Peter Lassally, a Holocaust survivor who was a pivotal figure in late-night television for nearly half a century as a top producer of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” “Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 93.
His death, at a memory-care facility, was confirmed by his son, Tom, a film and TV producer.
The urbane Mr. Lassally knew what made talk-show hosts successful. Among his strengths was “getting the host to understand how to listen, how to ask the questions that an audience might want to hear, and to listen to the answer and to not be thinking ahead with a joke,” the comedian Garry Shandling, who guest-hosted for Mr. Carson and later starred in “The Larry Sanders Show,” a series about a fictional late-night talk show, told NPR in 2012.
After being hired as an associate producer for “The Tonight Show” in 1969, Mr. Lassally rose to become a producer and then an executive producer, working in tandem with the show’s other executive producer, Fred De Cordova.
Following the taping of each show, Mr. Lassally and Mr. Carson would meet to discuss what had worked and what had not.
“I sometimes had a tendency to be much more negative than he was about a portion of the show,” Mr. Lassally said during an interview with the Television Academy in 2009. “He would say to me: ‘It’ll play better on the air. Don’t worry about it.’ I’m supposed to calm him down.”
Later, while working with Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Lassally found that it was best to wait until the next morning to offer an honest assessment, because Mr. Ferguson would be on too much of a high immediately after the show.
The Scottish comedian, who was a novice host when he was hired for “The Late Late Show” in 2004, gave Mr. Lassally a nickname: the host whisperer.
“He had a great deal of authority, but he was quiet, soft-spoken and gentle,” Mr. Ferguson said in an interview, although “sometimes he’d say things that were hard to hear, like, ‘You have a creepy laugh, you have to drop it.’ Really?”
One piece of advice that Mr. Ferguson received continues to resonate with him. Mr. Lassally, he said, would never say no to a joke, but he would say: “Is this joke worth it? How funny is it? If it’s not funny enough, it’s not worth it.”
Mr. Lassally was also known for finding new talent for “The Tonight Show,” especially comedians.
“He was looking to expand beyond the routine guests, which was important for Carson, who was an Old World talent,” Bill Carter, the author of “The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno and the Network Battle for the Night” (1994), said in an interview. “He had to bring in new talent to keep the show alive.”
In 1982, Mr. Lassally discovered the deadpan comedian Steven Wright at a Boston comedy club called Ding Ho, where Mr. Wright was among a dozen or so comics performing — all of them aware that Mr. Lassally would be there scouting.
Afterward, the comics milled around in the parking lot, hoping for an encouraging word. But Mr. Lassally was looking for Mr. Wright, who had already left. He later found Mr. Wright’s phone number and called to book him.
“He was so clever and so different, and such a nice boy,” Mr. Lassally told CBS News in 2018. “And so grateful — he still calls me every anniversary of his appearance to thank me again.”
Peter Gerhard Eduard Lassally was born on Oct. 14, 1932, in Hamburg, Germany, to Paul Lassally, a coffee importer and exporter, and Else Lassally, who ran the home.
In 1938, his family fled the Nazis, settling in Amsterdam, where Peter, a violin prodigy, continued to play and his sister, Irene, attended grade school with Anne Frank.
Several years later, his father died of cancer, and soon after, in 1943, he and his mother and sister were sent to Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp in the northeastern Netherlands. They were next imprisoned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, in what was then Czechoslovakia, where his sister was part of a group that built gas chambers. Among the atrocities Peter witnessed was a baby being hanged from a lamppost.
“It was a hard time for all of us,” he told NPR.
The family survived and, in 1947, sailed for New York, where they settled in Queens. Peter graduated from Newtown High School and started his show business career, first as an usher at Radio City Music Hall and then as a page at NBC.
In the 1950s, he produced nationally broadcast programs for the NBC radio network, including “Monitor” and “Nightline,” where he hired rising comic talents like Mike Nichols and Elaine May. He also produced “PM East/PM West,” a late-night TV talk show hosted by Mike Wallace and Joyce Davidson, from 1961 to 1962, and radio and television shows with Arthur Godfrey, a megastar of the era.
His connection to “The Tonight Show” was Mr. Carson’s second wife, Joanne Carson, who had heard about his work for Mr. Godfrey and asked him to produce a TV pilot for her. It was never shot, but she helped him get the job with her husband.
In a 2014 interview with “The Carson Podcast,” Mr. Lassally described his working relationship with Mr. De Cordova, the better-known of the show’s executive producers.
“He would be Mr. Jolly and schmooze with the guests, which I don’t like to do,” Mr. Lassally said, “and I would do all the work.”
He had a different sort of relationship with Robert Morton, his co-executive producer on Mr. Letterman’s “Late Night” program on NBC, where he moved in 1992 after Mr. Carson retired, and on Mr. Letterman’s “Late Show” on CBS, which started a year later.
As Mr. Morton said in an interview: “I ran the show, but Pete was the guy who guided us in turning the show from a 12:30 show to an 11:30 show. Nobody knew 11:30 better than Pete.”
Mr. Lassally was a key confidant of Mr. Letterman’s during the comedian’s failed attempt to succeed Mr. Carson at “The Tonight Show,” a position that went to Jay Leno instead. At one point, said Mr. Carter, the author of “The Late Shift,” Mr. Lassally brokered a meeting between Mr. Letterman and Bob Wright, the president of NBC, that nearly led to an offer for Mr. Letterman to succeed Mr. Leno as host at the end of Mr. Leno’s first contract with “The Tonight Show.”
Mr. Lassally also advised Mr. Letterman to hire the agent Michael Ovitz, who fielded a panoply of offers that resulted in Mr. Letterman becoming the host of CBS’s “Late Show,” running opposite “The Tonight Show” at 11:30 — actually, in the modern era, 11:35 — p.m.
That deal with CBS also gave Mr. Letterman’s production company control of the 12:30 a.m. time slot, on which “The Late Late Show” aired.
By the time Mr. Lassally left “Late Show” three years later, he was also an executive producer of “The Late Late Show,” hosted by the newsman Tom Snyder from 1995 to 1999. Mr. Lassally returned to run the show when Mr. Ferguson was the host, from 2005 to 2014.
In addition to his son, Mr. Lassally is survived by a daughter, Andrea Gibbin, and four grandchildren. His wife, Alice (Gershon) Lassally, died in 2019.
Not long after Mr. Lassally joined “The Tonight Show,” he said, Mr. Carson drunkenly confided that he didn’t deserve his job.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be a rough trip,’” he said in the Television Academy interview. “But that was the only time in all those years where he just lost control completely and revealed what his fears were.”
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