“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!””He was in the house all the time,” Powel recalls. “I said, ‘This can’t last – it’ll drive us crazy!’ Literally every 10 minutes, he’d poke his head in the room and say, ‘I don’t wanna bother you, but do you know where the Band-Aids are?’ ‘I don’t wanna bother you, but do you know how to use the phone?’ He was so sweet about it, and I felt like such a jerk. But seriously, I almost rented an office for him.”
Conan is on the cover of next month’s Rolling Stone, riding high and hanging from a ladder under a helicopter. The full article’s not online yet, as Rolling Stone is awful at the internet, but there is an excerpt. Here’s a bit about what Conan was like when he was stuck at home with nothing to do, the poor bastard:The issue hits newsstands this Friday, and I’m sure the full article will show up online not too long after that.
