The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [121]
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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
STILL DAVE, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
On 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