The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [41]
Ross, recalling his recent experience with Miller, knew he didn’t want to live through that on a full-time basis. He repeated his concern. He needed to know who the host was going to be before he could commit.
OK, Michaels told him, it just so happened that that very night he was going over to the Improv club on Melrose to watch a showcase of comics auditioning for the Late Night chair. He invited Ross to come along.
The entire NBC Entertainment hierarchy was arrayed at the club, with Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield the two men in charge, thanks to their roles as the top executives at NBC Entertainment. Ross knew next to no one, so he sat quietly observing the long roster of comics. Most he had never encountered before, some he had seen perform, and a few he—and everybody else—would come to be familiar with over time. The group included veteran stand-ups, like Allan Havey, Paul Provenza, and Michael McKean (well known as a onetime member of Spinal Tap), as well as some lesser-known but accomplished comics, like Rick Reynolds, along with newcomers, like a roundish guy in thick-framed black glasses named Drew Carey and a witty, compactly built guy with long hair named Jon Stewart.
After the long show ended, the NBC group crossed the street to a restaurant for a postmortem. Nobody’s name seemed to be rising to the surface in the discussion, which hardly surprised Ross. How could it? They were all sitting there thinking the same thing: Not bad, but he’s sure not Letterman. Ross judiciously kept silent, but as the group was leaving, Lorne approached him. “There’s a meeting tomorrow in Littlefield’s office; I want you to come.”
The request struck Ross as slightly surreal. He hadn’t accepted the job, they had no host, and no one had any idea where they were going to find one. But now he was going to sit in on a meeting with the NBC bosses at the network’s Burbank headquarters.
When he showed up the next morning he was accepted without question as “Lorne’s guy.” Again Ross said nothing as the execs began batting around names; again nobody was compelling. Lorne wasn’t crazy about the idea of a pure stand-up as host, in any case—they always seemed to want to score, and that approach didn’t work when talking to guests. For his part, Ross kind of liked Stewart; he had previously worked with him at a New York Comedy Festival and was impressed by his quick comic mind. But nobody solicited his opinion.
Then, out of nowhere, somebody asked about Conan OʹBrien: Was he going to run the writing for the show? Michaels explained that Conan had decided he didn’t want to do it. He had his mind set on turning himself into a performer.
That seemed to stop the conversation dead. After a pause, Lorne had another thought: “Hey, maybe Conan can host it.”
Few in the room had a clue who this Conan guy was. But Warren Littlefield did; he knew him from his SNL background and from his reputation as the hot writer from The Simpsons. It didn’t seem to strike Warren as all that crazy an idea. “Well, should we test him, maybe?” Littlefield asked.
For reasons Ross could not fathom, Lorne turned to him and said, “Well, can we test him?”
The first thought that popped into Ross’s head was, What the fuck do I know? But what he replied was: “Yeah. Sure, we can test him.”
Conan got the call in his office at The Simpsons. It was Lorne, in that hypercalm voice of his: “We haven’t found anyone yet. Would you consider doing a tryout?”
Fear? Yes, for sure. Disbelief? Naturally, but there was no time for either. “Yes, of course,” Conan said. “What’s the harm in trying?”
What Conan had also been feeling was something eerie; he had been feeling it for months, since before he had parted with Howard Klein. Something was coming for him. Maybe it was an oncoming train—or maybe a ticket on that train. But it sure felt like something was coming.
When he got home that evening to the apartment he was renting on Wetherly Drive at the edge of Beverly Hills, Conan tried to make sense of what might be happening. Before he could get too far, his phone rang. It was Michaels