The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [27]
When Conan heard the financial terms, he realized he was almost certainly in a position to play hardball with NBC. “Look,” he could say, “I’m going to stay at twelve thirty, but it’s going to cost you.” But he informed his team that he wasn’t prepared to do even that. He realized he had to give things up—it was part of his nature: “Fuck me. I’m Catholic.”
This was the deal Jeff Zucker had painstakingly put together as he gathered himself for the daunting encounter with Jay that March afternoon in 2004 in Burbank. For support and expertise in late-night issues—and because he knew how much Jay respected him—Zucker brought along Rick Ludwin.
Ludwin had been an integral part of the planning for this moment. Of all the executives at NBC, he had the only ongoing, straight-line connection to both Jay and Conan. Ludwin’s position throughout had been clear to everyone else in the talks: He supported Jay now and always but he believed the future was Conan. Ludwin was as soft-spoken, unpretentious, and unassuming in his mid-fifties as he had been over his two-decade tenure as NBC’s late-night specialist. Still square shouldered and soft featured behind his professorial glasses, still frequently in uniform—blue blazer, gray slacks—Ludwin had the requisite reverence for NBCʹs late-night tradition. He saw The Tonight Show as a constant in the lives of Americans—“as comforting as your own living room,” as he viewed it. Even the strongest shows in prime time came and went, Ludwin would argue, but The Tonight Show kept on rolling, more than half a century on, “like Ol’ Man River.”
The hosts, Ludwin accepted as an article of faith, became part of people’s families in a peculiar way—viewers took it personally when something happened involving one of these guys, even if they hadn’t watched the show in a while. Ludwin had long expressed his philosophy about the job of hosting The Tonight Show: It was a rental. “You get the keys to The Tonight Show when it’s number one and you’re expected to hand it off when it’s number one. But you only have it for a certain amount of time. Someone was there before you got there. Someone’s going to be there after you leave, and it’s your obligation to maintain it until the next person takes over.” As Ludwin saw it, Jay had fulfilled his obligation with distinction. And it could be expected he would continue to meet the network’s expectations until the end of this next contract, leaving at number one. But then, it was time.
One of the other reasons Zucker was reluctant to sit down with Jay that afternoon was that they were meeting him in the private sitting room, the place where Jay would hold occasional postmortems about the show with his writers, the place Zucker called “the dungeon.” Just outside his dressing room, deep in the bowels of the Burbank studio, it had the quality of a dank, well-worn rec room in a frat house. Pizza boxes with a few congealed slices left might be taking up floor space. Bowls of salsa or graying guacamole along with some stray chips might be on the coffee table, along with half-finished bottles of soft drinks. Zucker, who had been there only on a few previous occasions, thought it was disgusting. Jay found it relaxing and homey.
After the usual greetings, Zucker and Ludwin sat on one of the lumpy couches opposite Jay. Debbie Vickers had decided not to tip Jay off as to the purpose of the meeting—it was NBC’s call; let their guys take the heat—and if Jay had any expectation of what he was about to hear, he didn’t betray it.
Zucker began by saying that he had come to talk about the contract extension, and the news on that front was good. But he also had some other news. The network was going to extend Jay’s deal just as Ziffren had proposed, Zucker explained, so it would add up again to five years total—the bulk of the two remaining years and three more, taking Jay to the end of 2008.
But the network had decided that at that point it would be time to make a move. They were going