The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [30]
As for Jay’s longevity, Conan played the game, making it sound as if he had no reason to expect his Tonight commitment wasn’t open-ended. “Jay may decide he wants to do the show until 2025,” Conan joked. “Jay could say, ‘My brain will be in a jar and we’ll wheel it out and I’ll do the monologue.’ ”
But at the same time he took pains to express fondness for the man who at that point seemed—outside of the small circle involved in the deal, in any case—still to be in Conan’s way. “I like Jay and I wouldn’t want to do anything with NBC that I wouldn’t be able to tell Jay I was doing,” Conan said. He was being entirely sincere. That had never been his intention and would never be his intention. “I do not want to manipulate my way into this job.”
Of course, even with every issue of potential contention apparently settled—in private—the situation was worth another innocent joke: “Let’s just hope it gets ugly, and then we’ll all have fun,” Conan said.
On the morning of September 27, 2004, almost six months to the day after the formal announcement of the Leno extension, Conan O’Brien stepped into the NBC executive offices on the fifty-second floor of 30 Rock, picked up a pen, and signed his name to the document that promised to make him the next host of television’s most storied entertainment show: NBC’s Tonight Show. He returned to his Late Night offices, gathered his staff, and broke the news, beaming through the sustained applause.
At about ten a.m. in Burbank, Jay had his own staff meeting. Betraying no hint of reservation, he revealed that word was about to break in New York that he would be leaving the show at the end of 2009, with Conan taking over. The Tonight staff reacted with some shock, but Jay assured them 2009 was a long way off and they all had plenty of work to do in the meantime.
Soon after Jay made his announcement, NBC pushed the button on its prepared press release. It was official: Conan would be Leno’s (and Carson’s) successor in 2009, following the expiration of Jay’s contract. The only quote in the release was a crafted statement from Jay: “When I signed my new contract, I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor, and there is no one more qualified than Conan. Plus, I promised my wife, Mavis, I would take her out for dinner before I turned sixty.”
NBC deliberately shunned answering any press questions, wanting to allow the first public comment to come from Jay on that night’s show. Nothing emerged from the OʹBrien camp, either—not even a pro forma statement from Conan—again permitting Jay to take the lead. This concession was not made out of deference to Jay’s status as late-night’s leading star, however, but rather was linked to the fulfillment of one of the demands that had come from Conan’s representatives during the negotiations over the details of the Tonight Show contract.
One deal point that Conan’s reps had insisted on was that NBC announce the deal publicly. The network would have much preferred to make the arrangements quietly, and then leave them in place for a couple of years before going public. To Graboff, Zucker, and the other NBC executives, it seemed far too soon to be creating a lame-duck situation, which they knew was going to happen the second the world heard a guaranteed succession was in place. But the network team had little choice. Even if they resisted and pushed to keep the agreement secret for some substantial period of time, they guessed it would be only a matter of days before somebody on the Conan side—most likely Gavin Polone—would plant a story saying O’Brien was staying at NBC because he had been given The Tonight Show. So NBC assented to full disclosure—and Jay presumed