One night, he pulled up in front of the club on this huge motorcycle he drove and came inside. We said hello, and then after realizing he needed to pick something up from the drugstore, he asked me if I wanted to come along for the ride. Naturally, I said yes, and so I climbed onto the back—and to this day, I’m sure I still have hip problems I don’t even know about from straddling the back of it. It also had this massive sound system. So I got on, Jay cranked up the Beach Boys on the stereo, and we went cruising around Hollywood for the next hour looking for whatever he needed, with my hair blowing in the wind. It was as if I had fallen through some magical portal in Massachusetts and come through this astounding world on the other side.
BOBBY KELTON:
I’m thinking that 1978 or thereabouts was when I first met Jay at the Hollywood Improv and we became very friendly as the years went on. He hooked me up with his then managers Helen and Jerry Kushnick, which was a complete fiasco, but whenever I’d do The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the first call I got after my spot always came from Jay.
I wasn’t ever on again after he became the host, but sometime in the mideighties, he asked me to fill in for him at a corporate gig he had in Hawaii. Despite the fact that it was at the last minute, there was no way I could refuse because he said, “It’s day after tomorrow. The money is great. You can bring anybody you want. Everything is paid for.”
I decided to invite my brother, and we flew over the next day. The only catch was that because Jay called me on a Thursday and the gig was on a Saturday, they couldn’t change anything. It also meant that I had to use his name, which Jay told me to, and I flew to Hawaii as Jay Leno. This was before the days when people were hypersensitive about security and you had to present IDs everywhere, so when I got to Hawaii they rolled out the red carpet for us. Everything was comped and we stayed in the best hotel and ate at the finest restaurants with me posing as Jay.
A week later, I was scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show. I’d been telling everybody in Hawaii this, which I thought was okay, especially since I figured that most people there didn’t watch The Tonight Show. Well, the night I was scheduled to go on after I got home, I was at NBC in Burbank when it suddenly occurred to me that when Johnny Carson announced me, everyone tuning in back in Hawaii was going to say, “Wait, that’s Jay Leno!” I would have given anything to be a fly on the wall that night. To this day, I still often wonder what their reaction was.
EDDIE BERKE:
Somebody once told me a story about the time they’d gone with Jay on his private plane to perform somewhere. It was in a smaller city and after the gig on their way back to the airport, Jay wanted to get some food. The only place open was an ampm or a 7-Eleven, and when they stopped and the other comedian offered to go in, Jay told him he wanted to go instead. The reason why is because he wanted to let them have their moment. Jay wasn’t being arrogant about it at all. He simply wanted to give the people working there a chance to meet a celebrity because they probably didn’t have an opportunity to meet one that often.
BARBARA MCGRAW, college professor, attorney, and former Improv singer:
Jay never took off as an actor because he wasn’t that great, but he’s probably the best comedian there ever was when it comes to turning an audience around. There’s just nobody like him and when he got The Tonight Show, we were all like, “Of course!”
Although I was already an attorney by this point and we’d lost touch, I remember writing him a letter to congratulate him and getting a call in my office a few weeks later. It was completely out of the blue and I was totally shocked, but when I picked up the phone his voice was unmistakable. He said, “Barbara, this is Jay. You didn’t put your number down and I had to call all over town to reach you.”
Keep in mind that this was 1992, which was before the Internet even existed yet. I just remember being absolutely floored that someone as important as Jay had gone to such lengths to track me down just so he could thank me for what seemed like such a small and well-deserved gesture.
But that’s the kind of humble and unassuming guy Jay is. The last time I saw him was at a car show in Southern California several years ago. By this point, I’d gained about thirty pounds and was sporting a different hairdo. But Jay recognized me immediately. He came right up to me and said, “Hi, Barbara. How are you?”
DANNY AIELLO:
Let me tell you something about Leno. By virtue of when we were both there, I didn’t know him that well at the Improv, but by the time he was hosting The Tonight Show we were pretty close. I was also a fairly frequent guest, and several years after he took over, I was on one night not long after my daughter Stacey had gotten married. Now I don’t get offended easily, but all through my segment, Jay kept needling me about my daughter’s wedding and asking whether or not we served meatballs at the wedding reception because I’m Italian. He just wouldn’t stop, and for a long time after that I held a grudge against him. I really resented him talking about my daughter like that on national television even if he was just kidding.
But a few days after my son Danny passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2010, Jay did the most incredible thing. I’ll never forget this and I still get choked up just thinking about it. Three days after my son’s funeral, I was sitting in my house in Saddle River, New Jersey, not in the mood to talk to anyone when the phone rang. It was Jay, and on top of being in mourning over my son I was still pretty upset with him about what he’d said about my daughter on The Tonight Show.
However, I took the call anyway, and when I picked up the receiver, he said, “Danny, this is Jay. I just want to remind you of something. I saw a beautiful, blond-headed little boy hanging with you and watching what you did at the Improvisation so long ago. I just wanted to remind you that that boy was your son, Danny.” I’ll tell you I was speechless. Any ill feelings I might have had towards him just instantly faded away. He went way back up on the totem pole with me after that.
JUDD APATOW:
When he was hosting The Tonight Show, Jay used to accept unsolicited jokes for his monologue and I submitted some. Comedian Kevin Rooney was a buddy of mine and he’d written for Jay, so he recommended me. This was in the early nineties, not long after he’d begun hosting the show, and I was still living with my mother and grandmother at the time. So one night around midnight, the phone rang and my grandmother answered. It was Jay and my grandmother came running into the room to tell me. She was like, “Jay Leno’s on the phone!”
At first, I couldn’t believe it, but, sure enough it was Jay. He said, “I read your jokes and they’re close.” Then he explained why they weren’t right. Of course, I was disappointed, but I also remember how incredibly kind and encouraging he was while saying my jokes weren’t right for him. It was a huge thing for me.
PAUL PROVENZA, comedian, actor, writer, producer, and TV host:
To me, Jay was always one of these Oh My God! comics. When I first started going to the Improv around 1975, he had already moved to LA so he wasn’t there that much. But as it just so happened, he was the emcee on the first open mic I did in New York. He probably did twenty minutes at the top and five minutes in between everyone else.
The way it worked back then was that the manager or one of the waitresses came in around six or seven to start getting ready for that evening’s show. If you were a comic, they would hand you a number, which was the place you were on that night’s lineup. And you didn’t dare leave for any reason, because if you did you’d lose your place. At the time, I was still a teenager in high school living at home with my parents up in the Bronx, which was a good hour’s commute by subway, and I had school the next day.
Even so, I wasn’t about to miss my first shot at doing the Improv. But because I was a rookie I wasn’t scheduled to go on until 3 AM. By this point, I was starting to get antsy and I was exhausted, so I went up to Jay and said, “Mr. Leno, I know it’s not my turn for a couple of more numbers, but if there’s any way I could maybe get on now it would be great because I’v
e got class in three hours.” Well, Jay just thought that was hysterical and he brought me up next. The best part of this story is that I got to retell it to him on The Tonight Show twenty-five years later.
JUDY ORBACH:
Jay and I used to have these great, really esoteric conversations about comedy. He used to say to me, “You know, Judy, there are a hundred jokes. Everything else is a finger off of that. It’s only a hundred.”
I’d be like, “Thanks, Jay. That’s good to know.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Producing My First Show
As much I enjoyed the newfound success and notoriety the Improv was bringing me, I never lost sight of my original goal of becoming a Broadway producer. In some ways, my dream burned brighter than ever—even in spite of the fact that by the early seventies, Manhattan’s theater district, like the rest of the city, was in the midst of a precipitous and steadily escalating period of urban decay and economic decline that would nearly force New York to declare bankruptcy in 1975.
Of course, Times Square, where most of the Broadway theaters were not far from the Improv, has always had a seedy side. At the time, however, it was facing its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Practically overnight, the place once dubbed the “Crossroads of the World” had turned into a veritable potpourri of drugs, prostitution, and crime.
Even so, the 1970s ushered in some of the most acclaimed shows in Broadway history, particularly musicals. Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Chorus Line, Hair, Sweeney Todd, Pippin, The Wiz. These were just some of the names that lit up the marquees back then.
And now with my bank account and network of contacts expanding thanks to the Improv, I was clamoring to get a piece of the action any way I could. However, I still didn’t have any sort of a game plan aside from occasionally attending opening-night parties, reading the show-business trades, and voluntarily holding multiple backers’ auditions at the club.
Though most of the time my efforts were for naught, little by little I became savvy enough to know what was involved. I was also so excited whenever somebody tipped me off about a new show that I’d invariably take time to check it out no matter how busy I was, which is how I found out about a musical revue that was holding backers’ auditions in the winter of 1972.
When I arrived at the stately prewar apartment building on Riverside Drive where they were being held not far from where I lived, I was immediately struck by a breathtaking blonde fashion model from Athens, Georgia, who was trying out for the lead. Not only did she have one of the most beautiful singing voices I’d ever heard, hitting every note pitch-perfectly, I also loved her genteel southern accent, which was sweetly tinged and foreign to me, and only added to her appeal. Her name was Kim Basinger.
The only downside was that she was still a completely unknown entity, and I worried that casting a novice would be too big of a risk. Having already worked with hundreds of young singers by this point, I had become highly attuned to what makes a person “ready.” So with Kim, as much as I liked her personally, I just couldn’t take a leap of faith—especially with my own money at stake. However, I was so enthralled with her otherwise that I might have been willing to overlook her lack of experience had it not been for one of the other producers telling me that I had to use her because she had a wealthy boyfriend who was only willing to invest if I did. Although I was as polite as I could be about it, I decided right then and there to tell him no. And while Kim would, of course, go on to become an Academy Award–winning actor, it turned out to be the right decision because the show never got off the ground.
It wasn’t long, however, before I got another opportunity—and actually did produce my first show even though it never made it to Broadway. This time it was an anti–Richard Nixon political satire called What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a State Like This? Originally conceived as a comedy album, it was written by Ira Gasman and Cary Hoffman. Aside from ripping apart Nixon, whom I loathed—and coming to my attention just as the Watergate scandal was about to explode—the other major selling point was that I’d known Cary ever since he started coming into the Improv to sing shortly after we first opened.
Not only that, our lives ultimately took similar paths. Like me, Cary had worked in advertising, although he wrote jingles and he was never on the account management side as I had been. He also later became a talent manager for singers and comedians—most notably for the late R&B legend Luther Vandross and comedian Zach Galifianakis—plus, he wound up owning a comedy club called Stand Up NY on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. By the time I found out about the new show he had written and convinced him to let me produce it, we had known each other for nearly a decade.
CARY HOFFMAN, singer, talent manager, and composer of What’s a Nice Country Like You Doing in a State Like This?:
Maybe it was 1964, ’65, or ’66, Cary Hoffman’s name was Cary Ross and I was a struggling Frank Sinatra impersonator. Nobody told me that there was a pretty good real-life Sinatra and that I didn’t have a chance. The only place I could sing was at the Improv—all because Budd Friedman used to introduce me and he liked me as a boring crooner. But make no mistake about it: I was a boring crooner. I couldn’t lift my hands from my side even at the end of a song.
But Budd liked me, and I would come in with this other comic named Howie Mann who he loved, so he would put me on followed by Howie Mann. This went on for several years until I decided to give up singing to write advertising jingles. Then I got a call one day from a close friend of mine named Ira Gasman who also worked in advertising. Ira had been approached by somebody at another agency about writing the lyrics to a comedy album about Richard Nixon.
The premise was basically along the lines of the First Family album about the Kennedys, which had been a monster hit during the JFK administration. Ira asked me to write the music and so we collaborated on this comedy album called Let Me Sing One Perfectly Clear Make that was sold to Septa Records and recorded. One of the performers on it was Luther Vandross, whom I later signed and became his first manager and producer.
But then not long after, Septa discovered that Richard Nixon was putting together an enemies list and that anybody who went against the Nixon administration could get in trouble. This pretty much put the kibosh on things until Ira played a master copy for a woman named Miriam Fond who ran a small theater company out of a church in New York and convinced us to turn it into a live show, which we spent the next six months writing. When we finally opened, we had a lot of luck with it. It got a great review in the New York Times and eventually moved to the American Palace Theatre.
I went to see it not long after I read the review in the Times. Then when I discovered Cary had written the music, I immediately decided that I wanted to be involved. The premise was fantastic and the possibilities seemed endless because not only did it attack Nixon, it also went after H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean, who were all coconspirators in the Watergate scandal even though none of us knew how serious it was yet. I was so enthusiastic that I may have even called Cary the same night.
CARY HOFFMAN:
This had to be around 1972. Nixon had just beaten George McGovern in a landslide and been reelected president. Anyway, I got a call from Budd late one night. He said, “Cary, I heard about the show. I went to see it and I want to produce it.”
Of course, I was thrilled because I always liked Budd and I never forgot the fact that he used to let me sing at the Improv. The only problem was that we were already in early negotiations with another producer who was planning to bring it to Broadway.
I told him that, but then I remembered that the other producer was also beginning to get cold feet because in a recent meeting he’d said, “Shows like yours belong in a cabaret, not a legitimate theater. You will die.” Those were his exact words, [so I thought about it] and the very next day we cancelled our negotiations with this other producer and set up a meeting with Budd.
One of the reasons we decided to go with him was his enthusiasm. That was
number one. Number two was the fact that I knew him, and I knew that he was a bit of a showman who could talk his way into just about anything. Plus, I knew how successful he’d been with the Improv. And he was funny, and he was a larger-than-life New York personality, which seemed like the perfect combination.
As much as I believed in the show, I also knew instinctively that it could never work in a traditional theater because it was a political satire and they rarely do well in this setting. My other concern was that the five-person cast was too small, and I also felt the audience was too specialized.
Still, my enthusiasm never waned and the woman who ran the Off-Broadway theater where it was playing was married to Sam Cohn at International Creative Management. Sam was one of the most powerful agents in America at the time. We were pretty friendly. We negotiated a deal where we were fortunate enough to get two then unknown actors named Betty Buckley and Priscilla Lopez. It was a major coup because they both went on to Broadway fame in Cats and A Chorus Line, although doing it at the Improv was out of the question because of our small stage and seating configuration, so I never even tried.
But as luck would have it, I was very friendly with two other guys named Sid Davidoff and Richard Aurelio, who had served as deputy mayors under New York mayor John Lindsay, who was one of the most progressive mayors in the US at the time. Sid and Richard had also recently become partners in a new restaurant called Jimmy’s on West 51st Street around the corner from CBS. In the 1940s and ’50s, the restaurant had been the site of Toots Shor’s, a celebrity watering hole frequented by the likes of Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles, and Ernest Hemingway. In its new incarnation, Jimmy’s attracted a lot of politicos and media types.
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