Leno still saves all his TV pay for rainy days
SEATTLE – Jay Leno makes a reported $32 million a year as the host of NBC’S The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and banks every dime. Just in case.
“I’ve always done that,” Leno said over the phone. “That’s my style.”
It started when he was growing up in Massachusetts and had two jobs: One at McDonald’s, the other at a car dealership.
He saved the fast-food money and lived on the dealership money. Then he banked the dealership money and lived on the money he made doing standup. Then he lived on the standup money and banked the Tonight Show cheques. But ... why? “I’ve always looked at TV as a temporary job,” he said, “and then it ends and you don’t work for a long time.”
Comedians are an insecure lot, aren’t they? Leno has been on the air since 1992, and still he worries about holding onto his job.
Few know that better than Conan O’brien and David Letterman, who both competed against Leno for NBC’S late night slot — and lost.
For his part, Leno has been making Sunday-night appearances at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., since 1978, as a way to work on his act.
“You can’t just run marathons,” he said. “You have to run every day. If you’re trying to keep a couple of hours of material in your head all the time, you have to work on it.”
Sometimes a joke seems funny, but you don’t really know until it hits the room.
“Comedy is very audience-dependent, so you go out and work,” Leno said. “Plus, it’s fun. I like being a comic.”
The benefit of a live show is that he can “get the whole room.”
If you see someone not laughing, you can try to loosen them up. Television? Not so much. “TV is so subjective,” Leno said. “You just do the best you can. You’ll never get the whole room. You don’t really know if something is funny.”
He gets a lot of help from writers, some of whom send him jokes. If they’re good enough, he hires them onto his staff, sight unseen.
One joke writer he hired turned out to be an Orthodox rabbi. Another had severe cerebral palsy; he showed up at NBC and told Leno he had to work at home. Fine with Leno. “I was hiring people based on the material,” he said.
No conversation with Leno is complete without talking about cars.
That morning, he drove his 1966 Ford 7-litre Galaxie in to work. He finished the restoration last year.
“It was the car I made my dad buy when I was a kid,” Leno said.
He remembered every detail: the dealership (Shawsheen Motors in Andover, Mass.), the salesman’s name (Tom Lawrence), and that, un beknown st to his father, Leno ordered the 428 engine with the “police pursuit package,” the muffler-delete option and bucket seats.
When the car arrived, Leno’s father was incensed, calling it “a (expletive) rocket ship.”
Years later, Leno would put the car into a tree. Years after that, he would find another just like it, and restore it.
God knows he had the money.