The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [55]
Soon the comparisons delivered by the Letterman camp took a different tack, such as “Dave is a four-star French restaurant; Jay is McDonald’s.” What Jay knew about McDonald’s was he liked to eat there occasionally, and that many more billions of meals were served there than at Le Bernardin. He would even make the analogy himself, describing his comedy as “good food at reasonable prices.”
Still, Letterman mattered to Jay. Like no one else on television, no one else in show business, no one else even in his life, Letterman mattered. The two comics had been linked since their earliest days as stand-ups in LA; they also broke into television at about the same time, with Letterman opening the way for Jay to emerge into public consciousness by having him as the most frequent guest on his Late Night show.
And of course they came together like estranged princes in a Shakespeare history play, each seeking to succeed the departing king. When NBC anointed Leno the host of The Tonight Show in 1992, it first played as a usurpation, as Letterman had for far longer been the presumptive heir. Later, when NBC came close to ousting Jay in favor of Dave, it turned into a Restoration drama—but only in one act. Leno survived, and rewrote the ending, but only at the cost of seeing his rival installed in the castle next door. And there they sat for sixteen years, separated by the narrowest of channels. Dave’s realm enjoyed a brief giddy reign before the size and strength of Jay’s historic empire of the night gradually overwhelmed him, leaving him permanently the lesser power.
By 2005 the outcome was routine: Jay supreme; Dave suppressed. Mercurial and moody in the best of times, a perpetually frustrated Letterman tipped often toward maddening to both his always admiring but usually cowed staff and to any executives at CBS who came into contact with him. Apart from the big boss, Leslie Moonves, whom Dave grew to respect and would sometimes chat with playfully by phone on the air, network interaction tended to be minimal. Little good usually came of any request or suggestion from CBS. Letterman never deigned to try to enhance his position by making some effort to help out affiliates or cater to advertisers—no upfront appearances for him—and he certainly had no interest at all in speaking to the press, even when advantageous moments for publicity arose. Virtually every interview request was declined, unless there was an element of duty involved—paying back guests like Ted Koppel at Nightline, Regis Philbin on his morning show, or Oprah Winfrey on her afternoon show. To even innocuous appeals for his reaction to some development, significant or trivial, Letterman would tell his press representatives, “What I have to say I say on the show.”
His tenth-year anniversary at CBS? No acknowledgement in the press. His twentieth anniversary as a late-night host—perfect fodder for some high-profile attention—received none. Emmy Awards won five years in a row, from 1998 to 2002? Dave didn’t show up to accept any of them and gave no interviews to express his feelings about them. The end of a famous feud with Oprah (she had resented his jokes about her) was marked by Dave’s publicly escorting her to the theater on Broadway next door to his own, where the musical she had produced, The Color Purple, was opening. While the stunt lifted the ratings for one glorious night, Dave had done no publicity to build up the numbers that night and he let the much covered moment with Oprah pass without taking any further steps to capitalize upon it.
Sometimes his reluctance was based on his commendable commitment never to play the shameless showbiz shill