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."