COVER STORY : <i> Chez</i> Jay : Given the keys to NBC’s franchise, Jay Leno hopes to remain true to ‘Tonight’ and to himself

It is 5 p.m. in Studio 1 at NBC in Burbank. This is the home of “The Tonight Show,” and the permanent guest host for the last five years, Jay Leno, dressed in light blue jeans and open-collared aqua shirt, strides out to do his own audience warm-up for the program that will start taping 30 minutes later. He works close to the audience, sizing it up. “If I see an older group,” he has explained a few minutes earlier in his dressing room, “then I know my Axl Rose joke isn’t going to work.”

But there is more going on this evening than just a testing of jokes. This is a special night. There is quiet electricity in the air, from the hallways backstage to the audience itself.

It is Jay Leno’s final night in the bullpen.

The staff, the crew and many in the studio audience know that the jut-jawed comedian is leaving the series for six weeks after this broadcast in mid-April--and that when he returns on May 25, “The Tonight Show” will be turned over to him as the heir to Johnny Carson, the extraordinary eminence of the late-night institution for nearly 30 years.

In the meantime, Carson fittingly will preside alone over his TV domain, providing a grand, ongoing personal farewell until his May 22 retirement from “Tonight.”

As Leno wisecracks with the audience during his warm-up, an older man shouts, “I know you’re going to make it.”

“Oh, thank you, sir,” Leno shoots back quickly. “The Godfather is here.”

Laughter followed by lengthy applause.

“Who’s going to be your first guest?” someone else in the crowd asks.

“Billy Crystal.”

“There’s a lei for you backstage,” yells a woman, apparently from Hawaii.

Leno can’t resist: “There’s one every night.”

As the 5:30 show time nears, Leno has to be reminded by aides that he had better get dressed and ready.

Back in his dressing room, slipping into a light-brown suit and tie, he continues chatting with a visitor only minutes before air time, cool as a cucumber, as if everything--including the national broadcast that is coming up--is just all in a day’s work.

“I like this job. I really do enjoy it,” he says.

Then he heads for the historic “Tonight” desk and his show with John Goodman, Dick Clark, Ed Marinaro of NBC’s “Sisters” series and the musical group Chic.

The opening monologue goes smoothly. With the income tax deadline the next day, Leno tells the audience that it’s “the happiest group of taxpayers I’ve ever seen.” Not a great line, but the enthusiastic crowd laughs.

Leno takes a political shot. The Bush Administration, he says, has learned something from the Persian Gulf War: “The next time, have the war a little closer to the election.”

Not once during the show does Leno mention directly that his days as the most famous sub on TV are over. For these weeks are what is known at NBC as “Johnny’s time,” a period in which show business and Carson’s fans are focusing on the legendary comedian and paying tribute to one of the great reigns in American entertainment history.

As the show ends, Leno simply says to the audience, “I’ll see you guys at the end of May.”

Leno, 42, will need all the cool he can muster in the months ahead. He has been given the keys to the kingdom--network TV’s most prestigious program franchise--and he will be under the microscope as few performers have ever been.

The Carson years, which remained profitable even when the network floundered, “have been for NBC perhaps the most important relationship the network has had with anyone in the history of the company,” says Warren Littlefield, the president of NBC Entertainment.

Littlefield adds quickly, however, that even if Leno gets off to a slow ratings start, “There will be no quick hook. There’s a long-term investment in someone we know very well. He’s hosted the show over 330 times.”

Nonetheless, even Leno’s longtime personal manager, Helen Kushnick, who will become the executive producer of “Tonight,” knows there is something more to prove. It is one thing to be a successful guest host, no matter how often, and quite another to have to carry the show--which Leno will do under a workhorse schedule: 47 weeks a year, five days a week.

“We haven’t succeeded yet,” she says in her office at NBC earlier on the day of Leno’s final show as a substitute.

“Everybody’s writing about us, but I keep saying we’ve got to do a good show. We haven’t been on the air yet. I mean, we know what Jay can do. We’ve done six years (overall) of guest-hosting. We’ve done weeks of shows that have been excellent. But now Jay will be the boss. So it’s going to be a different tone and a different pace.”

But while Kushnick is fiercely devoted to Leno--”His monologues are sensational, and that’s what the show is about”--others out there in the late-night arena, most notably Arsenio Hall, are out to cut him down to size.

In an astonishing interview in the April 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine, Hall paid homage to Carson--”I am happy being the prince while he is the king”--but said that he would “kick Jay’s ass.” He was quoted as saying that “Jay Leno can’t replace Johnny Carson” and added, “I always hear that Jay and I are friends when they interview him. Jay and I are not friends.”

Hall also strongly suggested that he expected first crack at guest bookings, which “The Tonight Show” has long dominated under Carson.

“I’m genuinely puzzled,” Leno replies. “I like Arsenio. I think he does a fine show. I’ve never said anything bad about Arsenio in print, nor have I ever attacked him. He says we’re not friends. We were. I mean, I thought we were. He brought his mom in to meet my wife. He sent me an invitation to please come to Hollywood Boulevard when he got his star. I came down. We shook hands. People took pictures.

“The only part that really bothered me was telling people that if they’re on ‘The Tonight Show,’ they can’t do ‘The Arsenio Hall Show.’ Obviously, big stars are going to ignore that, but new people. . . .”

Leno lets the thought speak for itself, then adds: “When you do these shows, people don’t understand that you get $529--(minus) 10% for agents, another 10% for managers, and taxes. So you really make about $210. If a comedian has a routine, I say, ‘Do it on “The Tonight Show.” ’ (Some) comedians will come up to me and say, ‘Do you care if we do Arsenio?’ I say, ‘No. Do Arsenio. Do Dennis (Miller). You want to do me first? Fine. You want to do them? I don’t care.’

“I mean, you can’t watch every show every night. And I think demographics will show there are different audiences.

“You know, I used to love the old Fred Allen-Jack Benny (comedy) feuds. Why can’t you do that? Why can’t you have a little bit of fun? Obviously, if somebody is camping on your show Thursday and somebody else’s Friday, that’s too much. I would go on record as saying I like (Hall’s) show and I respect the guy, and if he wants to attack me, that’s fine.”

Despite his genuine popularity, his acknowledged comedy skills, his good-guy image and his ratings success on “Tonight,” Leno has found himself somehow involved in other controversy as the heir to Carson--particularly when he got the job over David Letterman, on whose NBC series he genuinely blossomed.

How does he account for the various furors?

“Welcome to show business,” he says.

Then, in his direct, disarming, cool-handed way, he adds: “You know, ‘Saturday Night Live’ did a parody of me. Some people said, ‘Oh, it was very mean.’ I got a bunch of calls: ‘What do you think about that? What are you going to do about it?’ What do you mean, ‘What am I going to do about it?’ It’s a joke about me. I mean, stop . I mean, please . If you can’t stand the heat . . . you know.”

The way Leno describes it, his tour as guest host of “The Tonight Show” has been pretty much a comedian’s dream.

“I didn’t get the notes from upstairs: ‘OK, you’re doing poorly with 11- to 15-year-olds,’ ” he says. “I never got those notes from anybody. The nice thing about working with Johnny and the staff here is that at no point did anyone ever say to me, ‘Well, what are you going to talk about? What are you going to do?’ I was very grateful for that.

“That’s where Johnny’s really been terrific. No one ever said to me, ‘Listen, politics is Johnny’s thing, so you talk about something else.’ And they would have been well within their rights to say that. They always said, ‘Just come in and do what you do.’ That was always the thing that impressed me the most.”

The NBC late-night show, which has only had three hosts before Leno--Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Carson--has become, hands down, the mecca for comedians appearing on network TV. And Leno says he intends to continue what he believes is Carson’s inherent approach for creating a sort of irreverent, yet All-American, decorum on “Tonight”:

“I think this is Johnny’s rule, and it will sort of be my rule: You don’t see people that you don’t like. You don’t see people on this show who have slept with a baseball player and that’s what they’re famous for. You don’t see people like Andrew Dice Clay because he’s famous for being outrageous. Nobody’s on this show, I don’t think, who is famous just for being famous--or infamous. They’re on because they’ve earned the right to be there, and Johnny genuinely likes them. Or I like them.”

According to NBC, Leno’s first appearance as a Carson guest was in 1977, but it was in the 1980s that his relationship with the network really bloomed--in great part because of his dynamite outings as a guest on “Late Night With David Letterman.”

“I always wanted (Jay) to have a deal at NBC,” Kushnick says. “I felt this was the network of comedians. This is where he belonged. And I sent (then-NBC Entertainment President) Brandon Tartikoff--I didn’t even know him--a packet of all his reviews from around the country and told him we were doing a cable special (Showtime’s “Jay Leno and the American Dream”).

“When Brandon saw a rough cut of the special, he decided to make a deal with Jay. It was not for any specific purpose. It wasn’t for a series or specials. It was: ‘Let’s see what happens. Let’s sort of start living together and see if we want to get married.’

“When we did our first and only prime-time special, in 1987, they put us in the ‘St. Elsewhere’ time slot the night before Thanksgiving, which was not a high-rating time slot at all. Everybody was projecting Jay would get a 20 or 21 share (percentage of the national audience), and what Jay got was a 27 share.

“They (NBC) came back and said, ‘Do another one.’ And I said, ‘No--we only do the magic act once. You can’t do “The Tonight Show” and do this. You have to decide what you’re doing.’ So Jay chose not to take the extra money. He decided not to do specials, to just do guest-hosting on ‘The Tonight Show’ and the road work (in clubs), and that’s what he’s been doing.”

It was a wise choice, and his status grew swiftly.

“One of my big problems when I first did ‘The Tonight Show,’ ” Leno says, “was that I would sit down and Johnny would say something and I would go, ‘Well, Mr. Carson. . . .’ I always felt funny saying ‘Johnny’ because I wasn’t brought up that way. It just seemed rude to me. I mean, here I just met the man and now I’m calling him by his first name.

“The Letterman show was really sort of a breakthrough for me because suddenly everybody on that show was 31, 32, near my age, and I could draw out references and things that I thought were maybe funny.”

Now, as Leno prepares to take over “Tonight,” he admits that the slashing humor that marked his appearances with Letterman and elsewhere has turned a bit softer--partly because he thinks it will wear better over the long haul. But there is something else in his thinking that may be a clue to his basic nature:

“As civilization becomes more uncivilized, I think you need to bring it back a little bit. Comedy is only funny because it’s outrageous. And things are only outrageous because human nature is basically conservative.”

It won’t be the same “Tonight Show” under Leno. It can’t be, no matter how hard he tries to stick to the Carson format.

NBC and Kushnick have asked Carson’s executive producer, Fred de Cordova, to be a consultant, perhaps for a few months, to help the transition. He has agreed, and the arrangement is that the Leno people can call him at home if they need some advice.

But there’ll be no sidekick: Ed McMahon will be replaced by an off-camera announcer, Edd Hall, 33.

And the sensational big-band sound of “Tonight” will be gone too, along with the orchestra’s leader, Doc Severinsen. Instead, there’ll be a smaller group led by jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, 31, who will be as close to a sidekick as Leno will have.

Leno’s staff will definitely be on the young side, including a former writer and segment producer for Arsenio Hall: Bill Royce, 38, who says he approached Kushnick for a job and now will be co-producer of “Tonight.”

But that’s just the start of the changes. Carson owns “The Tonight Show,” but now it will revert to NBC, with Leno an employee of the network and its parent company, General Electric.

Carson, of course, hasn’t hesitated to take shots at penny-pinching GE, which bought NBC in 1986. Nor has Letterman. And it may be instructive to see if Leno shows the same tough irreverence toward his employer when the occasion calls for it--especially when GE is in the news, which would immediately qualify for the comedian’s topical monologues.

Every new host of “The Tonight Show” has been under pressure. There were doubts that Paar could measure up to Allen, his predecessor. And many wondered if Carson could measure up to Paar. The difference is that there were six months of different hosts between each of those two changes--whereas Leno takes over three days after Carson’s departure and will be subject to immediate comparison.

Leno, says de Cordova, has “the problem of replacing a legend, but Jay has the talent to be an enormous success.”

But the pressure is also great because Leno is being handed the only program area that NBC has consistently dominated in the ratings for decades: late night. His success or failure could have a definite effect on the two other winning series that follow “Tonight”--the Letterman show and “Later With Bob Costas.”

As for performance, Leno will have to look beyond the jokes that he admits are all-important to him. Carson’s panache, style and worldliness have enabled him to breeze through the final 45 minutes or so that follow the monologue. But Leno’s interviewing technique too often lacks the authority, sophistication and sting that he brings to his comedy--and he is dangerously near gushing at times over his guests.

An interview with Spike Lee was particularly disastrous. Leno admits: “I didn’t know where to go with that. I’d like to try that one again.”

There are certain areas, Leno admits, that he has to beef up: “Oh, yeah. I probably need to be more show-business aware. I kind of like to go under the premise that I like to know what the general public knows. The great thing about Johnny to me is always the fact that he has the sense of, ‘The dinner cost how much? $200?’ And I tend to be the same way. I don’t go to the places in town. I don’t hobnob in a show-business way. So that way I can hobnob on the show.”

Hobnobbing or not, Leno and his good-guy image wouldn’t be harmed--especially in an industry of sharks--by subtle, witty and authoritative reminders to guests, when called for, as to who’s in charge and what the risks are for forgetting it.

NBC, however, is betting that Leno’s wholesome, blue-collar amiability is just the ticket after the cynical ‘80s.

“Jay genuinely likes people,” Kushnick says. “I mean, he sits in airports--he’s never used a first-class lounge. He looks like a pack mule with all his stuff. And he carries it on the plane. He just sits down right in front of the gate and waits for the plane to take off, and he’ll sit there and talk to people. He did the same thing 15 years ago, and he’s doing the same thing now.”

In many ways, the question is not only what Leno can do for “The Tonight Show” but also what “The Tonight Show” can do for Leno. “Tonight” is a force all its own. It is TV’s version of playing the Palace. Performers and guests simply look better amid the simple, elegant trappings of “Tonight” than they do anyplace else on television.

But now, the 30 years of bedtime rituals that have developed under Carson, and are so much a part of the “Tonight” aura, are, inevitably and understandably, about to be altered, if not dismantled. Perhaps that is why Leno and Kushnick are sensitive enough to the situation to downplay the magnitude of any changes.

Yet Kushnick says frankly, “We’re not the 31st year of a show. We’re the first year of a new show.”

And Leno suggests that his comedy bite may get tougher again when the series is his: “I’ll have a lot more leeway in terms of the band, the staff--they’ll be people who are my contemporaries, who I can really go after and make fun of.”

The same with guests, he says: “I didn’t want to be in a situation where I made somebody look bad on Johnny’s show, or I screwed up. For me to do something inappropriate on his show would be like drinking out of the milk carton at somebody else’s house. In my own house, I can put my feet up on the furniture. If I come to your house, I’m not going to do that.”

Just about everyone agrees that the soon-to-be new host of “The Tonight Show” is a decent fellow. He is also, if not old-fashioned or prudish, rather traditional in significant ways in his comedy tastes. All’s fair in his shots at political figures and the like. But he admits to limits:

“There’s a friend of mine who’s a comedian, who’s very talented, and I say to him, ‘Why did you put the word (expletive) in this joke? There’s no reason for it.’ He says, ‘Well, I have to say it because that’s who I am.’ Oh, shut up .

“When I was a kid and watched George Carlin, he would use obscenities to make a point. And since you didn’t hear them every day, his point was clear. The point was not the obscenity. But now the obscenity is the point. There’s just no reason for that.

“To me, ‘The Tonight Show’ and the monologue have always been about jokes. I watch other shows and I see people swagger and walk and do things--but they’re not jokes. Writing jokes--that’s what it comes down to.”