The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [120]
“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