Word: carsons
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...Monday, May 25, the occupant of that chair will change from Johnny Carson to James Douglas Muir Leno, the man whose jutting jaw has launched a thousand bad metaphors. Leno will become only the fourth person to sit in that spot since 1954, marking the end of the 30-year Carson era, which began when J.F.K. was a President rather than a movie...
...Carson was the King of Late Night, a slightly aloof and mischievous monarch, his heir, Jay Leno, the salesman's son from Andover, Mass., is more like the Mayor of Midnight -- a good-natured, sensible small-town mayor who knows everybody's name and believes in good government. To watch Leno win over an audience, to observe him shaking hands in airports, blithely signing autographs in coffee shops, chatting out his car window with other drivers, is to see a man engaged in a cheerful campaign for the office of Most Popular Regular Guy in America, a position...
...Carson came to see Leno perform at the Improvisation in 1975 and gave him one piece of advice: more jokes. He had already appeared on the Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas shows when he got his first shot on the Tonight show: "March 2, 1977. Burt Reynolds, Diana Ross. I was last." He had enough jokes this time, and Carson invited him back. But over the next half a dozen appearances he got worse, not better. He was running out of material...
...Leno hit the road. What got him back on network TV was David Letterman. Letterman put him on dozens of times, and Leno credits his friend with resurrecting his television career. While Leno was nervous with Carson ("I always called him Mr. Carson," he says with a laugh), he was on the same wavelength as Dave. Leno killed on Letterman...
...then he leapfrogged over Letterman. Whereas Letterman had once been NBC's choice to succeed Carson, Leno campaigned for the job. Leno is not what Letterman calls "a show-business weasel," but he was shrewd. "The thing that got me the Tonight show," he says, "is that I would visit every NBC affiliate where I was performing and do promos for them. Then they would promote me in turn. My attitude was to go out and rig the numbers in my favor." Nice guys don't finish last when they can also rig the numbers...