The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [90]
Meanwhile, Rick Ludwin was still doing his job. Whenever he chatted with Jay, as he routinely did, he had a message: The cash might be greener elsewhere, but that didn’t mean the grass was. Just look at the other examples of stars jumping from their home networks, Ludwin urged him, citing the one Jay would be most viscerally familiar with: Dave. Look what happened when Letterman went to CBS, Ludwin pointed out. Sure, he beat Jay’s brains out for a couple of years, but once NBC retook the late-night title, Dave was a loser for the next fifteen years. And the examples extended beyond late night. How about news stars, like Katie Couric? She was America’s sweetheart in the mornings on the Today show. Now look at her—last place on the CBS Evening News.
How much impact these arguments had on Jay, Ludwin could not be sure, but he felt he had at least planted some seeds of doubt about a happy switch to ABC.
Those seeds might have fallen on stony ground, but others had already dug some deep roots in Jay’s consciousness. More than anything else, what gnawed at Leno about his contract situation was NBC’s ability—and now intention—to beach him for at least six months. Conan would start June 1; Jay couldn’t get back on the air until after January 1.
When NBC agreed to Jay’s five-year extension back in 2004, it had carefully included, along with the obligation to pay him in full for the life of the deal, the right to shelve the comic at any time the network desired. In other words, NBC had Jay Leno for five years, and if at any point during that time it decided to replace him, it was completely within its rights to put him on a (symbolic) beach for as long as it wanted for the duration of that five-year period. Jay could work Vegas, Reno, and every Native American casino from Temecula, California, to Ledyard, Connecticut—but nowhere else on television until after January 1, 2010. Now, it was true that NBC had basically agreed up front that it would not exercise the right to shelve Jay until June 2009, when Conan was slated to start. But that was more handshake than handwritten.
Nobody was more aware of this situation—and obsessed by it—than Jay Leno. As he looked forward and considered his options, he could not help but look backward and chafe under his limitations. ABCʹs desirability as a destination was undercut by a sobering realization: Before he could reach it, he would have to endure the test—torture test, really—of an enforced absence of six months or more from television.
One top Hollywood agent, a strong Jay supporter, found himself befogged when Jay told him of this dilemma. With the clear leverage Jay had had back when NBC came to him with this cockamamie five-year plan, the agent knew Jay could have protected himself against getting boxed in like this. “The guy always went in by himself to make his deals,” the agent said. “He was the big dog. Somebody representing him would have said, ‘OK, five-year deal, you’re making Jay leave. But the minute you take him off the air, he’s free to go anywhere he likes.’ ”
Jay usually couched his concern about being off the air for so long in terms of what it would mean for his staff. If NBC really did send him into enforced exile starting in June, that meant months of no pay for his writers and other staff members. He conjured a worst-case scenario in which he got stuck in neutral all the way until April. That would be the case, he estimated, if he couldn’t hook up with anyone at ABC or Fox until January and couldn’t even talk to anyone before that. He couldn’t be expected to launch a new show overnight.
But the circumstances were actually quite different. From his conversations with Kimmel, it was clear Jay had a reasonably good idea that ABC had an 11:35 spot laid out for his arrival. As for the staff worries, could he not push his suitors for some assurance that nobody would lose income for that interregnum? A raise or advance in salary for