The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [51]
Ohlmeyer also called Jay directly, basically to tell him, lovingly, that he was an idiot—that he should never have accepted this affront from NBC. He was dominant in late night; nobody should be telling him when to leave the stage.
However much Jay appreciated the sentiments, it still seemed to him that resistance would have been futile—“You serve at the pleasure of the king,” as he put it—not to mention out of character.
Jay’s public image had always been that of the blue-collar, work-hard, don’t-expect-much regular guy, so that had to be his for-the-record stance in the wake of NBC’s move. When the topic was raised, he would say things like “There’s nothing worse than whining in show business,” which he frequently compared to the lowest form of commercial enterprise: “You don’t fall in love with a hooker.”
Love was a prevailing theme of these shrugged-off remarks, and he mockingly equated NBC’s decision with being dumped romantically. “I’ve never been one of those guys, when the girl says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other anymore,’ who says”—and here the vocal pitch would reach a falsetto of mock anguish—ʺʹWhy? Why not? What can I do?’ No”—with his voice returning to its usual register—“I don’t do that. It’s ‘OK, babe, I’m gone.’ ”
The relationship metaphor had not popped into Jay’s head by chance. Even in his private conversations with Debbie Vickers and others, Leno came off sounding a bit like the jilted lover. He’d been loyal; he’d been true. And yet NBC had picked somebody else. Jay was, by his own description, “brokenhearted.” He sat in his dungeon thinking, We could not have been doing better. We were the only show making money after eight o’clock at night. It doesn’t make any sense.
It made sense to Jeff Zucker. With Fox breathing down his neck, Zucker—who fully believed that the offer from Fox was real because his trusted friend Jeff Ross had told him so and Ross was no spinner of self-interest-based yarns—seemed to have little choice. If he wanted to preserve his late-night lineup intact for as long as possible, he had to summon up enticement for Conan while locking in Jay. This plan had done it—and, in the bargain, avoided a replay of the Leno-Letterman train wreck. So Zucker was more than pleased with how efficiently it had all gone down.
But the strategy of “don’t lose Conan” also bred detractors. A veteran producer of entertainment series said, “Conan wasn’t Letterman. That was the difference. I don’t know if anybody looked at Conan and said: That’s the next host of The Tonight Show. He was hot, but, you know, the host of The Tonight Show? It was shocking.”
So shocking that from the moment of the announcement this producer had doubts about whether Conan should count on it happening. “I wondered that. A lot of people did. I never thought Jay Leno would give up the chair so easily. Jay Leno is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A big bad wolf.”
Up in the Burbank offices of The Tonight Show, that was not the animal Debbie Vickers was seeing. She was looking at a guy who felt like a lame duck—and a wounded one.
Jay was also angry—though he tried to keep that submerged. When Kevin Reilly, the new president of entertainment for NBC, came by asking if Jay wanted to talk about any of this, Leno suspected Reilly had been dispatched by the NBC hierarchy to massage his bruised ego. “Hey, I don’t want a therapist,” Jay told him.
Vickers felt caught in the middle, serving as mediator between Jay and NBC. On the one hand, she got the network’s point, in theory at least. But she thoroughly understood Jay’s reaction. Why not wait until he at least showed signs of fading before stepping up to erase him?
Debbie also knew shows had to get produced every night, no matter what was going on