The War for Late Night (7 page)

 

Early in 2004, with the issue of Conan’s long-term future unresolved, Jeff Ross got a call from Rick Rosen. Rosen asked him to set up a quiet place for lunch in New York with an executive named Andrea Wong, who was in charge of reality shows and late night for ABC.

This was the first time the letters ABC had appeared on the horizon, though Ross knew that nothing serious in terms of a new negotiation for his star could even begin until well into the following year. Still, having another network interested couldn’t hurt.

Ross was aware that ABCʹs entertainment executives had been agitating internally for several years, looking for an opening into late night. The network’s long-venerated news program
Nightline
had seemed to be heading for the end of its run, with its anchor, Ted Koppel, less involved, and the show’s original premise—live interviews on the news of the day—overtaken by cable news programs. In 2002 ABC’s entertainment division had pulled an end run around the news division, secretly seeking to replace
Nightline
by courting Letterman with promises and birthday cakes as the CBS late-night star’s contract neared an end. The talks had gotten serious by the time
The New York Times
broke the story of the negotiations, and the news division, poleaxed, released an anguished cry of betrayal. Although ABC didn’t back off, Letterman soon did, thanking ABC for its interest but re-signing with CBS after some timely last-minute concessions by that network’s boss, Leslie Moonves.

ABC responded by reaffirming its commitment to news in the eleven thirty time slot—even as it continued to chase entertainment talent. After making a run at Jon Stewart, hoping he might be induced to break away from his cable hit
The Daily Show
, ABC pursued a guy they thought represented a broader, more down-to-earth appeal, Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy, best known at that point for the raunchy
Man Show
on Comedy Central and witty appearances on the NFL coverage on Fox, jumped at the network opportunity. In early 2004, he had been on the air for less than a year in the 12:05 time period, serving as the follow-up act to
Nightline
.

Conan was obviously not moving anywhere that wasn’t going to slot him at 11:35 (or 11:00 in the case of Fox). So when Andrea Wong asked for a meeting, Jeff Ross had every reason to conclude that
Nightline
wasn’t in the clear yet.

The pair lunched at the Café des Artistes, something of an alternate (and much more upscale) ABC cafeteria on West Sixty-seventh Street, not far from the network’s Manhattan headquarters. Ross found Wong, a willowy Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties, personally appealing and impressively smart. (She might have been the only network entertainment executive in history with an electrical engineering degree from MIT.) He wasn’t sure she fully comprehended the late-night television “thing,” but then again, Ross didn’t think many television executives really got late night, with the exception of the guy Ross dealt with most often, the one with real history in the genre, NBCʹs Rick Ludwin.

Conan’s advisers were unsure how serious this initial ABC approach really might be until, soon after the meeting with Wong, Ross got a call from Bob Iger, then number two at ABC’s parent, the Disney Company (and previously an ABC executive, including president of entertainment). Jeff knew Iger a bit from socializing in New York in earlier days, so they were comfortable with each other. Iger’s message was simple and direct: “This is for real.”

When Ross reported on the Iger call to Conan’s career team, he learned that ABC was not the only network sniffing around. Fox had reentered the picture, making it clear in messages from executives to the Endeavor boys that they were keenly interested in another run at Conan.

Ari Emanuel knew exactly what to do with all this valuable information.

 

At NBC, the era of good feelings about late night was short-lived—as all the executives involved knew it would be. The peace achieved by hanging on to O’Brien for four more years couldn’t last, because the fundamental equation had not changed: Two still did not go into one. At some point the issue of when Conan would get his shot at
The Tonight Show
—or wouldn’t—had to be faced.

Still, there was time to find some solution, and everyone at NBC knew that they could not afford a replay of the events of the nineties. The message was clear: Keep the consistently winning Jay as long as possible while also preventing Conan from taking his increasingly impressive talent elsewhere. Rick Ludwin, NBCʹs top late-night executive for more than two decades, had no doubts about these marching orders, or where they originated: “down from the top.” In numerous meetings early in the 2000s, Bob Wright, CEO of NBC, had asked the question directly: “How do we keep Conan O’Brien at this network?”

Everyone knew where Wright stood with regard to Conan: He loved the guy. Bob had jumped on the Conan train early, at a time when other NBC executives still saw more awkwardness than brilliance in the young comedian, and he had never wavered. He had established a relationship with Conan that some NBC colleagues saw as a kind of professional paternity. “Bob would do that with certain people—become a father figure,” said one of Wright’s closest associates at the network. “He certainly did with Conan.”

Suzanne Wright, who also embraced the role of matriarch of the network, adored Conan and Liza. Conan had had his ups and downs with various sections of NBC’s management over the years, but of Bob Wright he said, “I would walk over broken glass for that man.”

But neither that warm relationship nor his long history with Zucker was going to be enough to keep O’Brien at NBC indefinitely. The earlier late-night slot of 11:35 beckoned, as Conan began freely to acknowledge. “I think it’s natural to at some point want to move earlier,” he said. “I think I’ve proved I can do a show that I don’t think has to exist at twelve thirty.”

Starting in late 2003, Zucker and Ludwin, along with Marc Graboff, who as the executive in charge of business affairs dealt with the issues of money and deal making, held a series of discussions about what they saw as “the next cycle”—the coming choice between Leno and O’Brien, if they were going to be forced to make one. Zucker would often report on calls he had started receiving from Ari Emanuel about Conan. It was hardly unusual for Emanuel to phone Zucker—or any of the other major players in television—with ideas for his clients. That was his job, after all. He spoke more often with Zucker, though, because he genuinely liked the NBC boss, their relationship consisting of good-natured hostility. Ari, then in his early forties, steely eyed, built like a middleweight and rising fast up the power-agent rankings to a point where he was able to slug with anyone in Hollywood, would make demands, or promises. Jeff would resist or insist. They would yell a bit, tell each other to go fuck themselves, and then hang up laughing (usually). A couple of days later they would repeat the process.

Ari had decided he would keep Zucker in the loop constantly about the precise nature of the danger Jeff faced regarding the future of Conan O’Brien. As Ari saw the process, he was “making sure he knew he would lose Conan if he didn’t get the
Tonight
slot.ʺ If Bob Iger checked in about Conan, Ari let Zucker know about it. “If we set a Peter Chernin meeting or a Les Moonves meeting,” Emanuel filled Zucker in on the time and place. (Moonves had cast out a little fishing line on behalf of CBS during his squabble with Letterman over the ABC approach in 2002, which Conan had instantly rejected out of respect for Dave. But Emanuel still counted Les—who everyone knew drove Zucker crazier than anyone else in the business—among the interested parties for Conan’s services.) Ari was sending these little messages to Zucker “just to utz him—make him realize that if he fucked this up there would be other places for Conan to go.”

To Zucker, all of this amounted to standard practice from his buddy Ari. The calls came in; Ari was threatening him with something or other; that meant what—it was Tuesday? Zucker was neither surprised nor overly irritated. He knew how he was supposed to interpret these calls on behalf of Conan: “They wanted assurance that they were gonna get
The Tonight Show
or else they were gonna leave.”

In truth, NBC didn’t need much utzing. Internally, there was little resistance to Ari’s nudging. Some way was eventually going to be found to keep Conan in house.

The first real movement came from Jay’s direction, though. He was a creature of habit so ingrained that he was rarely seen offstage in anything but the same denim work shirt, faded jeans, and $14.99 pair of black Payless SafeTStep work shoes. These, Jay explained, he bought “by the crate” because they were “impervious to oil and gas”—a feature important to him because of all the time he spent working on the fleet of vehicles in his automotive shop in a converted hangar at the Burbank airport. As he did with all his other habits, Jay had such a regular timetable for rolling over his
Tonight
contract that Marc Graboff could all but put the next negotiation on his calendar the day a previous deal was concluded.

And the Jay negotiations were, without question, the easiest Graboff had ever conducted. It had been that way ever since Jay had fired Helen Kushnick and sworn off all representation for his future television career. That decision played to some as foolishness, arrogance, or parsimony on an epic scale: To try to manage a career involving so many millions without a formal agent or manager seemed ludicrous. But it was a source of pride for Jay, one more example—to himself if no one else—that deep down he was an unpretentious working man. An insanely well-paid one, certainly, but still a guy with a boss and a job and a salary.

But beyond its symbolism, or whatever else the antiagent stance meant to Jay, there was a compelling logic to his position. What did he need an agent or manager (or their bills) for at this point in his career? He had no plans to do anything on television other than what he was already doing. What other job was a manager going to win for him? Helen had secured the
Tonight
position for him; now she was gone. (After splitting from Jay in 1993, Helen passed away from cancer three years later at only fifty-one.) He still had the job.

Alan Berger, a well-liked agent from CAA, represented Jay up until the late nineties, but only for his stand-up appearances. As a favor to Jay, however, Berger took the formal meetings with NBC about extending Jay’s deal, along with Jay’s lawyer, Ken Ziffren. One late-nineties instance stood out to Berger as representative of all of these “negotiations.”

Berger and Ziffren had sat down to lunch in Beverly Hills with John Agoglia, Graboff’s predecessor as head of business affairs for NBC and one of Jay’s stalwart backers in the bitter battle with Letterman in 1993. As they gathered in the restaurant, the three men greeted each other warmly, schmoozing for a while about kids and families and things that were going on in their lives. Then Agoglia said abruptly, ʺOK, boys, let’s do business.” Berger and Ziffren grabbed a napkin and quickly wrote a figure on it—Jay was asking for a small bump, up to about $14 million a year at that point. Agoglia took one look at the napkin, stuck it in his pocket, and said, “Deal—now let’s order.”

The NBC money, as Jay always professed, had little impact on his daily life because he never spent a penny of it. He banked it all—either in his own accounts or in the small charitable foundation he had established. It again seemed bizarre to colleagues and most everyone else who heard of this idiosyncratic practice. The man was formidably rich but was sticking earnings under a mattress somewhere? Obviously Jay, who lived in a lovely Beverly Hills home, didn’t hurt for cash; Mavis had everything she could ever want and more; and Jay bought every vintage car and motorcycle that caught his fancy. But money for those things came out of the pile he earned on the side, performing up to 160 nights a year around the country at venues ranging from the big Vegas showrooms to outdoor chicken festivals in Fresno in 104-degree heat.

By rights—and again, by any sense of fairness that a hard-nosed agent would have hammered NBC with—Leno should long ago have been out-earning Letterman, whom he was not only outrating virtually every night of the year but also outworking by several weeks of shows a year. But Dave still pocketed millions more a year than Jay—a fact Jay never complained about, but actually trumpeted, usually trying to make a joke out of it: “My thing is, I always make a couple of bucks less than whoever the top guy is. You can’t eat the whole pie; you’ll get fat, choke, and die.”

At least some part of Jay’s attitude was due to the lingering fallout from the ugliness over Helen’s actions, which still affected him deeply. He would tell people he never wanted an agent or manager again, someone who might get overly pushy and poison his relationships. “I’ve heard how the executives talk and how they treat the stars that make what they perceive as unruly demands. And then suddenly it’s ‘Didn’t we used to get a promo at nine fifteen?’ Things go away, and you die a slow death.”

NBC knew that any typically aggressive agent would have insisted upon at least one dollar more than whatever Letterman was making (which peaked at about $31 million a year), but Graboff had a ready reply to any such demand: Jay was the guy sitting in the chair at
The Tonight Show
, the institution. Dave was the guy who had to set off on his own and create a franchise. Graboff had stored up a few more reasons why NBC could deny Leno Letterman-level money, but it never became a factor. “Jay never asked,” Graboff said.

And so it came to pass, like clockwork, just as Graboff expected it, that in December 2003, a little more than three years into Jay’s ongoing five-year deal, Ken Ziffren was on the line for a brief conversation about NBC’s most prominent talent. “We got less than two years left; Jay wants to extend.”

The expected formula called for a redo for the remaining time, with a small raise for Jay, and then three more years added on. That arrangement would commit NBC to Leno through the end of 2008. Graboff told Ziffren agreeably, “Let me talk to Jeff and Rick, and let me get back to you.”