Part II
"As a Playboy reader, he wanted to give me a
better-than-average interview. I wanted something more -- a definitive look
at the guy who may end up being the Johnny Carson of his
generation.
"Here's hoping we succeeded. If not, I carried
his germs 3000 miles and infected dozens of Californians for no good
reason." -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
O'Brien: Yes, this is how to do a Playboy
Interview -- completely tanked on cold medicine. I'll pick it up and
read, "Yes, I'm gay."
Playboy: We could talk another time.
O'Brien: (coughing) No, it's OK. I memorized
Dennis Rodman's answers. Can I use them?
Playboy: You sound really sick. Do you ever take
a day off?
O'Brien: No. The age of talk show hosts taking days
off is over. Johnny Carson could go to Africa when he was the only game in
town -- "See you in two weeks!" But nobody does that now. I will give you
a million dollars on the first day Jay takes off for illness.
Playboy: Do you ever slow down and enjoy your
success?
O'Brien: If anything, the pace is picking up. Restaurateurs
insist on giving me a table even if I'm only passing by, so I'm eating nine
meals a might. Women stop me on the street and hand me their phone
numbers.
Playboy: So you have groupies?
O'Brien: Oh yes. And other fans. Drifters. Prisoners.
Insomniacs. Cab Drivers, who must watch a lot of late night TV, seem to love
me lately. They keep saying, "You will not pay, you will not pay, you make
me happy!"
Playboy: How happy did your new contract make
you?
O'Brien: Terrified. The network said, "We're all set
for five years." I said, "Shut up, shut up! I can't think that far ahead."
Tonight, for instance, I do my jokes, then interview Elton John and Tim Meadows.
We finished taping about 6:30. By 6:45 my memory was erased and my only thought
was, Tomorrow: John Tesh. And I started to obsess about John Tesh. Sad, don't
you think?
Playboy: Not too sad. You got off to a rocky start
but now you're so hot that People magazine recently said, "that was then,
this is wow."
O'Brien: I try not to pay much attention. Since I ignored
the critics who said I should shoot myself in the head with a German Luger,
it would be cheating to tear out nice reviews now and rub them all over my
body, giggling. Though I have thought about it.
Playboy: Tell us about your trademark gag. You interview
a photo of Bill Clinton or some other celeb, and a pair of superimposed lips
provide outrageous answers.
O'Brien: We call it the Clutch Cargo bit, after that
terrible old cartoon series. They saved money on animation by superimposing
real lips on the cartoons. I wanted to do topical jokes in a cartoony way
-- not just Conan doing quips at a desk. TV is visual; I want things to look
funny. But we're not Saturday Night Live; we couldn't spend $100,000
on it. Hence, the cheap, cheesy lips, You'd be surprised how many people
we fool.
Playboy: Viewers believe that's really the president
yelling, "Yee-haw! Who's got a joint?"
O'Brien: It's strange. You may know intellectually
that Clinton doesn't talk like Foghorn Leghorn. Ninety-eight percent of your
brain knows the president wouldn't say, "Whoa Conan get a load of that girl!"
But there are a few brain cells that aren't sure. When Bob Dole was running
for president we had him doing a past-life regression: "My cave, get away."
And then back further, "Must form flippers to crawl on to rocky soil," he
says. There may be people out there who believe that Bob Dole was the first
amphibian.
Playboy: Do you ever go too far?
O'Brien: The fun is in going too far. It's a nice device
because you get Bill Clinton to do the nastiest Bill Clinton jokes. We'll
have Clinton making fart noises while I say "Sir! Please!"
Playboy: Are you enjoying your job now, with your
new success?
O'Brien: Well, there are surprises. I hate surprises.
Like most comics, I'm a control freak. But I am learning that the show works
best when things are out of control. Tonight I ask Elton John if he likes
being neighbors with Joan Collins. He says he isn't neighbors with Joan Collins.
He lives next door to Tina Turner. So I panic -- huge mistake! But Elton
saves the day. "Joan Collins, Tina Turner, it doesn't matter. Either way
I could borrow a wig," he says. Huge laugh, all because I fucked up. Later
he surprised me by blurting out that he's hung like a horse. The camera cuts
to me shaking my head: That crazy Elton. What can I do? Of course, I'm delighted
that he went too far.
Playboy: That "What can I do?" look resembles a
classic take of Jack Benny's.
O'Brien: There's an old saying in literature: "Good
poets borrow; great poets steal." I think T.S. Eliot stole it from Ezra Pound.
Comics steal, too. Constantly. When I watched Johnny Carson, I noticed that
he got a few takes from Benny and Bob Hope. When a comedy writer told me
how much Woody Allen had borrowed from Hope, I thought, What? They're nothing
alike. Then I went back and watched Son of Paleface, and there's Hope,
the nervous city guy backing up on his heels, wringing his hands and saying,
"Sorry, I'll just be moving along." Now look at early Woody Allen. You see
big authority figures and Woody nervously saying, "Look, I'll just be on
my way." Of course Woody made it his own, but he must have watched and loved
Bob Hope.
Playboy: Who are your role models?
O'Brien: Carson. Woody Allen. SCTV. Peter Sellers.
When Peter Sellers died I felt such a loss, thinking, There won't be anymore
of that. There's some Steve Martin in my false bravado with female guests:
"Why, hel-lo there!" And I won't deny having some Letterman in my
bones.
Playboy: You were surprise as Letterman's successor.
At first you seemed like the wrong choice.
O'Brien: I didn't get ratings. That doesn't mean I
didn't get laughs. Yes, I had a giant pompadour and I looked like a rockabilly
freak. I was too excited, pushed too hard, and people said, "That guy isn't
a polished performer." Fine! But it isn't my goal to be Joe Handsomehead
cool , smooth talk show host. Late Night with Conan O'Brien is supposed
to be a work in progress, and now that we've had some success there's a danger
of our getting too polished and morphing into something smoothly professional.
Which would suck.
� � �Do you know why I wanted this
show? Because Late Night with David Letterman played with the rules
and it looked like fun. Here was a place where people did risky comedy every
night for millions of people. We had to keep this thing alive. There should
be a place on a big network where people are still messing around.
Playboy: How bad were your early days on the
show?
O'Brien: Bad. Dave left here under a cloud: his fans
and the media were angry with NBC. Then NBC picks a guy with crazy hair and
a weird name. And the world says, "Harvard? Those guys are assholes." I sincerely
hope that the winter of December 1993, our first winter, was the worst time
I will ever have. I'd go out to do the warm up and the back two rows of seats
would be empty. That's hard to look at. I would tell a joke and then hear
someone whisper, "Who's he? Where's Dave?"
Playboy: You had trouble getting guests.
O'Brien: Bob Denver canceled on us. We shot a test
show with Al Lewis of The Munsters. We did the clutch cargo thing
with a photo of Herman Munster. Unfortunately, Fred Gwynne, who played Herman,
had recently died, and Al Lewis kept pointing at the screen, saying, "You're
dead! I was at your funeral!"
Playboy: For months you got worried notes from network
executives. What did they say?
O'Brien: They were worried. The fact that Lorne Michaels
was involved bought me some time. But Lorne had turned to me at the start
and said, "OK, Conan. What do you want to do?" Now television critics were
after me and the network was starting to realize what a risk I was. Suggestions
came fast and furious. I kept the note that said, "Why don't you just
die?"
Playboy: Did they suggest ways to be
funnier?
O'Brien: They were more specific and tactical. The
network gets very specific data. Say there was a drop in ratings between
12:44 and 12:48 when I was talking to Jon Bon Jovi. I'll be told, "Don't
ever talk to him again" Or they'll want me to tease viewers into staying
with us: "You should tease that -- say, �We'll have nudity coming up
next!'"
Playboy: You did come close to being canceled.
O'Brien: We were canceled.
Playboy: Really? You have never admitted
that.
O'Brien: This is the first time I've talked about it.
When I had been on for about a year, there was a meeting at the network.
They decided to cancel my show. They said, "It's canceled." Next day they
realized they had nothing to put in the 12:30 slot, so we got a
reprieve.
Playboy: Were you worried sick?
O'Brien: I went into denial. I tried hard not to think,
Yes, I'm bad on the air and my show has none of the things a TV show needs
to survive. We had no ratings. No critics in our corner. Advertisers didn't
like us. Affiliates wanted to drop us. Sometimes I'd meet a programming director
from a local station where we had no rating at all. The guy would show me
a printout with no number for Late Night's rating, just a hash mark
or pound sign. I didn't dare think about that when I went out to do the
show.
Playboy: Are you defending denial?
O'Brien: How else does anyone get through a terrible
experience? The odds were against me. Rationally, I didn't have much chance.
Denial was my only friend. When I look back on the first year, it's like
a scene from an old war movie: Ordinary guy gets thrown into combat, somehow
beats impossible odds, staggers to safety. His buddy say, "You could have
been killed!" The guy stops and thinks. "Could have been killed?" he says.
His eyes cross and he faints.
Playboy: How did you dodge the bullet?
O'Brien: There were people at NBC who stood up for
me. I will always be indebted to Don Ohlmeyer, who stuck to his guns. Don
said, "We chose this guy. We should stick with him unless we get a better
plan." He was brutally honest. He came to me and said, "Give me about a 15
percent bump in the ratings and you'll stay on the air. If not, we're going
to move on."
Playboy: Ohlmeyer started his career in the sports
division.
O'Brien: Exactly, his take was, "You're on our team."
Of course, it wasn't exactly rational of Don to hope I'd be 15 percent funnier.
It was like telling a farmer, "It better rain this week or we'll take your
farm away."
Playboy: What did you say to Ohlmeyer?
O'Brien: There wasn't time. I had to go out and do
a monologue. But I will always be indebted to Don because he told me the
truth. Wait a minute -- you have tricked me into talking lovingly about an
NBC executive. Let me say that there were others who were beneath contempt
-- executives who wouldn't know a good show if it swam up their asses and
lit a campfire.
Playboy: Finally the ratings went your way. Hard
work rewarded?
O'Brien: Well, I also paid off the Nielsen people.
That was $140,000 well spent.
Playboy: Ohlmeyer plus bribery saved you?
O'Brien: There was something else. Just when everyone
was kicking the crap out of the show, Letterman defended me.
Playboy: Letterman had signed off on NBC saying,
"I don't really know Conan O'Brien, but I heard he killed
someone."
O'Brien: Then I pick up the paper and he's saying he
thinks I am going to make it. "They do some interesting, innovative stuff
over there," he says. "I think Conan will prevail." And then he came on as
a guest. Remember, this was when we were at our nadir. There was no Machiavellian
reason for David Letterman, who at the time was the biggest thing in show
business, to be on my show.
Playboy: Why did he do it?
O'Brien: I'm still not sure. Maybe out of a sense of
honor. Fair play. And it woke me up. It made me think, Hey, we have a real
fucking television show here.
� � �Of six or seven pivotal points
in my short history here, that was the first and maybe the biggest. I wouldn't
be sitting here -- I probably wouldn't even exist today -- if he hadn't done
our show.
Playboy: The Late Night wars were hardly
noted for friendly gestures.
O'Brien: How little you understand. �Jay, Dave
and I pal around all the time. � We often ride a bicycle built for three
up to the country. �"Nice job with Fran Drescher!" �"Thanks, pal.
�You weren't so bad with John Tesh." �We sleep in triple-decker
bunk beds and snore in unison like the Three Stooges.
Playboy: You talk more about Letterman than your
NBC teammate Leno.
O'Brien: I hate the "Leno or Letterman, who's better?"
question. I can tell you that Jay has been great to me. He calls me
occasionally.
Playboy: To say what?
O'Brien: (Doing Leno's voice) "Hey, liked that bit
you did last night." Or he'll say he saw we got a good rating. I call him
at work, too. It can be a strange conversation because we're so different.
Jay, for instance, really loves cars. He's got antique cars with kerosene
lanterns, cars that run on peat moss. He'll be telling me about some classic
car he has, made entirely of brass and leather, and I'll say, "Yeah, man,
I got the Taurus with the vinyl." One thing we have in common is bad guests.
There are certain actors, celebrities with nothing to say, who move through
the talk show world wreaking havoc. They lay waste to Dave's town and Jay's
town, then head my way.