He retired as host of NBC’s Tonight Show in 1992, concluding a 30-year run that began when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was president and color TV was a toddler. Upon retirement, he made only a few evanescent public appearances, a silver phantom whose craving for privacy never wavered. A chain-smoker for most of his adult life (sneaking puffs at the Tonight Show desk during commercial breaks), he died of emphysema-related respiratory failure in 2005. And yet the spectral presence and kingly mien of Johnny Carson loom like Hamlet’s father’s ghost over the late-night talk-show wars that volcano’d this winter. It is over Carson’s throne that the daggers are drawn, his troubled spirit that must be honored and avenged. And it’s so hard to win Daddy’s approval when Daddy’s long gone.
ARTICLE: Hamlet, Johnny Carson, Leno, Letterman & O'Brian
GOOD NIGHT, TONIGHT
Great Carson’s Ghost!
The late-night war among Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and David Letterman is an Oedipal conflict: pretender, contender, and defender. But none has the elusive quality that made Johnny Carson king.
Johnny Carson, right, with sidekick Ed McMahon on May 11, 1988, hosted The Tonight Show for 30 years.From Bettmann/Corbis.
Although the late-night war of mouth-to-mouth combat has many smaller players to-ing and fro-ing, chewing bits of scenery for roughage, at its thorny heart is a trinity competing for karmic advantage—a contender, a pretender, and a defender.
Conan O’Brien is the contender, or was, until he was so rudely toppled. A herky-jerky jackanapes who triumphed over naysayers as the host of NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien, O’Brien and company delighted dormitories across America with beloved characters such as the Masturbating Bear, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and the mustachioed Spanish soap-opera heartthrob Conando. In 2009, O’Brien and his family and followers made the covered-wagon journey to reach the promised land, Universal City, California, site of his new home at The Tonight Show. And after only seven months, barely enough time to acclimate to the sound of Vin Scully’s voice lullabying the settlers to sleep, O’Brien was made an offer he couldn’t but refuse if he had a trace of pride within his balsa frame (to roll the starting clock on Tonight back to 12:05 a.m.), and refuse it he did, in an open letter addressed to the People of Earth: “Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity … and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future.” But now that franchise’s future squirms in the grubby, grabby hands of the windup stand-up comic who is both his predecessor and successor: Jay Leno, the pretender.
As every amateur scholar of pop media knows, the bad blood now bubbling and spilling over the brim anew began in 1991, after Carson’s retirement was announced and the war over who would win custody of the Tonight Show desk was joined. Carson had two vying and viable heirs, one of them long of jaw, the other gapped of tooth. The behind-the-scenes campaign to assume command of Tonight became the basis for Bill Carter’s 1994 book, The Late Shift, and a subsequent HBO movie, the latter an entertaining ruckus that made the main players look like braying cartoon critters with prosthetic attachments. One of The Late Shift’s wild revelations was that Leno hid in an office closet during a negotiating session, like Kyle MacLachlan spying in Blue Velvet, or do I mean Polonius fidgeting behind the arras in Hamlet? Whatev. Honor thy father was not high on Leno’s priority list once he took over Tonight. He notably did not mention Johnny Carson’s name on his first broadcast and salted the wound when, after one rousing applause moment, he exclaimed, “This is not your father’s Tonight Show!” Sacrilege!
In 2004, NBC, not wanting to have O’Brien warming up in the bull pen until his arm fell off, set up a succession plan that was almost too sensible to work: Leno agreed to step aside for O’Brien in 2009, affording The Tonight Show a seamless transition that would avoid the savage infighting and carpet stomping of 1991. In a 2004 statement that, as a YouTube clip, has since been draped like a toilet seat around Leno’s neck, Leno said, regarding the host job, “Here it is, Conan. It’s yours. See you in five years, buddy.” Yeah, see you in hell. For, unlike Carson, Leno refused to exit through the door exuding white light, instead succumbing to a new arrangement with NBC to host a nightly prime-timeTonight knockoff that would be cheaper to produce than hour-long dramas and keep his mug front and center. It was a bold experiment, composed of equal portions of hubris and folly. It wasn’t simply that the migration from late night to prime time seemed to produce a jet-lag effect in which Leno’s punch lines died before they got over the net, but that his sub-par ratings pulled down the ratings of the local-news programs of the network’s affiliates, which in turn pulled down the ratings of O’Brien’s Tonight Show,creating a huge drainage problem. Apparently working with clay models of the principals on his desk, NBC head Jeff Zucker then authorized the late-night reclamation plan that Leno accepted with lackey alacrity and O’Brien spurned. Leno emerged as the winner-loser. Although he has always positioned himself as a regular guy, a glorified grease monkey with a fleet of vintage autos, it was his head that seemed the most swollen with helium, vanity, and neediness—an unwillingness to let go that blinded him to the damage he was doing to his image and reputation.
Helpfully, David Letterman was available to point out Leno’s flaws, magnify them to gigantic, grainy size, and smash them with the palm of his hand with grouchy gusto. If O’Brien is the contender and Leno the pretender, Letterman is the defender in this Oedipal drama—the defender of the Carson faith. Although Carson had too much class to disparage Leno explicitly, it was obvious that he considered Letterman his true heir, making one of his rare post-retirement appearances on Letterman’s show and, we later learned, submitting jokes for Letterman. (After Carson died, Letterman did an entire monologue of Carson-supplied material.) The two even appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone’s comedy issue together, with Carson’s hand jauntily draped over Letterman’s shoulder, a significant gesture, given the much-vaunted armored-vault thickness of Carson’s frosty reserve. (Before he retired, Carson joked in a monologue that former staffers were trying to copyright the words “cold” and “aloof” for use in their memoirs.) What comedians admired about Carson was his poise, steely resilience, generosity to younger comics, Swiss-watch timing, and ability to mask his true emotions despite the camera’s stark examination, always maintaining a keen aura of ellipsis and enigma. Ironically, most of these qualities are what all of the late-night stars in this multi-sided kung fu cabaret—contender, pretender, and defender alike—have lacked. They have been incontinent, spilling their spleens, personalizing everything at a lowball level. (And then Letterman and Leno making cute with that dorky-looking Super Bowl stunt ad.) It will continue to make for great TV as Leno and Letterman face off on the ice again in competing time slots and O’Brien knits a network deal, but the adult supervision that Carson embodied will become further a relic of the past. The nearest cousin to Carson’s irritable, opaque cool can be found on television today only in Mad Men’s Don Draper, and he’s a fictional creation. Oh, and Barack Obama, equally lean, quick, and unrattleable, and there are those who think he’s fictional, too.
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