Still Talking (33 page)

Frightened, we brought in a firm of litigation lawyers to guide us-so now two sets of lawyers were checking every decision-“If I do this for Fox, is that setting a precedent? If I don’t, is it breach of contract?” There seemed no way to reverse the war of nerves and say to Fox, “Let’s stop and start again. ” If the ratings had gone up and up, the sun would have come out. But the national ratings had settled into the high 2’s and low 3’s, below Fox’s unrealistic expectations.

In November the lives around me-the people I depended on personally and professionally-began falling apart in tragedy. Billy Sammeth’s mother developed cancer, and he was hit very hard. He continued coming to the office, but in pieces. Jason Dyl, who for years had selected my clothes and jewelry, given me my look, tested positive for AIDS.

My husband, my partner, was disappearing into his own morass. While I was a moving, slippery target, Edgar was a sitting duck whom Diller detested.

If they could not break me, they could take aim at him.

A central issue was Edgar’s constant use of the letter of the contract-“Carson standards or better”-to get his way. Finally Wittenberg reneged in writing, saying that The Tonight Show was not a “template” for my show. But Fox, too, by God, was going to dot every contractual i.

For example, there was a stupid fight about the limousine Fox supplied to take me back and forth to the studio. I liked to arrive at the studio around 1:00 P.m., so I’d have the morning to do household things, write my jokes, and handle personal business. Edgar wanted to get to the studio long before noon. Waiting for me and my limo made him nervous and agitated, and he would chivy me”Come on. Come on. ” He could not drive himself because at night he was too exhausted to drive the fiftyminute return trip. In September the limo took him in and then came back for me. In November, Fox said Edgar could not use the limo by himself. So we rode together, and he saved face, but I had to get up early-which I hated.

Next Wittenberg passed the word through Peter Dekom that the contract said I was to be given a limo but not Edgar, so he could not even ride with me.

It was just lawyers’ tricks, so I sent word back that I would drive my own car with my husband, and the limo could follow me. They backed down.

Then the day came when I had to face that Edgar had begun to crack. While the lawyers were fighting, while I was on the phone constantly with Dekom, while the second team of lawyers was riding shotgun, all of us fighting to keep the show on track, Edgar was worrying about his office bookshelves.

They had finally arrived and weren’t tall enough for him. That was when I knew I was in deep, deep trouble.

At home Edgar kept railing about the shelves, wanting to call the lawyer.

I tried to tell him, “Don’t worry about

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the goddam bookshelves. Don’t pick on everything. Let it go; let it go.” But he was obsessed. This was a matter of principle-“You don’t understand. You can’t let it go. They promised us … ‘

It was the first time in twenty-one years I could not reach him on a rational level, the first major sign to me that something was deeply wrong with my husband, the first time I thought, Oh, my God, I’ve got to watch him, too. This was when I remembered what the UCLA doctors had said. They had warned me that during the monthlong coma Edgar might have lost what they called “instinctual judgment.” For months every issue had had equal importance, equal weight.

I was so on edge, my exasperation took over, and we had a fight, one so bad, Edgar slept in Melissa’s room. The next morning I put my head in the door to make peace, but he was still asleep. I checked his breathing, and he seemed normal just sleeping late as he always did when depressed.

This was the night Nancy Reagan, then the first lady, was to be a guest on the show, and the Secret Service men were swarming through the studio, checking everything. During a meeting with my segment producers, my secretary rang through to me-“It’s Edgar, and he sounds drunk. ” On the phone, mumbling almost incoherently, Edgar said, “I think I’m having a stroke.”

Suddenly at four o’clock I was in a car creeping to the UCLA hospital-forty-five minutes through rush-hour traffic knowing I had to be back in full makeup onstage at eight o’clock. In my head beat the words, “I did it to him. I did it to him. I did it to him.” Edgar was in the emergency room, and I rushed to the bed. He looked up at me and said in a horrible, dead voice, “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you. Get away—and then to the nurse, “I want her out.”

I stayed until the doctors decided it was not a stroke; they did not know what it was. He said he had taken a single sleeping pill, and they concluded it had been old and toxic. But I think psychologically he was ill with the

fear that he was more and more unnecessary, that I was subtly slipping away from him, absorbed by the show.

I got back to the studio in time for Nancy Reagan. After the show, as I walked down the hall to my dressing room, Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch came out of the private VIP greenroom. They passed me in that narrow corridor without a word.

In early November Fox held a huge meeting for the affiliate stations. In the second week of that month the stations in Seattle, Toledo, and Atlanta increased their late-night ratings 300 percent. Cities like Hartford, San Diego, Spokane, Dallas, West Palm Beach, increased 200 percent, and ratings for places like Mobile, Fort Wayne, Amarillo, Grand Rapids, went up by 100

percent. The average increase of all Fox affiliates because of my show was 69 percent. But Fox did not invite me, the only new show on the network, to the affiliates’ dinner right there at Fox Broadcasting.

When I believe I am right, there is no such thing as pride or manners or rules. I’ll do anything, stop at nothing. I never want to put my head down on that pillow feeling there was one more thing I could have tried. I decided to crash the dinner.

I arrived feeling frightened, embarrassed, and furiousbut when I came waltzing in to the dinner, the station managers were delighted with me as I walked among the tables and shook hands. They told me I was giving them numbers they had never dreamed of. One man said, “You’re making me rich.”

I was so desperate, I actually thought these men were going to save me, were going to bring Fox to its senses. I thought they would telephone Fox and say, “I don’t care what’s going on there. I used to get a point three rating, now I get a two. God bless Joan Rivers. “

What a dream!

15

…

0N November 13 Barry Diller finally called a meeting of the two camps to discuss a solution. I told our lawyers I was so devastated by Fox, I could not look Barry in the eyes-would just sit there and do my needlepoint. Our chief litigation lawyer, Richard Borow, said, “Let me tell you a story. A farmer bought the meanest rooster alive, and it went into the henhouse and screwed all the hens till they were all dead. Then the rooster went into the barn and screwed the cows till they were dead-and then the horses. Finally the farmer came out, and there was the rooster lying dead with vultures circling overhead. The farmer said, `It’s about time, you S.O.B.’ The rooster opened one eye and said, `Shhhh. If you want to screw a vulture, you got to play their game.’ “

So I sat there across from Diller and his lieutenants, acting as though we were all on the same team-while Barry did the same.

Barry started out saying that the quality of the show was not the issue.

“The on-air show does not seem to be the problem,” Barry said. “The show is good.”

He said, “We’re sure that a lot of difficulties between us have been caused by our actions and by me.” If he’d stayed with that thought, had said he wanted to be friends and let us feel listened to, let us vent all our nonsense and take our share of blame, the pain and tragedy and waste that followed might have been averted.

But that was scary territory for Barry. He was unable to deal in feelings and psychologies. Instead, Barry looked for an answer in the bottom line.

He suggested we reverse 235

our roles. As overall producer of the show, Fox set the budget for various categories and enforced it, battling us about size and salaries,
etc.
Barry offered to give us the role of producer, letting us take over administration of the budget, deciding ourselves how to apportion the money. We could decide if we needed ten writers and no set or ten sets and no writers. Well, that was what we had asked for; we were very encouraged.

Then, almost as an aside, came what I now think was the real reason for the meeting. “Frankly,” Barry said, “if we’re going to live together for a long time, we either feel nicer about each other or we don’t live together for a long time.” It was a major threat, but aimed at my team, not his boys.

They were going to continue living at Fox, even if we died. So the issue with Fox was our relationship with the executives. I still wonder whether, if Edgar and I had really heard that, we would have capitulated then and kept the show.

Leaving the lunch after the meeting, he walked around the table and touched me on the shoulder. With that, I was convinced that, after all, he was still behind us. Even then. But this was just another of the mixed messages Barry had been putting out-taking my side at an occasional meeting, giving me the announcer I had wanted.

In the weeks that followed, if Barry had been serious, he was sabotaged from below. Nobody at Fox ever followed through on what he had suggested.

Nothing changed. Ron Vandor was still in the office telling us what to do.

No matter how much we asked and assumed, we never received a serious breakdown of the budget, we were never given the power to make independent financial decisions. We called Diller but never got through. I guess Barry just walked away and didn’t want to know. And, once again, nothing made sense. The pressure for numbers increased. On February 6, I received a phone call: “This is Jamie Kellner. Let me just read you the numbers for the past few weeks. They’re down-three point two, three point one, three, two point nine.” Then I learned from my friend at NBC, Jay Michelis, that Doctor Ruth, the sexologist, had gone on the air with her new show and

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pulled viewers from all of late night. “Everybody’s numbers are dropping,”

he said, “Letterman, Carson, everybody. Didn’t they tell you that?” Was Fox that naive, I wondered, or just trying to keep us off-balance?

It must have been the latter, because that month a press announcement went out saying that on a network unavailable to one in five households, The Late Show had increased its women viewers by 45 percent, a higher rate than any other late show. Moreover, the advertising for the fourth quarter of 1986 had been sold out, and the first and second quarters of 1987 were sold out. The affiliates were making 200 to 300 percent more money.

Nonetheless, on February 26, 1987, Fox made its first overt move to take over the show. Barry’s threat from the November meeting came to pass. We were told-without consulting us-that the contract of our producer, Bruce McKay, would not be renewed when it expired April 3. And henceforth Edgar and I were not to deal directly with the staff of the show. Any suggestions we had must be passed through Bruce McKay, now a lame-duck producer. I would be allowed to work with the writers and segment producers, but not “supervise” them, not give them any directions or make any decisions.

That meant I would come in and receive the monologue and do the show. I would become a puppet. Frankly, if I had thought that would solve the problem, I would have done it, but without the imprint of my identity, the show would just be a mishmash. Now the true agenda was coming out in the open-Kevin Wendle and Ron Vandor said openly they thought they could do a better show. Well, later they got their chance.

We ignored the order and operated exactly as we had before, I supervising my meetings, Edgar still sitting with Bruce at the console during the show.

And finally, as I later discovered, Jamie Kellner was talking with Barry Sand, the original producer of the Letterman show, about creating a show to replace mine.

It was during February that my last prop, Billy Sammeth, cracked under the strain. I had counted on his booking

prowess to keep the show afloat, to compete with Carson. But because of his mother’s illness, he had been growing increasingly depressed, increasingly unavailable. He hated the confrontations on the show. As both our manager and an executive producer, he was constantly in the middle. Fox pressured him to control us, and we were unhappy that the man we were paying as our manager was not taking strong stands.

Billy was also buckling under the pressure of trying to get Tonight Show-quality guests without its clout. And like the rest of us, he was physically ground down by the stress of alive show, working all day and then staying on for the show and postshow meetings afterward, never getting home until midnight. For the staff, the show was like house arrest. When Fox research found out that broadcasting live made no difference, we begged to go to tape the way Letterman and Carson do, but Fox refused.

Without Billy’s full attention the guest list declined. I began looking at the booking board and saying, “Oh, yeah, okay,” and trying to make second-rank guests work-some of them unknowns pushed on us because they were in a new Fox series.

And on top of the pressure of an ill husband, the pressure of running my house and mothering my daughter away at college, the pressure from the press shooting at me, the pressure of Fox trying to fix the show when it was not broken-there was the pressure of putting on a good show each night.

To this day I work best when I am relaxed, when everybody loves me, when the staff, the advertisers, the people who put up the money, are all happy and affectionate. I am not relaxed when I pass Ron Vandor on the stairs and we do not say hello, when Kevin Wendle turns away from me as I go onstage, when every night I have to call my lawyer. I no longer went in front of the cameras feeling, This is my show, my kingdom. I never stopped monitoring myself, never was truly spontaneous. That had to affect the show, no matter how hard I tried.