The Late Night Wars

The time for Jay Leno to leave the Tonight Show is fast approaching.  Which, for me, brings up twenty-five year old memories of  pre-"Late Night Wars."  At least I think that's the title of the movie.  It's was the movie that trashed Helen Kushnick and made vastly false statements about her.  So 25 years after the fact, here's the back story.

I worked for Helen and Jerry Kushnick.  I was in the office eight to ten hours a day holed up with them.  Jerry was the socially cool one in public and a total ass in real life.  Helen was the a nice, pushed to the wall, stressed out woman who always referred to Leno as "such a nice boy," although he was only three and a half years younger than she.

Leno was Helen's exclusive client in the husband and wife management team.  She brought him with her as her client when they moved General Management to California.  But it was Jerry who got Jay the Tonight Show guest host gig - through guilt tripping Henry "Bombastic" Bushkin, Carson's attorney.

According to Jerry, and I heard the story over and over again, he, Ed Hookstratten and Buskin had been law partners in New York when they first got out of school.  Jerry had, according to him, the "good" clients - like Johnny Carson.  He did Carson's divorce from wife #2.  He represented Brooke Shields' father in his quest to stop her mother from "exploiting" her. 

But Jerry's heart was in the music business.  He took six weeks off from the legal practice to decide whether he would accept a corporate attorney job offer to work from RCA.  He decided not to take the job, but when he returned to his office, it had been stripped.  File drawers were hanging open.  All of his client's files - and clients - were gone.  His partners had even taken the lighting fixture from the ceiling.  Jerry said he sat in that office with bare wires hanging from the ceiling for two years, and looked up every day swearing that he would get even soem day.  

The split didn't destroy the lines of communication between the three completely.  He talked to Bushkin. If he hadn't, Leno would never have guest-hosted the "Tonight Show."

Jerry met Helen, who was a writer's representative, when he called her office for some menial thing.  Helen could be very foul mouthed, and by the end of the conversation she had told him to "Fuck Off" and hung up one him.  Jerry found that interesting.  No woman had ever spoken to him like that.  When she called a few hours later to apologize after she "found out who I was," and he asked her to dinner. 

Soon after, they were married, moved to California and worked the management business Jerry had started with Jimmie Walker.  Helen still represented writers.  She did most of the work in that department, but Jerry, at 6'4" and 250 lbs. (at least) was still the Ruler of the Roost everywhere except when it came to Leno.  Helen made all of those decisions.  Believe me, there were huge fights, with glassware flying down the hall at Jerry's head when it came to what Leno was going to do and not do.  A little bit of a thing, Helen actually slammed the ten foot tall door to her office so hard that the frame came out of the wall.

But I digress.  How did Leno get the guest host job?  According to Jerry, wanting to please Helen and knowing that the job was Leno's dream, he called Henry Bushkin and said, "You owe me for what you did with the law practice.  Carson was my client, and you stole him.  I want you to get Leno on as the guest host.  That's the least you can do.  He's a good kid."

According to Jerry, no one wanted Leno, and no one liked him for the job - except Freddie DeCordova.  But after a few more phone calls and a little more guilt tripping of Bushkin, Leno got the gig.

Helen was happy.  Jerry was happy because Helen was happy.  He went to every show with Leno.  He also went to every shoot for the Doritos commercials with him.  I believe it was because Jerry wanted to be a performer himself not because Leno needed a guardian.

The PR about the success of Joan Rivers or Leno as guest hosts was just that - PR.  Leno got about four fan letters a month - I answered them - and a hundred headlines to use on the show.  And Helen's focus was securing the show for Leno not screwing over anyone.

Helen certainly had nothing against Arsenio Hall.  Despite the stories out there, she came back from FOX one afternoon and said, "I just told Patty Bougouis (sp) that they had better offer Arsenio whatever money he wants before someone else gets him."

That's the truth about Helen trying to put a stop to Arsenio getting a show.  She encouraged FOX long before Hall ever went to Paramount.  Helen might have gotten bitchy about which stars went on which shows once Leno got the "Tonight Show," but Carson put limits on those who were on his show too.  The difference . . . Helen had no tact.

Helen and Jerry had represented both Letterman and Leno as well as Jimmie Walker and Elaine Boozler.  She wasn't about to do anything to harm Letterman, and she already knew he wasn't going to get the show.

Christmas 1987 or maybe 1988, half of Hollywood was on the Big Island in Hawaii.  Helen was at the pool talking to Brandon Tartikoff about Leno being put on the Tonight Show permanentaly after Carson left.  The day they got back she told me, Tartikoff said, "We have done the research.  Letterman will never get the show because he won't be able to hold the audience.  And Jay won't get it either if he doesn't learn to to something besides hold up newspaper headlines."  She was worried about what they could get him to do.  She didn't know if he could do anything else except his signature bit.

The PR was that Leno wrote all the jokes himself.  That was not true.  The absolute rule was to stop everything whenever anyone came in the door claiming to have sold Leno a joke.  Every morning before he was to be on the "Tonight Show" the fax with the night's jokes would come in from somewhere in Pennsylvania.  I don't remember the fellows name.  It's been too long.

Frequently, guys would come to the office and say they had talked to Leno backstage, given him a joke, and he had told him to come get their money.  True or not, they were paid immediately.  So what was Helen going to do to make sure Leno became the permanent host?  I don't know.  Jerry ticked me off so bad one day, I walked out.  Helen called later that afternoon and thanked me for putting up with him as long as I did.

What I do know is that Carson fired Bushkin a few weeks before I left.  I will never forget the smile of satisfaction on Jerry's face when he told me he had offered Bushkin space in the office if he needed somewhere to hand his hat.  Jerry didn't expect him to, nor did he, accept.  But Jerry was gloating while continually repeating that he was not gloating. 

And Helen delivered for Leno. 

Jerry died before Carson left the show, and Helen secured it for Leno.  She did it on her own, and it is a shame she was portrayed by Cathy Bates in the way she was.  Helen and Bates did have similar hairstyles.  That's as far as it went.  Helen had the best body on a woman her age I've ever seem.  Helen never shuffled down a hall anywhere in her life.  She walked with direction and a clip in her step.  And I can't imagine Helen, for one minute, walking around with a telephone headset on wheeling and dealing.

Until she was pushed into blowing up, Helen was extremely quiet.  I always thought her true desire was to be an interior designer.  She sat quiety in her office all day with her pencils and paper designing rooms.  She kept a tax number so she could shop at the Pacific Design Center on Melrose.  And you can see Helen's taste and design all over the original set of the "Tonight Show" when Leno took over.   

And, as far as Helen flying off the handle, Jerry used it to his advantage when he didn't have the guts to disagree with someone himself.  He would rile Helen up.  She would go nuts, and Jerry would come in to do damage contol as the nice guy.  He wasn't.

The truth about Helen is that, when she was about to go off half-cocked, all you had to do was put your hand on her shoulder, say "I'll take care of it," and she would calmly go back to her drawing.  As for the "Late Night Wars," that was in other people's heads because years before it had been decided Letterman would never get the show.