The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [191]
“Ladies and gentlemen, hello there. I’m Conan O’Brien and I’ve been practicing the phrase ‘Who ordered the mochachino grande?’ Look for me, and please tip, OK?ʺ
The next joke may have contained a more serious message. “I’m trying very hard to stay positive here, and I want to tell you something. This is honest. Hosting The Tonight Show has been the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for me. And I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Yeah, yeah—unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too.”
At NBC the joke represented the point of no return. All throughout the legal wrangling, even after the manifesto, Jeff Gaspin maintained a quiet wish that Conan would examine his options one more time and decide that staying at NBC still made the most sense. Maybe Conan and Jay would finally talk, work it out; somehow Jay might assure Conan this was not a long-term proposition and he should stick it out at 12:05 for a while and come back strong after Jay stepped down.
That, of course, would once again secure the Holy Grail—keeping NBC’s two late-night stars at home.
After the joke, the Grail vaporized.
Gaspin got a call from Jay about the joke. This one did not strike Jay as funny. He asked Gaspin, “Why the fuck am I giving up a half hour for this guy?”
And Gaspin asked himself, How could these guys work back-to-back if Conan hates him? There was no longer any question about resolving this in a fashion that might keep Conan at NBC, as far as Gaspin was concerned. Now all it really was about was: How does this get settled; and when does Conan go on his way?
The joke landed like a mortar shell in one other important NBC constituency. Dick Ebersol had been quietly seething as the days rolled by and the onslaught against Leno and Zucker continued in the press and on various blogs—not to mention on the other late-night shows, especially David Letterman’s. It looked to Ebersol like an organized campaign of character assassination by forces on Conan’s side—and, he gathered from Allison Gollust and others, that meant one name in particular: Gavin Polone.
But Conan’s joke about Jay was finally too much for Ebersol. (The same night Letterman hit a similar point, saying, “Our good friend Ricky Gervais will be hosting the Golden Globes—if Jay lets him.”) Ebersol called Gollust and said he wanted to go public with a defense of Leno.
She ran it by Zucker, who gave his OK. That Thursday Dick had a lunch with members of the U.S. Olympic Committee. As soon as he returned to his office, he had a call from Gollust saying she had thought Dick’s plan over and run it by the NBC lawyers. They were concerned it might rebound against the network position. They didn’t want him to do it.
Ebersol hung up the phone and had one thought: Fuck that. He couldn’t stand what was happening. He was going to do this for Jay, knowing that others would interpret it as being for Zucker’s benefit, as well.
The interview with Ebersol appeared the following day on the Business section dress page in The New York Times. Ebersol unloaded on Conan without reservation, explaining that NBC had made the late-night move because Conan’s ratings had plummeted. Citing the jokes made about Jay by Conan and Letterman, Ebersol said it was “chicken-hearted and gutless to blame a guy you couldn’t beat in the ratings.” He called it “professional jealousy.”
Ebersol related his account of his meetings with Conan during which he had advised the host to broaden his act. That hadn’t happened, Ebersol said, and the result was “an astounding failure by Conan.”
If NBCʹs fear had been that Ebersol’s comments might come across as spraying lighter fluid on the brushfire raging between the network and Conan’s representatives, they had miscalculated. His remarks actually had the effect of tossing the Olympic torch into an oil tanker.
Gavin Polone