by Carter, Bill
Robert Morton had a long-standing, friendly relationship with Helen and Jay from all the years Jay had appeared so successfully on “Late Night.” Morton thought that Helen had always been charming, gracious, and surprisingly easy to deal with. When Morton was named producer of the show six years earlier, Helen and Jay sent him a ceramic frog with a note that said, “To the little brown-nosed frog who became a prince.” Morton had heard horror stories about Helen but he had never had any bad personal experience like that, and he refused to be influenced by other people’s versions of events.
Before Peter Lassally arrived to join the show, Kushnick called Morton to warn him that Lassally was out to get him and that it wouldn’t be long before he would stab Morty in the back. Morton’s response was that he had known Peter a long time and would judge for himself. But he did have some concerns about how sharing the executive producer job was going to work. So did Lassally, mainly because Morton seemed to be friendly with Helen Kushnick, a woman he considered incompetent and dangerous. When he first arrived in New York, Lassally had Morton to dinner at his apartment and told him how concerned he was about Morty’s relationship with Helen. Lassally said: “You haven’t seen the side of Helen that we have seen on the West Coast.” Morton said he understood what Helen was all about and not to worry.
Morton’s first clue that he might be dealing with a different Helen Kushnick came when he sent a lovely tree for her new office, a gift for the show’s premiere. He included a personal note of best wishes and good luck. A few weeks later he received a thank-you note from Helen: “Thank you for your beautiful gift. Your generous support is much appreciated.” It was a form note.
Morton read the note and thought, What the hell is this? Not even a “Dear Morty.” No “It’s great to have friends like you.” Just a form letter that looked as if it had been photocopied and sent out to anyone who sent a stupid little gift of congratulations. Morton began to have second thoughts about the depth of his friendship with Helen Kushnick.
In the weeks before Jay’s premiere, Helen kept the show’s bookings a strict secret. When the listings finally came out, the “Tonight” show had booked Roger Daltry, the lead singer of The Who, one week after he was to appear on “Late Night.” Because “Late Night” had not kept its booking plans secret, Morton concluded that Kushnick had deliberately booked Daltry a week later. “Late Night” would still have him first, but this was surely a break from the past cooperation between the shows.
Then Morton and Lassally heard from Daltry’s record company, Kushnick was putting pressure on them to get the singer to pull out of “Late Night,” using the threat that other performers with the company might not get on the “Tonight” show. Morton and Lassally decided to fight, not because Daltry was a crucial guest, but because they didn’t want a precedent being set. So Morton called Kushnick to explain—and he had his first taste of a Helen Kushnick he hadn’t experienced before.
The conversation, at first pleasant, turned sharply as soon as Morton mentioned his. intention to keep the Daltry booking. Kushnick told him he had no power at NBC to enforce that statement; his guy didn’t even have a contract. Morton had no backing at the network, she said. She could put on whomever she wanted to put on. The network would never back his show over hers. The attacks got personal. Kushnick told Morton he didn’t have any idea what was really going on with the network, and that she ought to talk to him about his next contract because he was making peanuts compared to her.
It was a revelation to Morton, who had never felt the blast of Kushnick’s rage before. He didn’t back down, and kept the Daltry booking—thanks to a bit of courage from the record company. But Morton no longer doubted any of the Helen horror stories. The episode helped shape a stronger working relationship between Morton and Lassally, and established clear battle lines between the two NBC shows.
It also meant that Helen had put a torch to one of Jay’s most cherished relationships, his connection to “Late Night with David Letterman.” In the space of a few weeks running the “Tonight” show, she had managed to isolate the show and Jay from PR agencies, record companies, and many other Hollywood power bases—and even from some people, like Morton and Letterman, whom Jay still considered friends. Helen, who said she never looked to be liked the way that Jay did, who believed that doing your job was all that mattered, was quickly becoming an object of intense dislike throughout the television industry. But Helen Kushnick could live with that. She had certainly lived with worse.
Helen Gorman Kushnick attacked life as though constantly surrounded by enemies. A child from a mostly Irish-American enclave in Harlem, Helen Gorman had toughness bred deep into her. She learned early in her career in show business that women were expected to play the game differently; but Helen never did. She had unquenchable stores of brass and sass and intensity.
Starting as a secretary, she moved up to the position of agent for International Creative Management in the early 1970s. Her specialty: holding on to clients who were thinking of leaving. When Helen was turned loose on them, they usually fell back into line. In 1973, during a contract dispute involving singer-dancer Ben Vereen, Helen got a phone call from Vereen’s hard-nosed New York entertainment lawyer, Jerrold Kushnick. In her first conversation with her future husband, Helen told him to go fuck himself. Kushnick was impressed anyway. They had a phone relationship for awhile, then began seeing each other regularly, through Jerry was still married at the time. He left his wife and two teen-aged daughters to move to Los Angeles, where Helen was based. The couple eventually married in 1979.
In 1974, Jerry Kushnick formed a management company beginning with comic Jimmie Walker. With Jimmie’s help, the company, with Helen operating as a manager herself, added other performers like comic Elayne Boosler, dancer Debbie Allen, and for a time, David Letterman. Then in 1975, a twenty-five-year-old comic from Boston named Jay Leno was added to the roster of clients.
From the start, Helen put all her chips on Jay. She simply believed he was the comic spokesman of his generation. Jerry and Helen managed Jay together; Jerry made most of the club bookings, while Helen handled most of Jay’s television work. It was all special care and handling; Helen put together Jay’s schedule and took care of his personal affairs, including how he invested his money. She arranged his flights, gave him his travel money, advised him on wardrobe. Helen managed Jay’s life as well as his career, and their relationship reflected that intense level of involvement. Jay came to depend on Helen; and soon she would have reason to depend on him.
In 1980 Helen, then thirty-five, gave birth to twins, Sara and Samuel Kushnick, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Her joy was tempered by immediate concern for Samuel, whose health was fragile from the moment he was born. Both twins were premature, but Sara was quickly strong and healthy. Sammy had respiratory problems in the hospital, and even after he came home he was weak, plagued by ear infections and colds. His growth rate was slow, much slower than Sara’s. Soon after the twins’ second birthday, Sammy caught another cold, and this one lingered. Other infections sprang up. The Kushnicks were baffled; so were the doctors, who could only suggest that Sammy was suffering from some common childhood illness. But he got worse; the new symptoms included chronic diarrhea and high fevers. By October 1983, it was clear that Samuel Kushnick was dying, apparently of pneumonia. It was then that the Kushnicks learned that while Sammy had been in the neonatal unit three years earlier he had been transfused twenty times. The blood came from thirteen donors. One of them had AIDS.
Samuel Kushnick died October 13, 1983. The hospital administration refused to admit that Sammy had contracted AIDS from a transfusion. That set off a campaign by the Kushnicks to get Cedars-Sinai to search its records to see if any other children had been transfused with AIDS-contaminated blood during that period.
But the Kushnicks had another campaign to wage as well. Just before Sammy’s death, the twins had begun preschool at the Temple Emmanuel in Beverly Hills. While the Kushnicks were still at Sammy
’s bedside in the days before he died, they were visited by the school principal and the temple’s rabbi, who took time from the Kushnicks’ bedside vigil to tell them they would have to keep Sara out of the school. The reason: panic by the other parents. It was still the early days of awareness of AIDS, and the other Temple Emmanuel parents were caught up in the hysteria over how the disease might be spread. At the same time the Kushnicks learned to their horror that Sara had also been transfused three years earlier in the neonatal unit, at least once by a donor whose blood had also been used for Sammy. Rocked to their souls, the Kushnicks had elaborate tests conducted on Sara; she was free of AIDS. But school officials would not be moved. When Jerry Kushnick threatened to send Sara to school anyway, he was told she would be locked in a room separate from the other children. Jerry Kushnick told them, “The God that is taking care of Sam is also an angry God, and He will bring down his wrath on you.”
The Kushnicks’ campaign to get Cedars-Sinai to release information about its contaminated blood supply received national attention. They were interviewed on “Donahue” and the ABC news magazine, “20/20.” It took years and the formal intervention of the Centers for Disease Control, but the hospital’s high incidence of contaminated blood was finally confirmed. In one more twist to the tragedy, the donor responsible for giving Sam AIDS was eventually located. He was a young gay man in West Hollywood who had often given blood to Cedars out of a sense of social commitment, long before the country was aware of the threat of AIDS. By the time Samuel Kushnick died, the donor had full-blown AIDS himself. When he learned that his blood had killed Sammy, he tried to commit suicide. Then his own family rejected him. He died, devastated and alone.
The Kushnicks never blamed the donor. While at war with the hospital and the Red Cross who administered the blood bank, Helen turned her rage into energy. She cofounded the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and brought as many show business names as she knew into the AIDS fight. Jay was right there, of course. When he made a deal for one of his favorite “Tonight” bits, “funny headlines and newspaper ads,” to be turned into a book, he agreed that all proceeds would go to the foundation in the name of Samuel Kushnick.
But the Kushnicks were living a tragedy that had no sense of scale; already huge and overwhelming, it grew. Four years after losing Sammy, Helen Kushnick was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she successfully fought. Two years after that, Jerry Kushnick learned he had colon cancer. After a short, dreadful illness, Jerry Kushnick was near death. Jay Leno came for a last visit to his bedside, and Jerry asked Jay to take care of his wife and daughter after he was gone. The stalwart Jay, who had never wavered during all the long fights with hospitals and schools after Sammy’s death, who always said he was willing to put his career on hold, whatever the Kushnicks needed, said of course he would; and he repeated the promise at Jerry’s funeral.
A year later Helen’s breast cancer recurred. She underwent a mastectomy, and her chemotherapy treatments continued throughout the long campaign to land Jay the “Tonight” show.
Through it all, Helen’s style never changed. She never took her hand off the throttle. She didn’t become beaten or bowed; she just became more determined, more driven, more ferociously focused than ever before.
What surprised many viewers, from NBC executives to television critics to fans, was that Jay Leno’s early performances as the full-time, first-string host of the “Tonight” show seemed so out of tune, jumpy, so off from the reliably strong performances he turned in when he was Carson’s guest host. Partly the explanation was simple: Jay had to hit the stage night after night now, instead of once a week. His monologues, formerly carefully honed from several nights of practice at a club, now were being written and delivered daily. The grind was on.
But more than that, Jay simply didn’t seem as comfortable as he had, as natural as he once looked behind Johnny’s desk. “He looked stiff, uncomfortable,” one West Coast NBC executive said. “The interviewing was ragged. There wasn’t a lot of spontaneity with the guests.” Littlefield and Agoglia put it off to early jitters; Jay was just starting to find his own way in a familiar format. He needed time to make the show his own.
But the key NBC executives weren’t really worried because, after all, the numbers were there. The numbers. Whenever questions were raised about Jay’s early performance, somebody brought up the numbers. Most often Helen, if asked about some adjustments that might be made, would pull out the numbers and say, What for? The ratings were indeed solid, better than for a comparable period in Johnny’s second-to-last year (his last year being considered an aberrant standard), and much better in terms of the younger viewers NBC wanted Jay to reach. And yet …
“I have a feeling that if NBC doesn’t watch it, Jay Leno will turn into Merv Griffin on them.” That was the assessment made by a major entertainment industry executive with long ties to network television. A president of programming with one of the biggest cable networks said, “I cannot watch Jay Leno. I cannot watch the guy. I cannot sit down and watch him anymore, he’s so awful. What happened?” And one of the most influential comedy producers in television said, “It’s a show that can’t decide what it wants to be. I can’t watch it. It has flop sweat on it.”
Though she never heard those specific slams, many believed that Helen knew where the criticism was coming from, and saw a Hollywood conspiracy to undo what she and Jay had achieved. A “boys club,” she called it. At various times the possible schemers included Michael Ovitz; Brandon Tartikoff; Bernie Brillstein and Brad Grey (managers of comics such as Dana Carvey and Garry Shandling); Tommy Mattola, head of Sony records; even, in more convoluted machinations, Warren Littlefield.
“It was Helen being vintage Helen,” said one co-worker. “She called it the Hollywood game. All the backstabbing that was going on. It’s a better story when she’s fighting the Hollywood establishment. But she wasn’t fighting the Hollywood establishment. She was fighting herself.”
Some of what Helen asked Jay to do seemed simply illogical, and helped to make Jay look awkward. On the first show, for example, she insisted that Jay finish his monologue, then go to his desk, then get up and walk over to talk to Branford Marsalis in the band area, then walk back to his desk. The rest of the staff told her this was silly and agreed that Jay could cut out his first walk to the desk. But that only set Helen off into a tirade of name-calling and demeaning criticism of anyone who raised the point. Jay did it Helen’s way—and looked stiff and stilted.
The stiffness carried over into everything. It seemed as though Helen, in her quest to make Jay completely accessible to the broadest possible audience, had taken all the edges that had made Jay’s comedy so razor-sharp and rounded them off, so that he came across soft and puffy. She put him in suits from Fred Hayman of Beverly Hills—classy, but somehow the wrong look for the tireless, blue-collar comic. Jay adopted a signature move for the end of his opening theme song (Johnny, after all, had made his golf swing famous). Jay’s move was an exaggerated, stiff-legged sweep to the right followed by a theatrical pluck on an air guitar. Several staff members quickly came to dub the leg move the “Nazi three-step,” and they thought the air-guitar business made Jay look hopelessly dorky. But he kept doing it night after night.
What most of the show’s staff didn’t understand was how a terrific, gentle, giving guy like Jay Leno put up with the corrosive style of his manager—with never a peep of protest. Some came to believe Jay was some kind of wide-eyed innocent who went about his business oblivious to the cacophony that surrounded him. Others started to believe it was all part of a calculated strategy, a “good cop, bad cop” routine brought to the mean streets of show business. Arsenio Hall said he could never believe in Jay’s complete innocence in the booking madness instituted by Helen. “I just can’t buy the one-gunman theory,” Hall said. One outsider who knew Helen and Jay well compared them to a married couple who had been together so long they were afraid to break apart. He saw Jay and Helen at a dinner in Ne
w York once where they seemed to be in a spat over everything. “I never could figure out what the guy was all about,” this associate said. “Either Jay was aware of what Helen was doing and decided not to care about it, or else he wasn’t aware of it at all. Sometimes I just saw a guy whose head is up his ass.”
Those who believed Leno knew what was happening and simply put blinders on reasoned that he was well aware he was in a cutthroat business, so he needed somebody willing to cut throats while he was putting smiles on faces. And then there was Jay’s obvious sense of gratitude for all Helen had done, and his sense of obligation to her after all she had been through.
Helen herself gave contradictory messages. While she would at times say Jay knew exactly what was going on, at other times she called him a sweet, simple guy who wanted to be liked, who knew only that Helen was serving him steaks, but never how she was slaughtering the cow.
It was Helen’s slaughtering of Jay that most concerned the show’s staff. They saw Jay’s shaky performances as partly a function of how much Helen was intimidating him. “She was so vicious to him in public and in private that I assumed they had a relationship that I couldn’t possibly understand,” said an associate in Burbank who frequently came into close contact with the two. “She was abusive to him. She would tell him: ‘Go write your fucking jokes. Get out of here and go write your fucking jokes. You don’t get paid to think I’ll think.’” This berating would often go on in full view of people working on the stage, this associate said, and Jay’s reaction was just as remarkable. “This is where I first noticed no change in facial color. He didn’t flush with anger. He wasn’t embarrassed. There was nothing. He was so used to it.”