The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [64]
“Write joke; tell joke; get check.”
CHAPTER FIVE
SEIZE THE JAY
For six months or so Jay Leno would be fine.
Throughout the fall of 2004 and early 2005 his routine would be as it always had been. Around first light he would climb into his chosen vehicle for the day (1937 Bugatti, 1955 Buick Roadmaster, 1915 Hispano-Suiza, 1987 Lamborghini Countach, 1934 Rolls, 1996 Dodge Viper, 1926 Bentley, 1932 Duesenberg, 1909 Stanley Steamer—whatever choice from his ever expanding collection he and his garagemates had most recently restored to full driving condition) and make his way over the hill to Burbank from his home in Beverly Hills. Upon arriving on the NBC lot he would park in his designated spot adjacent to the entry ramp, pull out his battered leather saddlebag of a briefcase stuffed with jokes and the research the staff had provided on news stories and guests, and roll on in to work.
Many mornings the first one in, he’d settle down at his desk and pore over the jokes he and his head writer Joe Medeiros had committed to index cards late the night before in Jay’s home office. At the same time he would be culling printouts of the e-mailed jokes that had been submitted by the group still known as the faxers (a holdover from a bygone technological day), the pay-by-the-joke freelance contributors who got seventy-five or a hundred dollars apiece for every gag Jay used on the air.
When Debbie Vickers arrived hours later, she would take a reading of Jay’s demeanor. Most days she could discern the familiar attributes: steady, purposeful, joke obsessed. It didn’t mean Jay was no longer feeling the disappointment, resentment, and regret that NBC’s long-range termination notice had planted inside him. It meant only that, for the moment anyway, he was living by what he called “the first rule of show business: Don’t create anything bigger than your act.” Jay interpreted the rule to mean that, if you found yourself consumed by something bigger than what you are known for, your downfall was assured. If something distracting or dispiriting was going on in his life, his duty was to shrug it off, get back in the game of telling jokes, and be funny, day in, day out.
But after those initial six months passed, Vickers knew that every day would no longer be conventional. There came a morning, and then several mornings, when Jay’s demeanor was clearly different: sullen, chagrined, joke obsessed. On those days Leno would unburden himself to Vickers, spilling out his undissipated confusion over NBCʹs decision. His unhappiness was only exacerbated if he played a gig somewhere and faced bewildered fans asking, “Why are you retiring, Jay?” He would try to laugh it off, tell them of course he wasn’t really retiring, he would still tour and be around plenty. But the exercise was excruciating. So was having to deal with the guests who brought up the subject on the air, with cracks about being put out to pasture or some other dopey expression.
“I’m just sick of lying,” Leno told Vickers.
On the bad days he would openly kick around his options. At worst, he would announce, he would end up a really rich person. Or he just might decide to defect; maybe he would go down the road to ABC. They might be interested in him over there.
That was the scenario that eventually filtered back to Rick Ludwin from his contacts on the show. In his capacity as supervisor of late night for NBC, Ludwin always spent a great deal of time around the Tonight studio, but Jay wasn’t sending a message to NBC about his litany of unhappiness through Rick—maybe because Jay had begun to suspect that Ludwin had been one of the architects of the Conan elevation.
Inside the confines of the Tonight Show world, Ludwin heard Jay had been telling staff members things like: “Instead of