Midnight's Mayor

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.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Steve Hart

CAPTION: THE LITTLE KINGDOM OF LATE-NIGHT CHAT