The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [194]
Of course, that posture had defined Jay from the earliest of ages: He’d actually tried boxing once and found all he could do was let the other guy hit him. And then, of course, there had been that incident in school with the kid and the hammer.
Back at Jay headquarters, the discomfort was acute. Jay knew he’d walked into a door being pushed in his face and could blame no one but himself. He’d let it happen, so he wasn’t going to cut it from the air.
Debbie Vickers was furious. Jay accepted it as comedy, so he could not allow himself to be angry. Debbie believed it was bad manners; Kimmel had stepped over some kind of line into sheer rudeness. Jay ascribed Jimmy’s motivation to a small-time guy looking to get publicity from taking on a big-time guy. Not quite the fly who lives off the back of the elephant, but something like that. For Kimmel, Jay figured, this was like the best publicity he could get.
In that, Jay was certainly right. Kimmel climbed aboard a wave of reaction the likes of which he had rarely experienced before. For three days afterward he felt like Rocky on the steps in Philadelphia. For every one who accused him of being an invited guest who’d peed on his host’s carpet—and there weren’t that many who did—he had thousands of claps on the back. The Internet went wild with kudos for how ballsy he was to take Jay on that way face-to-face.
Kimmel couldn’t believe how it had worked out. Instead of giving him a question or two to bat this around, Leno’s forces had tried to avoid it, and he’d batted Jay over the head with it. That question about his greatest prank? That was so perfect, it was almost as though God had told him he had to do it.
He still could not believe that Jay had not expected it. If anyone had paid attention to Jimmy’s career, they would have seen he could be vicious if he needed to be—and that he lived for this kind of setup.
The reaction Kimmel appreciated most came from the other late-night voice reveling in the Jay-Conan saga. David Letterman sent him a brief note to tell him that his Leno bit had been really funny.
Through his steadfast massaging of each side, Ron Meyer had broken through on the main financial issues, determining the most NBC was willing to pay and the least the Conan side was willing to take. The math he could handle.
On Thursday, the day of the Kimmel “10 at 10” ambush, Meyer called Rick Rosen, who was still in Palm Springs, to inform him that he believed a deal could be made on the numbers—about $32 million to pay off Conan. Severance for the staff, which Conan had stressed as a condition as well, still had to be resolved. Meyer told Rosen they needed him back in the conference room in LA to finish things off.
When Rosen spoke to the Conan negotiating group, they agreed it was time for him to return, so he chartered a plane and flew back. He met first with Conan and Ross, then joined the group in the conference room at Universal.
There the framework of a deal seemed to be in place; the contract would be settled after one more week on the air for Conan, a concession the host had pushed for in order to set up a proper farewell for his Tonight show. But the NBC group needed a break to run things by New York. At that point, the forward movement slowed down. The counsel for GE got involved; GE would need to figure out how to structure the payout over a number of quarters.
NBC also had a few fine points it wanted to discuss, a primary one being an assurance that Howard Stern would not appear as a guest during Conan’s last week. This struck Rosen as a comical request—Conan had no interest in booking anyone as incendiary as Stern—so it was easily accepted. There were also demands that Conan not sit down for interviews with Letterman, Oprah, or Regis Philbin until months had passed. NBC also requested to see the show’s scripts for the final week, but that was never going to happen.
Nothing was finalized