As his new show prepares to hit the air, Conan fever is at an all time high. Check out an excerpt from his Rolling Stone cover story:
“Those weeks after the tour, where not much was going on, Conan was miserable,” confirms his wife, Liza Powel, a blunt and dryly funny former advertising executive with whom O’Brien has two children. “That was when he was the most depressed.” Powel says she had “all sorts of grand designs” about keeping her idled spouse busy: He would be responsible for camp drop-offs, he would cook dinner at least one night a week. None of which ended up happening. O’Brien did go for long bicycle rides, and read lots of history books. At a parents’ night at their son Beckett’s preschool, there was a stack of volunteer sign-up sheets, and O’Brien, who still had too much time on his hands, became overly ambitious and started signing up for everything: “Oh, I’d love to come talk to the kids about natural history!”
The morning after O’Brien’s final Tonight Show – his second-highest- rated episode ever, quadrupling his average nightly viewership – he and Powel drove up to a resort in Montecito. “I felt like I’d just been in a car accident,” O’Brien says. “Like a crazy mix of elation, anger, sorrow. Confusion was a big one.” That night, when they entered the dining room and the other guests stood up and applauded, O’Brien says, “It almost made me cry.”
Somebody’s milking this! We stopped feeling bad for you man, get back to funny!
