The War for Late Night (35 page)

The accumulated wisdom of all this analysis reached the Conan team in drips and splashes. Jeff Ross was having lunch a lot at the Grill on the Universal lot with Marc Graboff and listening to what Marc was hearing from New York—nothing really different from what was in the notes Ludwin and Bernstein were delivering in LA. Graboff didn’t think Jeff had slipped on a pair of rose-colored glasses; he always seemed to appreciate the inside intelligence.

But the heavy-rotation concentration on the bookings drove Ross a little mad. Of course they were trying to book the best names they could; they weren’t idiots. They always sought the A-list. But it was early summer, and how many A-list stars were making the rounds unless they were in summer popcorn movies, which were usually about robots anyway?

The music complaints seemed even sillier to Ross. The notes said, put on more music with wide appeal. Like who? Ross asked. There were only so many
American Idol
losers available. He checked his list: The music acts seemed to have a high quotient of crossover artists, with many singers Leno had previously booked.

One note from the network did get addressed quickly. As early as the first night no one had liked the way Andy did the voice-over opening. To many inside NBC it sounded like Richter was putting a little ironic top-spin in his inflection of “Conan OʹBriiii-en,
”
with the last syllable trailing off like the fade-out at the end of a song—as though Andy was partly spoofing the role of the announcer. That element got fixed

One other element—and a significant one, as far as Jeff Zucker was concerned—did not.

 

Jeff Zucker had never completely hung up his
Today
show cleats—the ones he had used, with recurring glee, to stomp on competitors when he produced the show in the nineties. Even as CEO of the far-flung NBC Universal entertainment empire (cable channels, broadcast network, movie studio, theme parks), he was still known to check in on occasion with the
Today
producer Jim Bell to suggest a segment—or, more frequently, a booking. Zucker prided himself on knowing a great story when he saw one, and the best way for a television show to take advantage of that story.

So as June rolled by with the press taking note of Conan’s shrinking margins over Letterman—and by week three Dave had edged past Conan in viewers for a full week (though Conan continued to crush Dave in the young demos)—Zucker saw the kind of wide-open opportunity that used to ring his wake-up alarm in the mornings:

Sarah Palin.

Always a magnet for press attention, Palin had jumped on an insult to her young daughter to launch a summer publicity offensive. And the target of her righteous parental wrath was none other than David Letterman, who had stumbled into Palin’s PR gunsights by cracking a joke that would have wandered dangerously close to offensive even if it had been accurate. The fact that it wasn’t only set Letterman up as easy prey for the former governor of Alaska.

On June 9, with Conan just starting his second week on his show, Dave told a joke about Palin’s visiting Yankee Stadium with her daughter. “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin,” Letterman said. “During the seventh-inning stretch her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

Everyone knew Palin’s unmarried eighteen-year-old daughter, Bristol, had gotten pregnant by her boyfriend and now had a child. Bristol wasn’t the daughter who accompanied Palin to the stadium, however. It was Palin’s fourteen-year-old, Willow.

Palin seized the moment. While she and her husband, Todd, took turns volleying fire at Letterman, accusing him of being “sexually perverted” for telling a joke “about raping” their young daughter, the backlash against Letterman, especially in the conservative media world of Fox News and talk radio, threatened to blow up into a wildfire. Two days later Letterman spent more than seven minutes during his at-the-desk segment in act two defending himself and explaining the mistake that had made the Rodriguez joke go wrong. In a tone of self-mockery that the audience took for humor—because they laughed all through it—Letterman acknowledged that the jokes were ugly.

“These are actually ugly. These are borderline,” he acknowledged, laying the reason down to “an act of desperation to get cheap laughs, which is what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years.” He also apologized—after a fashion—for the mix-up about the two daughters. But he adamantly defended himself against the charge that he had suggested that Willow might have sex with a grown baseball player.

“These are not jokes made about her fourteen-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a fourteen-year-old girl.”

Letterman summed up: “Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes. Did I suggest that it was OK for her fourteen-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.”

And then, signaling he was not going to prostrate himself before a woman he seemed to believe was a grandstanding politician, Letterman also mentioned a line—one Palin had labeled in an interview as “pretty pathetic”—that he had used the same night as the Rodriguez joke in a top ten “Highlights of Sarah Palin’s Visit to New York”: “Bought makeup at Bloomingdale’s to update her slutty flight attendant look.”

No apology for that one. “I kind of like that joke,” Letterman said.

Palin supporters bombarded CBS and Letterman’s office with calls of complaint and demands that he be fired.
FireDavidLetterman.com
, a Web site launched by Palin supporters, tried to gin up a rally to take place the following week outside the Letterman theater on Broadway.

The concern was real inside the Letterman camp. They took the protest seriously enough for Dave to take the unusual step of offering a second apology on the air the next Monday, made directly to Palin, admitting that his own intent was meaningless compared to how the joke had been perceived. That was good enough for Palin, who, having gotten as much as she could have possibly hoped to squeeze out of this episode, accepted the apology. The planned protest fizzled; only about fifteen people showed up carrying signs. They were vastly outnumbered by the media assembled to cover the event.

But if that protest was flaming out, another was still in full blaze.

As soon as the first news of the Palin-Letterman contretemps began breaking, Jeff Zucker sent a message to his Conan team: The perfect move in this circumstance was to book Sarah Palin as quickly as possible.

There was only one problem with this plan: O’Brien didn’t want to do it.

Conan explained it as best he could to some of his West Coast colleagues: He didn’t want to appear to be taking advantage of a situation Dave had gotten himself into; he didn’t want to come across as a pawn in some machination of Palin’s. If the show booked her at that moment, Conan told one associate, it would be obvious she was on only because of the news in the David Letterman world, and Conan would be vulnerable to the perception that he had been suckered into doing it. Not only would the press accuse him of pandering for ratings, but his fans would likely judge the move unseemly.

As both a producer and a boss, this reaction drove Zucker nuts. As a producer, he knew how to manipulate audiences—that was simply what you did as part of the job. He looked at Palin as the first of-the-moment guest who could change the game for Conan. As a boss, he couldn’t believe Conan would stand in the way of what was obviously the smart business move—for him and his network.

Zucker pressed the issue with Jeff Ross: Letterman wants to kill you. He wants to bash your brains in. And you’re bringing a knife to a gun-fight. This guy wants to kill you, and you guys aren’t doing all that well.

The
Today
show, still under Zucker’s direct aegis, did book Palin in the middle of the Letterman fracas. In her interview, Palin told Matt Lauer, the show’s biggest star, that he would have to be “extremely naive” to believe Letterman’s “convenient excuse” that he was not referring to Willow but Bristol Palin in the joke. She also backed a statement by her spokesperson that it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman. And when pressed by Lauer about what that statement was meant to imply about Letterman, she added, “You can interpret that however you want to interpret it.”

At NBC it was taken for granted that Jay would have booked Palin without a moment’s hesitation. That was certainly what Ebersol thought O’Brien should do. His argument: “This is your fucking competition. This is a business. You’re making eight figures.”

The Palin issue came up in meetings between the Conan staff, Ludwin and Bernstein, and other NBC executives. As Jeff Ross heard it later, there was not one person in these discussions who did not comprehend why Conan balked at booking Palin at that moment. The move had the potential to blow up in his face. No one questioned how seriously Conan took this situation—he had clearly thought it through, as he did everything involving his career. He was making a judgment based on what he believed was best for his show.

When Conan laid out his reasoning, Rick Ludwin, for one, could not find a reason to challenge it. In general, Ludwin believed it was wrong to try to force hosts to do something they were clearly opposed to doing. That could lead only to bad moments on the air. The network’s job was to make the host look good.

One Conan supporter did acknowledge that the show was forsaking the “ratings pop” that would have come with a Palin appearance. “Conan didn’t want to dictate what his
Tonight Show
would be based on someone else’s late-night show. The challenge for late-night shows, forever and always, is: At what price is the pop?”

For Jeff Zucker there was a much simpler—and less justifiable—explanation for Conan’s decision to bypass a Palin guest shot: He didn’t want to piss off David Letterman.

O
n the morning of December 9, 2008—six months earlier to the day of its host’s controversial Palin joke—excitement coursed through the usually sedate offices of
Late Show with David Letterman
, and it had nothing to do with Christmas season in New York.

Among the staff who actually interacted with the star on a daily basis—and that was a limited number, it was true—Dave’s arrival that day was much more than usually anticipated. The burning question passed around over coffee: What is Dave going to say about
this
?

“This” was NBC’s announcement that it had reached its agreement with Jay Leno to keep him on, transferring him to prime time, of all places, ten p.m. each weeknight. That move seemed to resolve, once and for all, the head-to-head rivalry between Jay and Dave, which reached back sixteen years to the decision over the Carson succession—and even further than that, to nights as stand-ups on stages like the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard in LA in the seventies.

Letterman had said little on the subject since NBC had installed its five-year layaway plan for
The Tonight Show
, with Conan O’Brien the designated heir to Jay. But then, he said little on how he felt about most topics, especially in public. On this matter, he had deigned to speak for the record only once, in a
Rolling Stone
interview the previous September.

At that time he had made the remarkable statement—remarkable at least to those still guessing how Dave might feel about Jay—that he no longer harbored any hope of ever topping Leno in the ratings. His acceptance of that fact was remarkable mainly for the reason Letterman cited, an explanation for his ratings shortcomings that defied all previous efforts by his own entourage to blame uncontrollable factors like CBS’s lead-in shows and NBC’s stronger local stations (as well as the well-known limited artistic tastes of the American public).

“The answer is me,” Dave said. “I just think that Jay has wider appeal than I do.”

His admission likely stunned those at NBC who had been hammering away at that same argument for years in the face of the litany of excuses being thrown up by Letterman’s defenders. With Dave himself conceding, “I think more people are responding to Jay than will ever respond to me,” the excuse well had officially run dry.

Given Jay’s now acknowledged victory in what, by that point, seemed like the Hundred Years War of Late Night, NBC’s decision to relieve Leno of his
Tonight
chair in favor of Conan left Letterman nonplussed. While he recognized that the network may have been attempting to find a “less messy way to handle what happened to me at NBC,
”
he still seemed thrown by the whole concept. Maybe because he knew his counterpart so well—perhaps as well as anyone who had interacted with the near impenetrable Leno in his long career—Letterman suspected (correctly, of course) that Jay would have preferred to stay exactly where he was.

So even then, ten months before the switchover was due to take place, Letterman found himself wondering whether it was really going to happen. The few times he would talk about it around the office with his producers and writers, Dave tended to agree with those who speculated that NBC would find some way not to go through with the handover to Conan. The pattern seemed far too similar to how the network had tried to handle Dave’s departure for CBS. NBC had offered him
The Tonight Show
at the last minute, but only if he waited eighteen months to get it. All his advisers at the time had warned him that NBC would have stiffed him in the end if Jay’s numbers looked good.

Here they were, fifteen years later, and with the numbers still looking good for Jay, a stiffing seemed in the offing—this time for Conan. Either that or NBC would be inviting Jay to pull a Dave and launch another separate franchise, probably at ABC this time.

In either case, Dave knew for certain that the balance in late night might shift for the first time since the early nineties. For his staff, it felt like a potential reversal in the earth’s rotation—back toward Dave.

When Dave arrived that December day, summoning a few of his key people together in his office for a regular morning meeting, anticipation hung in the air like swirling smoke from a lit fuse. Then Dave walked in, sat down, and said not a word about any of it. His number one nemesis was not only leaving the field but was going to prime time, and Dave was shrugging it off, as if . . . whatever. All he said to the group was “So what are we doing on the show today?”