Gumption (35 page)

Despite the bad feelings that the whole meshuggaas caused, I’m not out to roundly denigrate Leno here. He is a funny man, and he is good at telling jokes. In interviews surrounding this mess, he talked an awful lot about ratings and sounded like very much the company man, which to my way of thinking is the mark of an adequate person for his particular job. The conundrum of network television is that mere adequacy does not breed excellence. A Leno looks good on paper, but if you want your program to be more than adequate, if you want your show to be sublime, then you need a little more creative fire in the belly from your host. You want an adventurous maverick who is willing to just toe, or even caper across, the company line. You want a Carson or a Letterman or a Conan.

When peddling a creative product, a corporation is bound to take missteps. It happens all the time, and unfortunately the creative side of the equation often involves artists being hurt in the process. A corporation, despite the Supreme Court’s declaration that it has the same rights as a person, cannot, by definition, watch and enjoy a TV program. A corporation can see only a product, the value of which can be determined for them only by hard, cold numbers. Leno or Conan equals
cheeseburger or McRib. This is literally dehumanizing, and so it’s up to the creative participants to shoulder whatever indignities might come their way at the hands of the corporation. That’s showbiz, kid.

The ultimate boner, then, to my way of thinking, was in Leno’s lingering. When the network was still desperately trying to fit two leading men into one late-night Batman suit, they went so far as to try and shoehorn an hour of Leno into the prime-time space preceding
The
Tonight Show.
A patently bad idea, about which Jeff Zucker, then president of NBC Universal, made this unfortunate statement:

“Too much on television is the same show recycled. [
The Jay Leno Show
] will be a show that can provide an answer for the changing times we live in.”

That’s some next-level salesman jive-talking right there.

The only appropriate thing for Mr. Leno to have done at that juncture was to walk away. I’m sure that became quite clear to him once the dust had settled and the irreparable damage had been wreaked upon his own image and that of
The Tonight Show
.

In his subsequent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Jay made no concessions whatsoever, pointing the finger of blame in every direction except where it belonged—aimed squarely at his own famous loaf of a chin. “[NBC] said, ‘We want you to go back.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And this seemed to make a lot of people really upset. And I go: ‘Well, who wouldn’t take that job though? Who wouldn’t do that?’”

Uh, I’ll tell you who, Mr. Leno.

Conan wouldn’t do that.

The clear question to those watching was not “Who wouldn’t do
that?” Quite the opposite, in fact, the question was “Who the hell
would
do that?”

NBC had made a right mess of things, but they could focus on their hit reality show
The Voice
and limp forward. Leno shrugged, polished his acres of precious vintage cars, and told himself he was a blameless prince. Conan walked away.

This is solely
my
beef, by the way. Conan could not be more Zen about the whole thing, and when I told him that I might mention the topic, he said:

I’d be lying if I said I completely understand it, but I think when I’m ninety, there’ll still be moments of “What the hell was that all about?” . . . But mostly I feel like, you know, grateful. . . . I was dealt a series of cards and I played them as well as I could and I feel like I did the right thing by my people and my fans, and so I’m at peace with all that and really grateful that I get to go out there and do my thing every night. You know? And do it my way.

Just then Liza came into the room to deliver two large Ziploc bags of fresh beef for me to take home. If there’s a finer hostess than her, show her to me, and I’ll eat my hat. I also took the gentle hint that it was getting on toward bedtime in the O’Brien household. I said that I would wrap it up shortly, and that Megan was going to be very bummed to hear of our splendid three-way night together, without our usual double-date foursome (Megan was performing on Broadway yet).

Conan said, “You should really play this up like it was the greatest night ever.”

I said, “Yeah—‘Honey, they had that amazing masseuse Greg Lewis and his friend from the NFL both massaging me while I just ate a few pounds of fresh beef.’”

Liza said, “‘And Cartier watches and fine art were given away, and there was lots of dish—a lot of celebrity gossip.’”

Conan said, “‘Oh, that’s right, they had the greatest story about Ellen. Having diarrhea.’”

We said good night to Liza and wended our way toward the evening’s close, as Conan laid into some weighty Irish jazz riffs:

“What we’re seeing is just what we’ve seen again and again, which is, sadly, people our age saying, ‘Damn it, this is the way it’s supposed to be!,’ and being angry about change—and the quality I wish for most in myself, in later age, next to just incredible sexual powers—”

Me: “Sustained erections.”

Him: “Sustained—I mean, erections that are just like, you know, you have to put, like, traffic cones around my dick because it’s such a problem. Move power lines.

“But that aside, the thing that I would like most to stay young is to accept change; be interested in change.”

He spoke some more (I couldn’t shut him up, truth be told. Blah, blah, wisdom, blah) about how human nature informs us—when people applaud us, for example, how it’s in our nature to think, “Yes, that worked, and I was rewarded! I like rewards, so I’ll keep doing that same thing for as long as I can.” I’m sure we can all think of examples of performers who have kept on doing “the same thing” for far too long. You can almost see the calcification occurring as they, say, perform that hit song from 1978 one more time.

Instead, my host suggested, we prosper by “keeping our eyes upon our own test or running our own race. By working hard, building things, writing things, making things, and trying to better yourself, trying to be a good person, that is our life’s work. That’s how you proselytize, is by doing it.

“Everything in your body’s going to tell you to hunker down and shake your fist at the sky like King Lear, it’s like—try not to go that way. The easy way to go is to say, ‘It’s all gone to shit,’ when the great moral of the story, I think for your book should be, that
It’s always been shit
.”

Boom. That’s my valedictorian, right there.

I paused and considered that subtitle:
Gumption: It’s Always Been Shit. . . .
Hm. It’s not bad, but I imagine Dutton might have a different opinion.

Conan said, “It’s a very tricky marriage, art and commerce, and I, for the most part, and this includes NBC, had a really great time, and it worked out really well for me. [I] got a lot of attention for this one time when it really didn’t work out, and I was very disappointed in the way certain people behaved, but the headline was: ‘For the most part, it worked out.’ . . . Whenever my life is summed up by somebody, I want [the account] to be very positive: ‘That guy got away with murder and had a really good time, and worked his ass off.’”

Jill, let’s interpret that as a tacit invitation to pen the biography of Conan O’Brien. I’ll call it
Sorrow’s Bane: One Handsome Yankee’s Dandy Doodle.

He’s like if Tilda Swinton had a threesome baby with a Viking and a stork. He just wants to put on a hell of a show for us, a goal at which he succeeds with great regularity. The moral? “It’s always been shit.”

Long may he run.

H
ere we are, my gentle, no doubt sleepy reader. What a sweet soiree we have enjoyed—you, me, and twenty-one American heroes.

I am charmed by the thought of such a party—Willie Nelson smoking out Eleanor Roosevelt while Jeff Tweedy teaches Frederick Douglass and Olmsted to sing “California Stars” and Laurie Anderson and Ben Franklin fuck with the lights. Wendell Berry stands at the window, with Yoko astride him, piggyback, as she points out a moonlit cloud and tells him what to do with it. Theodore Roosevelt is wrestling George Washington while Tom Laughlin and George Saunders get into an excited spate of Jungian dream analysis. Michael Pollan lovingly prepares sandwiches of true North Carolina barbecue while Carol Burnett leads the rest of us in an up-tempo “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” All the while, Conan just dances up on the coffee table, all sexy like he does. Count me in. By God, I’ll do the dishes.

In the arithmetic I’ve executed for this book, I have certainly learned a great deal about all the different ways that gumption can
make a profound difference in a person’s life. I came out of this investigation with a much sunnier disposition than the one I wore upon entering, as my subjects repeatedly displayed for me the ready fruits to be plucked from the admirable human qualities of kindness, obduracy, originality, hard work, and flexibility. These accomplishments of my esteemed twenty-one have pointed me squarely in the direction of further good work. As Mr. Berry put it, “I want to deal with people who are at work because they see the real reasons to be at work. That’s what I call hope, if they can keep going.”

I sincerely hope that my gathering of troublemakers has done you some good and that perhaps we shared a chuckle or two as well. If my luck holds, I’ll see you at
work.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Chernow, Ron.
Washington: A Life
, New York: Penguin Press, 2010.

Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
, New York: Dell, 1983.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Isaacson, Walter, ed.
A Benjamin Franklin Reader
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

———.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

JAMES MADISON

Broadwater, Jeff.
James Madison: A Son of Virginia & a Founder of the Nation
, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
, 1845.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Hunter, Gordon.
Selected Speeches and Writings of Theodore Roosevelt
, New York: Vintage, 2014.

Roosevelt, Theodore.
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
, 1885.

———.
The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt
, 1913.

Morris, Edmund.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
, New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED

Martin, Justin.
Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted
, New York: Da Capo Press, 2012.

Rybczynski, Witold.
A Clearing in the Distance
, New York: Scribner, 1999.

Twombly, Robert, ed.
Frederick Law Olmsted: Essential Texts
, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Kowsky, Francis R.
Country, Park & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Roosevelt, Eleanor.
The
Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt
, 1961.

WENDELL BERRY

Berry, Wendell.
The Unsettling of America
, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.

———.
Watch with Me
, New York: Pantheon, 1994.

———.
Jayber Crow
, Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000.

———.
Life Is a Miracle
, Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000.

———.
Our Only World
, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2015.

———.
The Memory of Old Jack
, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974.

———.
Fidelity
, New York: Pantheon, 1992.

———.
Bringing It to the Table
, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009.

———.
The Way of Ignorance
, Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.

———.
Citizenship Papers
, Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003.

———.
In the Presence of Fear
, Great Barrington, MA: Orion Society, 2001.

———.
Nathan Coulter
, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

YOKO ONO

Higgins, Charlotte. “
The Guardian
Profile: Yoko Ono,”
The Guardian
, June 8, 2012.

Sheff, David.
All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono
, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.

Ono, Yoko.
Grapefruit
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Cott, Jonathan.
Days That I’ll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono
, New York: Anchor, 2013.

MICHAEL POLLAN

Pollan, Michael. “Unhappy Meals,”
The New York Times
, January 28, 2007.

———.
Second Nature
, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.

———.
A Place of My Own
, New York: Random House, 1997.

———.
The Botany of Desire
, New York, Random House, 2001.

———.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

———.
In Defense of Food
, New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

———.
Food Rules
, New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

———.
Cooked
, New York: Penguin Press, 2013.

THOMAS LIE-NIELSEN

Becksvoort, Christian.
The Shaker Legacy
, Newtown, CT: Taunton Press, 1998.

———.
In Harmony with Wood
, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983.

Korn, Peter.
Why We Make Things and Why It
Matters
, Boston: David R. Godine, 2013.

NAT BENJAMIN

Ruhlman, Michael.
Wooden Boats
, New York: Viking, 2001.

Dunlop, Tom.
Schooner
, Edgartown, MA: Vineyard Stories, 2010.

Gardner, John.
Building Classic Small Craft
, Camden, ME: International Marine, 1996.

Moores, Ted.
Canoecraft
, Richmond Hill, ON: Firefly Books, 2007.

GEORGE NAKASHIMA

Nakashima, George.
The Soul of a Tree
, New York: Kodansha USA, 2012.

Nakashima, Mira.
Nature Form & Spirit
, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003.

CAROL BURNETT

Burnett, Carol.
This Time Together
, New York: Harmony Books, 2010.

———.
One More Time
, New York: Random House, 1986.

JEFF TWEEDY

Tweedy, Jeff.
Adult Head
, Zoo Press, 2004.

Kot, Greg.
Wilco: Learning How to Die
, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004.

Grierson, Tim.
Wilco: Sunken Treasure
, London: Omnibus Press, 2013.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Saunders, George.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
, New York: Random House, 1996.

———.
The Braindead Megaphone
, New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.

———.
Tenth of December
, New York: Random House, 2013.

———.
Congratulations, by the way
, New York: Random House, 2014.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Anderson, Laurie.
Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Twenty-Year Retrospective
, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

WILLIE NELSON

Hall, Michael. “Trigger: The Life of a Guitar,”
Texas Monthly
, December 2012.

Nelson, Willie.
Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die
, New York: William Morrow, 2012.

———.
The Facts of Life and Other Dirty Jokes
, New York: Random House, 2002.

CONAN O’BRIEN

Babiuk, Andy.
Beatles Gear
, Montclair, NJ: Backbeat Books, 2009.

Spitz, Bob.
The Beatles: The Biography
, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.

Shakespeare, William.
King Lear
.

Robinson, John.
Born In Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry
, New York: M. Evans & Company,
1989.