Jay Leno’s ‘Tonight Show’ Secrets On Divas And Difficult Guests Revealed

Jay Leno’s time at The Tonight Show saw a whole slew of interesting guests, and now we’re about to learn a few secrets about some of the guests that sat in the hot seat next to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show.

Before Leno is called a tattletale, according to the New York Post this has little to do with Jay Leno’s secrets and is pulled from longtime producer Dave Berg’s new memoir who had to interact with the guests and conduct pre-interviews so the guests would know what they were in for before they went live with Jay. From diva moments to drunken debauchery, Berg reveals memorable moments from the guests that appeared during Jay Leno’s reign.

The memoir is called “Behind the Curtain: An Insider’s View of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show.” Berg would know all the backstage hijinks as he worked on the show for 22 years.

In Hollywood you have to have a thick skin to get through rejection and critiques, but apparently actress Helen Hunt just forgot or didn’t receive the memo. After a particularly bad segment, a producer “gently” critiqued her performance on the show while she was promoting her hit show Mad About You. After the exchange the actress waited a whopping fourteen years until she returned to the Burbank stage.

The memoir doesn’t only cover Jay Leno’s guests but Leno himself. It’s said the Leno “felt strongly that O.J. Simpson was guilty of murder” and because of that the late Johnnie Cochran, who defended O.J., was not granted a spot on The Tonight Show. At the time Leno reportedly called him an “opportunist.”

In what’s possibly the least surprising celebrity revelation, Christian Bale was called difficult to interview even before he rose to fame as Batman. Pre-2002 Bale ended the pre-interview after the questions were “too personal.”

According to Berg, “I had asked him where he grew up (Wales), how big his family was (three sisters), and what his first gig was (a Pac-Man cereal commercial). [He] didn’t seem to have even a basic understanding of how ‘The Tonight Show’ worked. I was glad he dropped out, thus averting an awkward on-air ­exchange with Jay.”

As for the “drunks” of the show, director Quentin Tarantino didn’t know how to dial back on the drinks and was slurring and “occasionally incoherent” during a 2003 interview.

As for just odd behavior Paula Abdul was known as a risky guest because, “her behavior was consistently erratic. She would cancel appearances for strange reasons, and when she did show up, her speech was often so slurred we could barely understand her.”

Are you surprised by some of the guest revelations?

[Image via NBC]