The Replacement

When Bill Clinton was in office we taped a show in which we toured the White House around Christmas. Our timing was great because a holiday party was scheduled for later in the day.

I returned for the festivities with Shawn, the broadcaster Tim Russert, and the sportscaster Jim Gray and his wife, Frann. The guards out in front of the White House checked Shawn in. They checked in Tim. They checked in Jim and Frann. Then I stepped up.


“Sorry, you’re not on the list.”
“What?”
“We can’t let you in.”
“But I was here all day.”
“Sorry, but we can’t let you in if you’re not on the list.”
“How do I get on the list?”

Obviously, they knew who I was. Obviously, this would all be worked out. So the rest of my group went ahead without me. Meanwhile, the guards started putting me through the same security procedures you go through at the airport.

It was crazy. As I was going through this, I looked up. There were Shawn, Tim, Jim and Frann, and Sam Donaldson looking down at me from a window inside the White House. They were all waving, with big smiles. You could almost hear them saying, “Hey, we’ll be happy to call you a cab . . .” Suffice it to say, I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in.

One of my final guests was Conan O’Brien. He got a true dose of what it’s like to be on the outside looking in when he was pushed off The Tonight Show. I’ve been on Conan’s show many times, and we have great chemistry. He asked me to help him with his opening sketch when he started his new show on TBS. It was a hysterical satire of his departure from NBC. The sketch starts out with Conan on the phone, telling the suits: “You want me to move The Tonight Show to 12:05? For- get it! I’m not doing it! Go to hell!”

He hangs up, puts his hands behind his head and says, real smug, “What can they do to me?” The next thing you know, he’s driving his little car out of the office parking lot. He stops at the guard booth. In the background, you can hear music reminiscent of The Godfather. The cop inside the booth takes his parking credentials and then ducks out of sight. Remember Sonny at the toll both? Four guys with machine guns pop up from behind the bushes.

They turn Conan into Swiss cheese for like, thirty seconds. Cut to Conan in the hospital. He’s inside a full body cast. A doctor leans over him and says: “The good news is you’ll live. The bad news is you’ll never work in network television again!” In the next scene, he’s recovered but depressed, at home with his wife and fourteen kids running around. His wife is going crazy, screaming at him. “Get a job!”
“I don’t know how,” he says.
He applies for a position in advertising with Don Draper from the show Mad Men. Draper looks at his application and says, “You have no advertising experience, and it’s 1965—and you’re two years old. Get out of my office.”
He finds work at a fast food place. He’s behind a counter telling a lady customer how great the musical acts on his show used to be. The lady says, “I don’t care who you were! I just asked for some extra sweet-and-sour sauce!” He hands her seven forks, and she explodes.

Next, he’s reduced to working as a clown at a kid’s birthday party. But he bombs when he gives the children a monologue with an Obama joke. So he’s destitute. He goes to the Fourth Street Bridge in Los Angeles and gets up on the guardrail. He’s looking down at the river. The boats passing beneath him seem tiny. The wind is blowing. He’s just about to take the fatal plunge.

That’s when I appear before him wearing angel wings. “Don’t do it, Conan!”
(It wasn’t in the shot when it played on his show, but a black guy driving by on the bridge slammed his brakes when he saw us. Holy moly!)
Conan looks at me.
“Larry King?”
“I’m your guardian angel.”
“But you’re not dead.”
“Never mind that. I have two words for you: basic cable.”
“Basic cable.” It dawns on him.

Next thing you know he’s negotiating a deal with TBS. His contract says: Less. Much less. But he comes out of the office like he’s whistling Dixie, everything is going to be OK. Then the same four network henchmen with the machine guns jump out and turn him into Swiss cheese again. His last words are: “Awwwww, come on . . .” The timing of his appearance on my show was just right. My final hour was soon approaching, and it was good to talk with someone who could tell me what it was like to be on top of the world one minute and off the air the next.

I admire Conan. He made a deal to take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno years ago. He waited for his time. He had a phone conversation with Johnny Carson before he took the reins. He understood the show’s place in history. Then after seven months, the network said, Sorry, we don’t like your numbers. Go to midnight. We’re bringing Jay back. Screw you, Conan said. He wasn’t going to do anything outside their initial agreement. There was a lot of debate over the debacle at our table at Nate ’n Al’s. Some of the guys felt Jay shouldn’t have taken the show back, out of respect for Conan. Others felt that Jay did nothing wrong. He’d made a decision to go on at ten o’clock when Conan took over. That time slot wasn’t working for him, either. What was he supposed to do when the network made him an offer to return to The Tonight Show? Say no? The network might have replaced Conan with someone else. Where would that have left him? Both guys used humor to vent their feelings. There were some great lines. I liked this one from Conan: “Hosting The Tonight Show has been the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for me. And I just want to say to the kids out there watching, you can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too.” Jay said, “Conan O’Brien understandably is very upset.

He had a statement in the paper yesterday. Conan said NBC had only given him seven months to make his show work. When I heard that, I thought, seven months, how’d he get that deal? We only got four!”

When he came on my show, Conan admitted to having some bad feelings about what happened. He told me that after he left the show he would occasionally find his mind drifting when he was driving on the freeway and joked that he sometimes took his anger out on the drivers around him. Jay was still feeling a little awkward about it all when I guested on his show shortly after mine ended. He came through the door of the green room with a big smile and said: “You’re the only talk show host I don’t get blamed for getting taken off the air.”

I invited Jay to come on Larry King Liveduring the last few weeks. But he said he didn’t want to seem like he was whining. He’s got a good heart. When he found out that I’d been hurt by some of his jokes about me, he phoned to apologize. And when we talked in private about his return to The Tonight Show, he said he realized that his overall silence was probably the wrong way to have played it. He should have had some public relations strategy to get out his side of the story.

There are always going to be ill feelings in a competitive business. I remember a story George Schlatter told about a long-running feud between Milton Berle and Bob Hope. The two didn’t speak to each other for years and were very old men when they finally bumped into each other.
Hope said, “You stole my Herbert Hoover routine!”
Berle said, “It was my Herbert Hoover routine!”
The argument got more and more heated until finally George Schlatter stepped in the middle and asked, “What was the joke?”
Neither one of them could remember. But they stayed furious.
I’ve never been one to get into those kinds of squabbles. The last fistfight I had was with my friend Herbie over the Dodgers and the Yankees when I was a teenager.

I’ve never gotten into spats on the air. The closest I came was when I was invited on Howard Stern’s radio show, and he asked me what it was like to make it with Angie Dickinson. I wasn’t going to go there. So I said, “Just so I get it straight. Is the question from a standpoint of desire or jealousy?” We started to go back and forth. Howard Stern is a broadcast phenomenon. He’s clever. He’s funny. But his sense of humor comes from the ribald. He’s not Lenny Bruce. I come from the Mel Brooks school. You never want to mess with Mel Brooks. I’m not saying I’m anywhere close to Mel. But I’ve got a little of what Mel has. Howard didn’t fare too well in the exchange. Finally, his father called in and told him he should know when to quit. I didn’t have any bad feelings about my replacement. Conan felt screwed about being replaced. I didn’t. Nothing is forever, and I had decided it was time to leave. So I looked at my replacement much differently. Besides, I had never felt like I cut out the woman I’d replaced twenty-five years before. So why would I feel like my replacement was cutting me out?

When CNN announced that Piers Morgan would be taking over the nine o’clock time slot, I didn’t know what to say. That’s because I didn’t know much about him. I’d seen him as a judge on America’s Got Talent. He seemed perfectly fine in that role. But I couldn’t tell much about him from that. I’d never seen him interview anyone. So how could I comment? I’d met Piers once. He was very cordial to me—even reverential. And how can you argue with a guy who gets the job and says, “This is like trying to follow Sinatra in Vegas”? All I could do was wish him the best. The one thing I didn’t understand was why anybody would want to follow someone who’d been at a job for twenty-five years and had a loyal following? It’s hard to follow Bear Bryant. I mean, wouldn’t it be better to follow the guy who followed the guy? Wouldn’t it be better to be Thomas Jefferson than John Adams?

The reaction at Nate ’n Al’s—and everywhere else I went— seemed to be puzzlement. Sort of like, How could a guy from Britain become president? This put me in some ticklish situations. The British angle was fresh meat for a comic like Jon Stewart. “By the way,” he said on my show, “they’ve made a brilliant choice—a British guy nobody’s heard of. When I’m thinking about floating a sinking ship, what do I want to bring on it? A guy that people are going to tune in to and say, ‘Who’s that? And why is he speaking so funny?’” Then, when Anderson Cooper appeared via satellite, Stewart tagged it with: “What country do you think the guy’s coming from to replace him? Do you think they’re going to grab a Romanian?” Jon is very witty and caustic. I didn’t share his view. But it was funny. What I had a hard time understanding was the way Piers promoted his show. He was going to be dangerous. I didn’t know if that was a bit of British humor, or what. I’d heard he’d interviewed the British prime minister something like fifty-six times. That doesn’t happen if you’re dangerous. I wondered how you could possibly be dangerous and get guests. The O’Reillys and the Hannitys don’t need big guests.

Their shows are about them. Over the years, so many of my guests told me they’d opened up because they felt comfortable. You learn a lot when people feel safe. Paul Newman once told me that I had it all figured out, that I could relax because it was all about the guest. Paul said, “You know you’re going to be here tomorrow.”

Maybe CNN was simply trying to separate Piers from me. Maybe it wanted to get across a message that something new was coming. I’ll tell you one thing. In Brooklyn, if you say you’re going to be dangerous, you’d better be dangerous. Just as I suspected, I found no danger in Piers’s early shows. He asked good questions. I thought he did fine. But dangerous? No.

BBC Radio interviewed me by phone around the time of the London premiere of Anna Nicole Smith: The Opera. As the interview wound down, I was asked what I thought of Piers. I said I thought he’d been oversold—which, of course, immediately spread like wildfire all over the Internet.

Naturally, Piers asked me to come on the show when he was out in Los Angeles—and I was happy to do so. There was a slight problem. I was scheduled to coach my sons’ Little League team the day that he wanted me on. So I could only do half an hour before leaving for practice.

We sat down. We laughed. Piers gave me a pair of Union Jack suspenders. They were clip-ons, but I appreciated the gesture. I told him I was opening up an Original Brooklyn Water Bagel Co. franchise in Beverly Hills and invited him to join me for breakfast. The invitation wasn’t for show—I wish him well, and he’s welcome anytime. I’ll even teach him to say water the Brooklyn way—wawduh. Piers didn’t know it, but he gave me another, more important gift that night. He gave me a piece of information that I wouldn’t have known until after my final show. When I arrived to coach my kids it was not yet seven o’clock.

Piers was still on. What I realized was that there was no other place on earth I wanted to be at that moment more than on that Little League field.