American on Purpose (22 page)

P
eter told me that he wanted me back in Los Angeles the following evening to have dinner with him and Bill Carter, a
New York Times
reporter who had written a bestselling book on the late-night war between Jay and Dave. Bill had agreed to write a story for the
Times
about my taking over if he could meet me, and since he happened to be in L.A. on other business, Peter thought this was a great opportunity and I should not miss it. I told him I wouldn’t.

The only problem was that it was already noon in Vancouver and I had to get my car back to L.A., which meant driving all day, catching a few hours’ sleep in a motel, and driving all the next day, too, if I wanted to make the dinner date. I didn’t dare leave my car in Canada and fly because I was still rattled and nervous from the bumpy six-hour flight I’d taken from New York that morning, plus I was convinced that the gods of irony would kill me in a horrible plane crash just after I had scored the biggest professional coup of my life. I was in my car and pulling out of the hotel parking lot within fifteen minutes.

My cell phone started ringing almost immediately. First it was the CBS press department scheduling interviews for me to do on
the long drive south. I talked to radio stations and journalists from local newspapers, and magazine writers and TV critics, and we all agreed on one thing. None of us could believe I got the job. That’s when I began to catch a whiff of the notion that they all seemed to share: that I would fail. Even the ones who liked me seemed skeptical that someone with an accent would be accepted as the host of a late-night talk show in America. I countered by saying that the present governor of California had an accent so thick that he couldn’t correctly pronounce the name of the state, so I didn’t think people would have a problem with me rolling a few
r
’s here and there.

Between interviews, I gave the news to family and friends. I called my mother in Scotland, even though it was very late in the evening there; my mother was used to getting the occasional late-night call from me ever since the time in Kelvingrove Park during my last acid trip, when I had been stalked by the killer ducks. Then a few years after that I had called her from Bangkok airport, where I was waiting to change planes on a long trip to Australia. I had partaken liberally of the free booze on the flight from London and was staggering around the airport when I spotted a Tie Rack store. For some reason I decided to buy a yellow tie with little black skulls on it. Because my drunken brain believed that buying a tie in Thailand was somehow significant, I had to tell someone.

“Ma, I just bought
a tie…in Thailand
. Isn’t that amazing?” I told her when she answered the phone, fuzzy with sleep.

“That’s nice, son, but what will you do with him when you get him home?”

I was too drunk to explain and hung up.

This time was different; I was sober and had genuine good news.

“Ma, I just got
The Late Late Show.
The job I was trying out for.”

She was very happy for me, although I was a little nonplussed
when I heard her wake my dad and tell him that I had become a newsreader in America. I let it pass and let them go back to sleep.

I called Business John, my Scottish guru, who said he thought I was doing pretty good for a hopeless drunk.

My girlfriend, Andi, was delighted but seemed to sense that this was somehow a threat to us.

I spoke to Sascha and she reminded me of her prediction outside the Letterman studio years before.

I didn’t have hands-free in my car and my head was beginning to feel cooked from all the cell-phone chat. Luckily the road started to climb and twist through mountain passes where reception was impossible. The weather began to get pretty ugly—a blizzard was coming in fast from the northeast. Traffic got slower and slower and slower.

By the time I got to Grants Pass, in Oregon, night had fallen. Cars and trucks were crawling along the slippery highway, and visibility was practically zero.

Eventually I got to a police barrier where a cop in a parka with padding three feet thick told me that the pass was too dangerous for traffic and had been closed. He thought it might open up in the morning.

There was nothing else to do so, I turned around and went to look for a crib for the night. I drove to a large Indian casino I remembered passing earlier, but the cheerful, morbidly obese receptionist in bottle-thick spectacles told me nothing was available.

“They closed the pass,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“When they close the pass everything gets full up. There won’t be a bed for you for fifty miles.”

“I’ll die of exposure,” I said.

“The Keno and Blackjack is twenty-four hours. You can sit in here.”

“I need sleep,” I whined.

“Well, you’re not allowed to park your car in the lot and sleep in it, I can tell you that,” she said and gave me a wink.

So I trudged back through the snow to my farty potato-chip-and-coffee-smelling car, where I spent my first night as Mr. Bigtime Talkshow Dude curled in the backseat, wearing two hoodies and two pairs of pants.

I watched the snow fall through the halogen lights in the parking lot of the Four Feathers Casino, and I felt great. It was perfect. Like the time I found out I was technically a millionaire just as I was extracting maggots from my dog’s bahookie.

I slept like a baby for three hours, then turned on the radio. The pass was indeed open, so I drove all that day, talking to more skeptical reporters on the telephone, and made it to the restaurant just as Peter, his wife, Alice, and Bill Carter were finishing their soup.

G
uest-hosting a late-night talk show for a couple of nights is exciting and fun. Doing it for a week is still fun, but challenging, and leaves you feeling exhausted. If anyone offers you the chance to do this job on a permanent basis I urge you to think long and hard, because it will change your life—in bad ways as well as good ones. And it just keeps coming at you, day in and day out, that forty-four minutes of time you have to fill between commercials every weeknight.

Then there’s the press and certain sections of the public who either can’t sleep or who are fascinated by late night—again only really because of Johnny’s legacy and perhaps because Dave’s enigmatic persona off-camera intrigues them.

The entertainment press considers it their duty to haze any newcomer to late night. Conan was trashed in the reviews when he started, as were Jay and Jimmy (both of them), and even Johnny back in the day. I was not spared, either. The best reason I have ever heard to explain this is from Bill Carter, who said to me, “First they have to forgive you for trying to make them laugh.”

That’s it exactly. People actually seemed to be angry when I first took over. Not just disappointed, or skeptical, but angry. The
San
Francisco Chronicle
said that for me to get a show was proof that the genre was itself redundant.
Daily Variety
hated me and said I served as useful reminder to watch Conan. And the
New York Post
guy wrote that not only wasn’t I funny but I was unintelligible and looked like I was wearing a wig!

I was stung by the reviews. I went on the Internet to see what the reaction was there, although I should have known better than to do that (I do now). People writing about you under the cloak of anonymity can be even more vicious, and in my case they sure were. I sucked, I should go back to Ireland(!), I was a traitor to Scotland (never could quite figure that one out), and someone deduced because of my accent that I must be a deviant homosexual.

But for all the naysayers, there were the supporters, too. The late-night hosts are something of a fraternity, at least they are a support group. I got a friendly call from Jay Leno, wishing me luck. Jimmy Kimmel sent me flowers and a lovely note which ended, “I hope you know what the fuck you’re getting into.” Even the great and powerful Dave sent me a welcoming telegram. That particularly amazed me—I didn’t know you could still send them.

My predecessor, Craig Kilborn, also called me and was very gracious to me on my first day at work; and Regis Philbin, who turned out to be a great friend of Peter Lassally, took me to lunch. When I say took me to lunch, I mean he had lunch with me. I paid.

Regis gave me the same advice I got from our mutual friend Peter, as well as from Dave and even from Howard Stern: “Be yourself. Make it your own.”

They all said it, and certainly they are all giants in their respective fields, but what the fuck does “be yourself and make it your own” mean in practical terms?

I felt lost and out of my depth.

After every show, Peter Lassally and Michael Naidus were there, as they are to this day, with little tips about how to relax and improve. Tips about how to get through the show without looking
too desperate or needy. They went from being mentors and allies to becoming true and valued friends, Michael eventually rising to being the head producer of the show under Peter’s tutelage as executive producer. I could not do the job without them, nor would I want to.

Peter is an immigrant himself who understands my zeal for the U.S.A. He is a Holocaust survivor who made his way to the States after being liberated at the end of the war by the Russian Communists, who, he says, were almost as frightening as the Nazis.

I don’t complain to Peter about the difficulties of my own childhood. He has something that is not seen so often in show business—class. He is a man who speaks his mind clearly and (for the most part) calmly. He keeps his word, he’s respectful of those who work under him, and he firmly but politely doesn’t take any shit from me.

“Remember,” he’s told me over and over again, “it’s after midnight. They don’t want you yelling at them. Calm down.”

Tips about not scaring the kids.

“You’ve got a creepy laugh. Knock it off.”

I didn’t know I had a creepy laugh, but now I keep a lookout. It seems to be dormant for the moment, although Lassally stands ever vigilant, protecting America’s insomniacs from a flare-up of sinister chuckling.

If Peter is alarmingly direct, Michael, on the other hand, is a born poker player. He can tell what I’m thinking by the way I walk into the office, and he can manipulate me shamelessly with the old bait-and-switch and passive-aggressive tactics. He does it regularly to get me to do what he wants without a fight. It’s very clever.

“Hey—feel free to say no to this, but…”

Over time, and with their help, I lost the tics that were getting in my way and weeded out most of the staff members who I felt weren’t on my side. I used to think I wasn’t a very competitive person, so I was surprised to hear myself tell the entire staff on my
first day as host: “This show is number two in its time slot. Anyone who doesn’t have a problem with that should quit now.”

You must forgive me, I was just excited about scoring the big gig and was getting in touch with my inner douche bag. For the first few months I followed the cookie-cutter format of these shows. A few quick gags, an overwritten comedy bit, then interviews with two guests who were usually plugging some of their own work, then a band or a comic. That was the format that had worked for years, and I sure as shit had nothing better. The guest segments seemed fine, but the comedy was pretty poor, and, as the TV producer Gary Considine, who worked on the show for a while, told me, “Lame comedy will kill ya.”

I don’t know if that is entirely true—I’m still doing lame comedy now and the show is doing great. Maybe that’s because it’s
my
lame comedy. I am
my
lame self and make the lame comedy
my own
.

About three weeks after I took over, Johnny Carson died after a long illness. I didn’t know how to deal with this on the air, but Peter helped me.

“Don’t fake anything. Just be honest about what you feel.”

So I told the truth and I said I had only a few memories of Johnny. I told the audience about my father laughing at
The Tonight Show
during our first visit to America, and that if you could make a Scottish Protestant laugh, you had to be really funny. I talked about my recent marathon watching all of those DVDs of Johnny, trying to learn whatever I could from the king of late night.

After my little eulogy we went to commercial and Peter came out onto the stage (which is unheard of—he usually watches from a chair in the safety of the control booth) to thank me for what I said about his old friend, and then he said excitedly, “This is it. Whatever you did just there, that’s how you do this show.”

I understood. Just talking off the cuff rather than reading cue cards seemed much more comfortable to me, so over the next few weeks I told fewer and fewer gags and ad-libbed more until even
tually the writers and I did away with the conventional method of constructing a monologue—a team of writers composing individual gags, then handing them to a chief who correlates them into sequence. We developed a new system that involved all of us talking for a while and making notes, then assembling these notes into a list of bullet points that I would try out on the studio floor in front of the live audience. Essentially the monologue would be sketched out but not finished until I’d performed it on camera. That’s still how we do it today, although the process has been refined and streamlined by Ted Mulkerin and Jonathan Morano, the show’s head writers and my most valued creative partners.

Some nights it works, and some it doesn’t, whether I stick to prepared material or ad-lib almost the whole thing. It all depends on where the moon is in Aquarius, or on my biorhythms, or something. I like to think that no matter what night it is, there is an honesty about the show.

I experimented in rebelling against the rule of the mighty Lassally by not wearing a tie, which made him very grumpy; but, like a patient parent, he correctly figured I would grow out of it.

When I did start wearing a tie again, it was, sadly, a black one, and it would have been inappropriate not to wear it.

In January of 2006, my father died after a rough fight with cancer. During his illness I had been pretaping shows and flying back to Scotland to see him, but when he finally passed away I was in L.A. I had a show that night and I didn’t know what to do, so, of course, I called my mother. She told me to do what my father would have wanted. My father would have said to go to work.

Remember, work is how my people express love.

I knew I couldn’t do a regular show, there was no comedy in me, so instead we turned the whole thing into a wake for my father. I talked about him, rambling from a few notes I had made earlier
in the day. I wanted the guests that night to be grown-ups capable of talking about grief, so we booked Amy Yasbeck—who is, sadly, an expert on the subject since the sudden death of her husband, John Ritter—and Dr. Drew Pinsky, because he is not only smart and empathetic but knows a lot about alcoholics, which meant he’d have a handle on how I was trying to cope. The brilliant Scottish-American trio Wicked Tinkers came on as the musical guests and I joined them in raising a wee bit of thunder, banging a drum loudly for the soul of my father.

I barely remember this show and haven’t watched the tape, but I heard it worked out okay. My mother said he would have liked it. That’s enough for me.

The Latin motto on the Ferguson clan’s official crest is
Dulcius ex asperis
. It means “Sweeter after difficulty.” I had the crest and the phrase tattooed on my right shoulder in memory of my father, who hated tattoos. The Celtic Paradox is alive and flourishing in the twenty-first century.