Behind the Curtain: An Insider's View of Jay Leno's Tonight Show by Dave Berg

Author:Dave Berg [Berg, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Television, General, History & Criticism, Entertainment
ISBN: 9781455619962
Google: qBH-oAEACAAJ
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company Incorporated
Published: 2014-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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