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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.