The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [4]
Pressed to come east for this new comedy event, the reluctant Leno asked Bass, “Is this the affiliates again?” He was told that this would be a significantly different group, though, yes, some affiliates would again be present. From his conversation with Bass, Leno took away the fundamental message: “It’s a night of stand-ups; I want you to do your stand-up act.” So after finishing his Tonight Show taping on Monday night, Jay had gotten up before dawn the next morning, driven to the Burbank airport, and jumped on a private jet for New York—to be, as he saw it, the closing act on a “night of stand-ups.”
As Jay arrived backstage, he was greeted warmly by the assembled comedy talent, including O’Brien, who said a quick hello; the two late-night stars had already seen each other briefly at four that afternoon at rehearsal. One of the other performers was a bit surprised by Jay’s somewhat ragged appearance: “He looked kind of fat, with his hair out of control.” When the makeup artist hired for the night approached Jay and asked if he wanted some work done before he went on, he declined. The performer, who had seen the Tonight host work in clubs many times before, was equally concerned by Jay’s demeanor. “It was striking that he was just sort of showing up and hadn’t bothered to put a comb through his hair,” the showcase participant said, adding, “In his defense, he had just flown across the country.”
In fact, Jay had been in Manhattan for just a few hours by that point. Arriving at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at about 3:30, Jay had rushed into town for his first appointment. NBC had brought him to a meet and greet with some of the affiliate board managers in the afternoon. Jay had no issue with that assignment, because he appreciated the importance of the affiliated stations as much as or more than any other star—or even executive—at NBC. His committed courtship of the station guys had been a key factor, after all, in his campaign to land the Tonight job back in the early nineties, when he won the fierce competition with David Letterman to succeed that show’s comedy colossus, Johnny Carson.
Jay had long held an almost Willy Loman-like belief in the power of the personal sales pitch. “Clean shirt, handshake” was one of his mantras for the process. “You come in, shake hands, meet the local news team. It’s just serving the customers—basic Dale Carnegie stuff.”
Leno knew some of the customers were uneasy about NBC’s ten p.m. gambit. He had already worked to douse a brushfire sparked when Ed Ansin, the owner of WHDH—NBC’s affiliated station in Boston (Jay’s home city, no less)—announced in April that he simply wasn’t going to run the new Leno show at ten p.m., supplanting it with an hour-long local newscast. “We don’t think the Leno show is going to be effective in prime time,” Ansin said. “It will be detrimental to our eleven o’clock news. It will be very adverse to our finances.”
NBC had every reason to fear such a move could lead to further defections from local stations fed up with the network’s abysmal performance in prime time for much of the previous decade, and so it had moved a howitzer into position in response: NBC threatened to yank all the network’s programs from the Boston station if it dared take that step with the Leno show. Jay himself stepped up, calling Ansin personally and telling him, “I’ll do what I always do: I’ll do local promos, whatever it takes.” The promise—and the howitzer—did the trick. Ansin backed down.
Conan, meanwhile, had passed much of the three months between the end of his run on Late Night in February and his arrival in Los Angeles to start work on The Tonight Show hopscotching the country making nice with affiliated stations, doing the same glad-handing of news anchors and smiling through the same promotional copy urging viewers to watch Phil and Denise on Channel 13 or Frank and Diane on Channel 5 that Jay had made de rigueur for