at all, having started in Scotland, of all places. The fact that his accent sounded so alien, at least to most Americans, was one more reason why Ferguson’s successful entry into the world of late-night television had a hint of hallucination to it.

Ferguson had done enough alcohol and drugs in his youth to hallucinate just about anything, but not this. This was the product of accidental timing meeting unforeseen talent. That he did have abundant talent was apparent in his résumé: rock drummer, stand-up, sketch satirist, film actor, stage actor, screenwriter, director, sitcom actor, novelist. And much of that had been accomplished while he was barely able to stand on his feet.

Ferguson had a theory about why Scotland was such a drinking society, and its climate was a major factor. “Anywhere you go where it’s cold, people drink like crazy,” Ferguson observed. But his homeland was different, in that the drinking there was all but pathological. “It was excessive; it was ridiculous,” Ferguson said. A Scottish politician Ferguson once met offered an explanation Craig came to embrace as telling. “Scotland is a country in mourning,” he said, “ever since World War II. So many died. It changed the society.”

The Glasgow of Ferguson’s youth—he was born in 1962—was a sorry place, riven by animosity between Protestants and Catholics and prone to casual violence that seemed impossible to escape. Ferguson often cited getting beaten up as a youth, though that wasn’t the worst experience of his childhood. For him, nothing could top the horror of school. Ferguson’s family was blue collar and lived in a soulless Glasgow area called Cumbernauld, mostly government housing built to absorb the overflow from the city, but it was a family that respected learning and education. Not Craig, though. Every early encounter with a teacher—nasty, disinterested, burned out, cruel to the students—soured his psyche. “I couldn’t take it. It was awful. Bad company and mean people doing horrible things to each other.”

He escaped in his teens, but the scars lasted. Ferguson could never sit for training of any kind because of his “abhorrence of the early years of my academic life. I couldn’t trust anyone who was willing to give me information.” That left him to pursue interests he could teach himself, like drumming, a hobby he fell into mostly because the punk world attracted him and playing in a punk rock band had the perfect subversive appeal. As with most things he tried, Ferguson proved himself to be quickly adept and he landed in a band called Bastards from Hell (later softened to Dreamboys). He was funny, too, of course, but humor had been of so little use in his life to that point that he considered it unworthy of his time or attention, except in the pursuit of girls who dug guys who could make them laugh. The band’s lead singer, Peter Capaldi (who later enjoyed a successful career as an actor), pushed Ferguson to give comedy a shot.

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 Michaels 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.)