The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [109]
Still, as the start of The Tonight Show loomed, the question of whether Lorne’s financial association would continue lingered for some time unresolved. NBC’s position was that some members of the Conan side had sent a message indicating that they were cool to the idea of keeping Lorne on. For their part, Conan’s reps swore that they steered clear of any and all financial arrangements between NBC and Michaels, because the network paid the fee; they didn’t.
However the process unfolded, the result was that Lorne Michaels received no EP credit on The Tonight Show and no weekly fee.
Michaels raised no protest. The Tonight Show was going to be in LA, three thousand miles away from New York, where he was already deeply involved with SNL and Jimmy Fallon’s new 12:35 show. Michaels himself interpreted the decision as Conan simply deciding to leave the nest. Conan had tossed that bouquet of gratitude Lorne’s way on the last Late Night show, and Michaels had been moved by it.
Lorne never said a word to Conan or Jeff Ross about the change in the arrangement. But Zucker, for one, concluded Michaels was hurt more than he ever would say to have that association with Conan and his show cut off.
He was right: Michaels would never say. Lorne concluded that, even without any contractual arrangement, Conan and Jeff Ross would always know he was on their side—because he was.
When Johnny Carson was counting down the days to his final edition of The Tonight Show, a cavalcade of favorite guests dropped by for one last visit with the King. David Letterman had been on the list; Jay Leno had not.
Jay had been determined never to repeat the rancor that accompanied that changeover, when neither Carson in his final show, nor Leno in his first, saw fit to mention the other. As always seemed to happen with Jay, he took all the heat for that snub—and even he later came to agree with that judgment. It had been an unconscionable faux pas, one that took years for him to live down. He had apologized for it, laying the misbegotten decision at the feet of his tyrannical manager, Helen Kushnick, who had all but gotten him fired from the show with that and other scorched-earth personal dealings. (And that, in turn, had always played to some as an especially egregious example of the ritual of blaming the manager or agent. As one of Jay’s late-night competitors put it, “If my manager told me to jump off a bridge, I wouldn’t jump off a bridge.”)
The bitter aftermath of that transition influenced many of Jay’s decisions about how to end his own Tonight run. The parade of familiar guests in the final weeks was inevitable; but Jay insisted that the finale needed to go down exactly opposite of how it had transpired with Carson. Not only would Jay acknowledge Conan on the last show, he would have him as his final guest.
So on Friday, May 29, 2009, Conan and Jeff Ross left their new studio and the preparations for Conan’s premiere the following Monday to make the short drive east on the 134 to Burbank.
Conan had done numerous appearances on Tonight, always with strong results. Whenever he was booked, his West Coast fans seemed to make a point to get there. Some of Conan’s support group took note of the raucous reaction he would attract sitting up there with Jay and concluded that it made Jay uncomfortable for Conan to bring all that passionate popularity into his house.
On the finale, his 3,775th Tonight Show as host, Jay got a huge ovation, which he had to tamp down to leave enough time for the usual joke-intensive monologue. Jay dug from some best hits: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Michael Jackson, even O.J. Of course, NBC’s travails were not ignored. “I’m going off to a safe, secluded spot where no one can find me. Prime time on NBC!