The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [33]
He went out and bought blue index cards and started writing jokes. He acquired a white yachting cap and a big cigar. And—even paler than usual from the surging fear—he set off for his stage debut. As he sat upstairs in the big Sanders Theatre, going over his cards, praying he knew what would make these people laugh, Conan could hear the crowd below, thump-thump-thumping their feet in anticipation. He realized he had arrived at the most frightening moment of his life and found himself frozen in his chair.
A stagehand finally came to nudge him: “You gotta get out there.” So Conan O’Brien sucked in some air, stuck on his yachting cap, picked up his cigar, and galumphed those big legs out onto the stage.
He got laughs—genuine, honest laughs. The sound wafted up from the audience and enveloped him, embraced him, cocoonlike—or maybe like the ring of smoke in an opium den. O’Brien had never used drugs and never would. But this? This was the same thing; this was cocaine.
The week of graduation, the Crimson—now edited by a kid named Zucker—ran a series of profiles of some of the departing seniors. Conan had his own framed and hung in his boyhood room back in Brookline (where it would remain, always). It identified OʹBrien—even with his American lit and history double major, and his thesis on “literary progeria” in the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner—as the “preeminent jokester” of the class of ’85. The profile ended with a quote from Conan, answering the question “What do you want to be doing twenty years from now?”
“I want to be hosting my own show,” O’Brien replied, “and hawking my own line of designer jeans.”
Conan Christopher O’Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on April 18, 1963, third in a brood of six, the children of Thomas O’Brien and Ruth Reardon O’Brien—a family so deeply Irish they might as well have lived in a bog.
But they didn’t; they lived in a big, rambling, comfortable home in a lovely neighborhood, a product of conspicuous professional success. Dad was a prominent physician, a specialist in immunology, who eventually would wind up teaching at Harvard Medical School. If anything, Mom’s record of achievement was even more impressive. A scholarship student at Vassar, she graduated from Yale Law School (after turning down Harvard Law), worked on the creation of the Peace Corps for the Kennedy administration, put aside her legal career to raise her children, and returned to law and became only the second female partner at the well-regarded Boston firm of Ropes & Gray.
Their third son did not spring from the womb funny—nor academically driven, despite the parental example. Though well loved in his supremely functional and warm family, Conan felt awkward and out of place for much of his childhood. He started out with a deep distaste for school, until he saw it as a route to recognition for achievement. Then he applied himself toward excelling with a steely purpose. Too gangly to be an athlete, unwilling to turn himself into a bookish nerd, and not confident enough yet to exhibit publicly the wiseass within, he was a kid without a natural constituency through most of his precollege years.
His sense of humor was initially more defense mechanism than personal statement, and it certainly did not seem an avenue to show business for the young O’Brien. But then, what did a kid in Massachusetts, with two professional parents, know about getting into show business? “You might as well say I’m going to Mars” was how it seemed to Conan. But he loved the idea of show business. He loved comedy, loved to make his family and the other kids laugh. He loved comedy movies, watching them obsessively, especially the classics featuring the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields. He took note of everything about comedy—pratfalls, verbal byplay, pure