BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN (21 page)

Not everyone shared Joy’s indifference toward Glenn. In September 2009,
TIME
did a cover story on the controversial host, featuring a picture of him sticking out his tongue with this headline: “Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?” When the story came out, I immediately showed it to my colleagues who, until then, had no interest in booking the hugely popular, wacky, firebrand conservative-libertarian radio and television host. They thought Glenn was a right-wing nut job. But now that
TIME
had “discovered” him, they were interested. Besides, I argued, we needed guests who could make a difference in the ratings with our failing prime time
Jay Leno Show,
and no other major talk shows were touching Glenn. We would be the first. Debbie Vickers and Jay agreed. I wasn’t concerned about Glenn’s political views, though I did worry that he might be a little crazy. I listened regularly to his radio show and knew he said some off-the-wall stuff, often embracing conspiracy theories that reflected his personality more than his politics. While other conservatives talked about the impact of the growing national debt, Glenn was predicting that economic collapse was imminent.

When I booked him in December 2009, some staffers complained that they were personally offended. I had no regrets as it was one of the most unique guest spots on
The Jay Leno Show,
as well as one of the best interviews Jay ever did. He called Glenn a polarizing figure as soon as he sat down. But Glenn insisted he was not divisive but rather a regular guy who “hated” both political parties. He said he was more Libertarian than Republican and admitted he would have preferred Hillary Clinton over John McCain in 2008. He quickly added, “That’s like, gee, do I want to hang myself or shoot myself?” Then he made a case for cutbacks and sacrifices because “the debt is unsustainable,” which he claimed the Obama administration didn’t seem to understand.

To earn his plug, Glenn showed Jay how to make sugar cookies for Christmas using his grandma’s “secret” recipe. It actually was fun watching the two men mix in excessive amounts of powdered sugar, flour, and other ingredients on a set that was festively decorated for Christmas. After the show, Glenn asked me to show him Studio 1, where Johnny Carson hosted
Tonight
for twenty years. An expert on the early days of broadcasting, he was very curious about everything. So I showed him the spot about forty feet back from the audience where Johnny did his monologue, along with the old seats—465 in all—built with a steep escalation right up against the back wall. He wanted to know all the shows that had been filmed there. I told him that list included
This Is Your Life, Truth or Consequences,
Bob Hope Specials,
Hollywood Squares, The Gong Show,
and
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
(for about a year and a half). A few months later, Glenn returned to Burbank with his wife, Tania, and his kids to see Jay’s collection of more than two hundred cars and motorcycles. My wife, Mary, and I were invited to join in as Jay showed us his vintage Duesenbergs, Bugattis, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, McClarens, and Stanley Steamers.

Another controversial figure at Fox News Channel is Bill O’Reilly. A former reporter, Bill became a commentator when he launched his nightly
O’Reilly Report
in 1996 (renamed
The O’Reilly Factor
in 1998), which quickly became the most successful news show in cable. I thought he was the most compelling and unique commentator in television news. He is knowledgeable and capable of making the most complex topics understandable and interesting. He tends to be conservative on most, though not all issues, and he emphasizes his sharp, often acerbic opinions in his “Talking Points” segment at the top of his show every night. He is also confrontational with many of his guests, holding them accountable for their actions.

I began pitching Bill as a guest almost as soon as I started watching
The O’Reilly Factor
in 2000, but my colleagues thought he came across as too mean. It’s true, he often has little patience for politicians and others who don’t answer his straightforward questions, but he’s also number one in the ratings. In time I wore my colleagues down, and we booked Bill for the first time in March 2001. He turned out to be charming and even amusing, as well as a ratings plus. We invited him back many times, and he went on to become one of our most popular news guests.

I continued to work with Bill each time he was on our show, and I have to give a shout out to him: the very idea of this book was his, and I thank him for it.

After I left
The Tonight Show
in 2010, Bill and his executive producer David Tabacoff met with me to see if I would be interested in booking Hollywood entertainers on
The O’Reilly Factor,
which had not featured many actors. “You mean you want me to book the folks you call pinheads every night?” I asked. I just let that slip out without thinking, and I was worried about how Bill would take it. He thought it was funny, and that’s when I knew I could work for him.

In January 2011, they hired me temporarily to help bring in Hollywood celebrities. When
The O’Reilly Factor
set up shop at the FOX studios on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, I was curious to see how the number-one cable news program operated compared to the number-one late-night show. The two programs were similar in many ways, though they also had their differences. Both existed in a constant crisis environment, and both lived by one rule: the show must always go on, no matter what. Expectations were high at both shows. No excuses were tolerated for not producing the best program possible. At
The O’Reilly Factor
there was no such thing as a slow news day. Producers had to come up with good story ideas even if there didn’t seem to be any. At
The Tonight Show
, writers had to come up with funny jokes, even in a news drought. And it was never acceptable for producers to say no good guests were available. We had to keep looking until we found them.

How were the shows different? Other than the personalities of the two hosts, there wasn’t much difference. Both Bill and Jay were demanding of and loyal to their staffs, although Jay often relieved the constant stress with jokes. At
The O’Reilly Factor,
Bill worked closely with the producers, sitting in on their meetings and seeking their opinions, but he was clearly the final arbiter of every programming decision. Jay was more of a team player. He had control over the comedy, but he delegated decisions about booking guests to the producers. However, Jay could veto any guest idea he didn’t like. Both shows were hugely successful on a level that may never be matched again in either news or entertainment.

Chapter Twelve

Sports Greats

Athletes appealed to viewers more than any other group of celebrities, including big-name actors. But Jay wasn’t much of a sports fan, so we didn’t book many athletes at first. However, nothing brought the studio audience to its feet faster than a sports superstar who had just led a team to victory in a championship game, such as the Super Bowl. I also think we’re attracted to athletes because we sense they’re basically freaks of nature, super humans able to accomplish feats we mortals can’t even comprehend. Yet like us, they’re vulnerable.

Most athletes liked Jay because he seemed like a regular guy, and they were impressed when he hung out with them in the dressing room before the show. I think it surprised Jay when he recognized he and athletes had common traits. Like him, they were competitive, had a strong work ethic, and believed in personal responsibility.

In September 1995, Major League Baseball’s Cal Ripken Jr.
broke Lou Gehrig’s fifty-six-year record of 2,130 consecutive games. It was a huge story, and Cal
would become our first big sports “get.” This was a sports booking Jay could relate to.

After all, Cal was being honored for showing up to work every day and never calling in sick, no matter how he felt. In fact, he had a fever for the three days leading up to his record-breaking game and couldn’t sleep. Still, there was no way he was going to miss it. By the time he retired in 1998, Cal had played in 2,632 consecutive games over a seventeen-year period. Like Cal, Jay would also work seventeen years without missing a day, notching 3,750 shows between 1992 and 2009. He called in sick for two days after checking into a nearby hospital, reportedly for dehydration, but he never missed a day of work after that.

In time, many of Jay’s consistently best guests would come from the sports world, including the NBA Hall of Fame’s Charles Barkley and Dennis Rodman and the NFL Hall of Fame’s Terry Bradshaw. Terry, a four-time, Super Bowl-winning Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, held the record for the most appearances on
Tonight
(almost sixty) and never made a bad one.

Audiences loved Terry’s goofy, off-the-wall remarks, and so did Jay. Terry didn’t hesitate to give Jay a hard time about embarrassing subjects like his ignorance of sports and, more recently, his impending retirement. In June 2013, he teased Jay:
“You love cars, you love your wife, and soon you’re gonna know how much you love her because you’re not gonna have this gig anymore.”

Athletes and their coaches were the most superstitious people I’ve ever met. Most were open about it, admitting their behavior was irrational. And it was understandable. They frequently had little control over the events in their lives, such as referees’ bad calls, erratic weather, and injuries. Jay, who was also superstitious, never failed to cover their rituals and good luck charms. Here are some of my favorites.

Golfer Tiger Woods wore a red shirt each Sunday (usually the last day of PGA tournament play) because his mom, who read his astrological charts, said it was his strong color. The color was also a nod to his alma mater, Stanford University.

When Shaquille O’Neal played for the Los Angeles Lakers, he painted his toenails black for every game. It started when his big toenail came off during a game and he painted the nail-less area black. That night, he scored a career-high 61 points. He also wore a new pair of size-23 shoes in every game, which added up to about one hundred pairs a season. When Jay asked him if he did this for good luck, he said no, he just liked new shoes.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, who owns four Super Bowl rings, talked about a superstition his coach George Seifert believed in. Seifert always had to be the last one out of the locker room, but Joe, the team clown, would sometimes mess with his coach. They were usually the last ones in the clubhouse at the end of the day, and Joe would start to exit and then stop and turn around, saying he forgot something. Sometimes he did it several times, driving Seifert crazy.

Turk Wendell, who pitched for the Chicago Cubs in the 90s, shared with Jay his lengthy pitching ritual: he wore the number 13 for luck, chewed four pieces of black licorice, brushed his teeth between every inning, and never stepped on base lines. He also wore a necklace adorned with mountain lion claws and wild buffalo teeth. Turk would later be named the most superstitious athlete of all time by
Men’s Fitness
magazine.

Turk was a perfect fit for the hard-luck Cubs, a team that has not won the World Series since 1908. Many people have attributed this dry spell to a long-standing superstition that began when a billy goat was refused admittance to Wrigley Field at the 1945 World Series. This upset the goat’s owner, Billy Sianis, who declared the Cubs would never win another World Series. His declaration became known as the Billy Goat Curse. Some believe it has kept the Cubs from even getting into the World Series since that time.

In 1996, while
The Tonight Show
was taping in Chicago, Cubs star first baseman Mark Grace was booked to exorcise the curse. He introduced Sam Sianis, Billy’s nephew, who came out with a billy goat and made this declaration: “I hereby remove the Curse of the Billy Goat. The Cubs are the World Series pick for 1996.”

The Cubs did not make it into the World Series that year—or any other year since then. However, after being traded, Mark kicked off a Series win in 2001 with a single for his new team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Sometimes, good luck has a mind of its own.

When the Anaheim Angels defeated the San Francisco Giants in the 2002 World Series, five members of the team—Tim Salmon, David Eckstein, Troy Percival, Scott Spiezio, and John Lackey—came on
The Tonight Show
to give credit to the “rally monkey” for their victory. The monkey first showed up on the stadium’s video board in 2000 during a game when the Angels were trailing the Giants 5-4 in the bottom of the ninth inning. The clip, taken from Jim Carrey’s 1994 hit comedy
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
showed a monkey jumping up and down. Shortly after that, the Angels scored two runs and won the game. Two years later, the monkey would bring the team the luck they needed to win its first championship in forty-two years.

In 2004, the Boston Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four games to reclaim the title World Series champions, breaking an eighty-six-year losing streak, second only to the Cubs. It was the biggest sports story to break during Jay’s run as host. And since Jay was from Boston, we pulled out all the stops to get the team on the show. The Red Sox even considered chartering a jet to fly the entire team to Burbank, but the cost was prohibitive.

Instead, we booked five players: David “Papi” Ortiz, Derek Lowe, Mike Timlin, Dave Roberts, and Alan Embree. When star player Papi Ortiz balked, Jay, a Boston native, got on the phone with his agent to make the case that Papi should do the late-night show hosted by the hometown boy. The agent quickly agreed to the booking. When the team members made their entrance, they were showered with red, white, and blue confetti, and later Jay literally ripped off his shirt to reveal a “Who’s Your Papi?” T-shirt.

He asked the players about a rumor that the team had participated in a ritual: taking shots of Jack Daniel’s whiskey before each World Series game. They denied it (wink, wink). But the real significance of the Red Sox triumph was that they had finally overcome the so-called curse of the Bambino. Like the Cubs, the Red Sox had been under the shadow of a superstition, and they hadn’t won a championship since 1918 when they beat—who else?—the Cubs.

The bad luck apparently began when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth, known as the Bambino, to the New York Yankees. So it was only fitting that Boston would bounce back from a 0-3 deficit, winning four consecutive games to defeat the Yankees in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series, which led to the Red Sox’s momentous championship.

Athletes told Jay inspiring stories of how they prevailed against all odds to achieve their goals. In 2000, Kurt Warner hurled a seventy-three-yard-touchdown pass to clinch the Super Bowl for the St. Louis Rams as they downed the Tennessee Titans 23-16. Five months earlier, he was the Rams’ back-up quarterback, playing for a yearly salary of $250,000 (the minimum wage in the NFL). He was only moved up after starting quarterback Trent Green blew out his knee in a pre-season game, knocking him out for the season.

Then Kurt admitted to Jay that after he was let go by the Green Bay Packers five years earlier he was stocking shelves for $5.50 an hour at a grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He credits that job for helping him become a better player. He was working late hours when there were few customers, which allowed him to practice his passing by tossing Nerf balls, toilet paper rolls, and candy down aisle nine.

In 2010, hockey great Patrick Kane scored the winning goal in overtime against the Philadelphia Flyers, making the Chicago Blackhawks the Stanley Cup champions for the first time in forty-nine years. The team, once described by ESPN as the worst in all of professional sports, had undergone an unbelievable turnaround in three years, led by Patrick, Jonathan Toews, Duncan Keith, and Brent Seabrook.

Those four players showed up with the Stanley Cup at
The Tonight Show
five days later to celebrate their miraculous victory. The audience saw video highlights of Patrick’s winning goal followed by footage of Duncan taking a puck to the face, which knocked out seven of his teeth. Still, he insisted on rejoining his team on the ice within minutes. He then presented Jay a necklace adorned with a prop tooth, which he wore for the rest of the show.

Some of the most outstanding coaches in sports made regular visits to the show
.
Phil Jackson holds a record eleven NBA titles as a coach and is arguably the greatest of modern times. He definitely gets my award as the most interesting coach to appear on
Tonight
. Known as the Zen Master, he had total control of his team and his emotions on the court and was soft-spoken off the court. Jay, not a fan of coaches in general, really liked Phil’s understated style and genuinely enjoyed having him as a guest.

Phil’s players included some of the greatest stars in the NBA, such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman. Most of Phil’s players loved and supported him, and he was a father figure to many. Some had huge egos, and Phil’s challenge was to motivate them to become team players.

He regularly used his appearances on
Leno
and other shows to send messages to his players. He would criticize their play on the court, such as in this anecdote about Kobe Bryant: “ . . . there was a game on Sunday night. He took the ball and went to the hoop immediately. That’s not how I saw it. So we had to talk that out.”

In May 2013, Phil, by then a former coach, opened up to Jay about his two biggest superstars: Kobe and Michael Jordan. He said they both had a “competitive zeal that was unmatched,” but he gave the edge to Michael, who had “a little better shooting percentage” and who was “a little more consistent with the team system.”

Something Phil never discussed with Jay was his practice of Native American exorcism rituals, which he performed annually and whenever the team was on a losing streak. He would light a bundle of sage and take it through the trainer’s room, the locker room, onto the court, and into the weight room in an effort to cleanse the team of bad spirits. I have no idea how he pulled this off with some of the NBA’s greatest stars.

Another great motivator was Pat Riley. In 2006, he coached the Miami Heat to its first NBA title, staging a dramatic four-game comeback against the Dallas Mavericks. Then he flew to Burbank to tell Jay how he did it. After the Heat lost its first two games, Pat told his players they would win the next four to claim the title. He wrote “6/20/06” on the board, which was the scheduled date of the fourth game.

Pat described “the pit” in the middle of the locker room floor, which was a large gold cutout shaped like a championship trophy. Only the team knew about this icon, which represented the NBA title. Pat said he and his players threw valuable items into the pit, including Pat’s six NBA Championship rings, a map of the route of the Dallas Mavericks victory parade, and the rosary beads of Pat’s mother, Mary, who had died during the season. This was done to honor her memory and that of family members the players had lost.

Then there was controversial firebrand Bobby Knight, who was the winningest college basketball coach when he stepped down in 2008 after forty-two years on the sidelines. The long-time head of Indiana University’s hoops squad, best known for tossing a chair across the court and giving referees a hard time, was always on his best behavior at the show and was a good sport, to boot.

When he retired from his coaching job, he showed up on
Tonight
wearing a ref’s black-and-white striped jersey. He told Jay he was looking for an easy job, like being a referee: “There are fat guys that referee, there are slow guys that referee. I mean, some of them don’t see well, and a lot of them don’t even know what the rules are. What better job could you have than being a referee?” “It’s dangerous,” Jay replied. “You could get hit with a chair.”

Despite his bravado on the court, Bobby was known for emphasizing academics to his players off the court. A very high percentage of them graduated from college. When Jay asked the coach how he wanted to be remembered he replied, “I think the major responsibility that any college coach has that recruits kids is to see that those kids graduate. Why else are they there?” he said.

We developed relationships that lasted many years with star athletes and former players who became regular guests, including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Shaquille O’Neal, Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant. But our ties with Tiger and Kobe went sour as experiences in their own lives became monologue material.

We first booked Tiger in 1996, long before he became the biggest name in golf. Still an amateur then, he was getting a
lot of buzz on the sports pages. He soon became a pro and the number-one golfer in the world. By his next appearance in December 1997, he was named PGA Player of the Year, after winning the prestigious Masters Tournament at age twenty-one.