Leno's Regrets

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Paul Drinkwater, NBCU Photo Bank / AP Photo As Conan takes over his slot tonight, Jay Leno is realizing his new 10 p.m. show will be far different than what he was promised by NBC and even his team is being reshuffled. Kim Masters reports that the pressure to succeed is even greater than when he took over from Johnny.

After taping his final Tonight Show last Friday afternoon, Jay Leno went to a party at a The Castaway, a seriously un-Hollywood banquet hall in the hills north of Burbank.

“The party was at such a Jay place,” says one of the guests—a longtime Leno associate. It was outside and everybody was freezing. There was food and beverage but—nothing pretentious. Let’s put it that way.” Not one for parties, Leno was glancing at his watch by 7:30 p.m.

This guest came away with the sense that Leno is resigned to moving on from his late-night throne and was fixed in his determination that the transition for the new host, Conan O’Brien, be “classy.” Leno was ushered in to the Tonight Show 17 years ago with a chilly handover from Johnny Carson amid hostilities with Carson’s favorite son, David Letterman. “It was such a horrific, horrific experience,” this associate says. “He wanted no part of that kind of transition—and he remembers it like it was yesterday.”

“Jay thinks of his body as something to carry around his head,” quips a former network executive. “He does not take particularly good care about diet or exercise. It wouldn’t be surprising if at some point, that machine has to break.”

To this observer, Leno seemed calm and fit—looking far better than he did at an extraordinarily uncharacteristic appearance a couple of weeks earlier in front of an important audience of advertising executives in New York. Leno is legendary for never having an off night when he does standup, so it came as a surprise when he turned in a flat performance in a packed New York theater just after the network unveiled its fall schedule.

His material was dated. His jokes were stale. “He was doing Hurricane Katrina jokes. I mean, gimme a break,” admits an insider. One of the most striking aspects of Leno’s appearance was his mane of silver hair, which was strangely long and unkempt. An executive at a rival network says the performance—and the look—were discussed at a staff meeting the following week, where he heard that Leno’s hair looked “like it was done by a weed whacker.” An advertiser who skipped the comedy night got the same report from a colleague.

“Somewhere there was a hugely dropped ball,” says a former high-level NBC executive. “The question is what does it reveal?”

Indeed, there were recriminations within NBC about how this was permitted to happen. And the episode raised a question about Leno’s health. A couple of weeks earlier, the 59-year-old comedian had gone to a hospital, calling in sick for the first time in 17 years, and canceling the taping of two shows. He told People magazine, “I think I just probably got worn out.”

That simple diagnosis doesn’t surprise some who have worked with the tireless comic and who say his health has never been a priority. “Jay thinks of his body as something to carry around his head,” quips a former network executive. “He does not take particularly good care about diet or exercise. It wouldn’t be surprising if at some point, that machine has to break.”

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