What Does Conan O'Brien Have That You Don't?

You can call it fate or you can call it breaking and entering. The differences are marginal. The time was the late '80s, a simpler period somewhere before the fall of the Berlin Wall but after Billy Squier had taught us "The Stroke," a time when the phrase "late-night wars" had yet to be invented. — Back then, while David Letterman was quietly building an empire in the hours past midnight, a young Harvard grad named Conan O'Brien was making his way as a writer for the recently resuscitated Saturday Night Live. Every now and then, to get a break from all-night writing binges, O'Brien would sneak downstairs, pick the lock to Studio 6A, pull the tarp off the host's chair and attempt to write comedy while sitting at Letterman's desk. — "It wasn't like, 'Someday I will sit here,' " says O'Brien. "It was more like, 'This is where he sits? Cool.' " He laughs — you know the sound: high-pitched, slightly braying — and continues. "Really, the point of the story is that NBC has terrible security, and I'm sure now every night there will be a different weird person sitting at my desk."

It is Sunday afternoon, the day before the staff is to return from vacation, and the 33-year-old O'Brien, all 6 feet 4 inches, obsessed workaholic of him, has come into that very studio to assess the new set that has been built for his show. His show. Gone are the tacky, Ikea-style desk and cheap paneling. In their places stand a plush new couch and a kind of festive blue-and-purple wall ornamentation that suggest O'Brien is enough of a network commodity to warrant a set that looks a bit like a brothel.

O'Brien walks around the couch, idly strumming an electric guitar, telling stories and making suggestions.

"The carpet has to go," he says. He pauses, as if this has been too demanding. "Don't you think?" And then, perhaps remembering he's the boss, he answers his own question. "We need to make sure it's gone by Tuesday."