|
Irish Voice -- March 18, 1997 Plucked from obscurity in 1993 to replace TV icon David Letterman, Conan O'Brien has gone from the nervous new kid on the block to a certified hit comic/talk show host who's here to stay. DEBBIE McGOLDRICK recently sat down with O'Brien to chat about his rise to the top, and his strong Irish background. "I WENT to Phoenix last week because I love the dessert. But it really puzzled everybody," Conan O'Brien was saying last Monday afternoon, his first day back from just over a week-long working vacation that also took him to Aspen, Colorado to participate in the town's comedy festival. It's no wonder that people close to the 34-year-old O'Brien were surprised at his choice of a holiday destination -- his whiter-than-white skin, smeared liberally with freckles, just begs to be burnt to a crisp. Couple that with a mass of bright red hair and you've got a recipe for instant sun-poisoning. "I burn up in 10 minutes," he acknowledges. "If I went out today and walked around for an hour I'd be read. I mean, it's March, and it's cold outside! That's the Irish in me." O'Brien the proud Irishman, clad very casually in denims and navy blue shirt, is sitting in his cozy office at NBC's Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The late-night music/comedy/gabfest he helms, Late Night With Conan O'Brien, is housed in a good chunk of the ninth floor at 30 Rock, and it's safe to say that the work environment O'Brien and his 40-odd colleagues has created is a relaxed one. (Putting the words "dress" and "code" next to each other, for instance, is sheer taboo.) It seems kind of clich After apologizing profusely for a very brief delay in getting this interview underway -- hey, when a phone call comes from NBC boss Lorne Michaels, what are you going to do? -- he offered to hold my recorder so when the time came to transcribe the tape, his words would be clear. (We settled on placing it on his desk.) Conan's staff simply rave about him -- "excellent" and "totally cool" are just two of the terms of endearment used when referring to the boss. And when nice guys finish first -- as O'Brien's hour-long show is consistently doing each night in the crucial Nielsen ratings -- it makes all the hard work that goes into producing a totally original, daily program seem like a snap. Prominent in O'Brien's office is a replica of a very large green pickle stashed in one corner; a basketball hoop that stands at just about the same height as his 6'4" frame is in another. A framed photo of the MTV derelict cartoon teens Beavis and Butt-head owns a prominent spot on his desk, and his vast collection of CDs includes Kisstory, the life's work of Kiss, the `70s heavy metal group also famous for garish face paint and long, slippery tongues that always hung out of their mouths. Could this really be what O'Brien's folks -- Mrs. a lawyer, and Mr. a doctor -- envisaged when they sent the third of their six children off to Harvard in the early 1980s to study American History and Literature? If indeed the O'Briens are surprised that their Ivy League child is one of TV's hottest (and zaniest) stars ... well, it's nothing compared to the shock their insecure kid experienced when he landed the ultra high-profile job of David Letterman's replacement in 1993. And the sense of wonderment he continues to feel. "When you go on vacation you get time to think about what you do for a living," O'Brien offers. "You go back a couple of generations. We probably took some crappy boat from Ireland over here, then we were handed rifles to fight in a Civil War we didn't understand. And now (looking around his office) this. How bizarre!" MAKE no mistake about it -- Conan O'Brien is Irish. Beside the fact that he'd make a perfect poster boy for an Irish Tourist Board ad -- "people always say I've got the map of Ireland on my face," he says -- every drop of the blood flowing through his body is guaranteed 100% Irish. O'Brien descends from Famine emigrants who left Ireland circa 1850 from counties Waterford and Kerry, and down through the years, both his maternal and paternal relations never married outside their Irish Catholic stock. "I'm probably more pure Irish than people living in Ireland," he attests. Conan was touched by a sense of Irishness even before his birth in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1963. It was his dad's intention to select a traditional Irish name for his third child (O'Brien has three brothers and two sisters), and during the course of his research he discovered one of the early Irish bishops called Conan. The unusual, catchy name stuck in his mind, and O'Brien is always pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, it wasn't made up for show-business purposes. While the O'Brien household wasn't an overtly Irish one, there were certain rituals observed. Chief among them was wearing the color green to school on St. Patrick's Day. He tells a cute story about his grandmother, who moved into the family house when she was 95. Conan was 14 at the time. "When she grew up there was a lot of prejudice and a lot of Protestant kids used to taunt. She used to tell us when we were going to school on St. Patrick's Day, `Watch out today, don't let those Protestant kids give you a hard time. When kids are wearing orange don't get into a fight with them because they're just trying to bait you.'" "This was what was happening when she was growing up," O'Brien adds. "It was like being a black American in the `50s or the `60s, so from my grandmother I could see that she did have those feelings of being discriminated against. It taught me that things used to be different for the Irish here." But those old prejudices had long disappeared by the time Conan was moving through school. He continues, "It was funny, because she was telling us to watch out, and I was going to school in this incredibly liberal school system and there were black kids and Iranian kids. No one was thinking about St. Patrick's Day." O'Brien's modern-day holiday celebrations are pretty tame, although resting on his desk is an invite to the St. Patrick's party that President and Mrs. Clinton are tossing in the White House the evening of the 17th. He's hoping to fix his schedule to attend the event, but if he can't swing it Conan plans on "just staying off the streets of New York because it's so crazy. And I swear, the people making the biggest fuss and causing the most trouble don't look Irish to me! "Last year on St. Patrick's Day I had to get to midtown to do an Irish radio show and people would see me and go `COOOOONAN, come have a drink!' So it's kind of nuts." The first St. Patrick's ad campaign for milk -- pictured on this page -- is also another O'Brien bow to his heritage. "I thought it was a fun idea," he says. "I don't get paid for it or if I do I think it goes to charity." O'Brien made his first trip to the land of his ancestors last summer and clocked up plenty of mileage on the rental car. Accompanied by his girlfriend, Lynn Kaplan, who works on Late Night as a talent booker, he landed in Shannon Airport and proceeded on a mission to discover precisely where his roots were sewn. A particular day in the old country would be ideal for one of O'Brien's famous Late Night comedy sketches. Arriving in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford -- the family townland, according to his father -- O'Brien found himself moved by the occasion. "So I think, well, it's a clich "I get out of the car and my girlfriend takes a picture of me kissing the ground, and then just as I'm doing that she's looking at the map and she says, `Well, there's another Dungarvan in Ireland.' So I was, like, `Thhuuhh' (he makes a gesture to spit.) And I remembered thinking that I hoped I didn't have my mouth on the wrong Dungarvan, because that would make me feel cheap." A phone call to dad quickly straightened the mess out -- Conan did place his lips on the proper Dungarvan -- and the trip throughout Kerry and Dublin proceeded without a hitch. The Irish capital city is a place that O'Brien would like to return to, and he was surprised to be recognized by a number of the natives who can see his show in Ireland on the NBC Superchannel. "I went to the Temple Bar area, and everyone is so young and vibrant and incredibly well-read," Conan remarks of Dublin. "It just looked like a place where you'd like to spend a week and walk around." THE young Conan O'Brien wasn't a terribly happy child, reveals Conan the elder. Thankfully, though, that statement wasn't a prelude to the "I'm a product of a dysfunctional family," type of story that characterizes so many celebrity r "From a very early age there was just so much that I couldn't do," he says. "I wasn't a great athlete because I wasn't coordinated enough. And my brother Luke was a math whiz and really smart in science and I couldn't do that. My brother Neil is really physically strong, a big guy, and he was a mechanical whiz, and I thought, `Well, I can't do that either.'" All of that may have been true, but O'Brien was also honing the skills that would eventually take him in a completely different -- and mega-successful -- direction. He just wasn't aware of it at the time. O'Brien wasn't a big fan of school, but he did manage to graduate Brookline High School as his year's valedictorian. The subjects that did hold his interest were English and Social Studies. Conan loved to write mini-plays and act out the parts; he even took tap-dancing lessons for a couple of years. He had a keen interest in comedy since third-grade, when his dad took him to a revival house to see the Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times. Conan was smitten after that. When the class teacher asked the pupils to compose a paper on what they wanted to be when they grew up, Conan wrote that he wanted to do what Chaplin did "because everyone was laughing in the theater." "I could make other kids laugh, and I used to enjoy doing it," he recalls. "I always thought that was the fun thing I did, but I never took it seriously." Not until he enrolled in Harvard did Conan realize that, hey, he was pretty darn good at this comedy thing, and maybe -- just maybe -- something positive could come of it. He started working on Lampoon, Harvard's famous humor magazine, and elder staff members were suitably impressed with Conan's comedic writing ability. "It wasn't until I got on the Lampoon when I was in college that I started to think," Conan says. "It was like, `Wait a minute, now I'm at Harvard, and here are these people who are older than me and they're serious about comedy and they have this nice building and they publish this magazine, and some of them are going on to make movies and things like that. That's when I remember thinking that I was going to take comedy seriously." The revelation came at an opportune time, as O'Brien's future career plans were dicey at best. Visions of law school danced in his head, so too did a career in politics. But both of these options proved to be just a blur that stirred no passion inside. Clarity arrived with Conan's coming out party at the Lampoon. Finally, the penny had dropped. "I've done plenty of things in my life where you just go through the motions," he offers. "But comedy was something I felt I could give 100% of myself, and effortlessly, too." After graduation in 1985 O'Brien headed for Los Angeles, where he worked as a writer for Not Necessarily the News. It was also in LA where he started to work on his performance skills -- writing was great and all, but his desire to actually get up on stage and interact with people was just as prevalent as well. (Friends star Lisa Kudrow was one of the first friends O'Brien made on the west coast; the two attended classes together at the Groundling Theater, which is renowned for producing a number of big stars.) A move back to New York saw O'Brien write for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. But the biggest career change imaginable was yet to come. THERE isn't a soul in America who doesn't know of David Letterman. The gap-toothed comic created a whole new audience of television-viewers when his revolutionary 12:30 a.m. NBC show proved to be must-see TV, no matter how tired one would be or how early the alarm was set to ring a few hours later. Dave bolted for the more prized 11:30 p.m. slot on CBS in 1993, and his departure left a gaping hole in the NBC lineup of stars. And pity the poor soul brought in to replace him -- how on earth does anyone fill Letterman's shoes? Enter Conan -- at first reluctantly, but then, little by little, earnestly. "It wasn't conceivable to me that I would get a shot," he recalls. "I remember thinking, `You'll just set yourself up for a miserable fall.' But then I thought that something's gotta go in there (Letterman's slot), and what goes in there should follow the same tradition. It should have an edge but also be playful, and that it should have the spirit of Letterman's show without copying it. I thought the new show should try and explore different ground." O'Brien was initially offered the producer's job for the new Late Night show but he balked, his wish to somehow, someday, actually perform still very much intact. Lorne Michaels and his NBC colleagues were finding it hard to sign the ideal replacement, and O'Brien's name surfaced again, but this time as the host. He auditioned brilliantly, NBC was excited, and a new big TV star was born -- almost. "The hardest part of doing the show was the couple of months before we went on air," he says of the weeks leading up to his October, 1993 debut. "The media were like, `Who are you, what are you going to do?' But I was ready to take the hits, to go through a wilderness period." Sure enough, the early critical response to the new show, and its host, proved most unkind, and even though O'Brien had steeled himself for the worst, looking at all the negatives in print -- not to mention the bottom of the barrel Nielsen ratings -- still hurt. "It was hard. It was pretty terrible," he says of the critical pounding. "Few people have gone on network TV as raw as me." But that was then and this is now. For the past year Late Night has very quietly but very steadily zoomed to the top of the ratings heap for its time slot; the show hosted by Tom Snyder, its nearest competitor, is some 60% behind. Media critics have started to embrace the show and its quirky, off-beat brand of comedy, and Late Night attracts an array of A-list guests -- new movie star Howard Stern is booked for Thursday the 13th -- and bands -- Smashing Pumpkins are huge fans who risked being booted from appearing on the Grammy Awards last month because they performed on O'Brien's show the night previous. So what brought all this good news on? "It's not just one thing," he maintains. "The show just kept getting better and better and we started to figure things out. In the beginning people beat me up and then they wandered away. It's like one of those Clint Eastwood movies where people beat up Clint but don't kill him off, and then he comes back. That's kind of what happened to us. "It's a great feeling," he says of success. "But it's always tempered with thoughts of, well, what about tomorrow. You're always thinking that things could be a little bit better." O'Brien is in the fourth year of a five year contract, and it's a certainty that NBC will be eager to resign their ever-rising star. It's a show that O'Brien is more than willing to commit to for the long haul, because he feels there are still things he wants to accomplish. "I'll keep doing this until I come into work one day and I look at my writers and I look at Andy (sidekick Richter), and we're all tired and we can't think of another thing to do," says the host. "I want to do it until it's not fun anymore." WHAT'S the best thing about being a hot-shot talk show host? That's easy. "It's this," O'Brien happily replies, holding up a copy of Inside Sports magazine with a cover shot of supermodel Donna D'Errico spilling out of her red bathing suit. She autographed it with this inscription: "Conan, you're awesome babe." Having supermodels worship the ground you walk on is, of course, a goal for most thirtysomething males, but there's more to the job than that. "The thing I like about having my own show is that I can do things that interest me culturally," he says. "Like, I just read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes over my break so I thought, well, let's have Frank McCourt on, so I call up the talent department and say, `Get Frank McCourt. I want to talk to him.'" McCourt's best-selling autobiography about growing up dirt poor in rural Ireland made a big impression on O'Brien. "In Ireland things were so different then; it was a such a different time," he says. And it's a different time for Conan O'Brien, too. Right now, it's the time of his life. Ethnic NewsWatch © SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford, CT |