BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN BEHIND THE CURTAIN (15 page)

John: I know I’m going to eternally rot in Hell for this. The poem is a poignant rumination on how “I Can Be a Delicious Lunch, Dinner or Breakfast—If You’re Weird.” She goes on to describe herself as a “round and flat piece of dough with lots of topping. I am a mouth’s best friend. I make you say,
yum, yum.
”

Jay: It’s amazing how kids know at such a young age what they’re gonna do with their lives.

The show was enormously successful, drawing fifteen million viewers, the third-largest audience in its history. I believe John put on the best guest performance I’ve ever seen on
The Tonight Show.
He was my favorite guest, and Jay’s, too. Not bad for a guy who was so afraid he would bomb that he almost cancelled his appearance. Without question, the
Seinfeld
finale and Jerry’s outstanding appearance helped drive the numbers, but it was John who made the show truly memorable.

A little more than a year later, we heard the news that John had died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. His wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, were also killed. All of us, including Jay, were deeply saddened. We talked fondly about the day our “mystery guest” showed up. I felt like I had lost a friend.

Chapter Nine

Mr. Sitting President

March 19, 2009, 4 p.m.

I was standing in a short line outside our studio waiting to greet President Barack Obama and his staff as they arrived for Mr. Obama’s guest appearance. Jay and his wife, Mavis, were in front of me.

The president’s motorcade was running a little late because of heavy traffic on Highway 101, but I knew it was getting closer because of the increasing Secret Service chatter. I had worked with the agency many times for political guests, including Mr. Obama, but this day was different.

It would be the first time a sitting president had ever made an appearance on a late-night entertainment show, and the Secret Service was there with a full contingent: twelve agents from Washington, DC, and eighteen more from different government security agencies in Los Angeles, as well as four snipers, two on rooftops and two in disguise at undisclosed locations. In the past, they had sent only a few agents to cover politicos.

Normally, the dignitary would be driven into the building through large “elephant” doors, traveling about twenty-five yards down the corridor to Studio 3, where the show was produced. But the president’s new Cadillac limousine, known as “the Beast,” had so much armor that it weighed upwards of fifteen thousand pounds. It was too heavy to bring inside for fear it would crash through the floor to the basement.

I heard from the radio chatter that the motorcade had arrived at the entrance to NBC, and I instinctively glanced at the elephant doors, which were wide open. The sun was unbelievably bright as it reflected off a shiny, white tent where the president would be getting out of his limousine.

Finally, the president’s limo pulled up. My eyes darted toward the elephant doors again, though they now seemed to be shrouded in billows of fog coming off the light. I wasn’t sure why I was seeing fog. Maybe it was the excitement of the moment and a week’s worth of sleep deprivation. Then a person stepped through the fog, a staffer. Followed by another, and another. They just kept coming, and they all seemed to be moving in slow motion. It reminded me of an old Keystone Cops movie where the cops just keep streaming out of the paddy wagon.

After about ten people came through, I started recognizing them: David Axelrod, the president’s political adviser; Hilda Solis, the labor secretary; and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary. Finally, I heard the president’s voice: “Hey, Jay.” His waving hand was reaching through the white veil of fog. Then he emerged, smiling and looking unbelievably presidential.

All of a sudden, he was there, shaking hands with Jay and Mavis. Then he was shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with me. This was Mr. Obama’s third visit, but somehow he wasn’t the same person. And it wasn’t just about the Secret Service, the presidential limo, and the coterie of aides. He was now the most powerful person on earth.

The president, a few of his aides, Jay, and I were then escorted to his dressing room. Actually, it was two adjoining rooms, a Secret Service requirement as would-be assassins can shoot through walls. I asked Mr. Obama if he had any questions about the show or the interview, and he said with a smile that he thought he could handle it, which ended the formalities. He had a story about the Secret Service, and he was anxious to tell Jay about it.

The day before, he had made an appearance at the Orange County Fairgrounds. After arriving there by Marine One, the presidential helicopter, he decided to take a short walk to the site where he would be speaking. But a Secret Service agent quickly nixed the idea because the distance—seven hundred fifty yards—was too far.

When the president said it would only be a five-minute walk, the agent replied, “Yes, sir. Sorry.” They did let him walk on the way back since the doctor was there with a defibrillator. Jay loved the anecdote and told the president to bring it up on the show.

Although Mr. Obama’s closest aides, Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod, were in the dressing room, the guy he really related to was his personal assistant and so-called “body man,” Reggie Love. Reggie had been with the president since his days in the US Senate, starting in 2005. When he was hired, he was given no formal job description. He was simply told to “take care of stuff.” And from all appearances he did that quite well. At six foot five, he played on Duke University’s 2001 NCAA Championship basketball team and was the president’s teammate in the many pickup basketball games he played. While Reggie was a better player than Mr. Obama, the president was quick to point out to Jay that his friend didn’t always understand the politics of the game. During the presidential election they had traveled to a small Northeastern town where they played a pickup game against some of the townsfolk. Reggie was running up the score with some hot-dog moves. Mr. Obama had to pull him aside and remind him they were trying to get votes, not win the game. He took great pleasure in busting his friend with this story.

After our visit, I returned to my office to wait for the show to begin. I had about ten minutes, and I couldn’t help but think back on the fascinating series of events that led to that moment, beginning five years earlier. I had never heard of Illinois State Senator Barack Obama before he delivered the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in Boston on July 27, 2004, which I thought was amazing. I had not seen such a powerful speaker since President Reagan, and I was convinced I was watching the future of the Democratic Party by the time his speech climaxed with these rousing words: “Tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

“
Who is that guy?
” I said out loud to the television over and over as I was watching the seventeen-minute speech. But I wasn’t the only one impressed by the forty-four-year-old, no-name politician from Hyde Park in Chicago. The entire nation was electrified.

And the very next day I made an offer to Mr. Obama that would eventually lead to today’s historic presidential appearance. Of course, I had no way of knowing that when I called his staff for the first time. They were overwhelmed by the reaction to his game-changing speech and suggested I stay in touch. I was just happy they took my call, which I’m sure was one of hundreds. Their guy was thrust into the national limelight overnight, and I suspected they weren’t quite sure how to deal with it, so they opted to keep the lines of communication open.

Two and a half years and several hundred phone calls later we got our first booking with Mr. Obama, then a national senator and a likely presidential candidate in the upcoming primary election. But he made no major announcement in that appearance, nor did he have anything to say about his famous speech. Instead he had a self-deprecating story about the first Democratic National Convention he attended four years before “The Speech,” where he was not the keynote speaker. He wasn’t even a delegate. He was a gate crasher.

He told Jay he was broke after losing a Democratic primary bid for a House seat and wasn’t planning to go to the convention. Then at the last minute friends and supporters talked him into catching a cheap flight to Los Angeles. When he got to the Hertz counter at LAX, his American Express card was rejected after several tries. Then he couldn’t get a pass to the convention floor, so he had to watch most of the speeches on television screens around Staples Center. He was so discouraged he caught the first flight back to Chicago.

Mr. Obama related his woeful tale to Jay with great flair and political savvy: “It’s not as if I was that much smarter in 2004 than I was in 2000. I’m the same guy. I’ve gotten some good breaks.”

Jay asked Mr. Obama if he was running for president, but he deflected the big question with a joke: “I’m already committed to the Food Network.” Two months later he made a dramatic entry into the presidential race in Springfield, Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s sixteenth president. Thousands filled the town square to hear him say: “It was here in Springfield, where North, South, East, and West come together that I was reminded of the essential decency of the American people—where I came to believe that through this decency, we can build a more hopeful America.”

From that point on we put a full-court press on him to make another appearance. I believed our chances were good because he had told me he preferred Jay’s “regular guy” persona over Letterman. My optimism panned out, but not until October, eight months later. It was well worth the wait.

He was still trailing Senator Clinton in the polls, campaign funds, and support of Democratic heavyweights. But at the show he was a textbook case of grace under pressure. On stage he came across as the leading candidate, as he turned his negatives into some pretty funny material: “When your name is Barack Obama, you are always the underdog.”

When Jay pressed Senator Obama on it, he pushed back:

Jay: Hillary
appears to be a shoo-in. How discouraging is that?

Obama: It’s not discouraging.

Jay: A little bit?

Obama: Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare mission accomplished a little too soon. [Much laughter and applause.]

Of course, Senator Obama would eventually defeat Senator Clinton in a close and exciting primary election. He would go on to win the presidency over Senator John McCain and then appoint Mrs. Clinton his secretary of state.

Had the stock market not taken a freefall in September 2008, Senator McCain had a real chance of becoming the commander-in-chief. He was ahead in the polls at the time, but when the economy definitively went south, voters decided to go with the new guy who was offering “hope and change.” And when Mr. Obama was declared the winner, he delivered a momentous speech in Chicago’s Grant Park that had commentators buzzing well into the next day. My thoughts drifted to the Illinois state senator who had given “The Speech” only four years after crashing the Democratic Convention four years before that. I got carried away in the moment because I felt as if I had been watching from a front-row seat as history was unfolding.

I told my assistant I wanted to do something that had never been done in almost sixty years of late-night television: book the president. I knew the chances would be slim, but it was worth a try. An interview with the popular new president would define Jay’s watch as the host of
The Tonight Show,
which I thought would be ending in June 2009 when Conan O’Brien was to take over.

I had a good relationship with the new president and his staff and wanted to take advantage of it by calling regularly, though I didn’t want to wear out my welcome. So I decided to be aggressive but clever about it. I would make many calls, sometimes contacting the president’s staff two and three times a week, often under the guise of making offers to presidential staffers, such as Robert Gibbs or Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. These gentlemen would have made terrific guests, but I knew they would never agree to appearances that could potentially upstage their boss. I was just keeping the lines of communication open.

One day Jay called Gibbs, who—to everyone’s surprise—put President Obama on the line. He told Jay he wanted to do the show when the time was right. It was an exciting moment, to be sure. Still, we didn’t have a date. Every sales person knows you don’t really have a deal until it’s closed, and I wasn’t going to relax until that happened. Jay wouldn’t let me. Every day it was the same: He would see me getting coffee in the staff kitchen and ask me if the president was booked yet. I would tell him we were still working on it. Then he would want to know why it was taking so long, and I would say I didn’t know, followed by an awkward pause. I felt a little like Phil, Bill Murray’s character in
Groundhog Day,
who woke up every morning to find it was the same day all over again. I understood Jay’s impatience. It’s just that he didn’t concern himself with the details, such as the fact that the president couldn’t just jump on Air Force One any old time just to do our show. He was now the new guy in charge of running the free world. We would just have to wait until he scheduled a trip to Los Angeles.

Finally, we got the word: the president was booked on March 19, the following week. It would be his fifty-ninth day in office, not even two months since his inauguration and not quite five years since “The Speech.” Our dream booking had come true! My first order of business was to let Jay know the news as soon as possible. He was as happy as I’ve ever seen him, and I was glad that I would be able to get my morning coffee in peace again—at least for the time being.

Five minutes later—after the euphoria wore off—I realized I had some loose ends to deal with: Teri Hatcher, star of
Desperate Housewives,
was already booked as the lead guest that night and would have to be bumped to another night. Since she was an Obama supporter, I didn’t think it would be a problem. He was the president, after all, but I didn’t know how she would react. We rarely moved guests, and when we did it was usually messy.

I sent Teri an e-mail with the news but didn’t hear back from her. Instead, I got a call from someone on her staff, who said Teri understood my dilemma and would be happy to make way for the president. Still, I was told, “a girl likes to be appreciated.” I told her not to worry because I was planning to send Teri some flowers. There was a long pause. “You know,” she said, “girls like Louis Vuitton . . . maybe a handbag?”

I had no idea such a purse could cost up to $2,000. I figured it would run about one hundred dollars, no more than a nice bouquet of flowers. Just as I was about to ask what style of handbag would suit Teri, I was interrupted by my assistant, who had been listening to my conversation. She came rushing into my office, waving her hands, shaking her head from side to side and mouthing the word “no.” I quickly revised my answer and said I would have to check our budget, which was a little tight. We ended up sending Teri the flowers, and we worked out another date. She was very gracious about it, but I’m not sure how she would have reacted had I promised a designer handbag and then reneged on my word.