by Carter, Bill
The story didn’t have the ring of wild fabrication as Leno told it, but Brogan pointed out that there was just one problem with it: “That happened to me and my father. That wasn’t Jay and his father. So I had to remind Jay to stop telling that story like it happened to him.”
For Brogan, who became one of Leno’s closest friends in the business, these embellishments amounted to another endearing trait. But another headliner comic was less charitable: “I don’t mind Jay and his fabrications as long as he keeps me out of them.”
What is certainly true is that Leno began at an early age to throw every ounce of his interest, energy, and attention into becoming a professional comedian. He worked unstintingly on his act, shaping himself as the always slightly irked observer of the absurdities of American life: airplane food, foreign cars, the phone company. Typical joke: “The Yugo has come out with a very clever antitheft device. They made their name bigger.” Jay knew exactly how to hit the last few words really loud, to emphasize the punch line. Leno was also distinctive for the things he didn’t do in his act: no drugs, no sex, no vulgarity at all.
Because of his background at the car dealership, Leno was often labeled a comedy mechanic. In truth he was closer to a craftsman. He worked on jokes to find the perfect word, to try to put a sense of meter into each line. “I liked to listen to Bob and Ray on the radio,” Leno said. “I would listen to it just for the flow the way other people would listen to a record.”
From his earliest days on stage, Leno had a commanding presence. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he moved somewhat stiffly, like Robo-comic, but he conveyed energy and a consistently aggressive attitude. The robot image was strengthened by his striking jawline, which tended to make his head look slightly oversized. The prominence of his jaw so dominated Leno’s looks that it was usually the only thing about his appearance that got remarked upon. In early accounts of his act, he was called “lantern-jawed,” “anvil-faced,” and even compared to the Frankenstein monster. Those who took the trouble to look past the jaw saw a guy with rather soft features, doughy cheeks, a head of Elvis-like black, wavy hair, and most surprisingly, a pair of arresting aquamarine eyes.
Leno met all the comics on the New York scene in the early 1970s, and most of them regarded him as a comedy savant. He knew how to create a joke, build it, and deliver it better than anyone else.
But most of the comedy business was still in Los Angeles, and in 1974 Leno decided to make his move.
As good as he was on the stage telling jokes, Leno had a hard time putting his career into high gear. An agent at the William Morris agency once told him he just wasn’t the kind of guy who could get his name in the papers. A casting director at NBC told him he should dye his hair blond and have his famous jaw rehung surgically because he had a face “that would frighten small children.”
Leno tried to turn his early struggles into virtues. When he was rejected, he would just hunker down and work harder, do more gigs, tell more jokes, keep pushing, pushing, pushing. “I watch other people and they like to go on vacations, to go out to dinner, go to athletic events. And I just write jokes. And it’s seven days a week and it’s fine. It’s just that you have to have the stamina to do it. You just do it every day. And I like it.”
Leno was aware early that his was not the hyperactive talent of Robin Williams, but the slow, steady, persistent, tortoise-style talent of a guy who would outwork every comic with a flashier act. Leno hadn’t been at it long in L.A. before other comics started calling him “the hardest-working comic in show business.” That was Jay’s identity. It was matched by Mr. Nice Guy. Jay spoke no evil, did no dirt to anybody. He was the choirboy of the comics. He had batches of young comics up to his apartment; they would sit around him on the couch and he would hold court on the craft of comedy, puffing on a pipe. Nobody disliked him, but some thought he laid on the hardworking nice guy bit a little too thick. Mostly, it was hard for anyone to figure Leno out. Everything about him seemed a little more complicated than what he showed on the surface.
Helen Kushnick had seen Leno in the Comedy Store in 1975. She had been managing writers and producers for ICM, then broke away to start her own company. She thought Leno had spunk and spark on stage, and signed him as a client. It was a business relationship that quickly put down deep, entangled roots.
The same year, Carson heard that a hot young comic was in town and came to see Leno at the club. He left unimpressed because Leno’s material, while funny, didn’t really seem to contain enough true jokes to work in the five-minute stand-up spots on the “Tonight” show. Jay at this point was doing a lot of long-story jokes about his parents, their inabilities to work remote controls and operate the car.
Leno reacted to the Carson rejection with his usual rededication to work: Hit the road, keep building the act. Helen started booking dates for him. When he finally did get an invitation to the “Tonight” show, it was 1977. He had been in L.A. more than three years and he felt as if he were the last comic of his entire generation to get on the show—even though he was only twenty-seven, and he still beat Letterman to the show by more than a year.
Rather than lead to new opportunities, the “Tonight” show experience set Leno back. His first spot, on March 12, 1977, went well; but he had used up most of his best material. When he was invited back a second, third, and fourth time, his material got progressively worse. And on the “Tonight” set, Jay wasn’t his cynical self. “As much as I liked Johnny, I was intimidated,” he said. “I would call him Mr. Carson—I felt funny calling them Johnny and Ed. So I’d say ‘Mr. McMahon.’ With Johnny I would feel odd trying to be a smart guy.”
Leno’s fourth appearance, by this time with a guest host instead of Carson, fell completely flat. It would be his last appearance on the “Tonight” show for eight years.
Helen, who kept trying to book Jay on the show for a time before giving up, didn’t believe the offers had stopped coming because of Jay’s lackluster performances. She thought the “Tonight” show people were punishing her guy for getting bigger laughs than Carson on one show. But she didn’t have much choice. She booked Jay back on the road, in the clubs and the colleges. Confident that his material could work with any kind of audience—and figuring it made sense for him to build his audience into every age group—Kushnick made a deal for Leno to open for Perry Como and Henry Mancini. She never stopped believing in Jay; she still thought he would break through on television. She just had to find the right sledgehammer.
On “Late Night with David Letterman,” they were actively looking for guests who weren’t getting booked with Johnny Carson. Leno had essentially disappeared from television, except for an occasional spot on Merv Griffin. But Letterman did not forget how much he admired Leno’s command as a stand-up. So just two months into his new show on NBC, Letterman brought on his old Comedy Store colleague.
The same night, April 15, 1982, Letterman introduced a new bit called “elevator races.” (A woman from Albany, New York, won the “Golden Shaft” award.) Leno came on later and did a killer stand-up, followed by some strong interaction with Letterman at the desk. Leno had no intimidation problems with Letterman; they were contemporaries with similar comedy temperaments.
As good as that was for the show, it was far more important to Jay Leno; he had finally found a way to make an impression on television. Helen Kushnick made a deal that effectively made Jay exclusive on television to the “Late Night” show. Every month to six weeks, she would call the show’s producers and say that Jay was ready for another spot. It was the completion of a circle. David Letterman had helped launch his own career by watching Jay Leno work in the clubs. Now Jay Leno was using his guest shots with Letterman to save his career.
Leno’s bookings on the road improved; so did his income. He started making more than $5 million a year doing stand-up dates. He had good uses for the money: He bought a new house, and more cars and motorcycles.
The Letterman-Leno act began to generate a lot of good pres
s. Nobody paid closer attention to what he called “buzz” in the media than Brandon Tartikoff. The buzz was valuable to Tartikoff, who never stopped being vigilant about scouting for new late-night talent to protect the NBC signature franchise. Leno was a new name on the late-night horizon. Tartikoff began to include it on the mental list he was assembling, the one he figured he would eventually have to call on whenever it happened that Johnny Carson finally decided to leave the arena.
By 1986, what he had seen of Jay had impressed him enough. Tartikoff contacted Helen Kushnick and made a holding deal for Jay Leno. All the deal did was bind him to NBC. But by that time Joan Rivers was gone and Tartikoff had an idea where Jay Leno might fit in.
In 1987 Tartikoff made a deal for Leno to split the guest-hosting job on the “Tonight” show with Garry Shandling. For Tartikoff it was extra insurance. He knew David Letterman had been auditioning for the “Tonight” job by putting on a great show at 12:30 each night. But even if Carson left and Letterman got the 11:30 job, Tartikoff believed it was smart to keep developing backup talent. After all, somebody would have to go in at 12:30 for Dave.
The two-man backup system only lasted a few months. Shandling, a creatively neurotic stand-up, whom many on the “Tonight” show then preferred to Leno, had started his own comedy series for the Showtime cable network, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” and he was writing and starring in all the episodes. He found the idea of doing both shows at the same time, and dividing up his energy and attention, exhausting and debilitating. So Shandling, with some reluctance, took himself out of the “Tonight” guest-hosting rotation. That left the field free for Leno, who had absolutely no problem giving energy and attention to the “Tonight” show.
The “Tonight” staff found Jay to be a pussycat to work with. He was friendly, manageable; he worked hard, took suggestions, and almost always brought in a polished monologue that he and couple of writers put together during his week off. Jay would have tried out the material in comedy clubs over the weekend. The only thing that troubled Peter Lassally, the “Tonight” show producer, was that Jay, pleasant as he was, had what he felt was a strange persona. When Lassally would sit in his office talking to Leno, he could see that the comic had trouble expressing his feelings. To Lassally, this necessarily limited Jay as a host because it made his comedy material more mechanical and his interviewing style stilted. Lassally had worked in television a long time—more than twenty years for Carson—and he felt he had developed a true eye for talent—as well as for people. Lassally spent a lot of time with Jay looking for the real person inside to emerge; but he could never find it.
Helen kept her distance from the show; but she advised Jay on all matters. And as Jay’s “Tonight” spots improved and he started to get more and more favorable press, she began to turn the heat up on NBC—lightly at first, but full blast was soon to come.
Helen Kushnick had other clients: they included a few television writers, producers, sometimes another comic. But no one who interacted with her missed the compelling force in her life: her mission. She was devoted to Jay Leno. An industry executive who worked closely with Helen said the obsessive commitment was unmistakable. “This was someone who was unbelievably devoted, centered on one thing: Jay Leno. And disciplined enough to say: ‘That’s it.’ That’s what she was there for: Jay Leno. That was her life.”
Helen knew the goal she wanted for Jay: the “Tonight” show. By 1990, thanks to the CBS offer, she had put him into place at NBC, but that was no reason for her to relax. Johnny Carson still held the power, still blocked the way for her boy. And Helen had too many doubts about the NBC managers to believe nothing could go wrong. Every year that Carson held on was another year something unexpected could happen. The network management could change, the network could be sold. And rumors that GE would dump NBC were all over Hollywood. Besides, Jay turned forty in 1990—not old yet, but certainly the right time in a career to grab the spotlight. Carson had been thirty-six when he took over the “Tonight” show. Letterman was thirty-five when he got “Late Night.” As far as Helen was concerned, the time for Jay Leno was now.
Early in 1991, Kushnick still did not have a firm date from NBC for Carson’s retirement—and she was getting angry. Almost everything about Carson made her angry, beginning with her conviction that the show had never appreciated her star client. She felt that the Carson people wouldn’t let Jay play on their field because he didn’t look like he belonged on television. He wasn’t blond. He wasn’t from the Midwest. So she decided to move the game.
Anger worked for Helen Kushnick. “She’s one of those people who are much more comfortable being angry,” said one of Helen’s close associates. “If you’re not angry, you gotta feel comfortable, so let me be angry about something. What she was angry about at that point was: How dare NBC not give this show to Leno? They won’t make up their minds. It’s getting to be Johnny’s thirtieth year. That was the whole big deal with her: how to strategize to get Leno the show—and get Johnny out.”
Helen hatched a plan using an industry colleague in New York as her go-between. “She asked me to plant a story somewhere, and I must say I did a great job,” this associate said. Indeed, the plan worked beyond their wildest expectations. Helen wanted the story in a New York newspaper; she wanted it to get great play, and to have absolutely no fingerprints—no attribution at all.
The story was to say that top NBC executives wanted Johnny Carson out. His audience was getting too old. Jay Leno was in the wings, attracting much younger audiences when he guest hosted. Therefore, the advertisers liked him more and the affiliates liked him more.
Helen’s associate, who was not an NBC executive and had not talked to anyone about this information, called the New York Post. The associate asked for a guarantee of front-page play in exchange for exclusivity—and got it. The reporters for the story read the piece back to the source to make sure that absolutely no names were used. Every promise was kept. The Post had a complete exclusive, based entirely on information delivered, through an intermediary, by Helen Kushnick.
Helen was on the phone to her accomplice in New York most of the evening. They knew the first edition of the Post would be out about 11:00 P.M. Helen called and said, “Look, when you get the story, read it to me and then we’ll call Jay. But don’t mention to Jay that we had anything to do with this at all, or how it happened.”
To the source who so effectively carried out her plan, it was a demonstration of just how far Helen was willing. to go to advance Jay’s cause. “As devoted as she was to the guy, she wasn’t completely honest with Jay,” the accomplice said.
In its editions of February 11, 1991, the Post story carried the headline: “THERE GOES JOHNNY; NBC Looking to Dump Carson for Jay Leno.” It had pictures of the two stars on page three.
They read it over the phone to Leno as planned. Jay sounded a little bewildered. He wondered if this might not mean some problems for him. But typically, he had no strong reaction. He just said okay, and hung up.
The next day NBC was in an uproar. The story hit the network executives like an unexpected brick to the forehead. Nobody knew where it had come from, or who was responsible for it. But that wasn’t the issue that had to be addressed. NBC had to first conjure up a statement of support for Johnny Carson.
It was a tortured exercise. On the West Coast, Warren Littlefield and John Agoglia were in charge. (Brandon Tartikoff was incapacitated by a serious automobile accident.) They were upset about the story. But they had a problem drafting a statement of denial the next day. They didn’t see an easy way to frame the statement, for the simple reason that the Post story had, in its scattershot way, hit on an issue that was being discussed in whispers in some corners of the NBC hierarchy. These voices were raising concerns about what was happening to the “Tonight” show, how much older Johnny’s audience was getting, what significant inroads Arsenio Hall had made. One top NBC executive admitted there was no specific plan in place to force Carson out the door, but
there was a general feeling that if it could be worked out smoothly, the time was right for a transition.
So NBC labored over its statement. It couldn’t say the network wanted Johnny to stay forever; truly, it didn’t. But what could be said short of that so it would sound as if NBC were standing behind the most important star in its history?
The statement that was released made reference to the network’s debt to Johnny and how it would always be up to him to decide when he wanted to leave the “Tonight” show. It said nothing about hoping that the king would reign forever. Inside the “Tonight” show, this episode was a dispiriting affront. The staff thought the ugly story in the Post had crushed Carson. Most of them were convinced that Helen Kushnick had planted it. But that was secondary to their concern that Carson felt humiliated by it.
Jay, too, heard the rumors that Helen had planted the story. So he asked her directly. Helen told him that “under no circumstances did this come from us.” Helen knew there were enough other interests at work in the fight for the “Tonight” show that the finger of blame did not necessarily have to point to her. “It came from the other side,” she told Jay. “They’re trying to screw you and put you down by leaking the story, and it backfired on them.”