The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [79]
Craig went along chasing his muddled muse (he also took up writing a novel at around this time) when he got a call out of the blue from a producer named Peter Lassally, who worked for David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants. Ferguson had no idea that this was the same man who had guided Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show before serving as professional father to Dave himself. The offer Lassally was floating sounded utterly preposterous to Ferguson: Would he like to take part in a series of tryouts for a new host for CBS’s 12:35 talk show?
Craig knew the talk-show gig solely from having been a guest on them. His best appearances had been with Conan, whose comedy Craig greatly admired. (The admiration was mutual; during at least one appearance Ferguson set OʹBrien to laughing so hard he had to throw to a commercial.) But hosting? Did this guy know Ferguson was from Scotland, not Cleveland?
Lassally assured him there had been no mistake. “This is what I do,” Lassally told him. “I find people like you. And if I’m right, you’re it.”
To Ferguson, that sounded like so much showbiz blather—nothing would come of it; but why not do it for a laugh? That was his prevailing feeling until approximately five seconds after the red camera light came on—and then it all changed for Craig Ferguson. “It was like show-business crack. I was hooked. I was like, This is it. This is what I do. I’m a talk-show host.”
His two-night stand sold Lassally cold. The producer found this lanky Scotsman completely fresh and original, just as he had hoped he would. “And he was a grown-up,” Lassally concluded, something out of the ordinary for would-be late-night hosts, who mostly were arrested youths, playing to audiences of similar young men. Lassally was convinced this guy could build an audience around women, and maybe change that late-night advertiser preference.
Ferguson loved the job extravagantly from the start, even though he felt at sea for a while. The ratings were passable almost immediately, but Craig felt “weirded out” for at least six months, trying to find his own voice in late night and sensing that he needed to do something to make the show his own. A symbolic turning point came in an apparently unconnected circumstance. With the show on a break, Craig was in New York visiting a movie actress he was then dating. “She was a fucking pain in the ass,” as Ferguson described her. “She wound up a great friend, but she was a rotten girlfriend. I found myself in bed about three o’clock in the morning. I sat up and I said out loud, ‘I think I’ve got it. I’m not going to wear a tie anymore!’ She looked up and said, ‘OK, that’s great.’ And I remember thinking, And you’re fucking toast as well.”
What the tie business was about—Ferguson skipped a tie for about a year—was “not just doing what was available,” Ferguson decided. A period of time went by before he put that urge into a real innovation: He chucked the whole idea of scripted monologues. They sounded forced and pedestrian to him, and most nights he wandered away from the jokes anyway. Instead, he would put together a list of topics, gather his own thoughts on them, and then riff away on the air—comedy as improvisational jazz. Risky as hell, yes, but the move had the potential to generate rhythms no other late-night show had ever had. Some nights the notes might not fit together as a melody. But when they did, the laughs had a music of their own.
Attention and better ratings followed, and then came a deal from CBS—one no other late-night host, first at NBC and now at CBS, had ever had. Ferguson won a guarantee that he