The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [87]
The NBC boss had arguments to marshal on behalf of this concept, but again, he never really got a chance. Jay did not see himself finishing out his career on cable television, which to him sounded like “living in the basement of your own house.” He was, by his own admission, an older guy who had grown up thinking network was the place to be. “Like my dad would say, ‘Cadillac is the Rolls-Royce of automobiles.’ ” The notion of relocating to cable at that point in his life “just seemed too weird.”
Jay felt old enough that he figured he shouldn’t start all over in “new media.” He had carefully taken note of what had become of radio’s biggest comic, Howard Stern, when he “sort of went to cable,” as Jay viewed it. Stern had accepted an enormous payday to abandon terrestrial radio in favor of the satellite company Sirius. To Jay, Stern had been a genuine populist—one of his highest compliments, because that was how Jay often identified his own appeal. “The truck driver, the average guy, would listen to Howard wherever, in the cafeteria, the car, the truck,” Jay said. “Then when he went to Sirius, I didn’t hear Howard quoted anymore. People don’t ever say, ‘Hey, did you hear what Howard said today?’ And I’m sure he’s still doing what he always did.”
The difference, of course, was that in order to hear Stern now, the old truck-driving fan would have to cough up twelve dollars or whatever a month, which surely amounted to a mighty investment for the average Joes whom Jay saw as the backbone of both Stern’s audience and his. If you started making it tough for the average Joes to find you, pretty soon you wouldn’t be a populist anymore. “To me,” Jay said, “the key to The Tonight Show is you’re at the airport and, oh look, it’s on the TV over the bar.”
Not likely that a show on the USA Network was making it onto many TVs in the airport in, say, Reno. Jay told Zucker his cable idea was a nonstarter.
As the 2008 calendar rolled through spring, May becoming June, Conan O’Brien could not help but think of the date looming one year in the future. His first night on The Tonight Show was set for June 1, 2009.
The prospect filled him with a real thrill because O’Brien, despite his long-held Letterman worship, also had a deep personal connection to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. He associated Carson directly with his dad and the fondly remembered experience of watching The Tonight Show as a twelve-year-old in 1975, in his den, next to his father, and recalling how his father laughed and enjoyed Carson’s matchless delivery and timing.
That reverence only deepened when Conan had occasion later—just a few times—to interact with Johnny. The first came before he even went on the air with Late Night in 1993. As a thirty-year-old kid, just named out of nowhere to replace Letterman, Conan met Carson at a celebrity-strewn lunch that the Center for Communication in New York held in Johnny’s honor—an event at which Johnny performed his final topical stand-up in public (though no one knew that at the time). Johnny’s best line of the afternoon: “I’m optimistic about television. Of course, you know, in the entertainment business, an optimist is an accordion player with a beeper.”
After the lunch, Carson greeted Conan amiably and offered a snippet of advice: “Just be yourself—it’s the only way it can work.” The comment seemed nothing but generous to O’Brien, though he later had a rueful second thought: And even then it might not work.
Later OʹBrien contacted Carson—and all the other giants of late night, including Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and, yes, Letterman—when he was hosting an NBC special about fifty years of late night on the network. Conan asked for Johnny’s input on the clips chosen for the special. He said they looked fine.
Most memorably for Conan, Carson had checked in with a call after NBC had named Conan as Leno’s successor (officially,