For nearly twenty years, Jay Leno had been a puzzle to those who view comedy in the Freudian context, as rage dressed in a smile. His act was clean, his work ethic was puritan, his offstage life was without spectacle, and, in defiance of the nasty-comic cliché, he himself was famously nice. Leno willingly signed autographs and chatted with strangers in airports—an opportunity that presented itself often in a road schedule of some two hundred dates a year. His peers called him “the hardest-working comedian in show business,” which wasn’t the same as the “funniest comedian in show business,” but when he was chosen to succeed Johnny Carson as the host of the “Tonight Show,” last spring, after a six-year apprenticeship, even those who thought Leno didn’t merit the job on sheer talent believed that, somehow, he deserved it.

On the night of Sunday, September 20th, four months after he ascended to the most celebrated post in late-night television, Leno was visited at home by two NBC executives. They told him that the network had decided to fire the executive producer of the “Tonight Show,” Helen Gorman Kushnick, who was his longtime friend and manager and who had, at his insistence, accompanied him to the show. They presented him with a choice: he could leave with her or he could keep his job, without her. Leno balked. Kushnick had been his manager for seventeen years, guiding his career with bird-dog concentration toward the prize that they had finally won. He felt that the victory was as much hers as his. What he considered loyalty, however, the NBC executives suggested was in fact “an addiction.” Borrowing the language used to prod drug and alcohol addicts into treatment, Warren Littlefield, the president of NBC Entertainment, told Leno, “This is an intervention.” He cautioned Leno that he must free himself from Kushnick before she destroyed his career.

Even by Hollywood’s standards, it was an unusual drama. In the space of four months, the genial Leno’s “Tonight Show” had become the source of so many intrigues and power plays, and of such unease inside the network, and antipathy outside, that NBC executives were beginning to see it as the locus of the many anxieties plaguing them. Helen Kushnick was by no means the first producer of a television show to annoy network bosses, but then this fall has been a very edgy time at NBC. When the General Electric Company bought the network, six years ago, NBC was at its crest—not only hugely profitable but admired by TV critics and by Wall Street. Since then, its respected chairman, Grant Tinker, has left; its respected head programmer, Brandon Tartikoff, has left; and NBC has plunged from first in the ratings to last. Rumors that G.E. means to unload NBC are so persistent as to have acquired in industry chatter the tenor of a fait accompli—the only remaining question being who the buyer will be. Barry Diller, the former chairman of Twentieth Century Fox; Martin S. Davis, the president of Paramount Communications; and, most recently, Bill Cosby have been mentioned as suitors.

Under Johnny Carson, the “Tonight Show” was a safe, reliably profitable corner of the day for the network. When he departed, a risk had to be taken on “Tonight” for the first time in thirty years. Although NBC went to great expense and effort to make the Carson-to-Leno transition seem like a seamless evolution, it was accompanied by much uncertainty. At issue was not only the new host’s force of personality but also his ability to preserve “Tonight” ’s hegemony on the celebrity circuit. For the men who ran the network, a seemingly trivial disagreement over booking guests was about to become a matter of dire consequence.