The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [39]
Conan liked Howard Klein, respected his work—but he fired him.
He started having a vague feeling that his life was changing, and he needed to be ready when the next door opened. So he asked a string of high-profile agents if they wanted to step up and explain why they might want to represent him. The agents all but lined up to pitch him their credentials. At the various meetings, Conan let them all know what he was intending: He wanted to shift to performing.
When Gavin Polone arrived for his appointment, he knew Conan would remember him from parties involving writers from The Simpsons, because many of them were Polone’s clients. He was now at United Talent (having been fired from ICM, the first of many contentious business separations in Polone’s career). But he had another ace to play.
Conan made his usual points about wanting to find a way to tap his urge to perform. Polone responded that he could totally understand that, because when Conan and his SNL friends had brought “The Happy Happy Good Show” to LA several years earlier, he had made a point of seeing the act. And he had liked it; he had especially liked Smigel and the redheaded guy. Of course you should be a performer, Polone told Conan. Maybe they could build a sitcom where he would write and star in it. Gavin was hired.
Still writing on The Simpsons, Conan spent his free time fighting off anxiety and frustration—and depression. He had always been prone to falling into an occasional slough of despond, sometimes even when things were going relatively well. Now he was picturing himself on an access road running parallel to the freeway, riding along mile after mile, looking for a ramp to get on but never seeing one. He knew he was close, so close, but he had no idea how to get onto that main highway.
Not that there weren’t distractions to alter his mood. It was 1993, and he couldn’t help but follow the tumult going on over at NBC in late night. NBC had picked Leno over Letterman as Carson’s Tonight Show successor—unaccountably, to an unabashed Letterman fan like Conan. Now, in the subsequent uproar, Dave was leaving for CBS and NBC seemed to have no clue how they were going to replace him.
By sheer coincidence Conan’s younger sister Jane had landed a job at the William Morris Agency. This put her in position to see confidential e-mails, and in the midst of the Letterman-Leno fracas, one that crossed her desk caught her eye: NBC was about to make a deal with Lorne Michaels that would give him control over the choice of the new host of the Late Night show. (NBC had to announce something the day Letterman was exiting; while it still had no host, it could at least tell the world that the talent maestro Michaels was on the case.) Knowing how much Lorne had respected Conan during his time on SNL, Jane called her brother to tip him off and assure him: This was meant to be; this is your slot.
Conan waited. He couldn’t realistically pitch himself to NBC as the replacement for David Letterman. Who the hell would take that seriously?
It was Lorne who did the calling, a couple of days later. Conan would compare his overture to being on the street when a meteor hits. But this wasn’t the crash at his feet; it was only the flash in the distance. The job Lorne pitched hard to Conan was as the creative brain behind the new Late Night show, a position that would place him somewhere between head writer and producer. Not the executive producer, responsible for the daily running of the show—Lorne had somebody else in mind for that. He wanted Conan to put his wildly inventive mind to work on the comic sensibility of the show.
Without a doubt this was an attractive offer: to put your own creative stamp on a big-time network show; to be, in essence, the Merrill Markoe of the new show, the brains behind the operation. Even so, Conan didn’t jump at the suggestion, but told Lorne about his plan to be a performer. They noodled around with a few ideas. There was the semibaked