January 30, 1994
BEHIND THE HEADLINES IN THE LENO -- LETTERMAN WAR
BY BILL CARTER;
NOTHING IN HIS OFTEN TURBULENT RELATIONSHIP with his network prepared David Letterman for the agony he would feel beginning June 1991, when two NBC executives flew into New York to give him the official word: Jay Leno, and not David Letterman, would succeed Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show." It was the end of the dream Letterman had carried with him since childhood.
When he was growing up in Indianapolis, Letterman once got a Tinker Toy set as a birthday gift. The first thing he built was a microphone, just like the ones he saw Steve Allen and Garry Moore using on television. When Johnny Carson took over "The Tonight Show," in 1962, Letterman found an idol. He watched and dreamed: Someday he would be that stylish, witty guy commanding late-night television.
In the mid-1970's Letterman began to date Merrill Markoe, a young comic and comedy writer he met at the clubs in Los Angeles. "We were on one of our first dates," he said, "and I told her. She was the only person I ever told." Merrill Markoe heard David Letterman's dream. Step 1: Get to "The Tonight Show," do a killer spot, then sit next to Johnny Carson. Step 2: Succeed Johnny as the host himself someday.
Even after he got "Late Night With David Letterman," the 12:30 A.M. show on NBC, in February 1982, and quickly established himself as the hottest television talent of his generation, he retained the dream, and the plan -- no campaigning for the job, nothing but respectful comments about Johnny. All along he believed he would earn "The Tonight Show" with his work -- 10 years of ground-breaking comedy, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues for his network.
When NBC ignored all that and chose Leno, Letterman was devastated. Only those closest to him saw the depth of the pain that decision inflicted on him. And as the days wore on, Letterman's oldest demon, self-doubt, came roaring up inside him. He began to feel overcome with the conviction that after all he had achieved, he suddenly had no future at all in television.
Jay Leno's ambitions were simpler but no less intense. His goal was to establish himself as a working comic, not as a television star. An all-encompassing emphasis on hard work and honest effort would come to define both his career and his personality.
For Leno a career in show business was not something you dreamed about, it was something you worked on -- like a car. "The Tonight Show" was a mecca because it was where comic reputations were made. To Leno, Carson was not so much an idol as the foreman of the most important plant in the business.
It was at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard in L.A., the cradle of the Baby Boom comics, in 1975, that Letterman and Leno first met. Letterman had walked out of a solid television career in Indianapolis to chase the dream. Leno was already the reigning talent of the new stand-up comedians. When Leno heard Letterman, he knew that a new, distinctive comedic voice had arrived. When Letterman saw Leno's polished act, he wanted to pack his bags and run home. Letterman, like most of the young comics at the Comedy Store, was in awe of Leno. But Letterman set out to learn from him, to add to his own hip material the cynically smart attitude that Leno carried with him on the stage. Letterman learned quickly -- and did very well.
The story of David Letterman and Jay Leno is a story of the two leading comedians of a generation who found their careers and their lives tossed into the high-speed mixer of show business competition. Their paths began along parallel lines, then crossed, with each man supplying the boost the other needed to vault himself toward stardom.
Eventually the game became leapfrog -- and then chicken. In the end the stakes would grow huge. Two networks with different ambitions and agendas would escalate the game into a showdown, looking to control the biggest share of the $70 million-plus profits in late-night. And the two comics in the middle would find themselves firing off jokes into the night on separate stages instead of sharing jokes on the same one.
WHEN "LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID Letterman" went on NBC, in 1982, Letterman did not forget how much he admired Leno's command as a stand-up. Two months into the new show, Letterman brought on his old Comedy Store colleague.
"Late Night" immediately had a signature guest to pair with Dave; future Leno appearances would consistently boost the show's ratings. As good as that was for the show, it was far more important to Jay Leno; he had been on "The Tonight Show" four times and ultimately bombed. In the chemistry between Dave and Jay, Leno finally found his television voice. It was the completion of a circle. David Letterman had helped launch his own career by watching Jay Leno work in the clubs. Now Jay Leno was using his guest shots with Letterman to jump-start his career.
The Letterman-Leno act began to generate a lot of good press. Nobody paid closer attention to buzz in the media than Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment. Tartikoff never stopped scouting new late-night talent. Leno returned to "The Tonight Show," then made several popular guest host appearances. In 1986 Tartikoff made a deal that would set up Jay Leno as the permanent guest host of "The Tonight Show."
Throughout the late 1980's the arrangement worked out perfectly -- for NBC. Letterman remained the master of the late late-night show while Leno drew strong ratings on Carson, especially with younger viewers. Leno was always cooperative with the "Tonight" staff -- a "pussycat," they called him. He was respectful of Carson and never openly coveted his job.
Letterman sensed the threat to his dream of succeeding Carson, but he had no easy way to act on it. He had grown deeply estranged from the NBC management installed by the General Electric Company after it bought the network in 1986. He had never insisted that his contract include a clause that he be guaranteed the job after Carson retired; that could have been interpreted as pushing Carson out, and Letterman would never allow that. Instead he got a guarantee that NBC would pay him a penalty of $1 million if the "Tonight" job went to somebody else. Naively, he later concluded, he hoped that would protect his interest in the show.
In 1991 sentiment had grown in some quarters of NBC's management that the "Tonight" franchise was in jeopardy. Carson was still king, but his audience was getting older, a bad development for business because television advertisers always prefer younger viewers. Though nothing was said overtly, some executives clearly believed the sooner Jay Leno succeeded Johnny Carson the better it would be for NBC's late-night franchise. Leno would never dream of pressing the point himself, but he had an advocate who did not hesitate to campaign tirelessly on his behalf. Helen Kushnick had been Leno's manager since 1975, when she spotted him at the Comedy Store. (For a brief time she had managed David Letterman as well.) Kushnick saw Leno as the comic of the future and set out to place him where she believed he belonged -- in Johnny Carson's chair.
In February 1991 Kushnick still did not have a firm date from NBC for Carson's retirement -- and she was getting impatient. Using an associate in New York as a go-between, Kushnick hatched a plan to force the issue. "She asked me to plant a story somewhere," the associate said. Kushnick wanted the story in a New York newspaper; she wanted it to get great play and to have absolutely no fingerprints, no attribution at all.
The story was to say that top NBC executives wanted Johnny Carson out. His audience was getting too old. Jay Leno was in the wings, attracting much younger audiences when he guest-hosted; therefore the advertisers had started to prefer him to Johnny.
Kushnick's associate was not an NBC executive, had no inside information, but had long experience and excellent contacts in the print media. The associate called The New York Post on Feb. 10 and asked for a guarantee of front-page play in exchange for exclusivity.
Kushnick was on the phone to her accomplice in New York most of that evening. "Look," she said at one point, "when you get the story, read it to me, and then we'll call Jay. But don't mention to Jay that we had anything to do with this at all, or how it happened."
On Feb. 11, 1991, The Post ran a story with the headline "There Goes Johnny; NBC Looking to Dump Carson for Jay Leno." Kushnick and her accomplice read it over the phone to Leno as planned. Jay sounded a little bewildered. He wondered if this might not mean some problems for him. But he just said O.K. and hung up.
The next day NBC released a tortured statement that acknowledged the network's debt to Johnny and assured it would always be up to him to decide when he wanted to leave "The Tonight Show." It said nothing about hoping that the king would reign forever.
"The Tonight Show" staff thought the story was an ugly affront to Carson. Most were convinced that Helen Kushnick had planted it. Jay, too, heard the rumors, so he asked Kushnick directly. "Under no circumstances," she told him, "did this come from us."
Leno had never allowed himself to doubt Kushnick. Her choices had worked well for him so far, and it was easier to trust her than to examine their relationship too closely. In many ways that was typical of him. People close to Leno said the portrait of an uncomplicated, everyman comic -- a Time magazine cover article called him "the most popular regular guy in America" -- was somewhere between superficial and totally inaccurate. "Jay is one of the most complicated human beings I have ever known," a member of "The Tonight Show" staff said.
For all his outward warmth and his easy approachability, Leno seemed to distance himself emotionally from people around him. When one comic friend was going through a tough period in her life, she asked Jay what he did when he felt down. "Down?" Jay asked, as though the word belonged to a foreign language. "I've never been down."
Still, Leno recognized that The Post story was likely to upset Carson. As usual, he tried to do the right thing -- he called Johnny.
"Listen, Johnny, about that New York Post story," Leno said. "I'm sorry it came out. I know you think it came from us, but I don't know where it came from."
"It came from you," Johnny said evenly.
"No, let me guarantee you," Jay said. "I checked with my manager about it, and she said under no circumstances did this come from us. I feel terrible about this because I know your people think it did."
Johnny didn't prolong the conversation. He just told Leno that in show business you sometimes had to be very wary of situations where other people speak for you.
DESPITE THE UNEASE OVER THE POST STORY WITHIN NBC, Leno's momentum was unstoppable. After CBS made a serious run at Leno, offering him an 11:30 show to compete with Carson's, NBC's hand was forced. On May 16, 1991, Kushnick and Leno went to NBC's Burbank, Calif., headquarters and signed a deal that guaranteed them "The Tonight Show" as soon as Carson stepped down. NBC believed it had the best solution in place: Leno at 11:30, Letterman at 12:30. It wanted both stars, not one or the other. And Letterman was under contract until April 1993. The network was confident it had solved the problem of how to keep its late-night dominance intact.
At NBC they expected Carson's decision to leave to be announced in October 1992, when he would celebrate his 30th anniversary on the show. But Carson had other plans. He stunned the NBC executives by turning up at their affiliate conference in New York on May 23, 1991, and dropping a bombshell: He was quitting "The Tonight Show" at the end of the following May. He had shown his displeasure with the network by telling the world before he had told them.
The network dodged the question of a successor for two weeks while it sought to put its relationship with David Letterman into some sort of order. Letterman responded by asking to be relieved of his contract.
Letterman may have been furious at NBC, but he was even more conspicuously -- and characteristically -- hard on himself. Despite acclaim from critics and growing ratings during his 10 years at the network, Letterman sensed failure every day, always because he believed his own performance was inadequate. With each passing year at "Late Night," he rejected more material from his writers. Five bits were tossed out for every one he accepted -- then the ratio grew.
Most of the staff admired Letterman for his commitment to excellence. But Dave's post-mortems for each show could be witheringly negative. Letterman wouldn't beat up the staff; he would beat up himself, pointing out spots where he could have filled in a slow moment if he had only been quicker with a line. On some of the nights he felt he had totally fouled up, he would lock the door to his office to review the show on tape, and the staff would hear crashing noises through the door.
During a commercial break on the set in the mid-1980's, the band was playing so loudly that it was impossible for Teri Garr, one of Dave's favorite guests, to make herself heard. When she all but shouted at him "How are you doing?" Letterman grabbed a pad on his desk, scribbled a note and passed it to her. "I hate myself," it read. Garr was a bit stunned. But when she tried to reassure Dave that he was, in fact, truly a wonderful guy, Letterman grabbed the note, underlined "I hate myself" twice and passed it back.
When "The Tonight Show" went to Leno, Letterman withdrew even more and questioned his own reluctance to play the Hollywood game. He had always believed that show business was filled with sleazes. His dominant experience with the concept of "agent" remained: "A couple of nights in Pittsburgh with Tony Orlando, and let me call and maybe we can get you $500." It had all seemed so distasteful to him, but maybe it was necessary.
Though he believed his future was shot, his friends did not. In the next few months Peter Lassally, an executive producer for Carson, who also served as David Letterman's unofficial career counselor, began his own efforts to counter what he deemed the unjust rejection of Letterman by NBC. He began by lining up a powerful new advocate for Letterman: Michael Ovitz, the chairman of Creative Artists Agency (C.A.A.), the most powerful talent representative in show business.
On an August morning in 1991, David Letterman and Peter Lassally were escorted to Michael Ovitz's corner office on the third floor of the I. M. Pei-designed C.A.A. headquarters, in Beverly Hills. Ovitz greeted them with a rush of warmth and enthusiasm. As soon as they were comfortable, he revved up the sales pitch to high speed. Ovitz said he saw Letterman as an enormous star with geometric possibilities; he had drawn up a complete architecture for Dave's future. C.A.A. would deliver everything Dave wanted. Yes, there would be an 11:30 show for him, and there would be offers from each network. But the deal would be bigger than that. Ovitz would be able to bid Dave around the entire television industry. Networks, studios, syndicators, everywhere and everybody. Dave would become a giant from this deal. All these things would be delivered, because Dave was the biggest and the best.
It was virtuoso salesmanship, a performance so dazzling that even the two show business cynics who were bathed in it could not help but come away dripping with excitement. Back at Lassally's house that afternoon, a giddy Dave kept saying over and over, "I've been to see the godfather! I had a meeting with the godfather!"
Ovitz began to deliver on his promises the following summer, as Letterman's contract was winding down. He set up an elaborate courting process, in which the heads of other networks and virtually every television company in the industry were invited to pitch for David Letterman. A line immediately began to form. Eventually Letterman received serious offers from a half-dozen syndicators including the Walt Disney Company and Viacom Inc., which proposed a deal that could have made Letterman up to $50 million a year, as well as the Fox network and CBS. CBS was the favorite from the beginning because it was a traditional network, had a stronger station lineup than Fox and was Letterman's preference -- if he couldn't get "Tonight."
On Dec. 7, 1992, CBS won the first round in the bidding for David Letterman with the promise of a salary that could reach $14.5 million a year. But NBC still had 30 business days to match any offer and keep the star. Once the CBS bid was in, the network faced one question: how to match the offer without giving Letterman "The Tonight Show," which would mean dumping Jay Leno.
Robert C. Wright, the president of NBC, had seen his network fall into an alarming slide in almost every division since he and other corporate bosses from the General Electric Company took over NBC in 1986. Wright had a vision of a changing television environment and tried to position the network to survive in that climate. But to critics, Wright seemed to embody the G.E. management style: aloof and disconnected from the human side of television.
That side included something called "talent relations," the art of massaging and placating the sensitive egos of big stars. In fact, Wright had more ability in that area than most outsiders realized. He had developed good personal relationships with Bill Cosby and, especially, Johnny Carson. But one relationship had long eluded him. Even though he was based in the same building in New York, Wright had never connected with David Letterman.
Wright hated the thought of Dave walking out the door of NBC. Moreover, the thought of Letterman walking in the door at CBS and into the arms of the CBS Broadcast Group president, Howard Stringer, made Wright almost apoplectic.
Several top NBC executives in New York were arguing strenuously that Letterman must be kept at all costs. But virtually all Wright's executives in Burbank, led by Warren Littlefield, the president of NBC Entertainment, and John Agoglia, the president of NBC Enterprises, were equally ardent in their commitment to Leno.
With time dwindling, Wright set up a meeting with Letterman for Monday, Dec. 21. The day before the meeting, Wright made a call he had previously resisted making. He called his friend Johnny Carson.
Carson had no interest in stepping into the middle of this situation. "Bob, why are you asking me now?" Carson said. "Isn't this a fait accompli? Doesn't Jay already have the job?"
Wright said of course he did, but added, "We made a mistake. I should have asked you before."
Johnny politely declined the invitation to cast a vote. "I'm not volunteering now," he said. But he did have one very strong opinion: "It's going to be a shame if you lose David, Bob."
ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 21, BOB WRIGHT walked into David Letterman's office on the 14th floor of the RCA Building. Much had happened between Dave and NBC, and Letterman had never felt any sense of humanity coming down from above. But now Bob Wright had turned up as a man with a problem, and Letterman found himself connecting with the boss.
"Is there anything we can do to keep you here?" Wright asked.
In his gut Letterman wanted to say yes. He wanted so badly to stay. He truly liked it at NBC, despite all the pettiness and even the crushing snub when "The Tonight Show" went to Leno. He loved the building and especially the NBC late-night tradition. "You know," he said softly, "I would stay, but your 11:30 show is taken. And so beyond that I can't stay."
In the week after Christmas, the NBC executives supporting Letterman were convinced Bob Wright would make the deal to keep him. Wright had committed to negotiating personally with Ovitz over New Year's weekend in Aspen. The pieces seemed to be in place for a stunning reversal of fortune for David Letterman and Jay Leno. But Leno did not sit idle. He launched a public relations campaign to save his job, giving interviews to the press, calling affiliate managers and advertisers to solicit support.
On Monday, Jan. 4, when he got back to Los Angeles, Michael Ovitz told his associates at C.A.A. that he believed his negotiations with Bob Wright in Aspen had gone very well but nothing definitive was agreed to.
Wright clearly still had reservations -- as did Ovitz. The circumstances guaranteed that this deal could not come neatly wrapped. Beyond even that, the question Wright seemed to be wrestling with was the same one that preoccupied Ovitz: How would it look if David Letterman suddenly replaced Jay Leno? Ovitz was petrified by the prospect of the story being interpreted as a display of arrogant power by Letterman. To have Dave perceived as destroying his old friend Jay and driving him out of television would be a public relations disaster.
With less than two weeks to go before the NBC deadline, Ovitz felt that Bob Wright just needed a little more time. In the next several days he would be consulting with all his important executives in the same place, at a meeting for the top managers of the General Electric Company held every year at the Boca Raton Resort and Club in Florida.
After taping his show on Wednesday night, Jan. 6, Jay Leno dashed down to his dressing room to get back into jeans and a workshirt. As soon as he had changed clothes, he told his writers and producers that he was taking off. Saying some quick "See you tomorrows" he grabbed his shoulder bag and bolted.
"The Tonight Show" dressing room was one floor below ground level in Burbank. Leno dashed up the stairs, out into the broad hallway behind the stage and then outside, down the ramp toward the alley between the studio building and the main NBC office building. He dumped his bag in the cab of his black Chevy pickup and headed for NBC's back entrance, carrying a notebook under his arm. He didn't bother with the elevator but turned sharply and took the stairs to the second floor, where the NBC Entertainment division executives had their offices. It was getting close to 7 P.M., and the place seemed completely cleared out. He moved quietly down the long hall toward the big, heavy glass doors of the executive suite.
He pushed his way in. Warren Littlefield's office was to his left; John Agoglia's to his right. Jay moved into the darkened room where Agoglia's assistant and secretary worked. He knew where he was going. He slipped past the secretary's desk toward a door at the back of the room.
The room behind it was small, dark and crowded, like a closet, with a photocopier, fax machines and a shredder. Pushed up against a wall was a small desk where guests of the executives could sit to use a phone in private. Jay pulled the door closed behind him. Then he eased himself into the chair and arranged his notebook on the desk. His setup was complete. The phone before him would tell him when the conference call from Boca was coming in. Now all he had to do was sit in the dim light in this cramped closet of an office -- and wait.
At about 10:30 Eastern time that Wednesday night, the NBC executives gathered in a business suite at the Boca resort. Littlefield had contacted Rick Ludwin, the vice president of Late-Night Programs, in Burbank and told him the conference call was about to start, so he should call in Eric Cardinal, vice president of research, and head to Littlefield's office to accept the conference call from Boca on his speaker phone. In the session in Boca were about a dozen top NBC executives led by Bob Wright.
As the meeting began, the debate fell along familiar lines: Jay got points for his agreeable attitude; Dave got points for sheer talent. Jay still had the ratings on his side, however, while the Letterman backers had their opinion that head to head Dave would overmatch Jay, especially in terms of pulling in the crucial younger viewers.
From Burbank, Ludwin was extolling Leno's improving performance; he was challenged in Boca by Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports, who cited his 20 years' experience as a producer of late-night television and argued for Letterman.
Back in Burbank, adjacent to the office where Ludwin and Cardinal were loudly arguing over the speaker phone, Jay Leno sat in his gloomy closet, listening in intently, scribbling notes on his pad. The whole thing struck him as wildly funny; he felt like Huck Finn overhearing the mourners at his own funeral.
In Boca the argument raged on, with Bob Wright maintaining a scrupulously neutral position; he just asked for opinions around the table. The meeting limped on past midnight. The voting was heavily on Leno's side, but Wright wanted to hear how he could keep his whole late-night franchise together, not who was better or who would win. "Black and white," he said, "we lose."
The group in the suite, exhausted by the argument, began to break up. They signed off over the speaker phone with the two executives back in Littlefield's office in Burbank.
In the next office Jay Leno was edgy and excited. He had sat in his tiny room with the photocopier and the shredder and overheard the entire conference. He had taken notes on all of it, and now he had specific quotations on what people thought of him and his show. Best of all he knew exactly who was for him and who was against him. It had been intense and sort of thrilling, Jay concluded, like the Hardy boys hiding in a cave to figure out a mystery. Jay was proud of himself. He had taken some action. At one point the thought had crossed his mind: What if somebody opens the door and finds me in here? But in a second he laughed that off. "What are they going to do?" he thought, suppressing another laugh. "Fire me?"
ON FRIDAY EVENING AT ABOUT 7 P.M. DAVID LETTERMAN was back in his office going through the usual post-mortem of the show. A call came through. It was Mike Ovitz.
At 7:20 P.M. the main members of the Letterman staff -- including Peter Lassally, Robert Morton, the producer, and Hal Gurnee, the director -- heard the news. One hour earlier David Letterman had officially been offered the job as host of "The Tonight Show." But the terms, as explained by Ovitz, were more than a little maddening.
NBC was offering a deal that would give Letterman a "Tonight Show" with a budget no more than 5 percent bigger than what Leno currently had. Letterman himself would be paid a fee that was described as between his present annual salary of about $7 million and the $12.5 million base salary in the CBS deal. Then came the punch line: The deal would not go into effect until May 1994. NBC was offering David Letterman "The Tonight Show" after a 17-month waiting period.
The May date, as everyone knew, coincided with the end of Jay Leno's current contract. So the implication was clear: NBC wanted to avoid paying off Jay. He could stay until the end of his deal, with Letterman sitting on his shoulder waiting to step in, or he could quit and forfeit his $10 million penalty payment.
"This gives Jay an extra year and something more to make a hit out of his show," said Peter Lassally, seeing the blaze of excitement in Dave's eyes. "And if he is a hit, NBC's going to weasel out of the deal with us. And even if Jay is not a hit and we take over, you, Dave, will be the villain who threw Jay Leno out of that time slot."
That sentiment was quickly backed by the rest of the staff. But David Letterman still had that dreamy look in his eyes.
For Letterman the moment was one of pure astonishment. He had heard Lassally and Morton telling him for weeks that there was still a chance "The Tonight Show" would come around again. But he wouldn't allow himself to believe. Now the reality of "The Tonight Show" truly being offered to him struck Letterman as some kind of miracle.
"I can't make this decision," he told Ovitz. "It's every race driver's dream to drive a Ferrari. You're asking me to give that up."
The C.A.A. negotiators met with John Agoglia in their offices all day Saturday and by phone on Sunday. In the end NBC resisted putting anything on paper. Without paper the offer was just a promise of "The Tonight Show" down the road.
After the weekend negotiations, Letterman had no new information to make his agonizing decision easier. It was going to come down to just how strong the dream still was.
Ovitz and others pointed out that in this deal Dave would get to do a television job for NBC in Burbank -- eventually. But it certainly wasn't a job that would make him the successor to Johnny Carson. That dream was forever changed, and gone.
But Dave had reached a point where he couldn't deal with rational analysis. "I can't say no," he said.
Lassally needed reinforcements. He called Johnny.
Johnny Carson had been reading the papers; he knew that NBC was up against a deadline to keep Letterman. Peter Lassally was a loyal friend from his long years of work on Johnny's show, and here he was calling, asking for help.
Carson agreed that the NBC offer sounded weak. But he didn't like to get involved in sticky deals like this. Lassally pressed him, stressing what a crucial moment this was in Dave's career. Johnny said he'd think about it.
Lassally called Carson back two more times. Finally, after a tough fight, Johnny said he would talk to Dave about the deal. "But I don't want to volunteer," he said.
Lassally went back to Dave. Call Johnny, Lassally urged him. Ask him what you should do.
"Why are you doing this to me?" he snapped at Lassally. "Don't you understand? I don't care. I cannot lose 'The Tonight Show' twice."
Letterman had never been so conflicted in his life. He knew he had to tell Ovitz which way he was going. He had very little time left. He was running out of ways to analyze it. But he still needed help. So he called Johnny Carson.
Carson took the call and listened for a while to Letterman and the jam he was in, then asked if he could think a while about it and call Dave back.
The other votes were in; the impact of all the recommendations for CBS was slowly eroding some of Letterman's emotional resistance. It was getting late on Sunday night when Johnny called back.
"You have to do what's best for your career," Carson told Letterman. "Do what's in your heart." The problem for Letterman, of course, was that in this instance those two sentiments didn't precisely coincide. He asked Carson what he really wanted to know: "What would you do if you were in this situation, Johnny?"
Carson didn't dodge the question. "I'd probably walk," he said. "I'm not telling you to do that, David. But if you're asking me what I'd do, if I had been treated like that, I would probably walk."
Letterman made one more call that night. He dialed Indianapolis.
"Mom," he said, "NBC has offered me 'The Tonight Show,' but I think I'm going to go to CBS."
"Well," she said. "I just hope you know what you're doing."
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/30/ma...l?pagewanted=1 
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