The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [63]
He and Mavis had never had children. They rarely vacationed together, mainly because Jay abhorred the very idea of vacation. During weeks off he booked himself into Vegas or some high-paying corporate retreat, while Mavis often traveled the world. Jay loved to tell a story of an ill-advised decision to take a booking in Hawaii, with an extra day scheduled afterward to relax on the beach. A morning on the beach led him to wonder if his watch had become filled with sand, because it indicated that only an hour had gone by when surely he had been out there all day. He was on a plane back to LA before noon. Jay also famously asked NBC to consider hiring a separate staff of writers and producers for the six-to-eight-week period that the show was scheduled to be dark so he could work all fifty-two weeks of the year while the rest of the regular staff got a break. (NBC politely declined.)
His aversion to going anywhere except places where he could tell jokes led to his making pronouncements that even his closest associates acknowledged sounded bizarre. “You start taking vacations and you go, ‘Uh-oh, what if I like this?’ Then you’re screwed.” The whole notion of going somewhere and doing something simply because it was pleasurable or interesting was a concept Jay simply didn’t get. “I understand how people spend money to buy things they need or they like,” Jay said, summarizing his philosophy. “But spending money on an experience? That seems like an extravagance to me.”
Of course, even though he always avowed that he never spent a dime of his NBC salary and lived only off the money from his stand-up dates, it didn’t seem to dawn on Jay that most of the people coming to see him tell jokes were on vacation and were paying for that experience.
Critics—as well as occasionally the network and his own producers—often cited Jay’s apparent lack of interest in the stories guests on the show told. Certainly most of the staff knew that Jay devoted little time preparing to speak to guests. Worse, at least for some, was a habit Jay adopted later in his Tonight Show run. As described by one A-level movie star guest, an appearance with Jay could be thoroughly disconcerting.
“I’m sitting there telling him a story about some damn thing that happened and I realize he’s not looking at me at all,” the star said. “His eyes are going straight past me. The audience can’t see this because he’s still looking vaguely in my direction, but his eyes are not on me at all. When he went to commercial I took a look over my shoulder. There was a guy with cue cards standing off to the side behind him. Jay was just reading the questions off the cards. Not paying attention to me at all. The whole thing was so artificial; I was totally put off by it.”
Jay’s day was so consumed with reading and deciding on jokes that he usually had to be clued in that it was time to stop. “By the afternoon he would have been reading jokes for about five hours,” one longtime staff member said. “He would have culled them down to about a hundred fifty by that point from at least five hundred. Then about four p.m. someone would go to him and say, ‘You can’t read any more jokes.’ He would go down to rehearsal, but while rehearsing whatever the comedy bit was in act two, Jay would still be reading more jokes right through the rehearsal.” Throughout the process, Jay would rarely, if ever, laugh.
But for Jay his method worked. Forget the Emmy Awards, the critics, the comparisons to Dave or anybody else. Others might watch him and shake their heads in wonder. Some might call him a robot, with no apparent inner