The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [18]
When the decision finally came, it was Conan alone who met with Peter Chernin. After telling him how impressed and overwhelmed he had been by the offer, and how appreciative he was for the time and effort Chernin had personally put into the courtship, he had to give an answer that Chernin was not going to like: “I’m not going to do it.”
Chernin and the rest of the Fox team, while disappointed, could not have been completely surprised by the outcome. They had reasonably calculated that their gambit might have come a little early in the game, but at least they were now in good position for whenever the late-night wheel spun again. Nor had Conan’s advisers, avid as they were for the Fox deal, been undone when Conan had told them his feelings.
“I’m still young,” Conan explained to Rosen and the others. “I’m not forty yet. I still have one more contract to see if they’ll give me The Tonight Show. So we can make one more deal with NBC, and then at the end of that they have to give me the show.”
Polone, as hard-assed as any talent manager could possibly be, nevertheless grasped that the essence of his client was his accommodating nature—and his straightforward decency. Conan was not only not cagy but was totally transparent and upfront, qualities that were no advantage in a negotiation. With Zucker and Wright, Conan felt he was dealing with friends as well as bosses. From Conan’s point of view, everything coming from NBCʹs direction was positive. Polone himself would never have had such faith, but he recognized that people had different ways of looking at life. A dedicated single man, Polone concluded that it would be impossible for him to convince a happily married man that it was better to be single—in the same way it was impossible for him to convince Conan not to want The Tonight Show. “We all have those things,” Polone concluded.
In January 2002, Bob Wright and his wife, Suzanne, were among the guests at Conan’s wedding to Liza Powel in Seattle. A month later Conan signed a new deal to stay on Late Night through 2005, a term that guaranteed he would host the show longer than Letterman, its legendary progenitor, had. The deal added a few goodies: Conan got some guarantees of program commitments for prime-time series that his production company might create.
Much more significant was the other commitment he landed. The new deal included an explicit Prince of Wales clause: If anything happened to Jay Leno—illness, accident, sudden desire to give up show business—Conan would step in as Tonight host. The official line of succession was now codified.
It was an issue of great importance to O’Brien that, whatever happened in the future with The Tonight Show, no one would ever accuse his side of using any kind of ugly muscle tactics to wedge out Leno so that he could slide into his place. Everyone in late night remembered the campaign that Jay’s former manager, Helen Kushnick, had waged to win the job for her client, which included planting some nasty stories about NBC wanting Carson out. Jay came to be ashamed of those tactics, and after he split with Kushnick, did his best to apologize abjectly to Johnny, insisting that he had not been a party to those moves, and if he had known about them he would have repudiated them.
In contrast to the always chilly relations between the Carson and Leno camps, Jay and Conan seemed to go out of their way to be cordial to each other—on the air and off. Every quote each of them gave during the years after Conan agreed to remain at NBC was respectful, without ever quite approaching affection. Both men used the “friends” word, but in the way that professional colleagues do, not true intimates. Jay invited Conan onto his show as a guest, and Conan always nailed his shot. Jay once made a crack about Conan’s coming in to measure the drapes, but that was no more provocative than Carson had been in the early eighties, dropping Letterman’s name in jokes about his being the presumptive