On October 14, 1932, Peter Lassally was born into a Jewish family in Germany, who fled to Amsterdam just prior to World War II. He attended grade school with Anne Frank, and surprisingly remembered her being unpopular. “Other girls did not like her,” Lassally told NPR in 2012. “You know, she was a bit of a loner,” he continued.
When Lassally was 10 years old, he and his family were interned in the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, before being sent to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia—a sort of “show camp” that was used for Nazi propaganda. “I remember watching from my window a little baby being swung against the lamppost and, you know, that’s what my life was like: Watching them kill an innocent baby in the most brutal way possible,” Lassally recalled in a 2018 interview with CBS News.
He Went to School With Anne Frank. Decades Later, He Helped Shape American Television.
Luckily, Lassally and his relatives were liberated and eventually made their way to the U.S. in 1947, where Lassally worked as a page for NBC. By the mid-1950s, he found himself producing TV host Arthur Godfrey’s popular variety show. Then, in 1970, Lassally landed his longest-lasting gig as the executive producer of The Tonight Show, eight years into Johnny Carson’s legendary run. He stayed with Carson until Jay Leno replaced him in 1992.
After Carson’s retirement, Lassally took over production duties on Late Night with David Letterman and coached Letterman during his transition to CBS’s Late Show—which Lassally served as an executive producer on. Lassally also helped create The Late Late Show, a series he stuck with through the tenures of Tom Snyder, Craig Kilborn, and Craig Ferguson. His various contributions to late-night history earned Lassally the nickname “the host whisperer.”
Following Lassally’s death earlier this year, NBC released a statement saying, “Peter’s brilliance was in shaping what we watch, how we watch and why late-night was, and remains, vitally significant.”
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