Peter Lassally, a concentration camp survivor who became known as the “Host Whisperer” for producing talk shows headlined by Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Craig Ferguson, has died. He was 93.
Lassally died Sunday of natural causes at a memory care facility in Los Angeles, his son, Tom Lassally, the partner, producer and manager at 3 Arts Entertainment, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Lassally had produced programs starring Arthur Godfrey and Mike Wallace before joining Carson on NBC’s The Tonight Show, then based in New York, in 1969. He served as the quiet behind-the-scenes guy in a producing partnership with the boisterous Fred De Cordova and remained with the show until Carson’s final broadcast on May 22, 1992.
After just one week off, Lassally jumped to Late Night With David Letterman as an executive producer for what would prove to be the NBC program’s final season. When Jay Leno was picked over Letterman to replace Carson, Lassally advised Letterman what to do next.
“I said to Dave, ‘If you’re going to follow Jay Leno at 12:30 when he gets The Tonight Show, you’re going to hate yourself, you’re going to be miserable,’” Lassally recalled in a 2009 chat for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
“You’re going to think, ‘Why am I following Jay Leno when I for 12 years hosted the 12:30 show … and my reward should be The Tonight Show?’ If you agree, I’ll try to get you an 11:30 show — not knowing when I said that just how I was going to do that.”
Lassally hooked Letterman up with powerful CAA agent Michael Ovitz, and the host fielded lucrative offers in syndication, cable and broadcast before deciding to move to CBS in 1993 to topline Late Show With David Letterman from the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway at 11:35 p.m.
The deal included ownership of a 12:35 a.m. program, The Late Late Show, and Lassally returned to California to set up that program with host Tom Snyder. When Snyder left after four years in March 1999, Lassally disapproved of his replacement, the snarky Craig Kilborn — he had pushed for Jon Stewart — and stepped aside. But when Kilborn quit in a salary dispute in 2004, he got his man in the charming Scottish actor-comedian Ferguson.
“I always had a good relationship with the hosts that I worked with because I would tell them the truth. That has really worked well for me. That’s how I got the title the ‘Host Whisperer,’” the two-time Emmy winner said. “I’m not good at pumping sunshine up their rears. If I didn’t like it, I can’t fake it, I can’t pretend it was good. I’m very lucky the hosts respected that.”
Peter Eduard Lassally was born on Oct. 14, 1932, in Hamburg, Germany. His father, Paul, was an importer/exporter in the coffee business, and his mother, Elsa, was a housewife.
He and his family fled Germany in 1938 on the way to England to escape the Nazis but “didn’t go far enough,” settling in Amsterdam, where he went to the same grade school as Anne Frank. After his father died and the Germans invaded the Netherlands, his mother and older sister were confined to two concentration camps from 1943-45.
The second camp, Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, “was a very strange place,” Lassally told NPR in 2012. “That’s where the Nazis fixed up the camp with all sorts of phony, wonderful decor and invited the Red Cross to come and visit and see what wonderful things they were doing.”
In 1947, Lassally came to live with an uncle in Canton, New York, where he attended St. Lawrence University after graduating from high school in Queens. Back in New York City, he worked as an usher at Radio City Music Hall and as a page (alongside Regis Philbin) at NBC.
Lassally reviewed Broadway plays for a WOR radio program hosted by Ruby Mercer and went on to produce her show, then produced the NBC radio program Nightline, where he hired Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and Nichols & May to do short comedy bits. “That’s where I found doing what I really love more than anything else, finding talent and developing them,” he said.
Lassally produced Godfrey-hosted shows on CBS radio and television — he eventually became president of Godfrey’s production company — and in 1961 moved to PM East, a syndicated talk show from Westinghouse that was hosted by Wallace. He regularly booked Barbra Streisand on that because she lived in an apartment above the studio; she hadn’t even begun her singing career yet.
Lassally got to know Carson’s second wife, Joanne, when she asked him to produce a TV pilot for her, and she helped him get a job on The Tonight Show. De Cordova came aboard a bit later, and they enjoyed a complementary relationship, he told Mark Malkoff on a 2014 episode of The Carson Podcast.
“He would be Mr. Jolly and schmooze with the guests, which I didn’t like to do, and I would do all the work. And that worked perfectly,” he said. The pair had lunch together every day for more than two decades, often throwing in a game of poker.
Lassally had final say on all Tonight Show guests — he recognized Garry Shandling‘s potential during an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show and pursued Steven Wright after seeing him do stand-up at a Chinese restaurant — and broke in the guest hosts who sat in when Carson was on vacation.
“The gift that I keep looking for in people, whether they’re hosts or guests, is likability,” he said. “I don’t care if you have the No. 1 record or the No. 1 movie; if you’re not likable, I’d rather not put you on because I don’t think the audience will stay up.”
Joan Rivers eventually became the permanent guest host, and she assumed Lassally would follow her when she landed her own late-night show at Fox in 1986. He stayed loyal to Carson, however.
After Carson retired, Lassally convinced him to send jokes to Letterman for his monologues. “He didn’t want to force Dave to use them because of who Johnny was,” he told Malkoff. “I said, ‘No, these jokes are wonderful, and Dave would be honored and proud to do them on his show.’ He finally gave in.”
Shandling also bounced talk-show ideas off him for HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show. “Shandling and his writing partner would ask me, ‘Could this have happened?’ I would say yes and no,” he said.
In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Lassally noted that Late Show originally was to spend just one year in New York before moving to Los Angeles. However, when the program came out of the gate beating Leno in the ratings, those plans were shelved, and Lassally stayed in New York for about 2 1/2 years, longer than he would have preferred.
He was serving as a consultant on Late Late Show when he was asked to oversee the selection of a new host after Kilborn’s exit. Four finalists — Ferguson, D.L. Hughley, Michael Ian Black and Damien Fahey — emerged from more than two dozen guest hosts (among them Stewart) before Ferguson, despite his heavy Scottish burr, got the job.
Lassally retired in 2014 as executive producer of Late Late Show when Ferguson left. He collected 13 Emmy nominations during his career, with wins in 1992 for The Tonight Show and 1994 for Late Show.
“When Johnny Carson and David Letterman needed counsel and an honest opinion, they immediately went to Peter Lassally, the professor of late night,” NBC said in a statement. “His relationship to each of these giants was immeasurable, and both of them would undoubtedly say his contribution to their success was so impactful that it would be difficult to put in words. [He was] a quiet man whose influence and stature spoke volumes; his brilliance was in shaping what we watch, how we watch and why late night was, and remains, vitally significant.”
In addition to his son, survivors include his daughter, Andrea, and his grandchildren, Walker, Eloise, Annabel and Owen. His wife of 60 years, Alice, predeceased him.
“I respect talent, I’m in awe of talent,” he once said. “If you are really talented, I will put up with your craziness. Because if you’re that talented, you’re not a normal person; there’s something wacky about you.”
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