The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [192]
Even if it was decades old. Team Conan even dug up the ancient story of how Zucker had had Conan arrested at Harvard (for a Lampoon prank that involved stealing Zucker’s chair out of the Crimson office), an anecdote that had been reported many times before, but which played especially effectively in the context of Zucker’s threatening to fire him now.
Ebersol’s broadside may have galvanized Polone, but it pulverized his client. Conan felt shocked that NBC had suddenly decided that even the insult of a public demotion wasn’t enough. Now it was time to kill Conan. His show an “astounding failure”? His jokes proved he was “gutless” and “jealous” of Jay?
Conan believed he had taken the high road; few of his comments had been directed at Jay. OK, he did the one joke. But he wasn’t unleashing a venomous attack on him. Compared to others—Dave, Kimmel, or Howard Stern, who said on his radio show that he felt like vomiting at the name Jay Leno—Conan had been restrained. He had simply announced that he could not participate in something that offended him; now they were coming after him, savagely.
The tenor of the negotiations now shifted. NBC began looking less for a rationale to pay Conan a smaller settlement than for ways to control him while he was still on their air—and even for a bit after that. How much time did they need to keep him off the market? How much time did they need to keep him—more to the point his people—from spewing nastiness about NBC and Jay?
The level of nastiness certainly surprised Jay. He told himself not to take it personally, because, even after Conan’s poisonous joke, he believed what the other hosts were attacking was less him than the symbol of The Tonight Show, the pinnacle every comic aspired to achieving. Nobody was going after his wife or anything like that, so he tried to ride it out with shrugs.
That got much harder thanks to his own misread of who still might be friendly to him. He expected his “10 at 10” interchange with Jimmy Kimmel, scheduled for the fourteenth, the same day Ebersol gave his interview to The Times, to be a way to capitalize playfully just a little on all the late-night uproar. One associate on Tonight was astounded that the booking had even been made, thinking it was foolish to believe Kimmel might be a friend of the show, especially under the circumstances.
Kimmel expected the interview to kick off some typical give-and-take between comics, based on the whole NBC ferment. But when the segment producer called him to try out a few questions, they couldn’t have been more bland and off the topic, like “What’s your favorite snack junk food?”
“I’m hoping we can talk about everything that’s going on,” Kimmel told the producer. “I have a huge viral thing on my hands because of the imitation.” Kimmel’s impression of Leno was all over the Internet.
“Well, we don’t want to beat that to death,” the producer replied.
“I understand that you don’t want to beat it to death,” Jimmy answered. “But it’s the elephant in the room. It has to be addressed.”
The producer said he would talk to the higher-ups about it. But when Kimmel got the proposed questions later in the day, he saw nothing about the whole Conan dustup. His conclusion: That little fucker Jay intended to neutralize him on the show, sending a message—“Oh yeah, Jimmy and I are friends. That vicious imitation of me he did? That didn’t mean anything.”
Kimmel felt he had been totally up front about what he wanted to discuss, so it would be fair game for him to spin the answers in that direction, even if the questions steered far away.
Knowing the premise of the bit, Kimmel figured he had some advantages. It had to be ten questions,