The late shaft

IT WAS JAY LENO VS. CONAN O'BRIEN IN i GREATEST TV BAnLE EVER. A LOOK INSIDE THE HEARTLAND MINDS OF THE COMBATANTS

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• befell the sacred Fraternal Order of Late Night Talk Show Hosts. Befell them like a Hi-DEFCON nuclear strike, no less! You did hear about all that, I'm sure: the Cuckoo Coup upon Coco's Stillborn Empire? The Great Toadying Chin-Surrection and Double-Cross Grab-Back in Burbank? The Giddy

Dance of the Hoosier King's Spite Demons on Broadway? Oh, it was a time of atrocity, yes, but also of sweet adrenaline rush for those of us who patrol the deep after-dark side of the TV moonscape. Me, I'm never far from the sleepless front lines; such is my curse and professional lodestone (which we'll get to). But damned if it wasn't wartime all over again, and for certain, each major combatant rattled onstage nightly with a manic righteousness; defiance and swagger roiled and ruled. Whether getting fired, getting even, getting personal, getting shifted or unequivocally shafted—these boys were having almost too much fun, especially amongst themselves. (Gallows glee is just one of their job requisites—and so had commenced this black-hearted pile-on most exuberant.)

Somewhere near the thick of it I wandered into the Holly­wood command post of noble rogue Jimmy Kimmel, whose merry rampages during the fray—notably in the realm of Big Jaw-busting—had already won him the admiring sobri­quet of Robin Hood from comedy hepcats Paul Shaffer and Martin Short. Buoyant and still twinkling after a Friday

evening taping, he explained, "I love my wars! They energize me." He did look stronger and more formidable than when I saw him a few months prior—but that could have just been his new fascination with Man Spanx starting to pay off. Of course, the fine Kimmel fief-dom at ABC had never been in any real peril, whereas just a few miles away in Burbank, rape and pillaging (NBC style) had vanquished the redheaded prince-who-would-be-king (or something like king, eventually—if he'd gotten decent prime-time lead-ins and a full year or so to finish ridding his smart jangly pants of a few more ants). Ousted two Fridays earlier from his blip of a Tonight Show tenure, Conan O'Brien had last been seen flapping off toward purgatory unknown on the wings of a "Freebird" guitar jam, twanging along with Beck and Ben Harper, et al., while Will Ferrell crooned, "This

bird you cannot change " It made for a feisty final glimpse and

heroic lingering image of a fall guy who never knew what hit him. Anyway, downstairs in the warren of Jimmy Kimmel Live! dressing rooms, I happened upon guest Barry Manilow, who had appeared on the next-to-last Conan broadcast to perform, sans irony, the retro-swoony "Where Do I Begin? (Theme From Love Story)"—despite the rising stench of hostile takeover curdling the studio ions. Recalling the experience—"God, that staff of his is crazy about him!"—the pop legend mentioned that somebody he knew had randomly snapped a photo during rehearsal on that day, which caught a forlorn O'Brien in civvies parked at his onstage desk, lost in reverie and more than a little misty-eyed. Others in the Manilow retinue confirmed seeing the "bittersweet picture" before it was deleted ("out of respect") from its owner's camera phone. But by most accounts Coco had endured his foul comeuppance with shifting gusts of stoicism and indignation, always managing

to find the tunny in his sneak-up shit storm. "You can't blame a shark for being a shark," he matter-or-factly told colleagues who implicitly understood the shark to be that great white hammerhead of comedy James Douglas Muir Leno—once and future (ad infini-tum) host of the hallowed institution that had been handed over to O'Brien not quite eight months earlier. It was an unprecedented transition of power, in that Conan's job promotion from his Late Night graveyard domain had been announced a tad precipitously— as in way back in autumn 2004 (when George W. Bush was still in his first term of office). At that point he had followed Leno onto NBC air nightly for 11 increasingly itchy if madcap years; the network could keep him from bolting elsewhere only by promis­ing the venerable Tonight Show would become his...one distant day...five years down the pipeline. (Of the waiting period he would later reflect, "I thought in 2009 we'd be flying around with jet packs and our dinners would be in pill form.") But the deal was struck, and Leno (secretly hating it with all of his strange and unknowable heart) agreed to the switchover, and finally the time was nigh. So last year, on the Friday before Conan's Monday debut on June 1—during what were believed to be Leno's waning min­utes of Tonight Show sovereignty—there was the lame-duck host (i.e., Magnanimous Mandible) proclaiming to his lanky successor seated in the guest chair, "I just want (continued on page 118)

SHAFT

{continuedfrom page 58) to say I couldn't be happier. You were the only choice. You were the perfect choice. You have been an absolute gentleman...." Three nights later came the successor's warm but savvy reciprocation, imploring to his curious new viewership that "this is very important—I want to acknowledge somebody...a very good friend of mine... a vciy gracious man, a man who hosted this show for 17 years.... Let's all give it up for Mr. Jay Lcno! He did a nice job! Yes!" Then: "And he is going to be coining back on the air, I think, in two days, three days maybe, tops! {imitating the Lena whinny\ 'Yeah, let me get back in there, come on!'"

Which is to say the gingered prince had known everything from the get-go, without knowing anything. But then prescience and doggedness are two more key traits hard­wired into the genetic makeup of these Night Boys (the authentic ones, that is), fust as intrinsically, they can also flout obvious absurdity (wherever they may find it) with a subtle but majestic wallop. Thus, when he reemerged in public a month after his Janu­ary 22 network banishment, Coco did so via tweet, cheerily introducing himself to a new medium in 57 characters: "I had a show. Then I had a different show. Now I have a Twitter account."

So, to be clear, here is how the saga unfolded:

Brand-new Tonight Show host—a remarkably accomplished funnyman, no question—shakily makes it through seven-plus months of truly awkward, nearly unwatchable program steerage. (The rat­ings, while on a slight uptick, are much weaker than expected.) Whereupon the NBC suits, egg-facedly, decide to own their apparently idiotic mistake and pull the rug out from under the new guy. Franti­cally they oiler their storied franchise to the elder, proven stalwart host—still on the network payroll, thank Cod!—whose long exultant track record in late night should have prompted greater foresight and con­sideration before they promised the throne to this noisy new palooka. But since this happens to be late December 1992 and the floundering incumbent host is named Leno and the proven commodity who is suddenly bidden to unseat him (after serving for a decade in the hour adjacent to The Tonight Shoui with his postmodern Late Night enter­prise, which merely recast the template of talk-comedy and American Humor itself) is named Letterman—well, things play out rather differently.

For one thing, honor would prevail. But not before hell broke loose and the media fizzily declared the bristling Dave-ver-sus-Jay phenomenon a "Late Night War" (further immortalized by Nexi> York 'Times reporter Bill Carter's battle account turned 11 BO film The l/ite Shift). And as goes irony, here was Leno, seemingly the glass-jawed imperiled party—at least for a couple of weeks, three maybe, tops!—whereas Letter­man had already been lionized in smart

circles as the true injured party for not get­ting The Tonight Show in the first place (due in large part to Leno's supreme and argu­ably insidious network politicking). And so there, in desperate thrash, was Jay uncork­ing the wounded bravado, giggle-snorting about how NBC stood for Never Believe your Contract—the same soggy chestnut lie would deploy again 17 years later to evince an all-new victimhood for himself (fooling nobody). "It's a tricky situation," he said during that famous first go-round (tricky being the preferred Leno term for anything emotionally unpleasant). "Dave is truly a star and terrific, and this is a terrible position NBC is in. But fragging your own soldier doesn't make any sense to me." lie also said that he'd "obviously leave NBC immediately" before electing to move back an hour should Letternian consent to uproot him from the golden 11:35 p.m. time slot. He added (via native gearhead par­lance), "I feel like a guy who bought a car from somebody, painted it, fixed it up and made it look nice, and then the guy comes back and says he promised to sell the car to his brother-in-law."

Okay...in principle, maybe that's not the most delusional Leno metaphor ever, but even he knows his early Tonight Shows looked far from fixed up and nice. Almost uniformly they simply sucked in ways no redheaded future insurgent would be capable of matching—not counting the red­head's early work on NBC's post-Letterman Late Night program, since no new host can ever be instant dynamite. Leno himself told me in 1995 that he had erased every single show broadcast during his fust four months on the job—"practice shows," he flippantly called them—assuring they would never be seen again. (Cops might regard this as destroying incriminating evidence.) "They don't exist," he pronounced with the final­ity of a mob capo. "Never happened." Not coincidentally, those same debut months of awful Leno shows had been executive-produced by his longtime manager, the late and notoriously abrasive Helen Gorman Kushnick, whom NBC then ripped from his side (regarding it nothing less than an intervention) and fired for her professional thug tactics. (That Kathy Bates played her in the IIBO movie ought to explain enough.) "I look at that whole relation­ship as like a bad two weeks out of my life," Leno told me, erasing their 15-plus years of cahoots from his personal history as well and moving onward. "Never happened." As for the analogy about that car he bought, truth did resonate there, for good or ill, except that he (and Kushnick) had relent­lessly done the hard-core selling of Leno/ Tonight to network affiliates across the land, market by market, offering up any and all favors so as to cinch ownership of the most desirable and sleek set of wheels extant. And of course—lest we forget, because no Night Boy ever will—the sole reason for such fierce vehicular lust was that the previous driver (and legal owner until he turned in the keys after three decades of silky handling) was the impeccably fine John William Carson, silver-haired King I'.ternal of All Things Late Night. But then, as per inscrutable NBC tradition, the king's

royal carriage had been sold right out from under him when he wasn't looking (which didn't surprise him)—and sold to the wrong guy (ditto), not that anyone had bothered to ask the sagacious Carson for his choice in successor (Letterman, but certainly).

"Johnny was not even consulted," Leno later said to me, sounding actually incred­ulous. "Why wouldn't you ask him?" And just like that, from the safety of his trium­phant fait accompli, Leno demonstrated his great skill for guilt evasion—suggest­ing what had happened never should have—while somehow projecting Boy Scout altruism and fair-play values. This would be the Leno in which his nation placed its faith and also, within a few years of just adequate on-air improvement, its bulk share of Nielsen ratings evermore unwavering. At least, that is, until recent history barreled forth and NBC (coveting those dependable Leno numbers) finally cajoled him to stay close by slipping into the luxurious nightly 10 o'clock time slot last September, once Conan O'Brien had gotten a few months of decent Tonight Show stewardship under his belt (and, not insig­nificantly, lowering that hour's median age by 10 demographically seducible years). But Prime-lime Leno, with his Ameri­can flag lapel pin still glinting bright and blatant, looked stunningly worse—bored, impatient, ill at ease, distracted, denuded of desk—than even the early "never-happened" Tonight Show Leno. Mostly he just projected something akin to an affa­ble pout, his helium seemingly deflated by half—as though he was tapping his foot (which in fact he does quite madly— more like a jackhammer knee jangle, to be honest—whenever he sits still) and just biding time until this misbegotten folly died of neglect. Ratings blew, thus gut­ting lead-in momentum for local affiliate newscasts, which resultantly began tanking hard (despite Leno's appalling crossover shill: "Your local news starts now!"), which ultimately destroyed the valiant Coco smack in the middle of freshman curricu­lum. And yet Leno—the Leaden Toppling Domino of Doom—would whinny and rise anew, and the great critic Tom Shales would postulate (echoing suspicions fly­ing up and down the late-night corridor), "Here is a theory: lie did a lousy show at 10 o'clock on purpose, knowing eventually NBC would want to undo the (leal and put him back at 11:35. So the whole thing was a nasty, calculated Machiavellian scheme with Conan the hapless victim."

Meanwhile, Brother Letterman in the East—who had gotten himself blissfully snockered on vicarious-thrill overload—• was well under way attempting nightly to make convoluted sense of the mayhem, the allegations and the potential consequences for all involved but especially for Jay "Big Jaw" Leno (the reductive new pet name he'd lately hung on his old nemesis). In one mock public-service message—and there would be many of them beamed from his Ed Sullivan Theater, i.e., Broadway Baltlestar—he introduced a patriotic mon­tage in defense of that besieged prime-time host "with a fantastic variety show...a won­derful program!" Across floating pastoral

imagery of happy children eating water­melon and playing baseball and of Big Jaw himself smiling goofily, the voice-over explained, "Jay Lcno is Middle America. He represents traditional American values— the things this country was built on. Like killing Indians because you want their land. Jay Lcno. America's standing up for Jay!"

So here is where I might as well tell you I tend to know way too much about most of these poor crazy rich beautiful bastards. I will tell you they can't help being the way they are, nor can they help doing the pecu­liar night work they do. (It swallows their lives whole, quite joyously, despite atten­dant mania.) The ones who prevail are, without exception, congenitally possessed of an urgent unsettling brilliance, born of vulnerabilities sunk deep, nontrans-ferable to fellow mortals. "Yeah," David Letterman concurred in a surprising Roll­ing Stone interview two summers ago. "It's a pretty small group of folks, and only the people who do it know how difficult it can be." Rarely had Letterman availed him­self to any journalist since early 1997, but back when he used to talk more, he and I talked lots—and in those line dervish ses­sions his conversational dexterity would shimmer like quicksilver performance art: rich in heartfelt candor, arcane knowledge and perfect comic nuance. (Never have I encountered brain waves more pleasurable to download.) He made you understand the innate difficulties of his racket and of his own existential plight therein—which inev­itably meant nonstop shadowboxing with the magnificent exemplar of J.W. Carson, his idol and decade-long lead-in propel­ler. "I always feel like, Man, I'm struggling. I'm like a drowning man in quicksand!" he once told me. "And then you turn on John­ny's show and say [beaten], 'Oh, it's fuckin' Johnny!' lie's just easy, cool, funny. He looks good, he's got babes hanging on him, he's saying witty things...and it's like, How can it be that easy?" (Years later, Conan actually articulated as much to Carson in one of their few friendly phone summits:

"I'm a little angry with you," he pluckily informed the retired king, "because when I grew up watching you, you made it look like the greatest job in the world. You made it look much easier than it is." Carson just laughed, beyond knowingly.) Even back during that fractious juncture when NBC had proposed dumping Leno from The Tonight Show to make Dave's most fervent dream graspable at last (and thus derail his lucrative, if half-hearted, notion to open new business at CBS), I.etterman admit­ted to me, "I look at this mess I'm in now and I think [in dumb giiy voice], What the hell am 1 gonna do now? I have no clue. But Carson just figures it out and carries it off with great skill, grace and aplomb." Of course, history reminds us that Carson's solicited advice to Dave in that particular pickle was to get gone: "I would proba­bly walk," quoth the king, indelibly. Which Letterman did, straightaway from his holy grail, not least because Lcno's clumsy caress had quickly devalued it (i.e., it wasn't John­ny's anymore)—and also because Dave saw no moral victory in snatching back some­thing so meaningful that had already been given to somebody else.

Leno, I promise, would've gotten the same advice last January via any spiritual medium intrepid enough to flush Carson out of astral hiding. (lie was, after all, hard enough to find once he disappeared from television.) But as go poetics, the king had departed the mortal coil five years to the day after Conan departed his nicely fixed-up and repossessed 'Tonight Show. (Had the new paint job even dried yet?) When Letterman, in a monologue, wryly cited the coincidental anniversary of Carson's unex­pected death, he stressed, "But don't worry; Jay has an alibi." lie added, "You've gotta love Jay. He's like a Whac-A-Mole. You think you've canceled him and he pops up from another darn hole." But that—as Dave noted a few nights earlier—was and is Leno all over: "I've known Jay Leno for, I don't know, 35 years. We used to buddy around in the old days, and what we're seeing now is kind of vintage Jay. And it's enjoyable for me to see this. It's like, 'Iley, there he

is! There's the guy I know!'" By which he specifically meant this guy: Born when his mother was 40 (eons before in vitro fer­tilization), I.eno has ever since turned up when and where he was not supposed to. Fifteen years ago I wrote more or less that same sentence, never guessing its shelf life had no earthly expiration date. (Where else could he possibly turn up after his inde­fatigable slog to seize Carson's throne and then, since 1995, consistently rank num­ber one in the ratings over I.etterman's Late Show?) Then again, I also said Leno lives to be counted out because he knows he never can be. By then I'd known him as long as I'd known Letterman, going back to late summer 1982, when Dave's Late Night cavalcade was at its first-year midterm and Leno's booming semimonthly guest shots had become the postmodern equivalent of Don Rickles bulldozing onto Carson's set. Pitted together, their mutual familiarity bred a slaphappy faux contempt that was perhaps truer than either of them wished to believe. One such smackdown—lindablc on YouTube—captures them a year and a half into Late Night's march, with Leno deter­mined to elude actual conversation (never his strong suit, alas, as well evidenced dur­ing any given Tonight Slum' broadcast) so as to plow through his prepared litany of absurdities. Finally Letterman heaved a sigh and said, "I don't really need to be on here, do I?" And Leno jabbed back, "No, we don't need you here. I've been telling the network that for 18 months." Big Jaw, you see, was never not omnivorous.

Carson, the omniscient sage and sth-sayer (even minus Carnae turban), had of course been onto Leno early on. Never a huge fan of the Jaw's stand-up stylings, the king was later mainly bemused by "poor old" Helen Kushnick's transparent plot to expedite his ever-looming retirement and by Leno's shrugging "who me?" complic­ity throughout. Months after he stepped down—on his own goddamn regal terms, thanks—Carson came face-to-face with Leno in late 1992, behind the scenes at a teachers' awards function, and offered up unexpected pleasantries to his abashed

successor (who was by then free from Kush-nick's grip and suddenly fighting to keep The Tonight Show from being shoehorned to Letterman). Leno later showed me the ear­nest, contrite letter he sent to Carson after that meeting, which read, in part, "Dear Johnny: Just a little note to wish you good luck on your trip to Africa. I'm sure what­ever dangerous situations or wild beasts you encounter couldn't possibly be any stranger than what is going on at NBC. Have you heard the latest idea? Simulcast live: Dave on one side of the screen, me on the other." (As these parallels never cease, we might note that at the outset of Operation Coco-Coup, when NBC made rumblings about delaying The 'Tonight Show for a nightly half hour of I.eno's joke-a-palooza, O'Brien floated the same split-screen concept as a rumored resolution to the madness—as well as this one: "Jay and I will be joining the cast of Jersey Shore as a new character called the Awkward Situation." Letterman, meanwhile, suggested they work as co-hosts: "It'll be Conan and Jay! Conan comes out, says, 'Welcome to The Tonight Show— and now here's Jay with his little jokes.' Then Jay goes and works on his truck. It's a great show. It's genius!")

But wait—also in his letter to Carson, Leno went on to self-flagellate (quite unprecedented!) and to eat much crow regarding all ugliness surrounding his ascension to the Burbank throne: "I was extremely touched by your graciousness, considering how poorly everything at my end was handled. I was stupid and naive and will never again allow anyone to han­dle my affairs for me. If you remember the story I told you backstage, I would like to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger's words to me: 'Leno, you asshole.'" (Indeed, Leno has since flown without formal represen­tation, which may partly explain why he rolled over so easily—and in the long run so stupidly—in 2004 when NBC foisted the five-year exit plan on him. No profes­sional showbiz guard dog would've let that happen.) As for the future Covernator's reproach, any number of early Team Leno transgressions might've incited such con­sternation, but one in particular glared and glared. Leno, quite correctly, told me that "the biggest mistake of my entire life" was to intentionally refrain from acknowledg­ing Carson—at all—on his inaugural Tonight Show, just 72 hours after the king's momen­tous last hurrah. (lie claimed Mrs. Kushnick forbade it, and as their toxic dynamic dic­tated, he did as she told.) Nevertheless, I will tell you that Carson was far from totally sold on Jay's obeisant pledge of redemp­tion. After Leno bade me out of the blue to co-author his 1996 memoir, Leading With My Chin, a roustabout pastiche of favor­ite stand-up tales from the road—frankly, he knew I had heard most of them, end­lessly, over years of covering his runaway career climb—Carson dropped me a dev­ilish note in which he wryly questioned Leno's spirit of generosity by pointing out my name had somehow been left off the book's cover. (Frankly, I was fine with that omission—since always in the back of my head lurked the winking words of Leno's excellent post-Kushnick executive producer

Debbie Vickers, who asked me before the writing commenced, "Does it matter if any of it's true?")

I should add that four years later—after Letterman's emergency quintuple heart bypass shook both the late-night firinanient and the culture to its core (which tells you more about him than his ratings might)— I was assigned to write a long candid think piece about the Meaning of Dave (and thus of Jay, as they are that inextricable), which in the end did not please Leno for various reasons. (About that I remain sorry, since I will always hold certain affection for him.) lie phoned me immediately to pronounce, "This friendship is over"—and has since gone on to release a couple of books aimed at children. I've noticed that whenever celeb­rity authors guest on his show and ask him about his own literary output, he quickly mentions the kids' books—and then softly mutters, "And there was another one before those." In that way I'm reminded that I too never happened.

The eyes of Leno began spooking Conan by midsummer last year, following him all over Los Angeles. From billboards, from

MTA commuter shelters, even splashed onto the side of the bus idling in the next lane—Jeeeeesus! That anvil-like mug was everywhere, heralding its owner's immi­nent debut in prime time, which ultimately became the crime scene wherein The Jay Lena Show's weakest-link failure triggered the murder of O'Brien's loftiest achieve­ment. Of course Coco could not have known that at the time, so he just blithely reported the odd phenomena lo Tonight Show viewers, chuckling about this "giant face that pulls up alongside your car... and it's him leaning like this.... 'Hi there! How ya doiii'? How are ya?' I'll pull up at a light and he'll be like, 'Peek-a-booooo, Conan.'" True story—and also decent omi­nous metaphor for the Leno Skulk (as in, to loiter darkly, to never leave, lo lay in wait), which may well be remembered as the hinkiest aspect in this whole lost moot case against Big Jaw.

Letterman, in fact, had masterfully called the Skulk modus into question a few nights before Conan closed shop, unleashing per­haps his most stirring and plainspoken argument throughout the frenzy—"And I don't even have a dog in this race!" With all his hard-won fraternal gravitas, he threw down: "So five years ago when NBC said

to fay, 'You know what? Conan is going to take over your job in five years'—that's when you say, 'Okay, fine, no hard feelings.' You call ABC. You call Fox. You try to get my job. You leave. You don't say [in Ijmo whinny], 'Yeahhhhh, okay, buddy. I'll be in the lobby if you need me!' You don't hang around. You go across the street and you punish NBC. And you make them eat their words.... That's the way these things are supposed to work. It's just part of evolu­tion. It's Darwin. You get fired: Get another gig! Don't hang around waiting for some­body to drop dead!" Then he added, as only he could, after a short self-ieflective giggle, "Well...I feel I've gone too far yet again tonight."

Clearly, however, the intuitive great white [aw had tasted traces of pale Irish­man night-blood in the water since early on. Only two months into his prime-time Skulk, Leno gave a sort of uncharacter­istically raw Q&A to the trade weekly Broadcasting cs Cable, published November 2, in which his resolve of amicable tongue biting appeared to have worn thin. Asked whether he would be thrilled if magically reinstalled tomorrow at his old 11:35 post, he hemmed and hawed in a man­ner that sent chills through Conan's base camp: "Oh, I don't know," Leno replied, elliptically. "Are you married? Whatever you want, honey." Then he kept circling back toward prey: "If it were offered to me, would I take it? If that's what they wanted to do, sure. That would be fine if they wanted to." Would that be his prefer­ence? "I don't know.... I guess. But it's not my decision to make. It's really not. I don't know." If this wasn't quite schadenfreude aimed at the new Tonight Show regime, it nevertheless felt threatening enough to prompt interoffice firestorms. For one thing, according to a privy high-ranking source, Leno neglected to forewarn any­one of his slip. "Usually he'd always call Conan and say, 'Fhhhh, I didn't mean that' or whatever, but he never called. Noth­ing." (One NBC exec apparently even bleated—hyperbolically, for certain—to Coco's people, "fay's flipped out.") To sort out the mess, weirdly enough, it fell to America's last great sidekick (and Conan jangle-softener supreme) Andy Richter to reach out to Leno and ask what the hell he was thinking. But the Jaw refused to eat his words, according to the source. "I apologi/.e for saying it publicly," Leno told Andy, "but I do feel that way."

And so the Skulk would loom onward, perhaps even more portentously. "I never say no mas," he also informed the BisC, inter­rogator, despite his indisputable power to do whatever he wished anywhere on TV (or off) and his untouched mountains of fuck-you money with which to keep his large staff secure. (He notoriously brags of having banked every million ever paid to him by NBC while subsisting solely off personal-appearance fees.) "I've never walked away from anything in my life," he added. "This is what I do. You keep plow­ing ahead. If someone wants to take you out, I'm out." Less than three months later and a mere handful of days after Conan had been taken out and plucked clean of

peacock feathers, Leno would bring his urgent quest for image reparation to the High Court of Oprah. (Certainly he needed to improve on his interim blurt—vis-a-vis freshly tarnished image—during a week­end I'M/, ambush: "You know what's good for tarnish?" he joshed, all cavalier. "A mix­ture of vinegar and ammonia. That'll bring it right back.") Before the magisterial O, however, he shrugged, squirmed, whined, lamented, rationalized and referred to the grand hostess cum savior as "doll" and "baby." My favorite part was his insistence Oprah would never, ever be pried loose from television: "You'll be there, baby.... You and I will go down together. You and I will hold hands and walk out into the sunset together. You're not going anywhere; I'm not going anywhere."

Hut Madam Winfrey proved to be a firm and relatively immovable force of conscience—on camera, at least—throughout the deposition. Perhaps to fortify her demeanor, an Oprah .com poll taken before the show had indicated sympathies for Conan over Leno ran, quite stunningly, in the 96th percentile—which, let's face it, could've been the techno-geek wizardry of riled Team Coco revolutionaries at work. (Which further begged the question, Where were they when Conan was hurting for ratings?) Still, some testimony from the inquisition bears minor excerpting: (): Do you feel any personal responsibility for Conan's disappointment? j: No. It had nothing to do with me. I mean, as I say, there's always someone waiting in the wings in this business to take your job. If you're not doing the numbers, they move on. It's pretty simple.

O: Mm-hmm.... But do you think now you could have done what Conan did? When they came in and said your prime-time show's canceled, you say, 'Okay, you owe me two years.... Pay me out, pay out my staff.' You could have done that. j: I could have done that, but I didn't. They offered me my old job back. O: Right, I get that, j: Which is the dream job. I said okay.

Which was the foregone conclusion—• truest true stoiy!—that Conan had served up in a monologue once it was certain his own fleet "fulfillment of a lifelong dream" had been lynched: "I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life—unless fay Leno wants to do it too." Then came his Lcno-voiced punc­tuation, because there's something about emulating its familiar nattering sibilance that always makes unfathomable truth cut that much deeper: "F.hhhhh, you still using that? Can I have it now?"

If there was a singular shining moment in those January weeks of Night Boy tussle, it arrived on Tuesday the 12th when Coco the Conscientious Objector dropped his perfectly crafted "People of Earth" letter on the populace. He'd also read it aloud— betwixt intermittent quaky pauses—to his staff assembled on the cavernous $50 mil­lion soundstage NBC had built for him along the Universal back lot. Beneath the line foolish sci-fi salutation, of course, he had effectively "told the network to go fuck

themselves in a very elegant way," as one of his top producers put it to me. At crux, he declared that his Tonight Show would not be shoved five minutes into the next day so as to follow even a half hour of Leno, Conan's ever inescapable warm-up act. As such, the redheaded prince fell on his sword for a broadcast legacy owned by a conglomer­ate that gave not one shit about legacy. (Big Jaw, conveniently enough, had also cheer­fully stated in that November hot-potato interview, "I'm not a legacy guy." I ley, per­fect !) Conan concluded, "Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet, a time slot doesn't matter. But with The Tonight Shorn, 1 believe noth­ing could matter more." (Actually, after that last part, this is how he concluded: "For the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it's always been that way." But still.)

Anyway, he made no mention of the Karth People letter on air that night, but his brethren rejoiced in a stoked solidar­ity, if individually: The fearless Jimmy Kimmel performed his entire hour pro­gram as Leno in full Big Jaw prosthetics, entering to a fake Leno-zealot swarm of mindless high-fivers and lisp-yapping out, "My name is Jay Leno, and as you prob­ably know, I'm taking over all the shows in late night." lie also cited Conan's letter, "released [earlier] today that said, 'I won't participate in the destruction oi'Tlie Tonight Show.' Fortunately, though, I will!" Mean­while, Letterman's vicarious delirium knew no bounds—righteously pumping his fist in the air and embellishing on Conan's I-ain't-budging throw-down, he hollered over and over (like maybe Coco on steroids?), "Oh yeah? What are you gonna do about it?" (Guest

Whoopi Goldberg wryly indulged him moments thereafter: "It's really nice when you're vindicated, isn't it?") In his mono­logue he delivered this thinly veiled aside, based on the denouement to his own 1992 NBC quandary: "Conan said he made the decision not to follow Leno at 12:05 after he talked to Johnny Carson."

This much I know for certain: Carson, who endured three decades of NBC's corporate bungling, would have led all applause for Conan's gutsy stand (just as he would have been proud of Letterman's miraculous head-on defusing of the messy sextortion case that befell the veteran host last October). Kight years ago, when the king permitted me to profile him a decade after vanishing into civilian life, he repeat­edly told me (and anyone within his insular circle), "I left at the right time." For sure, the garish deterioration of late-night tele­vision and of society itself was not his thrill. In a previous chance encounter, I recall his palpable chagrin over the prospect of the Leno-Letterman travail being dissected as a strange cable movie: "Clan you believe that awful shit?" he said woefully. "It's just ridiculous. I mean, give me a break!" As it happened, I began work on a thorough­going (and ongoing) Carson biography not long after his 2005 death, which led me to the 30 Rock office of the recently anointed next-in-line—hilarious, right?— who happily recounted for me all of his (mostly telephonic) brushes with the great man. Indeed, in their last chat shortly after Conan had been named Leno's eventual successor, Carson cracked, "It sure is a long engagement before the wedding, kiddo."

But, as during the other couple of times they had spoken, Carson was warm and encouraging: "He was great," recalled O'Brien, "because I said, 'Listen, I just

want you to know that I'm going to do my best to take care of this franchise.' And he said, 'That's quite a franchise, isn't it?' And you could almost hear his eyes roll. Kind of like [sarcastically], 'Pretty good, huh?' I'm like, 'Yeahhhh....' But when I got off the phone, I thought whatever happens now— even if by some twist of fate, for whatever reason, I didn't get to actually have The Tonight Show and ended up on Skid Row—I talked to Johnny about taking over that program, and he gave me a little advice. And I thought, Well, I've always got that. What beats that in show business?"

Of course the epilogue to all this made anti­climax feel like gross understatement. On the night before Super Bowl Sunday, I hap­pened to be in the social midst of comrade Kinimel, whose radar misses nothing. Thus he just learned of the top-secret Letternian Late Show promo to be unveiled during the game: "And guess who's starring in it with Dave," he said, more than a little crest­fallen. (It had been Kimmel, after all, who climbed directly into the ring with I.eno— heroically rope-a-doping llig Jaw two nights after playing him on his own show—by sub­mitting to Leno's hoary prime-time Q&A segment "10 (or) 10," wherein he starkly implored, "Listen, Jay, Conan and I have children—all you have to take care of is cars. I mean, we have lives to lead here. You've got $800 million! For Clod's sakes, leave our shows alone!") And so the largest viewing audience in TV history beheld the 15-second spectacle of Leno-Oprah-Dave sandwiched together on a sofa with snacks as Dave moans, "This is the worst Super Bowl party ever!" and Oprah admonishes, "Oh, Dave, be nice!" and a forlorn Leno whimpers, "He's just saying that because

I'm here," which Dave then parrots back in his mocking Leno-voice, prompting Oprah to toss up her hands in hopeless dismay, while Leno looks even more sunken and desperately deserving of a hug. And just like that—what, all was forgiven? The pub­lic could only guess—if it cared to guess at all, which it mostly didn't. Late-night insid­ers, meanwhile, were either entertained, disheartened or quite certain Letterman knew what he was doing—i.e., turning Leno into his personal lackey-buffoon after nearly two decades of zero contact between them. Letterman's longtime producer Rob Burnett instantly tried quelling speculation: "It's not like we all went out to dinner," he said. "Dave had a funny idea, Jay recog­nized that, and they both came together."

Leno, being Leno—and, at this point, why shouldn't he be?—played it to full advantage the following night on his next-to-last-ever broadcast ofThe Jay Ixno Show, which had plowed forth (naturally) for two awkward weeks in post-Oonan aftermath. "No matter what animosity there is among comedians," he merrily informed his audi­ence, "a good joke is a good joke. And I thought, ya know, it just makes it all go away." Which, from his point of view, it did—beginning with the seismic moment he and Letterman greeted each other at the clandestine shoot above Dave's studio. "You know," he went on, "whatever hap­pened in the last 18 years disappeared. It was great to see my old friend again. It was wonderful." That same night, on the other hand, Letterman said almost nothing about the promo spot—perhaps distanc­ing himself from its meaning any way he could. He did, however, acknowledge that "people really thought this was big-time stuff. So I just wanted to take a second here now to thank the actors who played Oprah and Jay Leno. They did a tremen­dous job." Word circulated, accurately, that Conan had also been asked to appear in the promo but declined out of fealty to his reported $4()ish million exit settlement with NBC. But according to one close Coco col­league, that wasn't exactly the case; instead, when the premise was described to him— the whole eveiybody-on-a-couch-with-Leno thing—his pale face went much paler. And his verbal response was thus: "No fucking way will I ever do that!"

Anyway, have you heard this? Leno reclaimed his show at the start of March and instantly began killing Dave again in the ratings. True story. I think it was on his third night back that he turned to his bandleader and said, "Kev, I know this is gonna sound weird, but it feels like we've been doing this for years!" Later on that same show, his guest Chelsea Handler referred to some stupid running bit she once withstood on his prime-time pro­gram. Leno quickly bouldered across whatever she was saying—almost like he couldn't hear her—and affected a big bari­tone swagger: "Those days are over, baby," he practically bellowed. "That never hap­pened!" By the way, just to be clear again: I didn't make any of this up.

CARSON WAS WARM AND

ENCOURAGING TOWARD

CONAN. "THAT'S QUITE A

FRANCHISE, ISN'T IT?" HE SAID.

"You call ABC. You call Fox.

You try to get my job. It's

Darwin," said Dave. "You

get fired: Get another gig!

Don't hang around waiting

for somebody to drop dead!"