JUST AS I PROMISED, HERE’S THE JAY LENO THROWBACK PLAYBOY INTERVIEW. I THINK IT’S INTERESTING TO READ AN INTERVIEW, OR ANY PIECE OF POP CULTURE FROM THE PAST. BUT THEN AGAIN I AM A HISTORY BUFF, SO MAYBE ITS JUST ME. LOL. I DO THINK YOU’LL ENJOY THIS THOUGH. CHEERS.
Originally published in the October 1996 issue of Playboy magazine.
He can't stop. Jay Leno, formerly the laughingstock of late-night TV, now the undisputed champ, is riding home from work on a 1918 Pope motorcycle, one of his many classic vehicles. The Pope is in near mint condition -- a gray-green comet zipping Leno through Burbank as he waves and grins at motorists. His fans yell and cheer and give him the thumbs-up.
"Hi Jay!"
"You're number one, Jay!"
Leno waves. He likes the attention. He is the least standoffish of celebrities, a guy who would rather chat with fans than visit a network boardroom. But he can't stop right now, and the reason has nothing to do with his fame. Today Jay Leno can't even slow down, for his bike isn't fully restored. It's missing one component.
"No brakes!" Leno says, as he whizzes around a corner at 20 miles an hour. Is Leno headed for a crack-up? It's unlikely. There's no doubt the man is driven. Once noted for logging millions of miles on the stand-up circuit, where he made up to 300 appearances a year, he now brings the same zeal to "The Tonight Show." Leno's monolog is one of the most quoted acts on earth, a cultural artifact that defines the American mainstream five nights a week. His ratings appear to be better than ever. In fact, after trailing The Late Show With David Letterman for two years, Leno now beats Letterman like a drum. With each ratings point representing 959,000 TV households in the lucrative 11:30 p.m. time slot, an hour in which the top show's revenue can approach $100 million per year, he is clearly earning his pay. Leno pulls down an estimated $14 million annually—enough to keep his gymnasium-sized garage stocked with vintage vehicles such as the unstoppable Pope motorcycle.
"Hey, hey, we're happenin'," he says, snapping his fingers like the too-cool showbiz types he loves to make fun of.
But it wasn't always such fun. The comedy world's consummate survivor bears the scars of his very public war with Letterman. Sure, he's riding high now, but the hardest-working man on TV can't seem to relax and enjoy success. It's as if he were afraid to look behind him to see who might be catching up.
"I never slow down," he says. "I don't take vacations. I don't take days off. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I weren't working."
Born 46 years ago in New Rochelle, New York, he was the second son of Angelo and Catherine Leno. Angelo was an insurance salesman, a big talker who moved the family to Massachusetts when James, then called Jamie, was nine. Ten years later young Leno was doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs, nursing homes and even college study halls in and around Boston. Like most kid comics, he dreamed of making The Tonight Show. It happened in 1977, when the nervous youngster first appeared on Johnny Carson's stage. He took a pal along for moral support that night: then-unknown Robin Williams, whose cackle is audible on the tape.
The show's talent scouts dismissed Williams when Leno tried to get him on the show. "Too crazy," they said. But Jay was just right for the mainstream. He was edgily funny enough for Letterman, whom he cracked up during countless segments on his show. But Leno's goal was to move from "permanent guest host" on Tonight directly into Carson's chair once Johnny retired. Garry Shandling, another contender, cleared the way in 1987 by leaving for cable TV, where he would satirize them all. But Carson delayed his departure, and NBC eventually botched the transfer. Leno was anointed Johnny's successor, then the network scurried back to Letterman, who hungered for the job. Would Dave get Tonight after all? Network executives reportedly offered it to him, promising to yank Jay out of the host's chair. In the end, however, Letterman took a megabucks contract and bolted to CBS. The Late Show With David Letterman first aired opposite Leno's Tonight Show on August 30, 1993. Letterman won that night and kept winning for 84 weeks in a row.
Leno was America's late-night loser. A New Yorker cartoon showed a Leno fanclub T-shirt that read, "I, for one, do not find Jay Leno painfully embarrassing to watch!" But then, in April 1995, Leno finally topped Letterman's ratings. Like the tortoise who never gave up, he had slowly, steadily improved his position until he had a chance to win. After a brief seesaw battle, he took the lead for good. Now Tonight beats The Late Show almost every week.
Last month Leno taped his 1000th Tonight Show. We sent Contributing Editor Kevin Cook to mark the event. Cook's report follows:
"I met Leno at his workplace—the Tonight Show soundstage in Burbank, across the street from the Johnny Carson Municipal Park. We would have four interview sessions, each one during his daily kick-back hour following the show's five p.m. taping. Each day he drove a different vintage vehicle. There was a gleaming white 60-year-old Jaguar, leather straps holding down its hood. There was a 1931 Bentley and an ancient Duesenberg as well as the Pope, which has a plate reading California Antique Motorcycle #893.
"He is everything you hear he is: polite, generous, an utterly regular guy who makes you feel like going bowling. After a minute with him I am already 'Kev,' a nickname only my wife uses. Immediately after every show he strips off his 'dorky suit' and dons jeans and a flannel shirt. Of course, he isn't really a regular guy. He's terrifically rich, blazingly ambitious and a lot smarter than he lets on. Before this interview I wasn't crazy about his humor, which sometimes seems a little dumbed-down for the multitudes. I preferred Dave. But talking with Jay—often in the boxing terms he likes to use—made me like them both more. They're Ali and Frazier, one more dazzling but the other more dependable, the artist and the workman. I defy anyone to watch Leno's monolog for a week without becoming a little addicted.
"We started by delving into his late-night battles and the personal emptiness he sometimes feels these days."
PLAYBOY: What have you learned in the ratings war?
LENO: How much I like the game. I never thought of myself as a competitive guy, but I guess I am.
PLAYBOY: How happy are you to be number one?
LENO: I am happy we won the May sweeps. We won the year. With two networks fighting for huge bragging rights, I'm glad the people paying my salary are happy. At the same time, I don't like the trash-talk mentality out there now—as if number one were all that counts and number two were nothing. People talk about boxing that way. They call one guy a champ and say the other sucks. But he doesn't suck; he could kill everybody in the world except that one man. You should respect that. And it's the same with Dave and me. Ultimately, maybe the best that can happen is what's going on now: Dave won the first couple of years, now we've won a couple. Then maybe he'll win again. It could go back and forth.
PLAYBOY: Are you saying you would share the lead with Letterman after years of gunning for him?
LENO: Why not? I've proved I can stay in the ring with him.
PLAYBOY: You're a bit of a medical marvel, aren't you? We hear you never sleep. Three or four hours a night.
LENO: My blood pressure is incredibly low, around 110/70. That's no big deal. But I am mildly dyslexic. I got Cs and Ds in school; you'll hear me mix up words in the monolog sometimes. And one thing about mildly dyslexic people—they're good at setting everything else aside to pursue one goal. I go five nights a week every week, no days off, no sick days. Can you wear thin that way? Maybe.
PLAYBOY: Three years ago you almost got a forced vacation.
LENO: I was an inch from being fired. They were going to shoot me and replace me with Dave.
PLAYBOY: Why?
LENO: I sucked. I was trying to do The Tonight Show exactly the way Johnny had done it, and it didn't work. And I almost wanted it to be that way. I almost wanted to lose, because I have a rather morbid fascination with hitting bottom, getting as low as I possibly can before crawling back up. What saved me, finally, was the monolog.
PLAYBOY: The stand-up part of your job.
LENO: It always got good ratings. You see, Dave is a broadcaster who did stand-up comedy briefly before going back to broadcasting. But I was always stand-up, stand-up, stand-up. Jokes are what I do best. So I lengthened the monolog.
PLAYBOY: And the rest is ----
LENO: A good, steady job. My parents were pleased that I didn't get fired.
PLAYBOY: Explain your "morbid fascination" with failure.
LENO: I was always that way. In junior high I took boxing and wanted to see how much punishment I could take. So one day I just stood there and got the hell beat out of me, actually was knocked unconscious. When I came to I thought, That wasn't so bad. I had a headache, but I wasn't dead. It was the same in my career. I started out in my teens, playing strip joints in Boston. The crowd would yell, "You suck, get out!" And I thought, What more can I ask? I wasn't working nine to five. I made more money than my friends. Stand-up comedy couldn't get worse than this, and it wasn't so bad already.
PLAYBOY: How does performing in nightclubs compare to hosting The Tonight Show for millions of people?
LENO: There's no comparison. The fulfillment of doing TV isn't so good as doing stand-up. Nowhere near. In a club you can control the room, 300 or 3000 or 15,000 people. Find the guy who's not laughing and play to him, win him over. You can rock the whole room. You have less control in television. You just broadcast it out there to people you can't see. TV is also a team effort, while in stand-up you're your own writer, producer and director. It's your show, it's you.
PLAYBOY: How did you get interested in stand-up?
LENO: I would always do anything for a laugh. If hitting your head on a tree gets a laugh, let's do it a lot. When I was about nine I got teased about my hard head. One kid hit me with a hammer, bonk! It felt like I'd been shot. But for some reason I grinned, fighting back tears, and waved to the other kids. If you're that sort of child, you almost have to go into show business.
PLAYBOY: It sounds as if you were called to your vocation like a priest.
LENO: It was the first thing I ever did that didn't make me think of something else when I did it.
PLAYBOY: Including sex?
LENO: With sex your mind might wander. But you're always thinking about comedy.
PLAYBOY: What if you've done the same material 100 nights in a row?
LENO: It can get automatic. You are adding columns of numbers in your head. It's not that you're bored; it's that you can now do it without really listening to the words. If I hear Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, I might laugh only at the six new jokes he has that night. The rest of the time I'll enjoy the flow of the words, the pauses he uses.
PLAYBOY: You weren't always so abstract.
LENO: No. In high school I snuck into the girls' locker room and poured water into the Kotex dispensers, which would swell up and break off the wall. But I was getting ready to do stand-up. When I had to stand up in class I'd ask the teacher, "What do I have? Two minutes?"
PLAYBOY: In 1959 the Lenos moved from New Rochelle, New York to Andover, Massachusetts, near Boston. You surprised your folks by getting work in strip clubs. How was your love life?
LENO: I was working a Boston strip joint, the Teddy Bear Lounge, when I was 19. One stripper says, "I think Silver Moon likes you." I go to her dressing room and Silver Moon is completely naked, one leg up on the arm of the couch. But I was a kid and an idiot—I walked out of there a minute later bragging, "Hey, yeah, I got her phone number!"
PLAYBOY: Were you always backward romantically?
LENO: Like most men, I feel better calling the shots. It's tougher when the roles are reversed.
PLAYBOY: How did you do in college?
LENO: I went to the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance until the dean said, "Why are you here? Just get out." Then I applied to Emerson College in Boston. The admissions officer said I wasn't what they wanted. But I sat outside his office 12 hours a day until he said he'd let me in if I went to summer school. The tuition was $1200. I took out my wallet and gave him $1200 cash. I was already making good money in nightclubs. I eventually graduated from Emerson.
PLAYBOY: Your relentlessness helped in comedy, too.
LENO: I'd go to auditions at Catch a Rising Star or the Improv in New York. The comics had to be there at three in the afternoon to line up for a spot. Guys would stand in line six hours, then say, "This sucks, I'm outta here." And I'd move up. In the mid-Seventies, I saw a comic on The Tonight Show who I thought was terrible. Next day I got on a plane to California. Didn't pack, just left. I think it's good to back yourself into a corner, because if you leave yourself any options, you'll take them. If you have no options but success, you'll hustle more.
PLAYBOY: Even now you take only two weeks off from the show per year.
LENO: That vacation is for the other people who work here. I instantly go on the road. Why don't I take a vacation? Simple. I'm scared I might like it. Then I'm really screwed. Comedians are superstitious: They're afraid that if they change something they won't be funny anymore. And it's not just superstition. Have you ever seen a comedian quit and then come back successfully? No. They try, but when they get back something's gone. The energy, the heart. It's because they found out they could live without it. Thank you and goodbye.
PLAYBOY: What's better, getting tons of belly laughs or making smart people chuckle?
LENO: Dennis Miller and I have argued about that. Dennis would shoot for a select audience. I'd tell him, "Young man, you're losing a lot of the crowd." With profanity, for instance. But to him that was part of the idea. I want the widest possible audience, though. I try to please everybody.
PLAYBOY: Only a few years after appearing at the Teddy Bear Lounge you were playing Las Vegas.
LENO: After my debut in Vegas, opening for Tom Jones, this woman says, "Great show." She wants to join me. We sit in the Caesars Palace coffee shop and I'm thinking how great I am when she says, "It's $200." "Huh?" Turns out she's a hooker who said "Great show" to every man coming out. Now she's shouting at me while the audience streams out. I'm hiding, cowering in fear as they say, "He seemed like such a nice young man," and wonder what depraved act I want that makes a Vegas hooker scream.
PLAYBOY: Do you remember when you first saw Letterman?
LENO: He appeared at the Comedy Store with a perfectly formed comedic sense. "We are vehemently opposed to using orphans as yardage markers at driving ranges," he said. I perked right up.
PLAYBOY: Over the years, you, Letterman and other comics would meet at the Green Kitchen in New York and at Cantor's in Los Angeles, and later would kibitz at your house in Beverly Hills. Who showed up?
LENO: Letterman early on, though he wasn't much for hanging out. Jerry, of course. Jim Brogan, who's still with me on the show -- we work on the monolog every night. We had Larry Miller, Freddie Prinze, Carol Leifer, Richard Belzer. Dennis Miller came along a little later.
PLAYBOY: Who did the cooking?
LENO: Me. We'd have pasta, chicken wings and burgers—huge, thick burgers.
PLAYBOY: Recipe?
LENO: Meat. But you have to put an ice cube in the center when it's raw. Grill it; the ice melts and keeps the burger moist.
PLAYBOY: Were you the most famous?
LENO: Nobody was huge. One day when Jerry and I were starting out he called and said, "Jay, congratulations. I see you were named best caricature subject by the American Caricature Association." He was very impressed, seeing my picture in the paper. I said, "Jerry, I am the American Caricature Association. I made it up and sent in my picture." And Jerry went nuts. "No!" He was furious. He didn't believe anyone could do such an underhanded thing.
PLAYBOY: Twenty years later you shocked Letterman and company. According to Bill Carter's best-seller The Late Shift: "Letterman and his staff did not understand how Leno could have risen up . . . zombie-like, from the competitive dead." There's that relentlessness again.
LENO: I approached everything the same way. I figure that eventually things will go my way. Ambition wins over genius 99 percent of the time. Sooner or later the other guy is going to want to eat, drink, sleep, get laid, go on vacation or go to the bathroom. And that's when I catch up. I guess people thought I might give up, just go off the air when Dave came on and started beating us. But I thought of The Tonight Show as a marathon, not as a sprint.
PLAYBOY: Letterman left you in the dust at first. From his CBS debut in late August 1993 until last year, he beat you every single week, just as you're doing now. Why did you flop before starting your crawl back up?
LENO: I asked people who had worked on The Tonight Show—who knew how to do it—and wound up doing the show by committee. It was, "Get your hair cut shorter. Wear really straight clothes. Keep to the formula, because it worked for Johnny." The idea was to keep the audience we already had, not to try to appeal to anybody else. That show wasn't me. That show sucked. Still, I wasn't discouraged.
PLAYBOY: You always surrounded yourself with women—including Tonight Show producer Helen Kushnick, who supervised those early efforts. It was said you were pussy-whipped.
LENO: That wasn't the problem. I listen to women because humor is like sex. All men think they're good at it. Talk with women if you want to know the truth. And they're as competitive as men, but more clever. A man walks into a cold room and says, "Turn off the goddamn air conditioner!" A woman says, "Is it cold, or is it just me?" Either way the air conditioner gets turned off. But the woman doesn't have people plotting to kill her afterward. "Think like a man, smile like a woman," that's what I do.
PLAYBOY: But Kushnick was by all accounts a producer from hell. She yelled at everyone—you, your guests, NBC executives. She sparked a turf battle with every other talk show by threatening to ban guests who appeared on rival shows. Why didn't you stop her?
LENO: I tend to block out things I dislike, and I hate yelling. When she was producer and guests complained, I would just say, "That's not my area. I don't handle talent." And I kept getting it drummed into me that it wasn't my end of the business, that I didn't know anything about it ----
PLAYBOY: Was Kushnick as monstrous as Kathy Bates played her in the HBO movie of Bill Carter's The Late Shift?
LENO: I didn't see the movie.
PLAYBOY: But you see all. Dennis Miller says you know almost every comedy bit that's ever been on TV.
LENO: I didn't watch it because I knew someone would ask, "Was your producer really like that?" I'd have to comment, and they'd go to her for a response and here we go again.
PLAYBOY: Following Kushnick's instructions, you didn't mention Carson even once on the first night of your reign on Tonight. Critics and fans were appalled.
LENO: That was the biggest mistake of my life. I'm lucky he's gracious enough to speak to me after that.
PLAYBOY: Carson occasionally pops up on Letterman's show, but he hasn't appeared on yours.
LENO: He can come on any night he wants. I'd get out of my chair. I'd give him my chair and I'd sit on the couch.
PLAYBOY: Does winning heal all wounds? Or do you have other regrets? There was an incident with Jerry. LENO: His show had just gone on the air. I'd just taken over "The Tonight Show," and he wanted to use our set for a scene in Seinfeld. My producer at the time ----
PLAYBOY: Kushnick.
LENO: My producer said no. Forget it. I said, "Wait, Jerry's my friend." She said no way. She said Warren [Warren Littlefield, president of NBC Entertainment] wouldn't allow it. I honestly believed her. Later I found out Warren wanted me to say yes, but I wasn't communicating with people then and I didn't know what to do. I had an out-of-control producer. I went along with her. I said no, and Jerry was really hurt. But here's the thing: He was kind enough, and smart enough, to work around it. To wait. He could have said, "Jay's an asshole. Screw him." But what he said was, "I don't think Jay knows what he's doing right now. I'm going to wait and see, and I hope he'll come around." Finally it all passed over and we talked again. He said, "Hey, welcome back." And I will never forget that. I owe him big-time.
PLAYBOY: How about NBC? The network almost dumped you.
LENO: But in the end I got to continue and fix what I was doing wrong.
PLAYBOY: Still, weren't you mad when NBC executives wooed Letterman by offering him your show?
LENO: I'm not naive. I'm not saying they didn't want to give him my job. But I'm Italian, I understand business. I mean, my wife, Mavis, thinks it's hilarious that I get angry watching The Godfather, Part III, just enraged, yelling at the screen, "Mike, don't be a wimp. Go after those guys, take 'em out!"
PLAYBOY: Please translate that for us non-Italians.
LENO: Don't count on loyalty. Maybe you get it, maybe you get paid a lot of money instead.
PLAYBOY: You've been called the nicest guy in show business, but you're not above scheming. You hid in a closet at NBC to eavesdrop on network execs discussing you and Dave.
LENO: My career was at stake. I had to know where I stood. Am I dead meat? Who's on my side and who isn't? I had my supporters, including Warren Littlefield, but it was also fascinating to hear my own eulogy. I recommend it as excellent therapy. It sure keeps you humble.
PLAYBOY: Was it spontaneous—you jumped in the closet when the moment presented itself?
LENO: I don't do things spontaneously.
PLAYBOY: So you planned it. But what if a janitor had discovered you?
LENO: I would have laughed.
PLAYBOY: It must have been grim, knowing your job was on the line.
LENO: [After a pause] It wasn't just that. I haven't talked about this before, but. . . . Both my parents were dying. I was flying home to see them on weekends, then flying back here to tell jokes. It's so odd, such a shock, that people can get so old in a few months' time. Mom went first. After that my dad, in that Italian-guy tradition, couldn't go on without her. He was so used to having things prepared a certain way. . . .
You know why my father became a prizefighter? When he was 15 he was walking down the street and was jumped and robbed by seven guys. They beat the hell out of him. And my dad actually sent away for the Charles Atlas course. He became a Golden Gloves boxer. And he went back and found each one of the guys who robbed him. He beat them up pretty bad. Well, six of them. He never found the last guy, and that bothered him all his life. Last year he was on his deathbed and he said to me, "I never got that seventh guy." I told him to relax. If the guy was still living he was probably in his 90s now. Dad didn't care. "I never found him." I said, "Pop, I'll see if I can get him for you." The next day he passed away.
It was hard losing both my parents within a year.
PLAYBOY: Has it changed you?
LENO: Sometimes I ask myself who I'm doing the show for. Who do I do it for now?
PLAYBOY: Was there a moment you knew you were OK with your folks—when they knew their Jamie was famous?
LENO: Years and years ago, the first time I did Carnegie Hall, my mother was amazed, looking up at the marquee with my name on it. That was better than when I made the cover of Time magazine, because with Time she was sure they put my picture only on the magazines in her neighborhood.
PLAYBOY: What's the key to your success?
LENO: You know the difference between Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin? Johnny always had the jokes. Merv had jokes in the beginning of his show, but then he'd play piano or sing, and however good he was, it wasn't jokes. When Dick Cavett started his show he was a comedian, then he stopped doing a full monolog. I think that's why his show didn't last. He stopped being a comedian. Cavett was extremely bright, an intellectual, a good interviewer, but a lot of people are. This job is about jokes. That's why Carson was always the best. For years people came home after a hard day and they wanted jokes. They wanted to laugh at what Johnny Carson said about that day's events—especially if it involved sex or money.
PLAYBOY: It must sting a little that he hasn't come back to Tonight.
LENO: I was not his original choice for the show. I accept that. If the choice had been his, I'm sure he would have chosen Dave over me. But nobody asked him. Yes, he's done a few walk-ons with Dave. I saw them. I thought they were funny. But nobody's saying, "Screw you, Jay." Those guys had a long-term relationship before I came along.
PLAYBOY: You have admitted you were "awed by Carson's legacy" when you took over his show. You think you failed, and you destroyed the tapes of the first 12 weeks of your Tonight shows.
LENO: They were no good.
PLAYBOY: Did you burn them? Smash them with a hammer?
LENO: No. I just taped over them. Taped a few Letterman shows, a couple Saturday Night Live shows.
PLAYBOY: You taped Dave right over your own show?
LENO: Sure. I like Dave. He makes me laugh. Even when I was getting my head kicked in I liked him and enjoyed the game. Even if I knew I was going to lose every week for the rest of my life, I'd do the show the same way. What else am I going to do, sell insurance? Here's how I think of it: The worst comedian in the world still has it pretty damn good, and I'm not the worst.
PLAYBOY: What's your theory on the monolog?
LENO: People want to hear your joke on the day's news, whether it's Whitewater or Kathie Lee. There are news seasons; unfortunately we're in a slow one right now. Dole is old, Clinton's a philanderer, blah, blah, blah. The worst time to do a monolog, of course, is when there's a national tragedy. You still have to go out and tell jokes. And while it's incredibly selfish, you can't believe this horrible event has messed up your job. When a jet crashes you can't do an airline joke, even about airline food, for a month. I did a joke about that little girl pilot, the youngest cross-country flier: "Next time you're on a flight and you hear a baby crying, it might be the pilot." Got a big laugh. Then boom, the girl's dead. I had to pull the show in Europe, where it runs a day later, or people would say I was making fun of a dead little girl.
PLAYBOY: Your O. J. Simpson jokes, always predicated on his guilt, helped you turn the ratings around.
Letterman shied away from the issue. You've been praised for your courage on that count.
LENO: Oh, that didn't take any balls. It might take balls to say it to his face. A truly brave comedian would tell the audience O. J. was innocent. I was just reaffirming what people already believed. Do I think O. J. did it? Yes. I took a cake to a party for the LAPD that said He's Guilty. But come on—I hate hearing about "brave" comedians. You don't change anyone's mind with comedy. I might call tobacco companies liars and thieves and drug dealers, which they are, but the laugh comes first. A comic should never get confused about why he's out there. It's not about philosophy. It's not about right and wrong. You're there to get a laugh, that's all. There's an old saying in prostitution: When you start coming with the customers, it's time to get out of the business.
PLAYBOY: There's a new saying in prostitution, too: Hugh Grant can make you famous.
LENO: I like Hugh Grant. He seemed genuinely embarrassed, coming out to take his punishment. He got us huge ratings.
PLAYBOY: Helping you turn the corner in the race against Letterman. Is it true that Grant chose your show over Dave's because you're more predictable? He knew you'd be gentle, didn't he?
LENO: That wasn't it. We had already booked him weeks before.
PLAYBOY: You opened with your now-famous question: "What the hell were you thinking?"
LENO: That one, believe it or not, was spontaneous.
PLAYBOY: How did you know he wouldn't punch you in the nose?
LENO: You never know until you look in the guest's eyes. Sometimes a guest will freeze with fear. Once I went in before the show to ask a guest, as usual, "any funny stories, anything happen to you recently?" "Yes, I was in Europe." We get out there and the guest freezes. "Been to Europe?" "No. I don't travel much." "Oh, well, anything happen on a boat?" Now they remember, but they tell the story 100 miles an hour, the crowd can barely hear it, you get zero response. All you can do is smile and say, "We'll be right back." It'd be wonderful to talk with Dave about this stuff, to commiserate over bad guests. I'd really enjoy that. Will it happen? No.
PLAYBOY: Why not?
LENO: Too awkward. What are you going to say, "Oh, we're doing this new bit on such and such," and give it away? You can't do it. Maybe you and he are the only ones who really know what the job is like, but you can't talk it over. Too bad.
PLAYBOY: Since your dark days on Tonight you've mended fences with a few former enemies.
LENO: Those fences weren't really down. You might be on the outs with guys you compete with, like you're dating the same girl, but you can't hate them. They're the only ones who know what the job is like. I mean, Arsenio and I had some rough times, but I always knew we'd be friends again.
PLAYBOY: He swore he would "kick Jay's ass" in the ratings.
LENO: But he said it to a magazine. Now that looks serious in print, but I didn't take it that way. You never saw any response from me, did you? Because I know Arsenio's a professional wordsmith. Like any comic, he can use words as a saber, and if he really hated me he could have been a lot more cutting than "I'll kick your ass." That line was a butter knife. I mean, he didn't say that I'm not funny.
PLAYBOY: You also feuded with Dennis Miller. He was pissed about Kushnick's threats to ban his guests from your show. Her tactics were "like dropping an atom bomb on an ant," he told us. Did you apologize?
LENO: I tried calling him a couple times, but Dennis wasn't ready. Finally he called me. I said, "Listen, some stuff happened that I didn't know about. It's over now." We got to talking, and laughing, and it was like this "feud" hadn't happened. You can't stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh. You can't be enemies. It's like good sex—whatever you were angry about somehow falls by the wayside while you do this.
PLAYBOY: He accepted your apology?
LENO: No. "Jay, man," he says, "you know everything that happens. You know who appeared on Madame's Place in 1971." And I laughed out loud because it was such a perfect, completely obscure Dennis reference, and he laughed on the other end of the phone, and we then were OK.
PLAYBOY: You're 46 with no little Lenos. Don't you feel a duty to pass on that jaw?
LENO: If Mavis had wanted kids we'd have them. I'm a good uncle; maybe I'd have been a good dad, but now it's just too late.
PLAYBOY: You still do stand-up gigs, just like a beginner. Almost every weekend you can be found at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, performing for 150 to 200 people.
LENO: Because I'm a comedian. My stand-up act is the principal; TV is only the interest. I don't want to be a TV personality, I want to stay sharp like the kids who are after my job. Kids such as Chris Rock, who are edgy and funny and make me ask myself if I'm getting lazy. "Am I getting worse? Am I not hitting the corporate structure hard enough because I'm part of it?"
PLAYBOY: Do you have any protection during your club dates? Are you surrounded by security men? No. LENO: You can't live in a bubble. I mean, one day I see a scruffy guy pushing a baby carriage past my house. It's Springsteen. I figure if he doesn't have security, I don't need it. And I think it helps that I genuinely like people. I've seen performers do the wrong thing—the psycho fan comes up and the performer is very dismissive, and you watch the fan, who's had a whole life of being dismissed, get angrier than ever. On the other hand, you can stop, look them in the eye, shake their hand and say hi. That's usually all they want.
PLAYBOY: You study their eyes as if they were guests on the show.
LENO: It's like a bad Star Trek episode. There are Klingons out there. Some of them are genuinely mildly retarded. They show up every day and all they want is a minute of your time. How hard is that? You can make them happy with nothing more than that.
PLAYBOY: Please tell us how you write the monolog.
LENO: Jim Brogan and I sit in my den until 2:30 or 3:00. We have to sit in the same chairs every night or it doesn't work. We'll knock jokes back and forth until we can't think anymore. Sometimes I'll be sitting there writing jokes and not notice that I've dozed off for a few minutes.
PLAYBOY: Do you use a computer?
LENO: No. If I had computer files, thousands of jokes, I might be tempted to cheat—to find an old one and update it instead of writing a new one. No, it's all on paper. Brogan and I go through stacks of stuff. We go through it over and over. "You think of anything for this yet?" We're flipping channels on TV, too. Bosnia, no way. No tragedies. Turbulence on Clinton's plane? Might be something there—FBI files on Republicans all over the place!
PLAYBOY: Does Mavis help?
LENO: No, she's sleeping. She goes upstairs to bed at 11 or 11:30.
PLAYBOY: She doesn't watch the show?
LENO: Sometimes she does. I'll have her watch on the satellite at 8:30 if there's something she really likes -- some English actor or a bit from the San Diego Zoo. But no, I don't make her watch. I don't even urge her to watch. I learned my lesson in nightclubs. It's always the funniest thing when a comedian brings his new girlfriend to the club, and on the first night she's all excited. She laughs and has a wonderful time. Next night she's a little concerned: Isn't this the exact same act? By the fourth night she's got the look of a dog that hates its owner. Grrr, I hate these jokes! And she's really pissed at the people around her: How can you laugh at these stupid goddamn jokes? I've seen it happen to a lot of comedians. He makes his wife or girlfriend watch his act until she hates every word of it and wants to see it die. So no, I don't make my wife watch.
PLAYBOY: What do you do after writing tomorrow's monolog?
LENO: I'll do some reading. I read my motorcycle magazines and old automobile books, anything on automotive history. And let the day run through my head. I don't brood about my job, but I think about it. It's like dealing cards in Vegas—20 minutes on and 20 minutes off all day long, you're never far away from it. But when my head hits the pillow I get to sleep pretty fast.
PLAYBOY: Do you miss the old comedy gang?
LENO: Not really. People come and go as they get more successful. That's how it should be. I don't see Jerry nearly so much as I'd like to, but how could we sit around like we did in the old days? He's too busy—he's the most successful of us all. I try to hang out with people who want my job, kids like Chris Rock. I need to see the hunger.
PLAYBOY: How about you and Letterman? Are you hoping to drive him to his professional grave?
LENO: Come on. Letterman makes me laugh.
PLAYBOY: You're Frazier and Ali, aren't you? You're the tireless straight-ahead puncher, and this time the puncher has won.
LENO: We'll see what happens next. Will I fight hard every round? Sure. But if I run second will I be a piece of crap? No. I've shown I can do the job.
PLAYBOY: How much of your nice-guy image is real and how much is PR?
LENO: I've wondered about that. For instance, I always stop and help people who have car trouble on the freeway. Now, am I doing that just to help them, or do I want to be recognized and have people say, "Hey, Jay Leno is a hell of a guy -- he helped me fix my car"? I don't know. Maybe it's impossible to know. It's probably best to stop worrying and fix their car.
PLAYBOY: We've noticed that you wield a wrench left-handed.
LENO: A lot of comedians are left-handed. We're left-handed kid brothers, usually, kid brothers vying for attention.
PLAYBOY: Tell us another comedy secret.
LENO: There's not a comic in the world who doesn't still use his first five minutes. Because that's what you know will always work. If you're doing the AT&T Christmas party at the Fontainebleau Hotel and you're dying, that's what you fall back on. All comics do it. Jerry has this old bit about a guy who weighed 1200 pounds and lost 200 pounds and his friends all said, "You're a rail, baby." If you're in a club listening to your friend and you hear that first-five-minutes stuff, "You're a rail, baby," you laugh from recognition—not because it's funny but because you know how desperate your buddy is. And likewise, Jerry will come to the Comedy and Magic Club and I'll hear his Seinfeld laugh if he recognizes my old material.
PLAYBOY: Which is?
LENO: A bit about the California Cling Peach Advisory Board: "I mean, what sort of cushy-ass job is this?" Then I do a female voice: "Mr. Johnson, a caller wants to have cling peaches with cornflakes." I pause and finally say, "I can live with that."
PLAYBOY: Do any other bad moments come to mind?
LENO: There was a time on Letterman when I recycled the first joke I ever told onstage. It was a college joke. We had a very liberal school. You could have girls in your room, and liquor and drugs, but the one thing you were not allowed was a hot plate. So I did the "boom-boom" on the door: "What's going on in there?" "Just liquor and girls, sir." "Don't lie to me, son. You've got soup in there, don't you?" I did this ancient hot-plate joke for years, and in 1988, after I had done something like 50 Letterman shows, I dragged it out. Dave cracks up, just dying, and the crowd thinks he thinks it's funny, but he knows and I know it's just that this proves I'm completely out of material.
PLAYBOY: Was that your most excruciating gig?
LENO: No. I do a lot of police benefits, and one night in New Jersey, about 1985, I'm sitting there, waiting to go on, when a screen comes down from the ceiling, and on it is a giant photo of an officer who was killed. "Shot down by a punk on the streets," the captain says. "Here's his widow." Now the widow walks up, carrying two crying babies, to accept the award. Before she gets back to her seat the captain says, "Now for a change of pace -- Jay Leno!" And the slain officer's picture stays right where it is. I do my act between that picture and this woman with her two babies. "Hi, how you doing? I'm Jay. . . ."
PLAYBOY: That must have been awful.
LENO: No. It was the same as usual. It was my act.
PLAYBOY: You make it sound easy.
LENO: It's not. And I certainly don't think I'm smarter or even funnier than anybody else. But I'm probably at least as funny as the next guy, and as long as I can physically get to the stage, I can make a living.
PLAYBOY: You used to do The Tonight Show with your parents in mind. Now that they're gone, who are you doing the show for?
LENO: I guess, in the end, you do it for yourself.
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