Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (11 page)

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Authors: Marlo Thomas

Jay Leno is TV royalty, having worked his way up from the grungy comedy club circuit to the
Tonight Show
throne, as the heir to the king of late night, Johnny Carson. But his heart is always in the clubs. He plays more than 160 club dates a year—trying out new material, hunting down the killer laugh, polishing his skills. You would think that’s the last thing he’d need to do, but there’s a reason for this—and you can see it in his face the moment you ask him about his work. He simply loves what he does. To Jay, there’s not some magic component to telling a joke—there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Leno way. And the Leno way has made him a superstar.

Most of the comedians I talked to demurred when I asked them to tell me their favorite joke. Not Jay—he had two. I’m sure he would have told me more, but he had to get back to work . . .

—M.T.

J
ay:
I grew up in a household with a dad who was very Italian and very loud, and a mom who was Scottish and timid. I was trapped between those two worlds, and that’s where my humor comes from. It was a funny place to grow up.

My father was very outgoing. No matter what I was doing or who I was going to meet, he’d say to me, “Look, you make sure you tell them you’re Angelo Leno’s boy!” My mother was the exact opposite. To her, the worst thing you could do was call attention to yourself.

Here’s the perfect example. When I made it in show business, I bought my dad a Cadillac—and because he’s Italian, I made sure it was a
white
Cadillac, with red velour upholstery. For my mother, this was very embarrassing. They’d be in the car together and pull up to a light, and my mom would look over at the next car and say to these strangers, “You know, we’re not really Cadillac people. Our son got us this.” Then my father would start yelling. “What do you mean we’re not Cadillac people? We got a goddamn Cadillac!
We’re Cadillac people!
” My mom would sink down in the seat, out of sight, and my dad would keep screaming. Later that night I’d always hear from a friend who would say to me, “I saw your father today, driving down the street and yelling—but he was alone in the car. Is he okay?”

My mother would sometimes laugh this repressed kind of laugh, but for the most part she was quiet. She liked to say “Shhh” a lot. I remember when I played Carnegie Hall, my mom and dad were sitting about four rows back, dead center, and behind my mom were six or seven college kids who’d seen me on TV and knew my routine. So they’re laughing hysterically at my jokes, and my mother turns around and says, “Shhh!”

So I stop the show and say, “Mom, you don’t shush people at Carnegie Hall!” I mean, how can you not find humor with parents like this?

MY MOTHER CAME FROM SCOTLAND.
When she was small, her mom ran off with a younger man, and there were so many kids in her family that my grandfather had to get rid of a few of them. He went door to door with my mother—
Anybody want a daughter?
—and eventually put my mom on a boat and sent her to America to live with her sister. She was eleven, and went to work in a factory.

So I always sensed a sadness in my mom, and I felt it was my duty to cheer her up or make her laugh. If I could do that, I’d get a great feeling of satisfaction.

But sometimes I went too far. When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was go to the supermarket with my mother. I would run away and go up to the manager and say, “I’m lost—could you page my mother?” And he’d get on the loudspeaker and say, “Would Mrs. Catherine Leno please come to the front of the store?” I knew there couldn’t be anything more embarrassing for her, but I was a kid. I thought it was funny.

Even when I started appearing on TV, she’d say to me, “You know, nobody wants somebody who’s funny all the time. If you want, tell a joke, sing a little song, do a little dance.” I’d say, “Mom, I’m not going to sing and dance to get to tell a joke.”

MY DAD HAD
a real good sense of humor. He was a salesman who worked himself up to manager of the office, and once a month he would have to give a pep talk to the other salesmen. So he’d write a funny speech and practice it on me. “Hey, you think this is funny? You think the boys in the office will like this?” And I thought,
Oh boy, being an insurance salesman has got to be the best job in the world, because you get to tell funny stories!

Dad also told me stories about the early days of selling insurance in Harlem. When he went to work for the insurance company, he asked, “What’s the toughest route?” And people, being very racist in those days, would say, “Harlem. You can’t sell insurance in Harlem.” My dad said, “Well, everybody’s got a family. Everybody wants insurance.” So he sold nickel policies in Harlem.

When he died in the early nineties, I talked about this on
The Tonight Show,
and I got a letter from a lady in Harlem who said that when she was a little girl, there was a man named Angelo Leno who used to come around to collect on the nickel policy. She said he was the only white person who had ever had dinner in her home.

“Your father would always give me candy,” she wrote, “and my opinion of white people was based on him.” It was such a lovely letter. I called her up, and it was great to learn a little more about my dad from her.

I know that a lot of comics had unhappy childhoods, but I didn’t. I had a wonderful childhood—and a wonderful family.

I NEVER WANTED TO BE A
TV personality. I always kept my day job, thinking I would do this comedy thing until I had to get a real job. I’d put the money from my comedy job in one pocket and the money from my after-school job—working at a car dealership—in the other pocket. Then one day I realized that the comedy pocket was much bigger than the other pocket. So instead of quitting comedy, I quit the other job and went to L.A.

I like being a comedian because it’s a trade—and when you have a trade, you can always make a living. That’s the real key. I mean, doing TV is nice, but—as we know—they can tap you on the shoulder at any moment and say, “Okay, you’re done.” And there’s nothing you can do about it.

But if you have a trade, you can always keep working. You can go to some small club. You can do a Christmas party. It’s like going to a gym for an hour and a half and running up and down on a machine. The stage is not a normal place to be, and if you’re not out there at least twice a week, it seems abnormal. But if you do it like clockwork, it becomes easier.

I have never touched a dime of my TV money, ever. It all goes in the bank, and I live on the money I make as a comic in the clubs. This way, I’m always hungry. I try to do a minimum of three gigs a week—about 160 dates a year. That’s a lot of material.

But jokes are disposable. Here’s my thing: write joke, tell joke, get check, go home. I mean, if you think it’s anything more than that, you’re mistaken. It’s a disposable product—like a tissue. You use it and it’s gone. You don’t reuse it and say, “Oh, here’s a tissue I blew my nose in two years ago.” If you keep moving forward, you never have to go backwards.

Being a comedian is sort of like being a transmission specialist. There’s always somebody with a broken car who needs their transmission fixed. Same thing with comedy. There’s always someone who needs to laugh.

A JOKE FROM JAY . . .

A man is in a hospital, and he’s hanging in traction. He’s been hanging for two years. Every bone is broken. He’s bandaged from head to toe, looks like a mummy—except for one little opening near his left eye.

Everything else is bandaged, except for this one little slit. Doctor walks in, looks him in the face and says, “I don’t like the look of that eye.”

ANOTHER JOKE FROM JAY . . .

This man always wanted to meet the Pope; he’s been making donations to the Catholic Church for years. Finally he gets invited to the Vatican, and he’s so nervous. He’s in a room with about fifty people also waiting to meet the Pope, and he’s at the end of the line.

The Pope comes in and starts going down the line. There are kings and queens and senators and heads of state—and in the middle of the line, there’s a homeless man in this long, filthy, raggedy coat. The Pope walks down the line and blesses each person, and when he comes to the homeless man in the raggedy coat, he puts his arms around him. Big hug. The American thinks, “That’s unbelievable! Here are these kings and queens and senators, and they get a little papal blessing, and this homeless guy in a filthy coat gets a hug. I’d do anything to get a hug from the Pope.”

So he steps out of line, goes up to the homeless guy, and says, “Look, give me that jacket!”

The guy says, “You don’t want the jacket.”

The American says, “Yes I do. I’ll buy it. Here—I’ll give you a thousand dollars. Give me that coat!”

So the homeless guy gives him the coat for a thousand dollars, the American puts it on, messes up his hair, and gets back in the line. The Pope walks by, sees the American, puts his arms around him and whispers into his ear:

“I thought I told you to get the hell out of here.”

Chapter 19
Miss Independence

W
hen I was growing up, my nickname was “Miss Independence,” and it fit. I was clearly of the
I can do it myself
persuasion, and though my dad had warned me that show business was a very difficult business—especially for women—I believed I could get where I wanted to go on my own. Still, the stories were legend, and scary, about how pretty young women were eaten alive at the hands of casting directors, directors and studio heads.

My desire to be an actress had always been a sore point with my father and me. He had come to see me in all of my school plays, and he always left worried.

“She’s got ‘the bug,’ ” he would say to Mom.

After two years of college, I was restless and told my parents I wanted to go to New York to study acting. “Finish college first,” Dad said. “That way you’ll have something to fall back on.”

The day I graduated from USC as an English teacher, I handed him my diploma and said, “This is for you. Now I’m going to study acting.”

I remember one night around that time, we were arguing about this during dinner. George Burns was at the table, and listening carefully to the back-and-forth. After a while, he took my side.

“What do you want her to be,” he asked Dad, “a milliner?”

A milliner. What a choice. But it took the air out of the argument, and made us all laugh. Then George said something that I found touching and revealing.

“To tell you the truth, Danny,” he said, “I feel sorry for anyone who isn’t in show business.”

And so I just kept on plugging. I studied, did workshops, appeared in plays (even got good reviews), auditioned for everything I could, took meetings, knocked on any door that I could find. And I was getting nowhere.

Finally, my father couldn’t take watching my frustration any longer and begged me to let him help me by setting up a meeting with a producer friend of his, Mike Frankovich at Columbia Pictures. I immediately felt uncomfortable about the meeting, but I went anyway. I sat across from Mr. Frankovich at his big mahogany desk feeling both desperate and hopeful.

He began by telling me what a great guy my dad was—a brilliant performer, a terrific golfer. After a while, I tried to bring the conversation around to me and my work. Mr. Frankovich looked at me dismissively.

“Why would a lovely, educated, well-raised girl like you want to be in this lousy business? Why don’t you marry your boyfriend, settle down and give your father some grandkids.”

I was totally demoralized. I called my father, told him about the meeting and drew a very clear line.

“Please, Dad,” I said. “Don’t ever—
ever
—make any more calls on my behalf. I’m going to have to do this on my own.”

But as I continued to try to make my way, it continued to eat at my father that I, his beloved daughter, was pounding the pavement in vain. So one night, he decided to talk to me about it.

“If you were a solo performer,” he said, “like a singer or a comic, you’d always be able to find work, just like I always can. But actors are too dependent on others for a job. They need a writer, a director and other actors. Too many things have to fall into place.”

And then he said in very plain language that he thought I should give it up—that it was a long shot that lightning would strike twice in the same family, and that I should rethink what I wanted to do with my life.

The more he spoke, the more upset and insistent he became.

“You’re an educated young woman. You could be a senator, for God’s sake! Why would you pick something at which you cannot succeed?”

I couldn’t believe it. After all the years of unconditional love, of encouragement, of support in everything I did as a kid, he had withdrawn his belief in me.

I got up from the table and walked to the doorway. Then I turned back to him.

“Not only am I going to make it,” I said in a fury, “but someday you and your partner, Sheldon Leonard, are going to want to hire me and you won’t be able to fucking afford me!”

And I stormed out.

Later I learned that my mother had overheard it all, and had immediately gone to my father.

“Don’t you think you were too tough on her?” she said. “Maybe you should go after her.”

“No, let her be,” Daddy said. “If she really wants it, she’ll have to face a lot tougher rejection than this.”

YEARS LATER,
after I had my own television series, my father and I were standing together in the wings of a Las Vegas showroom, watching Terre at the microphone, singing her heart out to the crowd in one of her first professional engagements. Tapping her foot as she sang, she looked adorable and sounded great. She has the loveliest voice—a lot like my mother’s—and as I watched her, I thought back to all the times when we were younger, when she would sing along to Doris Day records. My eyes filled with tears. I was so proud of her.

“Isn’t she good?!” I said to Dad.