It’s Not Just ‘Tonight.’ It’s Every Night.

To see Jay Leno change his pants in the confines of a private jet is to understand, if just a little bit better, why he is here and not at home or out to dinner with friends. It is around 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, and Leno has just finished an hour of stand-up comedy at a private party thrown by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Studio 54 discotheque of the MGM Grand Hotel. Leno does up to 100 of these dates a year, he says--high-paying, private appearances he often squeezes into his schedule during the week--jetting off to San Diego or Las Vegas or Palm Springs or even Denver between the time he wraps “The Tonight Show” at 6 p.m. and returns to his Beverly Hills home at 11, 11:30. It is then that Leno and Jimmy Brogan, a comic and Leno’s chief advisor on “Tonight Show” monologues, put together the 10 to 15 minutes of headline-riffing jokes Leno does at the top of each night’s show.

Some time after this, presumably, Brogan leaves, and Leno goes to sleep. Four or five hours later, it starts all over again. He gets to NBC at 8 a.m. He works out with a trainer. The rest of the day is spent in “The Tonight Show” offices. He follows the news, hangs out with his writers (there are 17 cranking out material, between the monologue, regular video bits and sketches), tracks the overnight ratings, hones the monologue, rehearses questions for guests. He takes phone calls, places others. He does audience warmup at 4:30 and tapes “The Tonight Show” in real time, from 5 to 6. Most nights, he leaves NBC at 6:30 and heads to the hangar near Burbank Airport that houses his vast car and motorcycle collection. At this point, Leno has four hours to kill before the monologue rendezvous with Brogan. Why not hop a plane?

I went with Leno on two of these midweek corporate dates--on a Tuesday night to San Diego, where he performed at a convention for the pharmaceutical industry, held at the Marina Marriott, and the next night to Las Vegas, where PricewaterhouseCoopers hired Leno to entertain a private gathering of clients, all of whom used a computer software program made by a German company called S.A.P. The details were fuzzy to Leno too; when I asked him where we were going beforehand, he sort of knew, but it was clear that the particulars didn’t matter.

“Welcome to show business,” he kept saying, as if this life had chosen him long ago and there wasn’t much use thinking about it.

And indeed it did choose him, the life of the show-biz schlepper. Many people have written about the workaholic side of Leno--including The Times, which followed him around a decade ago, when Leno was permanent guest host for “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” as he crisscrossed the country hopping planes and doing dates. And so I knew that he did this. Except back then it seemed to fit our collective image of the entertainer fighting his way to the top.

But Leno is still running as if he were not the host of “The Tonight Show.” He does his act for big money and for free, at charity events. Vacation is anathema to him, and he does not use touring as a means of getting away; instead, it’s all about getting there and back. As with so many comics, the mentality, the rituals don’t change. Every Sunday night, he puts on a suit and performs for a roomful of tourists and locals at the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach. When Leno did a four-night engagement recently at the MGM Grand in Vegas, he flew up and back each day, he said. He carries his own luggage, or what passes for luggage--a beat-up black saddlebag that contains monologue jokes or fan mail, and a copy of Time and Newsweek. In his other hand is a Tommy Hilfiger shopping bag that is who knows how old. In the bag Leno keeps a change of clothes--a pair of jeans and a denim shirt, which is what he always wears when he’s not in a suit, performing. (The suits, Leno says, are not even his. They belong to NBC.)

Leno constantly deflates his wealth and fame--an extension, he says, of his mother, who considered calling attention to yourself a mortal sin. He insists that he does his own laundry, that he doesn’t have a maid. “Well, we don’t have a maid maid,” he says, when pressed. “Someone comes in once in a while.” Really? Once in a while? For a Beverly Hills estate? “We do have someone come in, but it’s not ding-a-ling, Jeeves,” he allows, still demurring. “It’s not someone who lives there.”

When Leno boards his leased Learjet, a somewhat cramped four-seater with no bathroom, the pilot hands him a chicken dinner on a paper plate and some plastic utensils. Leno asks for a trash bag, which he places on the seat in front of him. The trash bag is his place mat. Eating is not an activity over which he wants to linger. “When I was a kid, eating in the car was the greatest thing, because you were moving and eating at the same time,” he says. “You were accomplishing two things. To me, there’s nothing better than eating while you’re moving. Why should you stop to eat?”

As the plane takes off, Leno picks at the chicken, but he doesn’t touch the vegetables. On the two trips I was with him, he threw out most of the food before we’d leveled off, having already shoved four or five sticks of chewing gum in his mouth. The fan mail was out of the bag, resting in his lap, and Leno was signing away. Watching him, I could think of nothing to ask. Leno is very easy to be with but harder to know; the insider’s view of him, long-held, is that he’s an unfailingly nice guy with a singular competitive streak and the emotional latitude of “Being There’s” Chauncey Gardiner. Whether or not this is truly Leno’s duality, I don’t know. There is, however, a duality in Leno’s work, and this one I have witnessed. For a generation of comedy fans now in their 30s and 40s, the Leno who opens every “Tonight Show” is a shadow Leno, a beige Leno--an affable joke machine and centrist comic still doing bits about Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes and Monica Lewinsky’s weight problems. “Of course, Father’s Day is coming up,” this Leno joked in a monologue recently. “In fact, I understand Madonna is renting out Staples Center for the event.”

It’s a stark contrast to the comic who raged against the foibles of consumer culture in the 1970s and ‘80s, the 90-minute, tour de force Leno, for whom words were like daggers. Back then, it seems funny to remember, we wondered why Leno didn’t appear much on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” He was, however, doing regular appearances on NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman,” the comic-in-residence showing up every six weeks to unleash some harangue, with Letterman the straight man.

“It’s a traveling syphilitic side show!” Leno once ranted, talking about circuses. “Diseased animals and hermaphrodite clowns throwing anthrax spores at the children. . . . This is like entertainment from the 9th century! Geeks, trolls, mutants, all these inbred circus people. . . . They come out from under bridges, releasing disease and pestilence into the air. I don’t like the circus.”

Letterman: “But the kids like it.”

Leno: “Yeah, well, I guess if the kids like it. . . .”

There is some of that old fire and rhythm in the act Leno does for corporate America, where he’s not beholden to the front page of USA Today. But companies are not paying for the old Leno. They’re buying the host of “The Tonight Show”--the guy rushing to the punch before you’ll flip to “Nightline” or Letterman or ESPN or HBO (Leno will always be smarter than the jokes with which people associate him). As the plane heads down the coast to San Diego, Leno whips through his fan mail, sitting there in his “Tonight Show” suit. It’s a quick there-and-back, something Leno can do in his sleep. I’m just staring at him, which is rude.

“What?” Leno says finally, through a mouthful of gum.

*

Jay Leno is 50. He makes an estimated $14 million a year as host of “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” where his contract runs through 2003. Brushing aside for a moment the critical hazing “The Tonight Show” still takes, he has been drawing the biggest audience in late-night TV for so long that people outside the late-night world have stopped caring about the Leno versus Letterman issue altogether. He is, by all conventional measures, on top, and has been for years--the anchor of a late-night lineup that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue for NBC annually. Through the week ending June 25, “The Tonight Show” had won 243 of the last 251 weeks in its 11:35 p.m. face-off with Letterman’s “Late Show,” averaging about 2 million more viewers overall. True, “Late Show” ratings, sparked in part by interest surrounding Letterman’s return from quintuple bypass heart surgery in February, were up last season; “The Tonight Show’s” remained stagnant (both camps are full of statistical figures to spin things their way). But Leno, with about 6 million viewers, remains the leading brand.

Why then, you could ask, is Leno still running so hard? Why is he not home (he and his wife of 20 years, Mavis, have no children)? Why is he not relaxing with friends?

With Leno, I would discover, this is both an incredibly stupid question and the only question. It is a stupid question because Leno is paid, according to various estimates, around $100,000 a throw to perform at private corporate functions--crazy money for a guy who grew up in Andover, Mass. It’s a stupid question because telling jokes is Leno’s first job, the one that will always be there should NBC decide someday to take back its suits and its show (Leno is also working on a sitcom for the network, though he declined to talk specifics).

“Jay is extra sophisticated, and, frankly, he sort of plays the role very well of the guy who is still under pressure to perform,” says Rick Ludwin, NBC’s longtime senior vice president in charge of late night.

There are comics who work more dates than Leno does nowadays, and without the benefit of private jet or limo. And there are people who work just as many hours at their less glamorous jobs--at Internet start-up companies, say, or in hospitals. Leno himself pointed this out. “I bet if you compared this to a nurse or a policeman or a [working] single mother, it’s exactly the same,” he said. During a half-dozen conversations, conducted in person and over the phone, Leno said other things about his inability to stop and/or desire to keep pushing. “You only lose your grasp if you drive to ‘The Tonight Show’ every day,” he said, or: “You’re only as good as your last joke, right? I mean, if you think you’re anything more that that, you’re in a lot of trouble. You’re delusional.”

“Obviously the money is very good,” he says, as the plane comes in for a landing in San Diego. “People always say, ‘Oh, money can’t make you happy.’ But if you’re already happy, money can make you happier.”

The plane lands and Leno gets into a waiting limousine. On the ride to the Marina Marriott, he is quickly briefed: His employer for the evening is a start-up company called Acurian, which specializes in clinical drug trials for the pharmaceutical industry. Acurian has a booth at the annual conference of the Drug Information Assn. Leno, then, will be doing his act to pharmaceutical salespeople and others whom Acurian is courting, giving them free tickets to a dinner and Jay Leno show.

At the hotel, Leno is led into a private room and introduced to Leslie Michelson, Acurian’s CEO. Michelson gives Leno a further briefing on his company’s new service, Aculaunch, and gently encourages him to work Aculaunch-related jokes into his act. The crowd in the ballroom has swelled to more than 1,000, Leno is told. For the next 20 minutes, he poses for pictures and shakes hands with people brought to him for the privilege. They are all either “Tonight Show” viewers or potential ones, of course--figurative babies to kiss. “It’s like Lyndon Johnson used to say, ‘Every handshake is worth 250 votes,’ ” Leno says, between groups.

*

Leno’s competitive fire has long been a source of both wonderment and bitterness among his peers. These people--comics from Leno’s generation, principally, but others too--point to darker reasons for Leno’s still-hectic schedule. There is an empty side to his success, they say, and it is this emptiness that drives him. According to the armchair psychologists, Leno is not running toward something but away from it--a personal life, meaningful interaction with other human beings, the ghost of David Letterman. Do the math, they say: Between “The Tonight Show” and his road work and his cars, how much time does he have left for a life?

Leno smirks at all of this. He is, he says, a very happy man--and even if he weren’t, who wants to hear about a rich entertainer’s problems? But he is hyper-aware of the shop talk. “So what’s the worst thing you’ve come up with so far?” he asks, on the flight to San Diego. “Anything? I’d just be curious.” He would begin phone conversations with “So how’s my epitaph going?” and several times before hanging up said, “So don’t kill me, OK?”

Lots of other comics do impressions of Leno--practically all of them, in fact. Their voices get high-pitched and whiny; it’s as if they can’t talk about Leno without lapsing into Leno. Perhaps, I suggested, this was ultimately a kind of tribute?

“Oh, yeah,” Leno says, thick with sarcasm. “I’m sure it is.”

With the media, Leno has good reason to harbor just as much distrust, even though he will forever court them. Although he marked his eighth anniversary as “Tonight Show” host May 25, an article will come out every now and then to remind Leno that in certain circles he is still considered the interloper, and Letterman the guy who should have gotten Carson’s chair. Letterman, the cacophony continues, has stayed true to his comic soul, while Leno’s just a pandering chaser of ratings, a guy so stiff with celebrity guests that his producers write “Great to see you?” on cue cards. A guy who, in winning, made an inexorable artistic choice, and now, in the words of one comic, “is doomed to teach the slowest kids in the class.”

“He will always be scarred by the bad press, by the way he was portrayed in ‘The Late Shift,’ ” says a source formerly embroiled in the late-night wars, referring to the book by Bill Carter that chronicled the tug-of-war among Leno, Letterman and NBC executives over Carson’s “Tonight Show” successor.

Some of “The Late Shift” themes about Leno--that he’s a ceaseless worker, canny when he needs to be but emotionally absent--resurfaced in a May Esquire cover story about Letterman and his return from the brink of a medical crisis. Written by Bill Zehme, who collaborated with Leno on his 1996 road memoir “Leading With My Chin,” the piece was another media testament to Letterman’s superior show and intact legacy, and a firm, backhanded slap at Leno and his pyrrhic ratings victory and Letterman inferiority complex. “Life for him is a contest and a tote board,” Zehme wrote of Leno. “He breathes largely to compete . . . , which is to say, he lives to keep tabs on Letterman with every fiber of his being bent on out-muscling him and outdistancing him.”

Leno dismisses the article as another media blindside. “I have no problem with Dave; there’s room for both of us,” he will tell any reporter who asks. If Leno says next to nothing publicly about their cold war, the reclusive Letterman says nothing at all--not to the media that worship him or to Leno. The two supposedly haven’t spoken in eight years. Leno, says a source, wrote to Letterman during his recovery from heart surgery but heard nothing back (another source says yes, Leno got a letter). Most likely it was terse; during this time, Leno also received a call from “Late Show” executive producer Rob Burnett, asking him not to mention Letterman on his show or to the media, leaving Leno in a public relations bind, adds the source. And on and on it can go.

*

There has been another development of late, and this one more public: Letterman, since returning from surgery, has taken several potshots on the air at Leno. About a month ago, during a Top 10 list, he called Leno a “hump” and joined the legion of Leno impressionists. Leno laughs it off as good-natured ribbing. Sort of. “The Late Show” official line, courtesy of executive producer Maria Pope, is: “Basically, this is not a big deal for us. We joke about everybody.”

Maybe, too, Letterman and Leno are glad they can still stir things up. “You’re sort of grateful that people are still writing about this story,” NBC’s Ludwin says of “The Late Shift” postscripts. Indeed, even having the Leno versus Letterman discussion seems out of step, given the disparate voices (Bill Maher, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, Dennis Miller, Craig Kilborn) in late night these days. The arrival of such shows as Rock’s Emmy-winning “The Chris Rock Show” and Stewart’s “The Daily Show” have made Letterman and Leno seem like bastions of a format growing a bit hoary. O’Brien, at 12:30 a.m., is widely credited with putting on the freshest comedy, not to mention the freshest stand-up comics. Leno and Letterman? Yes, the gun still sounds at 11:35, but by the time Letterman is into his grab bag of found humor and Leno’s into minute nine of his monologue, are you still with them?

For movie stars and the movie studios they represent, meanwhile, the shows are just part of the publicity conga line you dance the week before opening. Leno and Letterman may still fight over big names, but this is not where the war is fought, most in late night agree.

“Leno is like a politician running for president,” says a source formerly close to the show. “As soon as he got the job, he moved toward the middle and away from his comedic roots. He’s like George W. Bush running on the right in the primaries and then running to the middle in the general election. It may make for good political and TV strategy, but it has lost Jay his early, loyal fans and given him a reputation as a sellout among some of his peers.”

Leno is clearer on this subject. “The Tonight Show” ratings turned around precisely when he embraced his stand-up self and changed the set to suggest a more intimate nightclub act. Yes, he went to the middle, but that’s what he was hired to do.

“This is a business. I work for Jack Welch,” he says. Welch is chairman of General Electric, which owns NBC, and he will always own Leno’s devotion: In “The Late Shift’s” most infamous scene, Leno hid out in a supply closet, listening to network executives haggle over whether Leno or Letterman should get Carson’s chair. It was Welch who stuck his head into this meeting and lent his support to the loyal guy, to Leno.

“G.E.’s edict is, ‘We like things to be No. 1, or else we get rid of them,”’ says Leno. “My job is to keep this No. 1.

“There’s nothing funnier to me than sitting in Jerry’s Deli listening to a bunch of guys whine about how clever and inventive they were, and [how] the networks were scared and now they are out of a job. You’re either doing it or you’re not doing it,” Leno goes on, arguing that these critics have turned a deaf ear to the good jokes he tells. “. . . There’s a bit of that New England Calvinist thing there [for me], where you just go, ‘Shut up and do the job.’ ”

Someone familiar with the behind-the-scenes arc of Leno’s career, dating to the days when he was managed by the late Helen Kushnick and her husband, Jerry, says this of Leno: “In a sense, like a good businessman, he figured out what was needed.”

*

What was needed--jokes and lots of them, what Leno calls “good food at reasonable prices”--is in high demand on the corporate circuit. But there are other reasons Leno is an attractive commodity. Lots of big-name acts do private dates; they are, in fact, available for weddings and bar mitzvahs (Leno emceed a wedding in 1998 for telecommunications mogul Chris Edgecomb; Dana Carvey, David Crosby and Rod Stewart also performed, People magazine reported).

Like Bill Cosby or Jerry Seinfeld, other big fish to catch, Leno doesn’t offend or work dirty. He shows up on time.

In his act, Leno hits on themes that wouldn’t be out of place at a Reform Party gathering: Lawyers are cheats, cops are slow-witted, Clinton’s a sexual predator. He does sprinkle in nuggets from the old days. Describing the vagaries of air travel, he tells a joke that broke up Carson all those years ago. “I get stuck in that middle seat between the screaming baby with diarrhea and the octogenarian with halitosis. We look like the three stages of man winging through time.”

The corporate work often involves him shouting the jokes. Acoustics are a continuing problem; the rooms are cavernous ballrooms or conference center atriums. The crowds consist of corporate partygoers sated on free food and booze. They are not necessarily a captive audience. Jay Leno is speaking to them, but they have not forked over cash to see him. This matters. “These parties are worse [than club work] because the comedy is free, and people haven’t paid to laugh,” Leno says after the Vegas show in the Studio 54 discotheque.

“If you’re in a theater where people are sitting . . . you can tell a story and take your time, whereas with this it’s just bam! bam! It’s good training, because you find out if something is funny. Something that’s hilarious is funny here. Something that’s funny is OK here. Something that’s OK [is going to bomb]. A lot of guys don’t like to do these corporate dates because the material doesn’t work.”

In their own way, the dates are an extension of the gigs-from-hell that have always given Leno sustenance. Get him going about the road, and apocryphal anecdotes from the old days pour forth: There was the police benefit in New Jersey, where he had to follow a tearful tribute to a slain officer; the whorehouse in Dorchester, Mass., where he performed for men waiting to visit the prostitutes upstairs. There was the time he was booked at a resort hotel in the Catskills. Leno arrived and was horrified; the marquee read: “Jay Leno, Jewish Storyteller.” Inside were a roomful of Hasidic Jews, presumably expecting humorous parables with Old Testament themes. Leno, who is Scottish on his mother’s side and Italian on his father’s, did 45 minutes, he says, mostly in silence. “Thank you for not quitting,” Leno says a chagrined rabbi told him afterward.

Decades later, Leno still doesn’t make a fuss (once, in asking for nothing, Leno didn’t even get a microphone, he says). The Hasidim have been replaced by tan men in dark suits, riding in limos. Two such men, entertainment directors at the MGM Grand, meet Leno at the airport in Las Vegas to deliver him to the PricewaterhouseCoopers event.

“As soon as you want to start, it’s fine with me,” Leno tells them. “You wanna go quarter to 9 or something, that’s OK with me.”

“No no no,” one of them corrects, politely. “On the schedule there’s a lady . . . who’ll be introducing you. And they have a video clip that kind of introduces you.”

“Me?” Leno says. “A video clip?”

“It kind of talks about, uh, mission impossible,” the PR guy says. “It’s like mission impossible. To say, we’re on a mission to find the late-night comedian Jay Leno to bring him to PricewaterhouseCoopers.”

The video, screened for Leno later in a back office at the hotel, is cheesy and overlong. Watching it, Leno quietly winces, but he does the date and hammers out the jokes. Afterward, in the limo back to the airport, he polishes off three Nathan’s hot dogs. He is especially pleased by the response he’s getting to a new joke about the movie “Shaft.” In the bit, Leno takes the “Shaft” theme (“Who’s the black private dick who’s the sex machine for all the chicks? Shaft!”) and refashions it for more politically correct times (“Who’s the African American investigator who enjoys having safe, consensual sex with strong, independent women who work for equal pay? Shaft!”)

Leno figures the “Shaft” joke will have a shelf life of a year. “How many people see a movie the first month?” he says, back on the plane bound for home, chewing gum and going over monologue jokes. “Most people will see this movie in September, and by that time it’ll be out on video. Then there’ll be ‘Shaft 2,’ which will be a big hit.”

*

Leno has never done an HBO special (though he did do a Showtime special in 1986, “Jay Leno and the American Dream”). In his long career, he has never put out an album. Once, he says, he did a show called “Norm Crosby’s Comedy Shop,” but it broke a rule he’s tried to live by: “If you want to hear the jokes, I will come to where you are and do them.”

Leno got his first “Tonight Show” spot in 1977. He did several more in the ensuing months, but by then he’d burned his best material, and it took him seven years to get back on the show. This was in the day when comics lived to do “The Tonight Show,” when a single spot changed a career overnight. But try as he might during that drought, Leno couldn’t meet the approval of the late Jim McCawley, Carson’s chief stand-up talent scout. “I was frustrated and pissed off like all the other comics who can’t get on,” Leno says of those days.

Now that he’s host of “The Tonight Show,” comics see Leno as an even less forgiving presence. With few exceptions, he does not use stand-ups on “The Tonight Show,” and comics and their managers have been howling about it for years. “It’s very disappointing to a lot of people in the comedy community,” says one veteran manager of the perceived “Tonight Show” embargo on comics. Says another: “I don’t even know who books [comics] over there.”

That comedians have become an afterthought on late-night talk shows is hardly Leno’s doing. In Carson’s day, there was but one place a comic could introduce himself to the nation at large. By the time Leno took over “The Tonight Show,” in 1992, the appetite for stand-up was well on its way to burnout, thanks to all the clubs and cable TV’s demand for cheap programming.

Today, however, a spot on Leno or Letterman still matters--the credit can mean thousands of dollars in headlining work on the road. And though Letterman has reduced the number of stand-ups he puts on too, it is Leno who remains the focus of the animus. It is Leno, not Letterman, who is deemed too ratings-obsessed. It is Leno, not Letterman, who is supposedly threatened by the prospect of someone funnier than him on his own stage.

But it is also Leno, not Letterman, who picks up the phone and talks about the issue, however much you may think his answers are a dodge. “I’m at a disadvantage because I talk to everybody,” he says. “You don’t have to talk to a publicist to get to me. And when you go to the other side, it’s, ‘Well, [Letterman’s] not available.’ ”

And so, Leno will tell you he uses stand-ups in sketches, that big names such as Billy Crystal and Robin Williams are regulars in the guest chair. He’ll maintain that many comics work too dirty for his show and that others aren’t willing to work hard enough to make their material “Tonight Show”-friendly. He’ll lament that outlets like Comedy Central have bred laziness among the ranks of today’s young stand-ups, and that comics of his generation expect favors.

He’ll tell you about the minute-by-minute pressure to keep ratings high.

“There’s nothing I would love better than to be blown off the stage [by a comedian],” he says. “. . . I get this all the time, [managers saying], ‘Well, we personally feel that Jay is afraid of our client. But I’ve made my money. It’s all gravy at this point.

“I listen to them bitch and complain, and I don’t disagree. I understand. I like comics as people. . . . It’s hard having somebody say, ‘You know, you’re good, but your product needs to be honed or changed.’ I resented McCawley. The trick to getting on ‘The Tonight Show’ is, good performance and good material, so if either one fails you, the other one will carry you through.”

Leno has a way of talking and talking about a subject until you can’t tell how he feels, or if there is any feeling at all. “Whatever you don’t like, it’s all my fault,” he said several times.

He was talking, I think, about “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” He wasn’t being defensive or angry or confessional; in fact, he wasn’t being much of anything, and it was a little maddening. It was like having an argument with yourself. So go ahead and rail against Leno and his comedy to your heart’s content. To steal a line from a Doritos commercial he once made: “Crunch all you want, we’ll make more.”