Read Online The War for Late Night by Bill Carter - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bill Carter
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again seemed bizarre to colleagues and most everyone else who heard of this idiosyncratic practice. The man was formidably rich but was sticking earnings under a mattress somewhere? Obviously Jay, who lived in a lovely Beverly Hills home, didn’t hurt for cash; Mavis had everything she could ever want and more; and Jay bought every vintage car and motorcycle that caught his fancy. But money for those things came out of the pile he earned on the side, performing up to 160 nights a year around the country at venues ranging from the big Vegas showrooms to outdoor chicken festivals in Fresno in 104-degree heat.
By rights—and again, by any sense of fairness that a hard-nosed agent would have hammered NBC with—Leno should long ago have been out-earning Letterman, whom he was not only outrating virtually every night of the year but also outworking by several weeks of shows a year. But Dave still pocketed millions more a year than Jay—a fact Jay never complained about, but actually trumpeted, usually trying to make a joke out of it: “My thing is, I always make a couple of bucks less than whoever the top guy is. You can’t eat the whole pie; you’ll get fat, choke, and die.”
At least some part of Jay’s attitude was due to the lingering fallout from the ugliness over Helen’s actions, which still affected him deeply. He would tell people he never wanted an agent or manager again, someone who might get overly pushy and poison his relationships. “I’ve heard how the executives talk and how they treat the stars that make what they perceive as unruly demands. And then suddenly it’s ‘Didn’t we used to get a promo at nine fifteen?’ Things go away, and you die a slow death.”
NBC knew that any typically aggressive agent would have insisted upon at least one dollar more than whatever Letterman was making (which peaked at about $31 million a year), but Graboff had a ready reply to any such demand: Jay was the guy sitting in the chair at The Tonight Show , the institution. Dave was the guy who had to set off on his own and create a franchise. Graboff had stored up a few more reasons why NBC could deny Leno Letterman-level money, but it never became a factor. “Jay never asked,” Graboff said.
And so it came to pass, like clockwork, just as Graboff expected it, that in December 2003, a little more than three years into Jay’s ongoing five-year deal, Ken Ziffren was on the line for a brief conversation about NBC’s most prominent talent. “We got less than two years left; Jay wants to extend.”
The expected formula called for a redo for the remaining time, with a small raise for Jay, and then three more years added on. That arrangement would commit NBC to Leno through the end of 2008. Graboff told Ziffren agreeably, “Let me talk to Jeff and Rick, and let me get back to you.”
There was no reason for Ziffren and Leno to have expected that their standard move to extend would set in motion anything other than the usual add-on years. But the request rolled the Mouse Trap ball out onto the first ramp of the still unfinished contraption that was NBC’s plan to secure its late-night future. When Graboff called Rick Ludwin and let him know the call about lengthening Jay’s contract had come, Rick didn’t need to do much math to work out the salient problem.
“This is going to extend beyond Conan’s contract,” Ludwin pointed out. He knew that by coincidence, not design, Conan’s contract was all but coterminous with Jay’s, lasting only a few months more. That had been an accident, because it wasn’t really advantageous to NBC to have both stars free to leave at more or less the same time if some arrangement could not be worked out. Now, Ludwin said, underscoring the point, if NBC simply agreed to Jay’s terms as it usually did, the network would have Jay locked into the show without having Conan locked in as well.
Graboff knew all this, of course, just as he knew that Fox had made a galloping run at
By rights—and again, by any sense of fairness that a hard-nosed agent would have hammered NBC with—Leno should long ago have been out-earning Letterman, whom he was not only outrating virtually every night of the year but also outworking by several weeks of shows a year. But Dave still pocketed millions more a year than Jay—a fact Jay never complained about, but actually trumpeted, usually trying to make a joke out of it: “My thing is, I always make a couple of bucks less than whoever the top guy is. You can’t eat the whole pie; you’ll get fat, choke, and die.”
At least some part of Jay’s attitude was due to the lingering fallout from the ugliness over Helen’s actions, which still affected him deeply. He would tell people he never wanted an agent or manager again, someone who might get overly pushy and poison his relationships. “I’ve heard how the executives talk and how they treat the stars that make what they perceive as unruly demands. And then suddenly it’s ‘Didn’t we used to get a promo at nine fifteen?’ Things go away, and you die a slow death.”
NBC knew that any typically aggressive agent would have insisted upon at least one dollar more than whatever Letterman was making (which peaked at about $31 million a year), but Graboff had a ready reply to any such demand: Jay was the guy sitting in the chair at The Tonight Show , the institution. Dave was the guy who had to set off on his own and create a franchise. Graboff had stored up a few more reasons why NBC could deny Leno Letterman-level money, but it never became a factor. “Jay never asked,” Graboff said.
And so it came to pass, like clockwork, just as Graboff expected it, that in December 2003, a little more than three years into Jay’s ongoing five-year deal, Ken Ziffren was on the line for a brief conversation about NBC’s most prominent talent. “We got less than two years left; Jay wants to extend.”
The expected formula called for a redo for the remaining time, with a small raise for Jay, and then three more years added on. That arrangement would commit NBC to Leno through the end of 2008. Graboff told Ziffren agreeably, “Let me talk to Jeff and Rick, and let me get back to you.”
There was no reason for Ziffren and Leno to have expected that their standard move to extend would set in motion anything other than the usual add-on years. But the request rolled the Mouse Trap ball out onto the first ramp of the still unfinished contraption that was NBC’s plan to secure its late-night future. When Graboff called Rick Ludwin and let him know the call about lengthening Jay’s contract had come, Rick didn’t need to do much math to work out the salient problem.
“This is going to extend beyond Conan’s contract,” Ludwin pointed out. He knew that by coincidence, not design, Conan’s contract was all but coterminous with Jay’s, lasting only a few months more. That had been an accident, because it wasn’t really advantageous to NBC to have both stars free to leave at more or less the same time if some arrangement could not be worked out. Now, Ludwin said, underscoring the point, if NBC simply agreed to Jay’s terms as it usually did, the network would have Jay locked into the show without having Conan locked in as well.
Graboff knew all this, of course, just as he knew that Fox had made a galloping run at
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