BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN (4 page)

Chapter Three

The Dangerous Art of
Booking Guests

The monologue was the show’s cornerstone, the reason most people watched. While we never knew for sure which jokes would make people laugh, Jay had a very good idea—and was usually right. He had the monologue under control. The rest of the show was essentially a crap shoot, made up mostly of guest appearances. We couldn’t select guests (mostly actors) the way Jay picked the jokes for his monologue, rejecting sixty for every one he used. Once we booked guests on the show, we weren’t able to just cast them aside like rejected jokes. We had to work with them. So we learned to choose carefully. The art of booking required the skill of a diplomat, the fortitude of a high-stakes gambler, and the cunning of a spy.

Johnny Carson established the gold standard for guest segments. While our best guests were as good as Johnny’s, his were consistently good almost every night at a level our guests didn’t match. Part of the reason for this was Johnny’s skill as an interviewer. He knew how to listen and ask follow-up questions better than any other late-night host, and he was the master of the zinger. No one would disagree with that, including Jay Leno. The truth is Johnny’s show was essentially the only game in town. Entertainers had nowhere else to go to promote themselves and their projects. Oh, sure, there was Joey Bishop, Dick Cavett, and Arsenio Hall, but their late-night shows essentially drew niche audiences.

For comedians, the only road to success was through
The Tonight Show,
and it took years for most to get “discovered” by Johnny Carson. And if Johnny didn’t like their set, they usually didn’t come back. If they did get a second chance, it was usually not for a long time. One young comedian “killed” during his first set on Johnny. His second shot was good, but his third and fourth appearances were only fair. He didn’t return for eight years. That comedian was Jay Leno.

Actors and other entertainers also had to meet Johnny’s high expectations. As a result, his pool of guests became smaller and more exclusive. They were the best of the best. Toward the end of Johnny’s reign on
The Tonight Show,
his cadre of regulars probably numbered no more than 150 people. Viewers were frequently treated to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Don Rickles, Bob Newhart, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jonathan Winters, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Bette Midler, Dolly Parton, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Jay didn’t have the luxury of being so choosy. During his run, there were many other talk shows out there. Getting big-name guests first was very competitive and dicey. If we passed on someone, he or she could—and often did—show up on Letterman and become his loyal guest. Some, like Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, and Bruce Willis, simply preferred appearing on Letterman. Some chose to do Leno and then changed their minds, often for very arbitrary reasons. Danny DeVito made his first and last visit with Jay on June 2, 1994, and for reasons that are very murky never accepted another offer. Helen Hunt was a guest in May 1994 while co-starring with Paul Reiser in NBC’s
Mad About You
. When one of our producers gently critiqued her performance, making suggestions for improvements, Helen didn’t come back for fourteen years.

In the early 90s, NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield came up with a plan to protect Jay from the fickleness of guests. He reduced their numbers from four to three per show, adding a comedy segment right after the monologue with regular bits such as Headlines and Jaywalking. With the new comedy segment, guests didn’t appear until just before midnight (11 p.m. in the central time zone). In addition, music acts were almost always scheduled in the last segment because they usually had only a niche following. Singers who were big stars appeared as the first or second guest to talk with Jay and then returned as the third guest to perform their song. Some of these included Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, Garth Brooks, Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw and Dolly Parton.

Littlefield’s new format featuring more comedy and fewer guests vastly improved the quality of
Tonight
. Even so, guests were still the single-biggest factor in an evening’s ratings. We were rated for an entire hour, not just during the monologue and comedy segments at the beginning of the show. We knew viewers tended to tune out after the monologue. It was our job as producers to stop the hemorrhaging by booking and producing the best guest segments possible.

One of our best producers was Jay Leno himself. He was always willing to get on the phone to personally extend an invitation to a high-profile celebrity, and he was quite persuasive. Guests would often tell me the reason they chose our show over Letterman was Jay’s personal call to them. He helped bring in almost every “big get,” including President Barack Obama and former president George W. Bush. Eventually, we had to limit Jay’s involvement in bookings to protect him from a barrage of mediocre comedians and other entertainers seeking a spot on the show. They would approach him in social settings or at comedy venues, taking advantage of the fact that he was, indeed, a very nice man. So Debbie Vickers, the executive producer, made a decision that Jay’s job description no longer included booking guests, even though he continued helping us reel in the big names.

Despite the new policy, we often got calls from agents and publicists on the bottom rungs who insisted Jay promised their clients an appearance. He rarely did, but people heard what they wanted to hear. If Jay said, “I’ll pass your name on to the producers,” which he frequently did, that was interpreted as a booking. Many described their clients as Jay’s “good friend,” claiming Jay said he would “take care” of them, even though he didn’t make an explicit offer. Most of the time, Jay barely knew their clients—or didn’t know them at all. The ever-annoying agents were also predictable: the more aggressive they were, the less talented their clients were.

We tried as much as possible to bring in guests Jay preferred. If he disliked someone, we usually respected his views and didn’t book that person. Jay felt strongly that O. J. Simpson was guilty of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. When the jury found Simpson not guilty, most of his defense attorneys, including Johnnie Cochran, wanted to come on the show, but we declined because Jay dismissed them as opportunists. However, he liked the two main prosecuting attorneys, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, so we invited them to appear.

But we couldn’t always book the show based solely on Jay’s tastes. There were potential guests too famous, too topical, too attractive, or too good to pass over, no matter what Jay thought. He understood that and tried to cooperate with us, even though it didn’t always work. In 2003, we booked Trista Rehn, the beautiful and popular reality star featured in the first season of
The Bachelorette
and in the first season of
The Bachelor.
Jay had never seen either show, and he had no interest in them other than writing monologue jokes about them. Shortly after the taping, Trista saw Jay in the parking lot and requested a picture with him in front of his car. He had no idea who she was and assumed she was someone from the studio audience, so he asked what her name was and where she lived. Oops!

While we occasionally made mistakes, we put much thought into our selection of guests. The first thing producers, including Jay, did every morning was look at the overnight Nielsen ratings to see how well the guests did the night before. The hourly numbers with quarterly breakouts trumped everything else, including our own preferences. As a result, we knew which guests—and comedy segments—held the audience and which ones didn’t. This gave us a competitive edge over Letterman, whose producers weren’t paying close attention to the ratings, according to our sources at CBS. We also studied Letterman’s bookings, which confirmed what we had been told. His show repeatedly booked entertainers as lead guests who were ratings downers. We would never invite back guests whose numbers consistently tanked. Our booking decisions were based mostly on math, not instincts. Our knowledge of the Nielsen ratings helped us understand just how fickle viewers could be. Even one night of bad ratings could seriously change the show’s momentum. We saw it happen to Letterman. His CBS show was number one from its premiere in 1993 until July 19, 1995, the day British actor Hugh Grant was booked as a guest on our show. That single, fortuitous appearance was literally responsible for launching Jay’s nineteen-year reign as the King of Late Night.

Hugh, who had a long-time relationship with the beautiful British actress and model Elizabeth Hurley, had been arrested on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard for engaging in lewd conduct in his car with a prostitute named Divine Brown. The story immediately got worldwide coverage, and Hugh’s skyrocketing career as a bankable, likable comedic actor was on the verge of falling into the abyss. As luck—or perhaps fate—would have it, Hugh had already been booked on
The Tonight Show
before the scandal broke. He was coming on to promote his first major Hollywood film,
Nine Months,
which followed his hugely successful 1994 hit
Four Weddings and a Funeral.
But only days before his scheduled appearance, Hugh was having second thoughts and almost cancelled it. We encouraged him to reconsider, and Jay assured Hugh he would conduct the interview delicately, devoting only a few questions to the incident. Hugh thought about it and wisely promised to stay in, so he could own up to his transgression and publicly apologize for it. Less than two weeks after the arrest, he showed up for the interview.

“Let me start with question number one: What the hell were you thinking?” Jay enthusiastically asked Hugh as soon as he sat down at the panel. Jay had put much thought into that question and decided to add the word “hell,” making it slightly tongue-in-cheek. The question resonated with viewers and the press and it soon became a household phrase. I have no doubt Hugh also thought long and hard about his answer, which was an unadulterated apology. He accepted full responsibility for his actions and didn’t mince his words: “I think you know in life what’s a good thing, and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing.” He went on to explain that people had given him lots of advice about what to say: “I was under pressure, or I was over-tired, or I was lonely, or I fell down the stairs when I was a child. But that would be bollocks to hide behind.”

The episode got huge press worldwide even though Hugh had reportedly asked that no journalists be present at the show. On the day of the interview, the NBC publicity department figured out a way to get around the restriction by setting up a conference call for reporters around the country and feeding them live audio of the show. Other reporters staked out the area outside the studio to get the audience’s reaction, which was mostly supportive of the beleaguered actor.

That single appearance, combined with press accounts about it, saved Hugh’s troubled career and set the bar for the modern-day celebrity
mea culpa.
Until then, celebrities who were caught up in a scandal would routinely cancel interviews, attack the media for distorting the story, and go into hiding. Many of them still do that today, but not the ones who are savvy about proper crisis management techniques, which call for dealing with an emergency head-on.

Hugh’s public apology was even referenced in a popular thriller novel called
Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn, published in 2012. One of the book’s main characters, Nick Dunne, makes an appearance on a talk show to express contrition for being unfaithful to his missing wife, Amy, and to convince the interviewer that he did not kill her. In a classic case of art imitating life, Nick prepares for his interview by watching the Hugh Grant interview online. Nick is impressed with the British actor’s answers and decides to imitate him, both in substance and style: “I watched that clip so many times, I was in danger of borrowing a British accent. I was the ultimate hollow man: the husband Amy always claimed couldn’t apologize finally did, using words and emotions borrowed from an actor.”

As for Jay, his ratings, which had already started to turn around months earlier, were boffo that night, ending Letterman’s late-night reign and launching Jay to the number-one spot.
The Tonight Show
maintained its ratings superiority from that day forward, except for the seven-month period in 2009-2010 when Conan O’Brien hosted the show. Hugh’s appearance was a powerful reminder to the producers about the double-edged nature of ratings and the importance of guests, one that we never forgot. There’s no question the Hugh Grant interview was a game changer in late-night television. But why? Here’s my best guess: most guests are either celebrities or at the peak of their fifteen minutes of fame and are expected to be entertaining and funny. Some are booked simply because they’re controversial. On any given night, no single guest had all those qualities. No one, that is, except Hugh Grant, who was famous, entertaining, funny, and controversial. And the timing was perfect for Jay. He needed something big to happen, something so different and unique that it would capture the attention of a worldwide audience in a way no other late-night show had ever done.

But there’s more to this story. The episode that aired wasn’t the one we had originally planned. That one would have had an even bigger impact. On the night Hugh was booked, Dee Dee Myers was originally scheduled as the second guest. The former press secretary to then president Clinton had been charged with a DUI in Washington, DC, after police stopped and later arrested her for driving on the wrong side of the road. Like Hugh, she had been booked before the incident. At first, she agreed to stay in. Later, however, she got cold feet and dropped out after her lawyer reminded her the judge would probably not take kindly to seeing her on a high-profile comedy show prior to her trial. I tried to convince her that Jay would not make fun of her DUI and that her appearance would give her the opportunity to express genuine contrition, just as Hugh Grant would be doing. She still thought it was too risky, as she was facing possible jail time of up to one year. I often wonder what would have happened if she had appeared with Hugh. The show would have featured two celebrities, one from the world of entertainment, the other from politics, both offering
mea culpas.
Would that have made for a better program? There’s no way of knowing, but I’m certain we would have gotten even higher ratings.