The War for Late Night (57 page)

Polone remained on the phone in the theater lobby throughout the haggling. The movie ended; his date emerged. He was still on the phone. (The relationship didn’t last.)

At the Globes, amid a pelting downpour in LA, NBC threw a grand party on the roof of the Beverly Hilton. Gaspin dropped in and out of the festivities. He spent much of his time in a private room trying to get the deal finished. Issues of severance and details of what Conan could and couldn’t do the following week remained unresolved. It wasn’t happening.

Meanwhile, on the air, Ricky Gervais was introducing the show with the line “Let’s get on with it before NBC replaces me with Jay Leno.” Tom Hanks, presenting an award, remarked, “NBC said it was going to rain at ten p.m., but they moved it to eleven thirty.” And Tina Fey, accepting an award, said of the rainy night, “It’s God crying for NBC.”

 

For the increasingly besieged NBC, the online support for Conan had eclipsed the term “viral”; now it was more like a plague. Groups sprang up all over the Web and across the country in individual cities. The Facebook group “I’m with Coco” organized Conan rallies in New York, Chicago, and Seattle, as well as LA for that Monday, the eighteenth.

Along with Conan’s suddenly sizzling ratings, which continued to grow by the night, the rise of Coco mania served as additional annoyance for the pressed executives at NBC. Jeff Gaspin had an idea about what was happening. He theorized that when Conan moved to 11:35, he had stopped being Conan. He tried to be something he really wasn’t—a somewhat broader Conan without really abandoning the antic style that had branded him. The result was too soft for the hard-core Conan fans, but still not comfortable for the Leno fans.

But once he rose up to take a stand against NBC’s meddling with his career, once he went on the attack, Conan raised his game to a new level. Gaspin didn’t think this phase was something that could last, because it was built around a specific event, but while Conan was caught up in it, his show had clearly improved. Conan was now producing an irreverent show, a dangerous show, and the kids in the audience loved it. Gaspin could not help but ruefully admire the irony of the situation: NBC had given Conan his mojo back, just in time for him to take it somewhere else. That didn’t mean Gaspin had decided he’d been wrong, however. On the contrary, it seemed to him to prove that NBC’s evaluation that Conan had lost his mojo was exactly correct.

That Monday afternoon a crowd gathered outside the entrance to the
Tonight
studio, despite more rain, a deluge of the kind that usually paralyzes LA. Like something out of a sixties protest march, the fans came out carrying signs (“Conan Saved Me from Scientology”) and chanting slogans (“Jay Leno Sucks”). The star himself showed up and shook a few hands outside before making an appearance on the roof to wave to the fans, his famous pompadour doused thoroughly.

Conan was touched to his soul by the rally, which had hundreds of fans soaked to the skin chanting his name. As he stood on the roof, dripping, it struck him that this might be—appropriately enough—a water-shed moment, the first giant schism between the old broadcast world and the new electronic media dominated by the Internet. He believed NBC had tried in the old-fashioned way to undermine him, in the attack by Ebersol—whom Conan dismissed as one of the “silverback gorillas” still trying to rule television—and in the story about dissension on the staff.

The outpouring of support made Conan feel as if he was starring in his own version of the movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
, both because he was allowed to see a
Tonight Show
where he never existed and because the support made him realize he really was “the richest man in town.”

Beneath his feet, Conan sensed the ground moving, shifting finally from a baby-boom-centric culture to one controlled by Gens X and Y. Messages on sites all over the Web were rife with sheer anger at the boomers—symbolized by Leno—refusing to cede the stage and the culture.

By the end of Monday no deal had yet emerged, but widespread reports claimed that an agreement was close. Jay remained under assault everywhere, nowhere more so than over at CBS, with Letterman banging away at him relentlessly. He featured a faux ad for Leno, citing how Jay stood for middle America, for traditional American values like “killing Indians because you want their land.”

By that night Jay had had enough and decided to deliver a manifesto (of sorts) of his own. After finishing his monologue he took his seat at the desk and announced that he wanted to give “my view of what has been going on here at NBC.ʺ It was, especially for Jay, an unusually long personal statement, not much of which was played for laughs. He recalled how NBC had come to him in 2004, even with his position as top dog in late night unchallenged, and told him to make way for Conan.

“Don’t blame Conan O’Brien,” Jay said. “Nice guy, good family guy, great guy.”

But he did seem to assign blame to other parties—“managers . . . who try to get something for their clients.” That said, Jay agreed that he had announced he would retire, mainly to “avoid what happened last time”—when he and Letterman had jousted for the crown.

He then recounted the history of the ten p.m. idea, which he explained he had resisted but ultimately accepted in order to keep his staff in their jobs. Meanwhile, he said, Conan’s show “was not doing well.” The hope that Jay at ten would help Conan didn’t work out.

Then NBC told him it wanted to make a change. Jay said he asked to be let out of his contract; NBC refused. He outlined the half-hour plan, with Conan sliding back, and described how NBC had all but guaranteed him that Conan would accept the proposal. But then, he said, he saw Conan’s statement declining to go along with it. NBC came back, Jay said, and asked, if Conan decided to walk, would Jay take
The Tonight Show
back? Jay agreed, he explained, again out of consideration for his staff.

“Through all of this, Conan O’Brien has been a gentleman,” Jay said. “He’s a good guy. I have no animosity towards him. This is all business. If you don’t get the ratings, they take you off the air.”

He concluded by telling the audience that the resolution might come the following day.

It didn’t, of course. The haggling over financing employee severance and the details of the limitations on Conan kept the issue unsettled yet again. But Jay’s statement—as so often with his efforts, viewed as forthright by friends and Machiavellian by foes—seemed to confirm he would return to his old
Tonight
spot when the Olympics came to an end on March1.

Given the heightened attention on everything relating to the NBC late-night tumult, Jay’s statement could hardly escape comment. And once again it was David Letterman doing the most commenting. The following night Dave devoted his own desk segment—the entirety of it, despite a scripted comedy piece resting on his desk throughout—to an apparently extemporaneous analysis of Jay’s “state of the network speech.”

Letterman began by saying he had known Jay for thirty-five years, and used to “buddy around” with him in the old days. “What we’re seeing now is sort of vintage Jay,” he observed, without defining what that was exactly. “It’s like, there he is; there’s the guy I used to know.”

The part of the Leno statement that really piqued Letterman’s interest was Jay’s urging to the audience: “Don’t blame Conan.” Dave found this especially worthy of comment, “I said to myself, ‘No one is blaming Conan.’ ” Later he begged the audience not to blame Conan. “I know a lot of you people think Conan pushed himself out of a job,” Letterman said. “He’s not that kind of guy. He wouldn’t do that to himself.”

In his fake sincere way, Dave jumped into advice mode. “You call Fox. You don’t say”—slipping into the high-pitched Jay voice—“ ‘I’ll be in the lobby if you need me.’ You don’t hang around. You go across the street and you punish NBC. . . . It’s an early Darwinian precept,” Letterman concluded. “You get fired; you get another job. You don’t hang around waiting for somebody to drop dead.”

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.