The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [201]
He thanked his staff and his fans, and he closed out his time on late night’s biggest stage by saying:
“To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism—it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
MAKE LAUGHS, NOT WAR
They used the Conan O’Brien Tonight Show studio one last time, for a party—of sorts—to mark the leave-taking. It was hardly festive; one participant likened it to an Irish wake, but only because Conan was Irish, and his show was dead. Nobody did shots to salute the corpse.
Mainly the staff wanted one last chance to applaud a star most of them respected and were genuinely fond of. Someone had pulled up his monologue spot from the floor and had it framed; almost the entire staff signed it. They presented it to a clearly touched O’Brien.
He stayed late, posing for pictures with anyone who asked—every camera operator, every intern. His brother Neal had flown in to stand with him; he’d been there for the closeout of Conan’s Late Night show less than a year earlier.
Finally, totally spent, Conan got in his car with Neal, allowing his big brother to drive home. Though Conan had not drunk an ounce at the party, given the state of his emotions, it seemed wiser for someone else to be behind the wheel. When he got home, he still felt slightly in shock.
That night, before he settled to a point where he could sleep, a memory flashed by. When Conan had been unemployed for a brief time in 1987, after his first writing job at Not Necessarily the News had ended, he found himself sitting in a Du-pars coffee shop in LA. His writing partner Greg Daniels had already found a temporary source of income coaching an SAT prep course. Conan had no immediate prospects.
So he sat at the counter, taking an inordinate amount of time to eat his pancakes, because what the heck else did he have to do that day? Just thinking about what might become of him next, what was around the next corner, he suddenly uttered out loud (though not very loud) a little expression of personal conviction—a sort of quick, nondenominational prayer:
“I don’t care what happens in my career as long as it’s interesting.”
Back home in his elegant home in Brentwood on this night, freshly out of another job, this time accompanied by national headlines, Conan could certainly make a case that his long-ago prayer had been answered. Though, thinking it through, he realized he could tick off a long list of accomplishments that counted as just as interesting as being the guy who walked away from The Tonight Show after seven months. He’d made it as a performer, leading a show on a major network for sixteen years; he’d played guitar next to Bruce Springsteen; he had a picture of himself standing on his set next to his idol, David Letterman; he’d spoken to Johnny Carson; hell, he was even a national hero in Finland.
What had just happened to him in January 2010 had surely shone a revealing klieg light on who he really was and what he believed in. Conan was OK with that. He didn’t think he had a damn thing to be ashamed of.
Which was nice—except he still felt shattered to his last bone.
Over in Burbank an NBC executive visiting Jay Leno’s show for the evening could feel the emotional undercurrent rippling through that set as well. It was obvious that the star and his closest staff members had been badly bruised by the experience and were hurting. They all knew Jay was being cast as the bad guy, a role he found distressing and uncomfortable, but that seemed to dog him despite what he considered his own best efforts to play nice with everybody. Even though some in the press had always taken shots at him, Jay had not experienced this level of venom since the darkest hours of the Letterman face-off, when he was charged