You don’t know this about me maybe.
I can be a ferocious feral hungry dog who sees a scarce bone and you don’t want to get between.
Like a big time comedian. I am always reaching for the stars, even if they be ducking me.
From August 2, 1989.
Jay Leno, he works hard for his money. That’s one of the things we always read about the man. Something else we’re always told. Jay Leno is Everyman, a down-to-earth type who hasn’t let success go to his head.
When I finally chased down the comedian, he was in Las Vegas, in his hotel suite.
He answered his own phone. Just like you do at home.
A couple of minutes into our conversation, I thought I heard a splash. Leno was talking, so I ignored the sound.
Probably just my imagination.
Let’s face it. Telephonic communications just hasn’t been the same since the government decided to fix AT&T.
Which wasn’t even broken.
A few minutes later, I hear another splash. SPLASH!!!! Just like that. No mistaking it.
“Ummm, Jay, are you naked?”
“Well, uh, yeah.”
“Jay, are you in the bathtub?”
“Well, uh, sure.”
“Jay, are you alone?,” I pressed.
“Of course, ” he said, sounding just a bit indignant at my effrontery.
“Are you playing with your rubber ducky and your yellow submarine?”
“Nah,” Jay Leno says to me. “All that stuff’s back home.”
When I went to college, you could do anything in your dorm room. Have a girl. Anything.
Except you couldn’t have a hot plate. Mrs. Leno? This is the dean. We’ve got your son, Jay.
Yes, it was on suspicion of soup. The lab boys say it was definitely Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom.
By all accounts, that was Jay Leno’s first professional joke. On account of you gotta start someplace.
Leno started his career while still attending Boston’s Emerson College. He majored in speech, mostly because the final exam was always oral.
The talent was apparent much earlier in his education. Mr. Simon, Leno’s fifth-grade teacher, noticed it right away, jotting on a report card a note to the boy’s parents: “If Jay spent as much time studying as he does trying to be a comedian, he would be a big star.”
In high school, Leno progressed to stuffing dogs in hallway lockers, blowing up urinals with cherry bombs, and flushing tennis balls down toilets.
“Not exactly career moves,” Jay remembers. Mostly bathroom humor.
In the beginning, in college, comedy didn’t pay the bills. Leno worked part-time as a mechanic for a Rolls-Royce dealer. He also played some tough gigs. He paid his dues and didn’t get paid much for doing it.
He received ten dollars as the opening act in a bordello. He played strip joints with names like the Kit Kat Klub and the Teddy Bear Lounge.
One place had a huge neon sign flashing NUDE! NUDE! NUDE! followed by, in very small letters, “With Jay Leno.”
The manager of one such joint – his sports coat pocked with burn scars – advised the young comedian not to wear any flammable clothing. Because disgruntled patrons were in the habit of tossing lit cigarettes at performers.
Leno told jokes on carnival midways. He was the chief entertainment at more than a couple of birthday parties in homes for the aged.
“People always say to me, ‘How depressing!’ I was twenty-three,” Leno recalls sixteen years later. “I was making, twenty to forty dollars a night. I’d be in the dressing room and there’d be six good-looking nude girls giggling. I’d tell them jokes and they’d all squeal.
“My friends were working at Wendy’s for two dollars an hour. Oh, yeah, it was pretty horrible.” A nostalgic smile. “It was great. I loved it.”
He probably even enjoyed himself when he performed on the same bills as the Personable Yodeling Sensation and a dog act called the Cold-Nosed Five.
You’ve seen the television commercial where the idealistic college graduate goes to work for Dow Chemical so he can help save the world’s starving millions. First day on the job, he’s called into his supervisor’s office. “Kid, ahhh, that End Hunger project’s been put on hold. We want you to work on the new Death Gel. It’s kind of Napalm In A Tube. You’ll be working on a commission basis. Push, push, push.”
Leno kept pushing himself. He got first break when he was hired as the house comedian – twenty-five dollars a week – by a Boston jazz club called Lenny’s On The Turnpike. Finally, a hip and sober audience that understood something other than four-letter words.
Still working days as a mechanic, Leno began to drive, often in a Rolls, to New York City. He made twenty-four (24) trips to NYC before he got on stage at the original Improv. A stand-up comedian’s Mecca.
One night in 1975, Leno was watching “The Tonight Show.” A comic was doing a mediocre job and Jay decided he could do better. He was on the next plane to L.A. The next day he performed at the prestigious Comedy Store.
Leno had some trouble adjusting to the West Coast.
“The problem is that the ocean is on the wrong side of the beach. I kept diving into the parking lot.”
“The Tonight Show” took a bit longer. This was the period where Jay could be found sometimes sleeping in a car he still owns, a 1955 Roadmaster. “Mr. Buick. A car so big it seats seven. For dinner.
After a couple years, Johnny Carson caught his act. “He said,” Leno remembers every word. “You’re a funny young man, but you’re not ready for my show. You need more jokes to be on TV.”
By 1977, Leno was ready. He made a number of guest appearances on Carson’s national forum. Jay could’ve been better. He went back on the road to hone his material. His frequent flyer mileage is nearing five million.
His good friend from Muncie, one David Letterman, got his own late night show and Leno became a regular guest. The most regular.
Leno was so regular Carson decided it was time to give him another shot. In 1986, Leno became the guest host of “The Tonight Show,” appearing every Monday and whenever else Johnny was gone. Which was often. The rest of the time, Leno is on the road, playing two-hundred-and-fifty (250) or more shows annually, pulling down more than three million bucks a year.
Not bad for Everyman. “I honestly get a kick out of getting the checks with all those zeros.”
See what ARCO has done? They’ve combined the all-night mini-market – where twenty-thousand dollars worth of cameras protect twenty dollars worth of Twinkies – with the twenty-four-hour gas station to try to give you a one-stop robbery center. This way, criminals don’t have to drive around all night wasting gas. You pull in at 9:15, shoot the attendant, and you’re in bed by 11.
Let’s face it. Leno’s not the best looking man in show business. No writer omits a mention of the man’s unique features. People magazine once put his photo on the front cover and called him The Sexiest Man Alive. They were just kidding and that issue was the second worst seller of the year. Allegedly trailing everybody except demonic mass-murderer Charles Manson. Everyman doesn’t look like everybody else.
It has been written about James Douglas Muir Leno: the jutting, jumbo Mount Rushmore chin… lantern-jawed… anvil face… macromandible…
Pelican Head.
Other people simply were unkind. One network executive suggested Leno had no future in television. “Don’t take this personally, Jay,” he was told, “but we feel your face will frighten little children.”
A fellow comedian noted Leno’s head “looks like a crushed walnut.” His close friend Letterman describes Leno as looking “like some kind of cinder block that came out of the mold misshapen.”
Some of his other buddies don’t even like the way the man dresses. Says one, “Those ties look like they were made in summer camp, like fabric ashtrays he’s wearing around his neck.” Says another, “He dresses like an Iranian disco owner.”
Seems safe to suggest Jay Leno didn’t get where he is today based on his good looks or his snappy attire.
Maybe he has great legs.
If any of the criticism bothers Jay, he doesn’t let the pain show. The checks cash. The audiences howl in glee so the last laugh is surely his.
The last word comes from Mrs. Leno, Mavis Williamson, who has been married to this self-described big doofus for some nine years: “I have a tremendous passion for men who have blue eyes, black hair and large jaws.”
Mr. Leno’s passion, other than telling jokes, is his automobile and motorcycle collection. (Writers always mention this.) Not a collection in a museum sense, nor is it an investment. No, these are more like Leno’s motorized mechanical buddies. They are housed in a couple of garages adjacent to the Lenos’ two-story, stone-and-shingle, twelve-room house in Beverly Hills. It looks like a relatively modest hunting lodge, considering the neighborhood.
The home will never be mistaken for the Playboy Mansion.
On those rare occasions when Jay is at home, he can usually be found in the garage(s), tinkering with one of his twenty-two bikes, mostly Harleys and British antiques. In addition to Mr. Buick, there are also a couple of Lamborghinis, a 1954 Jaguar XJ120, a Mercedes, a 427 Cobra and his everyday vehicle, a 1989 Bentley Turbo R. The R stands for Really fast and Really expensive.
Leno’s big dream is to attend mechanic’s school. “I just like things mechanical,” he says simply. “It’s a fun hobby.”
Leno is a man who can use a break from his labors. He’s been called the Bruce Springsteen of Comedy, and the hardest-working white man in show business. He has never taken a vacation. In fact, he claims never to have gone a week without performing.
He does not drink. Years ago, he had a beer, and so disliked the experience, he’s never had the urge to repeat it.
He does smoke a pipe, but he avoids all drugs, including aspirin.
He’s faithful to his wife.
He doesn’t have a dog. “I had a dog once,” Leno has said. “The dog died. No more. Once I mate, I mate for life.” Such a straight arrow.
Whenever there’s one of those bogus oil shortages, the oil companies give you those stupid brochures, ‘Fifty Ways To Save Energy.’ They spill eighty million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. And they want me to go to the bathroom in the dark and save three cents a year?
Something else about Leno that always seems to merit mention – the long climb up the ladder of success. To most observers, the years and years of obscurity are noteworthy. The perseverance somewhat amazing.
“I don’t think it took long at all,” Jay argues. “How long is it supposed to take?,” he asks. Good point.
“I was happy every point along the way,” Leno claims. “I like writing jokes. I like telling them. You know, comedy is not like music. A successful young comedian is rare. You have to have some life experience to mirror the experience of your audience.”
You have to know when things are normal before you can have a clue when they get weird.
Jay Leno understands normalcy. That’s what the jokes are all about.
That’s what’s funny.
Epilogue. Here’s what I remember. Somebody, probably my demonic editor Don Campbell, gave me this assignment.
I imagine there were deadlines and paychecks involved. Something big to be promoted. How I made my living. Such as it was.
The SEAFIRST/BLAZER SLAM N” JAM. Opening act was the Rose City’s finest MoTown singers – “Salmon Dave.”
I was there. Civic Stadium. Slam Dunk Contest. The sidebar said something like, See Clyde The Glide Drexler and Mr. Jerome Kersey challenge the near-legendary gorilla jams of the incomparable Billy Ray Bates. I was there. Think Clyde must’ve jumped fourteen-two for the win.
But I digress. Hey. I. Was. There.
May surprise you but Jay Leno is not an easy get for an unknown freelance scribe in Portland.
I was in my boxers.
He was sitting in his Vegas suite, in his jetted bath tub. Wet and naked. I imagined bubbles.
Seems Jay Leno was scheduling phoners with media types every half hour.
I was his eighth (8) such conversation that morning.
I could actually hear him splashing in the bath tub.