The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [126]
If the same act was being done on a show playing at 11:35, Morton argued to Letterman, “You want to see the trick work; you want to see the best trick ever.”
Dave had levitated the expectations of the show in just that way when he moved up an hour and over to CBS. But this latest reinvention was not going to be a question of success or failure so much as it would be a question of age. Dave needed to find an age-appropriate way for a sixty-one-year-old guy to keep being funny in late night.
That didn’t mean the staff dismissed what Conan was up to. The booking department kept one eye on the guest list Conan’s staff had lined up for week one. As expected, it contained big names every night. With the odds pointing to a blowout for Conan (especially now that Jay wasn’t going to be available as a guest for Dave on the first night of Conan’s Tonight Show), the Letterman squad decided to borrow a little strategy from Muhammad Ali for their own guests that week. They would go for the rope-a-dope.
That was Ali’s scheme in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Ali essentially laid back against the ropes in the early rounds, allowing Foreman to whale away with his heaviest blows. Then, with Foreman’s best shots exhausted, Ali came back with a vengeance—and knocked big George out.
Citing that precedent, the Late Show strategists decided to stay away from Conan during his premiere week. They had the show’s booking staff, in effect, lay back on the ropes while Conan went for the big swings early. It almost might make it worse for Conan, they guessed, to have a monster first week and then have to start listening to everyone talk about how the numbers were dropping.
“Let’s go after the second week,” Rob Burnett told the show’s bookers.
The show—and Dave—would be loaded for bear.
In his early days at CBS, David Letterman was doing so well, surpassing The Tonight Show in the ratings and winning nonstop accolades, that Dick Ebersol, one of the NBC executives who had supported the last-minute effort to dump Jay Leno and keep Dave, decided to call a friend who worked on the show and ask if everyone there was over the moon about their success.
“Not everyone,” the friend reported. “The first week and a half Dave was happy. Now he’s gone right back to being the most miserable person in the world.”
The classic adage applied as much or more to the compelling, complicated, challenging David Letterman as it did to anyone else on the planet: You don’t get older, you just get more so.
By the end of 2008 Letterman’s fifteen-year run at CBS had encompassed a dizzying collection of highs and lows. He had won six Emmy Awards for outstanding comedy or variety series; he had led a driving team that won his dream race, the Indy 500, in 2004; he had experienced the unexpected joy of having a son born into his life at age fifty-six; he had won the admiration of his city and the nation for his sensitive leadership in bringing true comic relief after the horror of the terrorist attacks of 9/11; and he had shepherded countless memorable moments—foulmouthed Madonna, topless Drew Barrymore, post-slammer Paris Hilton—onto television. Oh, and CBS had paid him several hundred million dollars for his labors.
But the toll of lows was also long. Letterman had taken a battering over his one venture outside the cocoon of his show, when he hosted the Academy Awards in 1995; he had been forced to deal with a kidnap threat against his son; he had lost his idol Johnny Carson to death in 2005; whatever hope he had to prove NBC wrong for choosing Jay Leno over him had disappeared under the pile of weekly wins Jay continued to post;