TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031692/0316991.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 17.8 KB | 396 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 58

COVER STORIES

Midnight's Mayor


Jay Leno, succeeding Johnny Carson as late-night host to millions,
has already won the office of Most Popular Regular Guy in America

By RICHARD STENGEL


    The blue-gray ergonomic chair, with a tilt-swivel
mechanism and pneumatic adjustment, vinyl arms and a star
pedestal base, retails for $500. It's a fine chair. But it's
just a chair, of course -- except when it sits behind the most
famous Formica desk in America, the first desk in the history
of the Republic to stand for something other than homework and
bureaucracy. When that chair sits behind the Desk That Johnny
Built, that chair, of course, is a throne.

    On Monday, May 25, the occupant of that chair will change
from Johnny Carson to James Douglas Muir Leno, the man whose
jutting jaw has launched a thousand bad metaphors. Leno will
become only the fourth person to sit in that spot since 1954,
marking the end of the 30-year Carson era, which began when
J.F.K. was a President rather than a movie.

    Being the host of the Tonight show is not a job but a
secular anointment. He is not just a walking, talking soporific
for millions of Americans who watch him from between their
feet, but a kind of nightly tour guide to the culture, a
familiar stop on the highway of dreams, one of the few still
points in the spinning landscape of American life.

    If Carson was the King of Late Night, a slightly aloof and
mischievous monarch, his heir, Jay Leno, the salesman's son from
Andover, Mass., is more like the Mayor of Midnight -- a
good-natured, sensible small-town mayor who knows everybody's
name and believes in good government. To watch Leno win over an
audience, to observe him shaking hands in airports, blithely
signing autographs in coffee shops, chatting out his car window
with other drivers, is to see a man engaged in a cheerful
campaign for the office of Most Popular Regular Guy in America,
a position he may already have won.

    Leno cites all kinds of comedic models -- Alan King,
Robert Klein, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor -- but his mentor in the
pursuit of popularity was not a comedian but a President.
"L.B.J. claimed that every handshake was worth 250 votes," Leno
says, in his familiar high-pitched, nasal voice, "because each
person then goes and tells someone else you're a good guy and
then they go and tell more people."

    There are two kinds of comedians: those who want everyone
to like them, and those who don't seem to give a damn. Leno
epitomizes the former. If you write to him complaining about
something he said, Leno will not only read your letter, he'll
call you on the telephone. "Hi, Mrs. Maguire, this is Jay Leno
speaking. You wrote me a . . ." Will Rogers never met a man he
didn't like; Leno wants to say he never met a man who didn't
like him.

    As much as he desires to appear to be a good guy, he has
a horror of appearing pretentious. He's a man who has often
spent 300 nights a year on the road, and yet demurs at ordering
room service. He jokes that he's not comfortable eating
something that doesn't come wrapped in plastic foam. In Las
Vegas, at Caesars Palace, where he regularly performs, he and
his wife of 11 years, Mavis Nicholson, disagree about whether
they are staying in the same room as last time. "Honey, I know
it's the same room," he says with a slight whine. "I fixed the
toilet last time, and I had to fix it again last night."

    Leno is happiest in two places: on a stage and under the
hood of a car. He owns a warehouse where he keeps 19 vintage
automobiles, including a 1915 Hispano-Suiza and a 1954 Jaguar
XK120. He also owns about 40 motorcycles. He reads the most
esoteric motor magazines and cruises the San Fernando Valley
scouting out junk dealers for items like a carburetor for his
'33 Indian motorcycle. On his home answering machine, the
message says, "If you're calling about something important, like
cars or motorcycles, leave a message. If it's about anything
else, call my manager at . . ."

    Leno's own engine is never at rest. A foot is always
tapping, a hand slicing through his hair -- he is a
perpetual-motion machine. He says he has the attention span of
a gnat -- not necessarily a handicap for a talk-show host -- but
he has the stamina of an Energizer battery. He rarely goes to
bed before 4 a.m., and "I feel like a good-for-nothing if I
sleep past 9."

    Leno says he's most relaxed when he is onstage. On a
Sunday night before hosting the Tonight show, he can often be
found at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, trying out
new material. "Sometimes," he says, "I'll drive downtown to
test a single joke." He likens doing his act to an athlete
working out: a stand-up has to stay in comedic shape. For Leno,
it's an addiction and a pleasure. "Vacations are fun," he says,
"for a day or two. But they're not as much fun as doing your
act." Stand-up for him is entertainment at its purest: a guy
with a microphone, a stool and a glass of water.

    Leno's nightclub act is his television persona times two:
the gestures are bigger, the voice is louder. He's also more
ornery, less the smiling bar mitzvah boy. In order to try out
his dozen or so new jokes, Leno performs his whole 80-minute
routine. His act is sealed with a give-and-take with the
audience. "And what do you do, sir? You certainly don't teach
posture here in town. Oh, a quality engineer? Ladies and
gentlemen, here is the problem with our country -- the man's
slouching." When the laughter ebbs, he tells the audience he'd
like to read them some material that he's trying out for Tuesday
night. "Now if the jokes don't work," he says in a schoolmarmish
tone, "don't go watching Arsenio or anything."

    Getting him to analyze what makes him funny is like trying
to force a surfer to describe a wave. "Funny is funny," he says
with a shrug. He finds self-analysis pompous. Pressed, he will
squirm and say his comedy springs from his female side. "I
always liked the funny things that women liked. You grow up
trying to make your mother laugh. I enjoy making women laugh
more than men." And so he does: Did you see the movie Hook? It's
about a 40-year-old guy acting like a nine-year-old boy. Gee,
that's something women don't get to see enough of.

    When he performs, he is always himself. He's not dirty,
he's not malicious. His style is simply to take an everyday
premise, then explore it with rigid logic until it becomes
ridiculous. He is the voice of common sense teased out to the
absurd. Says his comedian friend Jerry Seinfeld: "His uniqueness
is that he is sophisticated and broad at the same time, so hip
and so ordinary. He has an act that you can do in SoHo and
Vegas." Seinfeld smiles with illumination: "Jay always knows
what's wrong with this picture."

    Each Monday night, Leno meets with several of his writers
at his rather gloomy mock-Tudor house in Beverly Hills to piece
together the Tonight show monologue. The sessions begin at 11
and usually run till 4 a.m. On one recent occasion the group
that gathered around his kitchen table consisted of Jimmy
Brogan, pale, scholarly-looking, wearing a blue baseball cap,
a stand-up comedian admired by other comedians; Ron Richards,
also a comedian, wry and pleasant; and Chuck Martin, a young
stand-up and the only one not on Leno's payroll, sitting in like
a rookie playing with the first team. (Leno will be hiring a
staff of six or seven writers for the Tonight show -- which will
include some of this group as well as a rabbi from New Jersey
and an ad executive from Philadelphia, both longtime
contributors to the Leno joke chest.)

    Leno, in his usual non-Tonight show uniform of blue jeans,
blue-jean shirt and cowboy boots, held a thick wad of index
cards on which were written jokes supplied by him and various
writers. Propping his boots up on the table, he read in a
deadpan voice, "With all the controversy about silicone breast
implants, a lot of women are changing to saltwater implants.
They're a lot safer, but the trouble is, some women have noticed
barnacles growing on them." Smirks all around. "Barnacles --
great comedy word," said Martin. Brogan, not sure the joke was
in good taste, murmured, "I think women take their breasts
seriously." Leno: "Not as seriously as I do."

    The joke made the cut. Many others fell short. (Leno: "The
economy is so bad that Domino's is delivering pizzas one slice
at a time." Brogan: "A little corny." Leno: "Corny? Gone.") By
3:30, they had whittled the selections to 21. Leno took out a
microcassette recorder and read the jokes into the machine. The
tape came in at five minutes 22 seconds. Bingo. Leno nodded:
"Anything between four and six minutes is fine."

    Freud said that all humor is displaced anger, but that is
news to Leno. "I was never angry," he says. "I could never
relate to comedians like Lenny Bruce." But beneath Leno's "What,
me worry?" exterior, there does lurk a subterranean anger.
"It's so stupid," he says, uttering this phrase perhaps 20 times
a day, pronouncing the word "stew-pid." He sees a newspaper ad
describing a knife as "perfect for a night out on the town." He
shakes his head. "It's so stew-pid." Small-mindedness irks him;
he can tolerate anything but intolerance. "It's so stew-pid. I
mean, racism and prejudice are just bad business."

    Leno is the most political of the late-night hosts. When
he says, "Pat Buchanan is the thinking man's David Duke," he
says it to be funny, yes, but he means it. Although he rejects
the notion that his humor is political -- "Political implies
ideological, and my comedy is not ideological" -- Leno is a
liberal in two senses: with a small l in that his sensibility
is humane and broad-minded (last month he went to Chicago and
Detroit at his own expense to do free shows for the unemployed
and the homeless); with a capital L in that he doesn't really
cotton to conservative Republicans ("I mean, these kids are 26,
they're Republicans, and they own a Lincoln Town Car. Not even
a Fiat").

    He is sensitive to criticism that he has watered down his
political jokes since becoming heir apparent at the Tonight
show. He thinks people are less open to political humor than
they once were. "Can you do a joke about abortion, pro or con?
Any number of issues are now colored by political correctness.
Plus, people don't really keep up with the news. Nobody knows
Tsongas' economic program, or anybody else's. Can you get an
audience interested in the S&Ls, in the Keating trial?" Leno
never wants to seem as if he knows more than the folks in his
audience, but he sometimes seems disappointed that they do not
know enough.

    Comedians often claim that an unhappy childhood is a
prerequisite to being funny. But Jamie Leno, as he was known,
was a funny, happy kid. His father Angelo Leno, the son of
Italian immigrants, worked as an insurance salesman ("The
funniest guy in the office," Leno says), and his mother
Catherine Muir, who emigrated to America from Scotland when she
was 12, was a good-natured stickler for honesty and proper
manners. Even now, Leno often seems to be the last good son in
America, worrying about offending his folks, checking on them
almost daily.

    Leno was no scholar. His fifth-grade teacher, Earl Simon,
wrote the following on his spring report card: "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." Leno was always the wisenheimer with the heart
of gold.

    He didn't like sports, especially football. "It's not in
my nature to knock people down," he says. He knocked them down
with humor instead. In his senior year in high school, he was
working at McDonald's when he entered the company's Northeast
talent show and won. That got him thinking. "Until then," he
says, "I just always thought I'd be a funny salesman."

    By the time he was a sophomore at Emerson College in
Boston, he was driving down to New York City on weekends to
perform at comedy clubs. From the beginning, Leno was always the
gym rat of comedians, the guy who practiced long after everyone
else had gone home. After graduating, he worked at strip
joints, rock concerts, coffeehouses, Playboy clubs. He delights
in recounting his knocks far more than his successes: how
lighted cigarettes were flicked at him at the Revere
Beachcomber, how he found a manager in the Yellow Pages (who
then tried to make him into a wrestler who told jokes), how he
sometimes slept in the alley near the Improvisation in New York.

    By the time he moved to California in 1974, his comedy had
evolved from telling jokes to telling stories -- stories about
how his mother could never master the VCR, how his father
wouldn't say the name of the James Bond movie Octopussy
("Octo-what, Dad?"), stories about the minutiae of everyday
life. He became part of the school of observational comics like
Robert Klein, George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

    Around the same time, he met Mavis Nicholson at the Comedy
Store in Hollywood. Cool and cerebral, the daughter of a
Bohemian California actor (not Jack), Nicholson was an aspiring
writer who read far more than she wrote; she still devours 10
books a week. "I don't make wife jokes," Leno points out. He may
be the first comedian since George Burns who could be described
as uxorious.

    Carson came to see Leno perform at the Improvisation in
1975 and gave him one piece of advice: more jokes. He had
already appeared on the Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas shows when
he got his first shot on the Tonight show: "March 2, 1977. Burt
Reynolds, Diana Ross. I was last." He had enough jokes this
time, and Carson invited him back. But over the next half a
dozen appearances he got worse, not better. He was running out
of material.

    So Leno hit the road. What got him back on network TV was
David Letterman. Letterman put him on dozens of times, and Leno
credits his friend with resurrecting his television career.
While Leno was nervous with Carson ("I always called him Mr.
Carson," he says with a laugh), he was on the same wavelength
as Dave. Leno killed on Letterman.

    But then he leapfrogged over Letterman. Whereas Letterman
had once been NBC's choice to succeed Carson, Leno campaigned
for the job. Leno is not what Letterman calls "a show-business
weasel," but he was shrewd. "The thing that got me the Tonight
show," he says, "is that I would visit every NBC affiliate where
I was performing and do promos for them. Then they would
promote me in turn. My attitude was to go out and rig the
numbers in my favor." Nice guys don't finish last when they can
also rig the numbers.

    Leno became the obvious choice for NBC. His ratings showed
that he kept Carson's core audience and also attracted some
younger, more affluent viewers. Leno is more in synch with the
zeitgeist: Letterman's pervasive irony seems less suited to the
'90s than Leno's sincerity. For NBC, giving Letterman the job
was a lose-lose proposition: the network would lose Late Night
with David Letterman, the best and most profitable
late-late-night show on TV, and it would lose Leno.

    Leno roams the Tonight show set like a kid at summer camp.
After makeup at 4 p.m., he always stops by to see his guests,
something Carson rarely does. At 5, still in blue jeans, he
bounds onstage to warm up the audience. "People say you should
only let the audience see you for the first time at the
beginning of the show," he says, which is the way the more
reclusive Carson does it. "But, hey, they've been sitting there
for half an hour. And if you bomb with the studio audience, you
die all over America."

    Come May 25, the show will be renamed The Tonight Show
with Jay Leno, a subtle prepositional shift from its current
title, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Jazzman Branford
Marsalis, who will be the music director, has already written
a funky new theme song. A new set will replace the old one. Ed
McMahon will be gone, to be replaced by no one. Leno has earned
the chance to occupy Johnny's chair, but now he must prove he
can fill it. Although the show is an institution, it is
Carson's institution, and Leno must make it his own.
"Letterman," Leno says, "is a comedy show that happens to have
guests. The Tonight show is a talk show that happens to have
comedy." Leno is adept with the comedy; the guests are a
problem. While Leno is peerless as a monologist, his
interviewing is still amateurish. He sometimes seems like a
guest on his own show, polite and admiring -- an usher at the
wedding, not the groom.

    Some comedians suggest that the Tonight show will turn
Leno into an electronic vaudevillian, a video jokemeister. He
worries about that. "I went from telling jokes to telling
stories," he says, "and now I'm back to telling jokes." He is
concerned about becoming detached from his audience. As a
stand-up, Leno traveled to your door like a salesman; now he's
popping into your bedroom without ever leaving the studio.

    As a boy, Leno watched comedians on The Ed Sullivan Show
making lame jokes about kids with long hair. He remembers
thinking how hopelessly out of date they were. The idea is
chilling to him. "I heard an older comedian the other day trying
to be young, and he used the word hep," Leno says, shaking his
head. "You try to be the age that you are."

    Although he may never admit it, his goal seems to be to
join the grand Will Rogers-Bob Hope succession of American
comedy, as a kind of spokesman for the national sensibility. He
would like to stand for his generation the way Hope -- and
Carson -- did for theirs. If so, he is moving into the right
seat for it.