The War for Late Night (58 page)

He stepped outside onto the deserted Universal lot. There he stood, in the dark, entirely alone, waiting to hear if he had successfully given up
The Tonight Show
. He had his cell with him, and as he ambled aimlessly he took some pictures with the phone. At one thirty a.m. he held the phone out and took a picture of himself. Behind him was one of the tiny cafés on the lot. It was closed but there were some lights on inside, just enough for the picture and enough to see a poster for some long-forgotten movie, indecipherable in the photo, illuminated behind his head in the foreground.

When he looked at the photo, Conan thought,
This is just me at one thirty in the morning, on the Universal lot, waiting to hear this news, and looking like: What the fuck?

Conan had no way of knowing it, but at just about the time he was snapping that photo, Ron Meyer was on the phone at his home, conferenced in with Jeff Zucker and Jeff Gaspin, to let them know that at long last he had everybody agreed on a final deal. But he also had a message he wanted to convey to the two Jeffs:

“You’ve got about ten minutes here before I call back to say we’re closed—ten minutes to say, ‘We’re staying with Conan, we’re going to get rid of Jay.’ ” Meyer had witnessed the national display of Conan mania during the previous ten days. “There’s a big outcry out there,” he told Zucker and Gaspin. “Think about it. I’m not suggesting it. That’s not my job. I’m just suggesting you think about it. There’s a moment here.”

Both Zucker and Gaspin had such regard for Meyer’s counsel that they did pause—or at least, out of deference to Meyer, made a show of pausing—and took the opportunity to consider, one last time, the implications of sending Conan O’Brien on his way.

Then they told Meyer: No. They believed they were making the right decision and they were committed to it.

Meyer made his call.

A few minutes later Conan finally got back to his office. It was a little after two a.m. The lawyers were still there. They had the papers for him.

 

From NBC’s point of view, Conan got a great deal. His salary had been set at $12.5 million a year; the settlement paid him for about the two and a half years remaining in his contract, with the final number coming out at a little over $32 million. Then there were payments to Jeff Ross for his own guaranteed contract, and severance for the staff, which Conan’s side had held out for NBC to improve beyond standard GE levels. In total, the settlement deal cost NBC about $45 million, which, in one of the seemingly endless coincidental twists in the saga, was exactly what it would have taken for NBC to pay off Conan had the network decided at the last minute to keep Jay in his top-rated late-night spot and forget all that ten o’clock nonsense.

That scenario had been brought up again and again internally in the wake of the self-inflicted drubbing the network had been through that month—if only someone had said, “Let’s just keep Jay in
The Tonight Show
and write the check to Conan.”

Conan himself had come to wish they had done just that.

What NBC got for its money was a period of nine months during which Conan could not mount a competing show. Their legal strategists figured that would be long enough to get Jay reestablished at 11:35, though they obviously had a few shudders about the prospect of Conan’s riding back in triumph to lead his young troops in a Fox army, storming the late-night citadel. But given the limitations that loomed at Fox, NBC did not take that as a serious long-term threat to what they expected would be—sooner or later—a return to supremacy for Jay Leno.

In addition, Conan and his minions—most pointedly Gavin Polone—could not disparage Jay Leno, NBC, or its executives in any way during what amounted to a graduated series of monthly periods. By September 1, however, Conan could say with impunity that Jeff Zucker wore women’s underwear, or anything else he desired to.

Those restrictions—and especially the ones NBC imposed on O’Brien’s final shows—continued to amaze the group around Conan, because to them these concerns only proved again how little NBC really knew about the man who had starred for them for seventeen years. Rick Rosen could see how someone might not respond to Conan’s humor, but as a person, who was classier?

 

Conan himself labeled his final show “a Viking funeral.” He wrote the phrase many times over on the blotter on his desk, which was always filled with his cartoon doodles and little turns of phrase. He had the guest roster he wanted, a dream lineup: Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, and Neil Young, who had called Conan to volunteer to be on the last show and to sing, appropriately, “Long May You Run.” And, of course, Will Ferrell, Conan’s signature guest, closed the show, with Conan onstage as well with the whole band—including guests Beck, ZZ Top, and Ben Harper—playing a long version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.”

By then Conan had delivered his eulogy for his brief
Tonight Show
run, and, consistent with his approach throughout, he took the high—and well-written—road. He tried to clear up any misconceptions, saying that, despite rumors, he really could say anything he wanted in his closing remarks, and what he most wanted to say was that despite his recent differences with them, he needed to thank NBC for making his career possible.

“Walking away from
The Tonight Show
is the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” Conan said. “Despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting
The Tonight Show
, and for seven months I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I’ve had more good fortune than anyone I know, and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-Eleven parking lot, we’ll find a way to make it fun.”

He thanked his staff and his fans, and he closed out his time on late night’s biggest stage by saying:

“To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism—it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

T
hey used the Conan O’Brien
Tonight Show
studio one last time, for a party—of sorts—to mark the leave-taking. It was hardly festive; one participant likened it to an Irish wake, but only because Conan was Irish, and his show was dead. Nobody did shots to salute the corpse.

Mainly the staff wanted one last chance to applaud a star most of them respected and were genuinely fond of. Someone had pulled up his monologue spot from the floor and had it framed; almost the entire staff signed it. They presented it to a clearly touched O’Brien.

He stayed late, posing for pictures with anyone who asked—every camera operator, every intern. His brother Neal had flown in to stand with him; he’d been there for the closeout of Conan’s
Late Night
show less than a year earlier.

Finally, totally spent, Conan got in his car with Neal, allowing his big brother to drive home. Though Conan had not drunk an ounce at the party, given the state of his emotions, it seemed wiser for someone else to be behind the wheel. When he got home, he still felt slightly in shock.

That night, before he settled to a point where he could sleep, a memory flashed by. When Conan had been unemployed for a brief time in 1987, after his first writing job at
Not Necessarily the News
had ended, he found himself sitting in a Du-pars coffee shop in LA. His writing partner Greg Daniels had already found a temporary source of income coaching an SAT prep course. Conan had no immediate prospects.

So he sat at the counter, taking an inordinate amount of time to eat his pancakes, because what the heck else did he have to do that day? Just thinking about what might become of him next, what was around the next corner, he suddenly uttered out loud (though not very loud) a little expression of personal conviction—a sort of quick, nondenominational prayer:

“I don’t care what happens in my career as long as it’s interesting.”

Back home in his elegant home in Brentwood on this night, freshly out of another job, this time accompanied by national headlines, Conan could certainly make a case that his long-ago prayer had been answered. Though, thinking it through, he realized he could tick off a long list of accomplishments that counted as just as interesting as being the guy who walked away from
The Tonight Show
after seven months. He’d made it as a performer, leading a show on a major network for sixteen years; he’d played guitar next to Bruce Springsteen; he had a picture of himself standing on his set next to his idol, David Letterman; he’d spoken to Johnny Carson; hell, he was even a national hero in Finland.

What had just happened to him in January 2010 had surely shone a revealing klieg light on who he really was and what he believed in. Conan was OK with that. He didn’t think he had a damn thing to be ashamed of.

Which was nice—except he still felt shattered to his last bone.

 

Over in Burbank an NBC executive visiting Jay Leno’s show for the evening could feel the emotional undercurrent rippling through that set as well. It was obvious that the star and his closest staff members had been badly bruised by the experience and were hurting. They all knew Jay was being cast as the bad guy, a role he found distressing and uncomfortable, but that seemed to dog him despite what he considered his own best efforts to play nice with everybody. Even though some in the press had always taken shots at him, Jay had not experienced this level of venom since the darkest hours of the Letterman face-off, when he was charged with snatching the show away from the friend who had done so much to elevate his career.

But nothing in that episode came close to the heights of malediction he was now experiencing. The Team Coco troops accused Jay of being a liar, a traitor, and worse. Jay was truly rocked to read a piece in
The Wall Street Journal
by Joe Queenan—a satire, certainly, but on a level of viciousness Jay simply could not fathom. Queenan compared Leno to Hitler, saying he had made “secret demands for territory” (that is, the 11:35 show) just as Hitler had with the Sudetenland, and that just as Adolf saw himself as the second coming of Frederick Barbarossa, Jay wanted to be seen as the heir to Johnny Carson.

Jay was astonished that this version of events—with him cast as evil genius—got any credence at all. He thought the story could just as easily have played as a feel-good movie of the week, laying out a totally different scenario: A guy in his fifties is told he’s doing a good job but gets fired anyway. Then, six years later, the boss comes back and says, “We were wrong; we’d like to give you your old job back.”

Despite the exaggerated cartoon being presented by Letterman, Kimmel, and others, Jay simply could not believe people actually accepted it as true that he had walked up to NBC, snapped his fingers, and said, “My show failed; I want that show back.” Still, he got e-mails every day from Team Coco supporters making accusations like “It was Conan’s dream and you took it. Just ’cause your show failed.” He wanted to ask them, “What are you talking about? Do you have any idea how business works?”

Did it really make sense to people that he should step aside even when NBC clearly made the call asking him to return? Was it wrong that at fifty-nine he still wanted to work? How different was this, really, from a situation where two actors are up for the same role? Tom Cruise gets it instead of Brad Pitt—should Cruise say, “No, I’m not taking this job because Brad was up for it?”

Jay looked to do repair work where he could. He called Michael Fiorile at the NBC affiliate board and abjectly apologized for failing the stations with his ten o’clock show. Fiorile, who remained a steadfast Jay backer, said, “The affiliates are still supportive, and the fact that the show didn’t play at ten really wasn’t your fault.”

The big concern for Leno—and for NBC—was that Jay would face a backlash of blame as he tried to reestablish himself at 11:35. There would be only a few weeks between the end of the misbegotten ten o’clock show and his return to
Tonight.
NBC was concerned enough to call in a crisis-management firm, Sitrick and Company, nationally known PR experts specializing in countering bad news.
Forbes
magazine called its founder, Michael Sitrick, “The Flack for When You’re Under Attack.”

The network was seeking to learn just how much damage had been done, and the best way to mount a response. In this case, the advice did not get too complicated: Jay needed to bring back his loyal fans and he would be fine. That meant keeping to his steady routine of outside stand-up appearances and benefit performances.

Jay himself had some concerns about those, but he had several big houses booked in January—a good way to assess if he would encounter any fallout. One of them was the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City, a 2,500-seat house. When Jay called, offering to back out if the sales were slow, he was told the show had sold out in a day. This seemed to be a good sign.

In one desperate stab at turning things around, NBC put together a promo ad to run during the Olympics that was a direct parody of the famous “It was all a dream” twist in the old CBS show
Dallas
. Several network executives were utterly appalled at this idea—it seemed unhip, old-fashioned, and horrendously insensitive.
What?
Now Conan’s term on the show wasn’t supposed to have even existed? Wiser heads prevailed, and the piece was shelved.

Some of those wiser heads remained equally appalled at how personal and ugly the standoff with Conan had become. It seemed cold and crass, especially to some younger NBC staff members who had always felt an affinity toward him. The decision to return to Jay—due to turn sixty in three months—struck them as a conscious choice by the network to shift its priorities in late night toward a mass-audience strategy and away from the more targeted let’s-play-young focus that had prevailed when Conan was named to the job. Jay could not be expected to change his own approach, and there was no way to “young him up.” NBC seemed to be conceding that the audience for late night was going to be considerably older for the foreseeable future.