The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [31]
There had been one other demand from the Conan side, tied to their desire for some guarantee of good faith from NBC. It was all well and good to be told Conan was getting The Tonight Show in five years, but as even one senior NBC executive conceded, “You can’t trust network executives; they go back on their word.” The Endeavor agents were hardly going to take at face value NBC’s assurances that they would go through with the deal, no matter what the coming five years would bring. They required a bit more value.
What was needed, Ari and his team concluded, was a penalty payment so crushing, so overwhelming, that nothing would ever induce NBC to put itself in the position of having to pay it. They consequently asked for $80 million. After the usual haggling, both sides settled on $45 million. Conan’s agents plugged in various bells and whistles, accompanied by recitations about how Conan could have taken another offer to go to a different network, and how he was staying only because NBC was promising this show, and if he didn’t get it, the damage was surely worth $45 million—plus his attorney’s fees after he sued.
Simplified, the terms meant that if NBC decided to renege on Conan for any reason—other than Conan’s refusal to work or some transgression of moral turpitude—the network would be compelled to sign a check of truly imposing magnitude. It was even bigger than Dave money.
That night, with a larger audience than usual watching—it included, after all, everyone who had been involved in this protracted deal, including Conan’s lawyers, who would be checking to make sure that whatever Jay said satisfied the stipulations—Jay stepped up to his assignment.
Looking sharp in a fresh haircut, Jay sat at his desk after the first commercial and, displaying something that looked like enthusiasm, laid out the tale. Like Conan and his backers, Jay clearly dissembled on the details, making it sound as if the two NBC decisions—extending Jay, anointing Conan—had been agreed to at different points in time. He certainly implied that he had agreed with the notion that his doing the show past 2009, when he would turn fifty-nine, was untenable, because “there was really only one person who could have done this into his sixties, and that was Johnny Carson—and, I think it’s fair to say, I’m no Johnny Carson.”
Leno acknowledged that Conan was funny and “the hottest late-night guy out there.” What was unquestionably true was the rationale for the move that Jay explained, which was the same one he had expressed to Zucker and Ludwin: He didn’t want Conan to go anywhere else. Jay cited the animosity between him and Letterman that had marked the previous turnover in the job and regretted that “good friendships were permanently damaged. And I don’t want to see anybody ever have to go through that again.”
Leno ended his statement by linking the move to NBCʹs late-night doctrine of temporary stewardship. “’Cause this, you know, this show is like a dynasty,” Leno said. “You hold it, and then you hand it off to the next person. And I don’t want to see all the fighting and all the ‘Who’s better?’ and nasty things back and forth in the press. So right now, here it is—Conan, it’s yours! See you in five years, buddy!”
CHAPTER THREE
THE CONAN OF IT ALL
On a brisk evening in September 1981, hanging around his cluttered room in Holworthy Hall, an eighteen-year-old Harvard freshman from suburban Brookline—near enough to Cam-bridge that he could have been a commuter—had no special plans.
He had spent his first weeks wandering the impressive and imposing campus, trying on different hats, looking for a place where he might fit in. Fitting in had always been an issue for the spindly