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Caloroga Shark Media. Happy Jay Leno Day. I’m Johnny Mac and the Saturday Deep Dives are back. Today we’ll take a look at Jay Leno. It is Jay Leno Day.
Jay hosted the Tonight Show at NBC Studios in Burbank for more than twenty years. The city’s home to his famous garage, hosting more than one hundred rare cars. He regularly performs at Flapper’s Comedy Club in Burbank, and he is being honored by the city. It is Jay Leno Day now for this deep dive. In particular, I’m going to skip the Tonight show, so we’re not gonna talk Tonight Show and we’re not gonna talk Conan.
The reason is this fall, I’m going to do a series about the late night hosts and we will cover that in detail, so we’re not going to bog down on that. Today we will talk about the man that I jokingly call the worst person who ever lived, because for some reason, people don’t like this guy I do. Jay Leno has said multiple interviews over the years consistently enough that it’s cloing not a bit. He never spent a dollar of the money NBC paid him for the Tonight Show, not one dollar. During that time, he was making somewhere between twenty and thirty million dollars a year, and yet he was living off his income from stand up.
The NBC money went into the bank. Jay Leno toured on the weekends, kept doing clubs in theaters, and kept treating stand up as the actual job rather than the thing he used to do before TV, and he used that income for his operating budget for everything. The Tonight Show money sat there and accumulated. His fortune is now estimated at around four hundred and fifty million dollars. Jay Leno, underneath all the Late night stuff will cover this fall, is fundamentally a stand up comedian with an extraordinary work ethic, a strange and consuming passion for machines with engines, a husband of forty five plus years that is currently one of the more quietly moving stories in show business, and a guy with a financial philosophy that treats television as a bonus rather than his career.
Understanding all that tells you more about Jay Leno than hosting The Tonight Show ever did. Born James Douglas Muir Lean I know April twenty eighth, nineteen fifty in New Rochelle, New York. Raised in Andover, Massachusetts, the son of an insurance salesman father of Italian descent and a Scottish mother who immigrated to the United States alone at eleven years old. His mother’s response to his comedy ambitions was, Jay, we’re not show people. His fifth grade teacher wrote in his report card that if Jay Leno spent as much time studying as he did trying to be a comedian, he would be a pig star.
Jay had dyslexia. The experience of being told repeatedly that you’re not smart, of having to compensate for how your brain processes written language by developing other skills, by talking, by performing, by being funny enough that people paid attention to you all shaped Jay Leno. He went to Emerson College in Boston on a speech therapy degree. That makes more sense than it sounds when you think about somebody who struggled with written language and decided to master spoken language. He started a comedy club on campus.
He was doing stand up in Boston clubs while still a student. After graduating in nineteen seventy three, Jay Leno moved to Los Angeles and spent the early years building an act in whatever rooms would have him. The comedy store, the improv, the small clubs. It was that short time post Richard pryor pre cable TV, jay Leno did three hundred nights a year. Do the math.
That’s roughly five shows a week every week of the calendar year. Fifty two times five gets you to two sixties. He got to double up some nights, and it was at the comedy store in those years where jay Leno met David Letterman. Letterman drove a red pickup from Indiana to la in nineteen seventy five, looking for his shot. Jay Leno had been out there three years and had established himself as one of the more comfortable and confident performers in the room.
Jay Leno has described that encounter saying Letterman had genuinely funny material, really clever wordplay, the kind of writing that was immediately recognizable as something different. But he was awkward performing it, visibly uncomfortable on stage in a way that jay Leno wasn’t. Letterman’s version of that story describes jay Leno’s stage confidence as something Dave genuinely envied and tried to understand, adding get up there and just be comfortable. Leto’s answer, more or less was that stand up had always felt like a natural place to him, the room where he met, which is not a skill you can teach someone who doesn’t have it. I’m originally from the United States, and the United States people hit a night.
That’s great, It’s Freddy mentioned I have a slight call. I have to apologize for that. When I can’t, I have. I’ve had it about two weeks. I went to the hospital over here, one of the large hospitals in California.
I don’t want to say the name. Just shows you what healthcare is in this date. This is absolutely true. I went in, man charged me forty dollars, gave me some pills to take, and on the way out as a doc, my throat is still really sort. Do you think I should have my tonsils out?
And this man is a specialist, and I’m showing the best hospitals in California? Says to me, well, what do you think. It’s? Watching the local news before I came in and I got to kick out a local newsman. You haven’t noticed how all newsmen use the same metaphors.
Another senseless killing early today in mid Manhattan. Senseless as opposed to what sensible? Killing? A man was beaten an oob of twelve cents on the west side? A senseless killing?
Where’s the east side? One thousand dollars killing? Very sensible? All came out of that friendship was something both described as mutually instructive. Jay Leno was a better performer than he was a writer.
Letterman was a better wordsmith than he was a performer. Each one watching the other work understood something about the craft more clearly for having seen the opposite approach done well. Letterman eventually said, I was a broadcaster who worked as a comedian. Jay was a comedian who worked as a broadcaster. By the time Letterman launched Late Night with David Letterman on NBC in nineteen eighty two, the two were kind of the elder statesman of the comedy store generation, not old, but experience enough to be the ones the younger comedians were watching as an example of how to do it.
And then Letterman gave Jay Leno a platform that introduced him to a completely different audience than one had been billion clubs. We have a good show. Jay Leno is a very very funny young man, and he will be out here in just a second as soon as I introduce him. He is my first guest. He is a good friend of President Reagan.
Also a very talented comedian. He will be appearing this weekend at the Carlton Backstage in Minneapolis. Please welcome Jay Leno. There. We have your magazine or do you do You want to take a minute to clarify this good friend of President Reagan.
What happened was the last time I was on the show. President Reagan had seen the show and one of his staff called me to ask me about a joke. Now, if I took time out every time I had a stake, called me, good, heavens I wouldn’t. But you know that he really called. No, he didn’t call me if he doesn’t stay up this late, does.
He not when you’re on, But when I’m a guest, occasionally he does that. He says, I don’t get a chance that often, but when you’re on. Okay, well that’s very nice. I have a copy here of something called Writer Writer Magazine. This is a motorcycle Enthusiasts publication interview.
All right, let’s see ye here it is funny David. Picture of Jay right on the inside. There, nice nice drawing, nice story. I guess I happened to see you in Playbook magazine. You know, it’s so funny.
You know, it’s so funny. While we’re talking about magazine, you know, the people from Playboy called me and they asked me to do an interview for Playboy. And rather than do my interviewing Playboy, I did mine in Women Are Our Equals magazine. Who’s who’s on the cover there. Well, let’s see this Geraldine Ferrero.
Then there’s a story in here in Margaret Meade. Here’s here’s an interview with Gloria Steinhem.
Now let’s see who’s in your magazine.
Muffy, Muffy, Muffy doesn’t like guys who are turn offs. Muffy’s favorite movies are Bambi and The L Shaped Room. I used to love when Jay Leno would show up on Late Night. There was a version of Jay Leno in the early to mid eighties that people who saw him on Letterman remember very specifically. It’s different than the who settled into the Tonight Show.
The early Letterman appearances featured a comedian who was sharper edgier, not a word usually here with Jay Leno. More willing to take the material somewhere uncomfortable. It was closer to the voice he’d been developing in the clubs, where you don’t smooth things out because the room will tell you immediately if you’ve gone too far. Dave and Jay worked off each other in a way that brought something out in both of them. Now is this possible?
When is the last time you were on this television program? I was here about a month and a half ago, and I haven’t been home since that. I haven’t I’ve been on the road the whole time. Isn’t that awful? It’s not awful, Dave, Not for us comedy foot soldiers who are out there in the trenches.
Now. I’m not one of your big time comedy generals with some cushy desk job wringing three four hundred a week, come out there in the trenches doing the club. People who watched those early Letterman appearances and then watch Jay on The Tonight Show in the nineties notice the difference. People in the comedy community said Lenno was a toned down version of the act he used in the clubs in order to reach the broader and more traditional Tonight Show audience. Which is a calculation completely understandable.
I don’t think that’s crazy at all. The version of jay Leno that a certain generation I’ll raise my hand discovered on Letterman younger, less polished, more specifically funny in the way the comedy nerds mean when they say specifically funny. That version is worth acknowledging as a real thing that existed before the TV institution softened some of the edges. The Letterman friendship eventually turned into something more complicated. We will get to that.
If you’ve listened this far, you probably know about Dave and Jay, and then Jay and Conan. We’re not going there today, but that early friendship at the comedy store, the mutual education, the Letterman years, that’s a whole different part of the Jay Leno story that you don’t hear these days. It’s hard to talk about jay Leno without spending time on the cars. The Big Dog Garage and Burbank started as a property jay Leno bought in nineteen ninety one seventeen thousand square feet. It is now one hundred and twenty two thousand square feet, expanded by a factor of seven over thirty years.
I know currently has more than two hundred cars and over one hundred and sixty motorcycles. He has sold exactly one car in thirty years, a Tesla model S he auctioned on bring a trailer, and he invited the new owners to a private garage tour after the sale. That’s how Jay thinks about the cars. They’re not investments, they’re the point. The collection ranges from a nineteen oh oh four curve to dash Oldsmobile to current hypercars.
He doesn’t keep them in climate control rooms. He’s a mechanic who happens to be famous, who bought a property in Burbank and filled it with cars. Jay Leno’s Garage started as a web series for NBC before moving to CNBC as a proper TV show or It ran for seven years before eventually moving to YouTube. The format works because Jay actually knows what he’s talking about. The knowledge is specific and real and comes from thirty years of working on the cars.
One car sent him to the hospital. That’s the nineteen o seven white steam car November twelfth, twenty twenty two. Inside the garage, Jay was working on the car and it caught fire. The fire burned Jay’s face in his hands seriously enough that he was hospitalized and required treatment at a center. Then, in January of twenty twenty three, he fell off a motorcycle and broke several bones.
People were wondering what is going on there, But it seems like it was just back to back accidents, and we need to talk about his wife, Mavis. Jay Leno met MAVs at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in nineteen seventy six. He said she laughed at all his jokes at the right time, which for a comedian is meaningful. It’s not just polite laughter, but genuinely timed laughter that tells you someone actually understands what you’re doing. They got married in nineteen eighty.
They never had any children, but for a Hollywood couple to be together forty five years, that is amazing. In January of twenty twenty four, Jay Leno filed for a conservatorship over Mavis’s estate after she was diagnosed with advanced dementia. Jay has been her primary caregiver since he limits his travel. When he does go somewhere for work, he comes home the same day. He doesn’t want to stay away overnight anymore.
He makes MAVs lunch. She’s home every evening. Jay has talked about how hard this would be if for roughly three years, Mavis would wake up and it would be the day her mother died. Should learn it fresh every morning, cry through it fresh each morning because the memory couldn’t hold overnight. Jay says he enjoys taking care of her.
It gives him purpose. When someone asked Jay Leno if he was going to get a girlfriend, he described it as the most Hollywood thing I’d ever been asked. He said, you take a vow when you get married, and people are stunned. They’re so shocked that you would live up to it. He said he would rather be with her than doing something else.
He said, I’m not just with someone because they’re attractive and sexy. At some point in my life, I’m going to be called upon to defend myself. That’s really what defines a marriage. That’s what love is. That doesn’t sound like the worst guy in the world to me.
Jay Leno, Happy, Jay Leno Day back tomorrow with a normal episode.