by Carter, Bill
Perth left out one detail. He didn’t actually own such an item; he just knew one existed, in a little motorcycle shop called Adam Ant’s in North Hollywood.
The next move for Perth was to meet with Jeff Sagansky, the president of CBS’s entertainment division. Perth had kept Sagansky informed of his ongoing gentle wooing of Leno and Kushnick. The problem, both men knew, was that hints of general interest by CBS might be enough for Kushnick to wring a better deal out of NBC. “I think we have to impress Jay somehow that we’re absolutely serious,” Perth told Sagansky.
“OK, what do you have in mind?” Sagansky said.
“I want to go out to the shop in North Hollywood, buy him the Triumph, and ride it over to his house and give it to him,” Perth said. Sagansky liked the idea immediately, but asked what this little overture was going to cost CBS. Perth told him the price: $6,000. Sagansky had the check cut that day.
Perth went straight to the shop, bought the bike, and drove it away. He stored it at a friend’s house in Hancock Park while he went on his next errand—to a trophy shop. The gift needed one more touch. Perth had the shop make a brass plaque, just big enough to be attached discreetly to the oil tank on the side of the motorcycle. The last thing Perth wanted, however, was this little shop owner to know CBS was out buying motorcycles for Jay Leno. CBS’s public posture was still 100 percent behind Pat Sajak. If Daily Variety or the Hollywood Reporter got a tip that CBS was giving gifts to Leno, that charade would be over—and so might the dance with him and Kushnick.
So Perth ordered that the message read: “To J.L.—Crank it on up and ride over to CBS … forever. Rod Perth and Jeff Sagansky.” The next morning he called Leno and told him his Triumph had just been shipped in from his old house in Chicago. Jay’s enthusiasm was dependable. He asked to see it right away.
So off Perth rode, in his CBS corporate suit and tie, across Sunset to Leno’s large but tasteful Tudor home on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. When he got to the gates, Leno pushed a button to let him in. And Perth got his first look at Leno’s downhill brick driveway that led to his enormous, double-stacked, twelve-car garage. It contained just a small assortment of Leno’s automotive treasures: a 1955 Packard, a 1967 Lamborghini Miura, and a 1915 Hispano-Suiza.
Jay walked out of the garage in his coveralls, oohing and aahing every step of the way toward the Triumph. The motorcycle wasn’t nearly as pristine as most of those already in his collection, but he walked around the machine with a lustful gleam in his eye, offering a few words of advice about what else Perth might want to do—like replace the speedometer, for instance, because it was all wrong for this model.
Finally Leno’s eye caught the plaque near the oil tank. He got down on one knee, read the words, and looked up at Perth. “What’s this?” the puzzled Leno said.
“It’s a gesture from us, Jay,” Perth said. “We just want you to know we’re dead serious.”
Leno’s face reddened slightly. He was clearly fumbling for words. “Gee, I can’t believe you did this. I don’t know what to say.”
Perth didn’t push at all, knowing Leno wasn’t the one he had to negotiate with anyway. CBS’s point had been made. Instead, Perth talked with Leno about the machine for awhile, and about his cars, and then got Leno to drive him to work in Leno’s replica Cobra, which overheated on the way.
Within a few weeks, after the first of the year, Perth scheduled a lunch with Helen Kushnick. He was bringing some friends. Perth picked a small Italian restaurant called Ronda, around the corner from CBS’s headquarters in Television City, because it was not frequented by Hollywood insiders. He knew a lunch that included Helen Kushnick, Jeff Sagansky, and Howard Stringer, the president of CBS, would be noticed—and no one would have to wonder what they were there to talk about.
When the CBS executives walked in, they discovered what seemed like half the television industry sitting around at the tables that afternoon. They tried to find an inconspicuous spot. When Kushnick arrived and saw Stringer, she knew that he hadn’t flown in from New York for more small talk about Leno. This was a serious negotiation. And the CBS guys had a serious piece of paper for Kushnick to read.
The offer CBS framed made Kushnick blanch. It was a three-year deal for Jay, at about $6 million a year. He would start in late night on CBS in September of 1990. “Holy shit,” she said. “You guys are serious.” Then she pushed the offer sheet back at them. “Take it,” she said. “I don’t want a copy of this.” The CBS executives assumed that, if asked, she wanted to be able to say she had no offer from CBS in hand. But everyone at the table knew Kushnick had absorbed every important detail on the paper.
Over the next few months, Perth discreetly checked in with Kushnick, and even more discreetly, with Jay. He respected the close relationship between them and he wanted to be extra careful not to insult Kushnick. When he called her, Helen would say she was dying to move Jay to CBS, that she was tired of waiting for the NBC executives to pull the chair out from under Johnny Carson. She said the same things to Howard Stringer during a couple of meals she shared with him and his wife, Jennifer. Stringer got the feeling that Kushnick was more interested in CBS than Leno was. Perth had the same impression: No matter what Kushnick was saying, Leno was not being won over, not with Carson’s crown still looming within his grasp.
What CBS was offering was a late-night job right away, for great money. But the chair being offered had been tattered by Pat Sajak’s woeful performance. The network had no history worth remembering in late night. As the days went on, with no positive response from Leno, Perth realized the only thing he might have accomplished with his energetic wooing was to hand Jay Leno another loud toy to tinker with; and to hand Helen Kushnick the crowbar she needed to pry Johnny Carson out of the most powerful seat in television.
In private, Helen Kushnick often slammed the NBC executives, saying they didn’t know a thing about the television business. But that sweeping denunciation didn’t include Brandon Tartikoff. Kushnick respected Tartikoff, and he had been friendly and fair with her. So naturally, once she had the firm offer from CBS in hand, she let Tartikoff know that Leno was in play.
Tartikoff, among the most skillful poker players in Hollywood, had managed to keep the “Tonight” show issue from becoming a crisis for most of the decade he ran NBC’s entertainment division. Tartikoff knew that the ultimate call on the “Tonight” show would be excruciatingly difficult to make; he knew how volatile the mix was, with three big stars—Carson, Letterman, and Leno—all involved. Tartikoff was also close to all three men. The one top NBC executive with a real gift for talent relations, Tartikoff had insight into each man, and he didn’t see an easy solution in any direction. He couldn’t hand the “Tonight” show to Leno while Carson still occupied it; but if he didn’t, he might lose Leno to CBS. And whenever the show did change hands, Letterman would have to be factored into any resolution. Tartikoff wasn’t certain Letterman would jump at the chance to do the “Tonight” show; but he believed the job had to at least be offered to Letterman or the star would quit.
As a hedge against such an uncertain future, Tartikoff had made deals with other comedians he saw as possible future late-night players. He signed Dennis Miller, then doing the “News Update” segments of “Saturday Night Live,” to a deal with the network worth about a half-million dollars. And he decided to indulge another comic with a commitment for a sitcom pilot, just to get him under contract to NBC. Tartikoff figured him much more for a late-night star; he didn’t have high hopes then for the sitcom project being pitched by Jerry Seinfeld, called simply “Seinfeld.”
But those were moves for the long term. The immediate, urgent issue Tartikoff had to deal with was the implication of what he was hearing from Kushnick: Here was Howard Stringer luring Leno with money and motorcycles. If Leno was at CBS instead of Sajak, would Carson still sail blithely along? And when Carson decided to quit, how would a Leno vs. Letterman late-night battle play out?
Tartikoff talked it through
with Kushnick. He knew Leno’s obvious preference: hang in at NBC and stay in line to succeed Carson. That was the card Tartikoff had to play. But he had to be careful. He knew that Kushnick was a potential loose cannon; she had to be finessed in this situation. One too many promises would probably mean reading the news in the next edition of the National Enquirer.
Tartikoff knew John Agoglia already had a deal with Leno that had a penalty payment in place if Johnny were to leave and the show went to somebody besides Jay. Now, a new deal was made for Leno. More money from NBC, more commitment to his future. It amounted to a chunk of financial security for Leno, and that figured to be enough to hold him. The rest of Tartikoff’s assignment involved the careful stroking of Kushnick.
He asked her—in a way calculated to get her to agree—if she really wanted him to force Carson out in September 1990. That would deny Carson his 30th year on the show, Tartikoff pointed out. Kushnick backed off, saying, of course, that made no sense. She settled for the deal Tartikoff had brought her.
It wasn’t quite what she and Jay wanted—the “Tonight” show right away—and it was not close financially to the deal CBS had offered. But Helen had some consolation anyway—or so she concluded from Tartikoff’s skillfully vague stroking. She believed the leverage of the CBS deal had won her the next best thing to the job itself: a verbal commitment from Brandon Tartikoff that Jay Leno. had the “Tonight” show as soon as Johnny Carson went away.
Leno had never had any inclination to accept the offer from CBS. He didn’t want to go against Carson, nor did he want to go against Letterman. He feared it would look bad: the onetime guest host, the former favorite guest, now biting the hands that once fed him straight lines. He would be cast as the ingrate, the upstart. Leno was terribly uncomfortable with those images. They didn’t square with the carefully assembled persona of the all-around good guy, straight shooter, and network team player. Joan Rivers’s experience had made an impression on him, too: Crossing Johnny and taking him on head-to-head on was the shortest route to the exit from show business.
And if Helen was right, this offer from NBC would just move them closer to the big prize anyway. Verbal commitment or not, Jay wasn’t convinced yet that the job would inevitably be his. But having maneuvered his way into position to be a change of heart away from the best job in television, Leno, always proud of the patience he had shown in developing his career, had every reason to be willing to wait a little longer. Besides, Helen had a plan.
Helen told Jay that all this endless speculation about who was going to replace Johnny Carson missed the point. “No comic is going to replace Carson,” she told him. “The affiliates are going to replace Carson.” As Kushnick saw it, the NBC station lineup, unified at 11:30 for close to forty years, had the true power over the “Tonight” show chair. And she believed she had the guy who could make the affiliates his strongest constituency. Jay was already the ultimate comedy road warrior. He had performed up to 300 nights a year in clubs and arenas and colleges all over the country. Even after he became the permanent guest host of the “Tonight” show in 1987, Leno continued to work the road in almost all of his free time.
Wherever he went, Helen had him check in with the nearest NBC affiliate, talk to the general manager, and see if he could do a promotion for the local news—or anything else the station might need a celebrity for. At the same time, she had Jay do interviews with the local papers, partly just to get his name out everywhere, partly to hone his skills with publicity and press. And anytime NBC needed something, talent for an event, a performer for a special, a presentation for stations or advertisers, Helen nodded and Jay came running. It was a carefully organized campaign to convince the network, and especially the people who ran the stations that made up the network, that Leno was Mr. Reliable.
The role was not a challenge for Jay Leno; he’d been playing it all his life.
If Leno’s ability to work the network and the affiliates made him look like a traveling-comedy salesman, he came by the resemblance honestly. At one point in his life Jay thought he would be a funny insurance salesman, because that’s how his Dad, Angelo, supported the Leno family in Andover, Massachusetts.
It was a small family; Jay’s only sibling, his brother Patrick, was ten years older, but they had large, somewhat conflicting extensions to the immediate family. The Italian relatives on Angelo’s side were typically boisterous, fun and food-loving, while the Scottish relatives on Jay’s mother’s side believed in restraint in all things. The mix came out about equal in Jay, a big funny guy who kept his emotions under rigidly tight control.
Jay’s mother, an immigrant from Scotland at age ten, was forty-one when James Douglas Muir Leno was born on April 28, 1950, in New Rochelle, New York. The family moved to Andover in 1959, soon enough for Jamie, as he was called throughout his youth, to acquire a solid, working-class New England accent.
Early on, Jay admired his father’s storytelling ability, often displayed at company conventions where Angelo was usually called on to introduce the vice president. The idea of being able to stand up in front of people and tell funny stories had a powerful appeal to young Jay, though he then could only foresee it translating into being another funny insurance salesman. Jay knew comedians existed, but they had jobs in show business, which in his neighborhood was looked upon as something undertaken by different life forms. “I had this friend up the street and his mom said to me, ‘You know, you can’t be a comedian because they’ve got a union and you can only do it if your father’s in the union.’ I thought you had to be like Milton Berle’s son.”
But some things are simply foreordained. Jamie Leno had an ear and an awareness for anything funny. Leno struggled in school, only learning later that he was mildly dyslexic. To compensate, he worked on providing schoolmates—and teachers—with laughs. Earl Simon, his teacher in fifth grade, wrote a note on Jay’s report card at the end of the year: “If James used the effort toward his studies that he uses to be humorous, he’d be an A student. I hope he never loses his talent to make people chuckle.”
Jay was lousy at sports. He had two explanations: He just wasn’t interested, and too many sports involved knocking people down. Jay hated to do that. From a very young age, he liked to be liked.
At Emerson College in Boston, Jay picked speech therapy as a major because it called for oral final exams. He simply couldn’t bring himself to open the books and read the material, though he retained everything he heard in class. The college had a comedy workshop, which Jay tried to join, only to be rejected—even though he was already making money as a comic. He and a classmate, Gene Braunstein (later to move to Hollywood and produce the sitcom “Who’s the Boss?”), formed a comedy team “Gene and Jay, Unique and Original Comedy” and played the Boston coffee-house circuit. After he went solo he began booking himself into any club, bar, joint, or dive that he thought might reasonably be interested in providing entertainment for its customers.
Leno came to specialize in colorful accounts of his early comedy days. The tales included getting lighted cigarettes tossed at him, being protected from hecklers by strippers in a sleazy club, being knocked out cold by another heckler who hit him over the head with a bottle of ketchup, being approached by an agent who wanted to turn him into a combination comedian-wrestler, and playing on the same bill with a performer who called himself the “Personable Yodeling Sensation.”
The tales of Leno’s wild and woolly early life extended to his determination to work on cars. He needed a regular source of income, so he went to a Rolls-Royce/Mercedes dealership in Boston and asked for a job as a car washer. The owner said no. As Jay related it, he simply turned up for work the next day, put on coveralls, and started washing cars. When the other guys on the job took notice of him, Leno told them he was the new wash guy and they all went on happily for a few days. Finally, the owner noticed him working and asked what he thought he was doing. Jay told him he thought he’d just do a good job for awhile without getting paid, and maybe if the ow
ner liked him he might eventually get hired. Of course, the owner caved in and hired him that day.
The Rolls-Royce job coincided comfortably with his comedy career because Jay got to deliver new cars to customers in the New York area. And he wanted to get to New York as often as he could to appear in the comedy clubs. Leno would drive a car down to Manhattan or Scarsdale or Garden City, pick up a car for the drive back from the Mercedes dealer in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then spend several hours at the Improv waiting for a shot to go on.
His best tale from this experience involved a Rolls he had to deliver to Greenwich, Connecticut. When he got there, the new owner said he was going to pay in full—in cash. The car cost $29,000 in those days, and Jay said he got the whole stash in a brown paper bag. Naturally he went to the Improv. Careful to take the bag of money with him, Leno managed to get on the stage that night and do a killer set. Excited and elated, he took the return car back out of Manhattan, heading home, listening happily to the tape of the performance he’d just completed. He got as far as Greenwich when he remembered something: the cash. Panic-stricken, Leno turned the car around and sped back to the city. He’d been on at about 2:00 A.M., now it was almost four and the club was getting ready to close. Jay burst into the club, looking immediately to the piano where he had left his brown bag. It was still there. “Gee, sorry,” Jay said, “I forgot my lunch.”
Like many of Leno’s early-days recollections, this one was vivid and detailed. But many of his closest colleagues and friends learned that a Leno story was rarely to be taken at face value. They described Leno as a champion embellisher. “Jay’s a comic. Storytelling is part of his act,” one friend said. “But Jay’s so good at it, makes it sound so believable, that sometimes you get to feeling he believes it all himself.”
Jimmy Brogan, a comic who met Leno in New York and later became a close friend and writer for him in Los Angeles, became aware of Jay’s tendency to put some extra spin on a good story. Brogan once heard Leno telling a reporter about a time when US magazine decided to do a story on him. Leno had said: “I called up my dad in Massachusetts and told him that US magazine was going to do this story on me and he ought to get a copy so he and my mom could read it. So my dad goes down to the store that sells the magazines, and he asks if they have a copy of U.S. magazine. The guy says, ‘You must mean U.S. News and World Report,’ and he gives my dad a copy. So my dad looks through it and there’s no story on me. So he calls back in kind of a huff and he says I don’t know what I’m talking about; there’s no story about me in this U.S. magazine. So I say, ‘No, Dad, it’s US, like you and me, US Magazine.’”