The War for Late Night (64 page)

But here he was, again forced to defend himself against charges of being an unworthy schemer—even though he had been the top-rated comic in late night for sixteen years.

One of his NBC associates, who had a good if somewhat superficial relationship with Jay, said that in the wake of what had taken place in the previous five months, Jay spoke more openly about his feelings when he returned to
The Tonight Show
. He made it clear that he wanted to get back in the good graces of those who still held ill feelings toward him because of the Conan business. But the heart-on-sleeve moments didn’t last. Jay could never be someone who waxed philosophical, the associate said. He simply didn’t look back. Seeking perspective might deflect his focus, and Jay believed that to stay on top it was essential to be single-mindedly focused on the job and the job alone. “The fact that he’s still number one alleviates most of the grief he takes,” the associate said. “He does his gigs; people eat it up. That justifies everything for Jay.”

Not that he believed anything he had done really required justification. The fact that show-business people, who really should have known better, could possibly conclude that it was somehow incumbent on him to walk away from
The Tonight Show
simply stunned Jay. His take remained: The show was taken from him, which was fair and square; somebody else got it. But the wheel had spun and, totally unexpectedly, the show came around again.

There was no deal in a back room. Circumstances played out; NBC moved him back where he had always wanted to be.

Jay slept well at night.

 

The tour, with all the spontaneous outpourings of love and support he encountered in every venue, surely helped Conan O’Brien get past some of his anger, but he was realistic. It would take time, longer than he probably could guess, to process completely the cosmic event that had crashed into his life.

Conan couldn’t help but look back, like someone wondering just what it was that had hit him over the head while he was honestly going about his business. In the end he accepted Liza’s analysis: NBC had never really given him
The Tonight Show
. It was a Potemkin version; they gave him the outline of
The Tonight Show
, but left out the guts.

He perceived the analysis emerging from certain corners of show business: Conan had played the patsy. At the very moment his career was exploding—when Fox and ABC would have torn up their floorboards to build a fire to attract him—he had allowed himself to be lured into staying where he was, because NBC had dangled
The Tonight Show
far in the distance.

But he had no second thoughts—not about any of that. The most important question for him had been and remained: Where can I do good work? Hanging on at NBC and
Late Night
all but guaranteed he would have every opportunity to do good work as he waited out the promise of
The Tonight Show
in his future.

Conan could not imagine doing anything different, either in his initial call to accept confinement in the waiting room for five years or in his final call to reject the ultimate insult of NBC’s wait-and-switch maneuver—the thirty-minute delay.

O’Brien took solace in his conviction that he was the only individual in the whole fucking mess who could say with total honesty that he’d held up his end of the bargain.

Could Jay Leno really claim that?

Conan had already thought about what he might say to Jay if he ever did chance to run into him again: “I know you think you’ve won, but you have no idea what you’ve lost.”

It wouldn’t have the slightest impact on Jay, Conan knew, because Jay would simply shrug and say, “Hey, I’m getting my numbers.”

Between the tour, keeping up with his growing legion of fans via Twitter, and prepping for the new show on TBS, Conan had plenty to occupy his mind and keep it from drifting again and again to fantasy confrontations with NBC executives, imaginary exchanges with Jay.

Conan was thankful for that, and immensely thankful for Liza and the kids, and for Jeff Ross and the others who had stood beside him in this sandstorm and never took a step sideways. They would all be back for the next ride in his career carnival, no questions asked, no regrets.

All of that helped in his sensible commitment to move on.

But still, sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the house was quiet and the bed was warm, Conan would lie awake, sleep impossible, the replay machine running in his mind, generating scenes wilder and more stunning than anything his always blazing imagination could ever have conjured.

Liza would wake and watch him for a while, just lying there, staring blankly. And then Conan O’Brien would softly say:

“What the fuck happened?”

A
few years after he stepped down from
The Tonight Show
, Johnny Carson met Jerry Seinfeld for dinner in Los Angeles. As one of the many comics who broke through into public consciousness thanks to a showcase on Johnny’s show, Jerry was thrilled at the invitation.

As they talked about the comedy business they both loved, Jerry said to Johnny, “In my entire career as a stand-up, one of the things endlessly debated in every comedy club I was ever in was: Who do you think is going to take over
The Tonight Show
when Johnny leaves? For like twenty years I had that conversation. And the one thing none of us realized was that, when you left, you were taking it with you.”

Johnny had broadly agreed, Jerry said later. The point, Jerry explained, was that the show—the way Johnny did it; “the institution,” as people called it—effectively ended the day he walked off that stage. After that, what was left? A time slot, another guy in it, and a name that essentially meant nothing. Because, Seinfeld pointed out, nobody in the business ever said, “I’m doing
The Tonight Show
.” Instead they all said, “I’m doing Jay; I’m doing Dave; I’m doing Conan.”

Observing the NBC events of late 2009 and early 2010, Seinfeld found himself astonished at the psychic bloodletting that had taken place, and all of it over a chair on a studio set, a television show, and whether that show would begin at this time or another time, a half hour later.

“Nobody ever uses these show names,” Jerry said, his voice hitting the high register familiar from his routines when he addressed the most mind-boggling absurdities of life. “These names are bullshit words! How do you not get that this whole thing is phony? It’s all fake! There’s no institution to offend! All of this ‘I won’t sit by and watch the institution damaged.’ What institution? Ripping off the public? That’s the only institution! We tell jokes and they give us millions! Who’s going to take over
Late Night
or
Late Show
or whatever the hell it’s called? Nobody’s going to take it over! It’s Dave! When Dave’s done, that’s the end of that! And then another guy comes along and has to do his thing. That, to me, is an obvious essential of show business that you eventually grasp. Somehow that seems to have been missed by some of the people here.”

Obviously Seinfeld directed most of his amazement toward Conan O’Brien and his team for taking a position that Jerry, a contemporary comic with distinctly old-school values, simply couldn’t fathom. “I don’t really understand why they were so offended,” Jerry said. “Jay’s show isn’t working; your show isn’t working—how about a new idea? To me, when I see the numbers those two guys were getting, yes, it’s time to sit down at the idea table.” And why put a career on the line over a shift of thirty minutes, he wondered. “A half hour is a half hour no matter where it is. It goes by forty-eight times a day! Who cares where it is?” As for the passionate defense of the tradition of
The Tonight Show
, Seinfeld observed, “There is no tradition! This is what I didn’t get. Conan has been on television for sixteen years. At that point you should get it: There are no shows! It’s all made up! The TV show is just a card! Somebody printed the words on it!”

Jerry admired Conan’s talent, wished him the best, and predicted he would do well “because he’s great.” But why on earth it had come to a point where he felt he had to leave NBC for TBS—that simply made no sense. “I couldn’t believe he walked away,” Seinfeld said. “I thought he should just say, ‘Yeah, let me go at midnight. Let me work this differently. Let me hang around.’ Here’s big point number two in show business: Hang around! Just stay there, just be there! The old cliché: 95 percent is just showing up. OK, I’m on at twelve; I’m still showing up. You never leave!”

 

At least one Conan loyalist, Lorne Michaels, found that argument sound. Lorne had never stopped believing in Conan, in his talent and his wit, and never wavered in his certainty that, left alone with his imposing intelligence, Conan would have composed his show as well as he composed his matchless comedy writing.

Michaels was convinced that the Conan he knew and had worked with would have reacted differently had NBC’s approach been better planned—if only it had been Jeff Zucker who turned up on Conan’s doorstep, saying, “Listen, what do I do here? I did this to protect you. Whether I was right or wrong, I did it for what I believed were the right reasons. I need your help now.”

The earlier Conan, Lorne believed, would have responded to that plea, because he was nothing if not pragmatic. In the panicky early days at
Late Night
, Conan had told a previous crew of bomb-throwing colleagues to stay calm, and they’d weathered that storm.

This time, it seemed to Michaels, Conan had been too beaten up to maintain perspective, and he had no one around him to provide the perspective he needed. Lorne didn’t know Gavin Polone at all; his frame of reference on managers was dominated by his own, the legendary Bernie Brillstein. Bernie, as Lorne recalled, used to say there were two kinds of managers: the ones who walked through kitchens and the ones who didn’t.

“The ones who walked through kitchens” referred to old-time managers who made a point to show up in every grimy club where a client performed, to the point where “they knew the guys with the hairnets working in the back.”

That kind of manager, as Michaels saw it, would have been in there talking to the guys in hairnets—and everybody else—at NBC, finding out what was really going on, getting the information he needed to warn his client that he faced serious trouble. From at least October on, Michaels believed, a Bernie kind of manager would have been asking the necessary questions: Are we OK? What do we need to do?

It was of no use simply to make the argument that Conan was superior to Jay, had paid his dues, and deserved the job more. In television, Michaels knew from deep experience, in the contest of numbers versus taste, it was no contest. To allow the situation to get caught up in “They misled me” or “I was lied to” or “They did the wrong thing and I’m doing the right thing” had the effect of turning it toxic.

There was no way that Bernie Brillstein would have allowed that to happen, Michaels knew. Instead, he would have been right there agreeing with Seinfeld: Stay on the air. You’re still on NBC—stay on and figure it out. Your position might not be idyllic, but complaining that “they’ve deceived me and they betrayed me” could result only in martyrdom. And, as Lorne pointed out, underscoring his and Brillstein’s (and Seinfeld’s) frame of reference, “Jews do not celebrate martyrdom.”

 

Conan also had a raft of fervent supporters online, and many in the press, who feted his show as a gem that NBC had treated as if it were a chewed-over olive pit. In one delicious twist for him, Conan’s
Tonight Show
was nominated for an Emmy (he lost again to Jon Stewart, who won for an astounding eighth straight year), while Jay was totally shut out. And of course, the stand Conan took to walk rather than be downgraded was widely celebrated as courageous and justified.

Among others in the comedy business, Conan had enormous support. His old friend and summer roommate Jeff Garlin linked the outcome to character issues—as in, Conan had character and Jay didn’t: “Jay should have had the character to say, ‘No, I said I was leaving and I’m going to stand by what I said. Instead he pretended like it never happened,”Garlin said.

Like some others, though, Garlin was not convinced Conan had found his rhythm yet on
The Tonight Show
—or at least not until his last two cant-miss weeks of shows. “Conan is extraordinarily talented,” Garlin observed. “He’s totally different. He should play up those things.” Instead, on
Tonight
, Garlin argued, Conan was trying to be both outrageous and mainstream. “You can’t be both things. He didn’t have enough time. He was three-quarters of the way there.”

Even Garlin conceded that NBC was probably right in believing that Jay would have beaten Conan in the ratings if he had left to go to ABC rather than move to ten p.m. But Garlin insisted that that proved nothing: Jay already beat Letterman with regularity, “and you can’t tell me that
The Tonight Show
with Leno is funnier than
Late Show
with Letterman.” Jay’s dominance, Garlin said, went back to the taste vs. numbers debate. “The people that Jay appeals to are not comedy
fans
,” Garlin argued. “It’s just the general public. Letterman and Conan appeal to people who are comedy
fans
. It’s like comparing John Coltrane to Kenny G. One of Kenny G’s albums probably sold more than all of John Coltrane’s library. But you can’t tell me for a second that Kenny G is better than John Coltrane.”

NBC didn’t care if Conan O’Brien was funnier, just as in 1992 it had not cared if David Letterman was funnier, though many of those in the position to make that decision had little doubt that he was. What NBC did care about was, yes, those album sales—or ad sales, in this case. Jeff Zucker had never claimed that Jay Leno was funnier than Conan; nor had Jeff Gaspin. In a business of quantification, how was a comparison like that even relevant? Nobody counted laughs and sold them to advertisers.