Have a Drink With That Plug

Forget the watermelon triangles and the spring rolls and the Evian--what “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” is offering to its guests backstage these days is liquor. Not endless belts of booze, just something to take the edge off. Because what is a talk show appearance, after all, if not an awkward date in need of a social lubricant? Nothing kills spontaneity quite like cue cards and film clips and prearranged banter, fussed over by publicists and managers and talent bookers. Given all of this, “The Tonight Show” is hoping alcohol creates a few fireworks, like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” without the bitter recriminations.

In these soy-milk latte times, “The Tonight Show” bar (it’s actually a lone guy pushing a cart around, but still . . .) could be seen as a symbol of a bygone era, a time when social drinking backstage was woven into the fabric of television. This was nowhere more evident than on talk shows and variety shows of the 1960s and ‘70s, which seemed like social gatherings themselves, the party merely having drifted from behind the curtain to in front of the camera.

Such freewheeling series as “The Gong Show,” ’The Dean Martin Show” and “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” seem to have existed on another planet--or at least at a time when celebrityhood looked like it might actually be fun. To watch Martin, Bob Hope and George Gobel on a vintage clip from “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” laughing it up in a cigarette haze, holding cups filled with an unnamed brownish liquid, is to realize how carefully disseminated celebrity behavior has become. Today, it’s still Hollywood, but Hollywood airbrushed of its vices and selling hard, then heading in Town Cars to the next talk-show couch.

“You get the feeling you’re watching this market-tested automaton,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York. “The thing about getting people’s guard down, which alcohol can help do, is that you break through the sophisticated inner workings of the public relations-industrial complex that has turned the American celebrity into a robot.”

To be sure, Martin’s drunk act was said to be largely that--an act. “The Tonight Show” under Carson thrived at a time when comics (Gobel, Martin, Foster Brooks) routinely mimicked such behavior for laughs, Mothers Against Drunk Driving didn’t exist, and cigarette smoking had yet to be confronted as a health crisis. It is unimaginable today, for instance, that a talk show host would puff a cigarette, as Carson did before he bowed to social pressures and put the ashtray under his desk, smoking during commercial breaks. He later quit smoking altogether.

Today’s Hollywood still drinks and smokes, of course, but increasingly against the backdrop of a corporation’s PR caution. Thus, representatives of “The Tonight Show” danced around the issue--acknowledging that guests are offered drinks but also refusing to talk about it publicly. A spokeswoman said the show provides transportation for its guests. The liquor is housed in a stock room, while the “bar cart” only has wine, chocolates, gum, and toys for kids, she added.

Sources say Leno requested last November that “The Tonight Show” have alcohol on hand backstage, particularly for female guests who, the show felt, opened up a bit more when they’d had a drink. During an appearance in February, actress Charlize Theron complimented the show’s margaritas, then was brought one onstage (although “The Tonight Show” refused to release a copy of her appearance).

As a practical matter, having alcohol backstage means that staffers don’t have to leave the NBC lot to get a guest a drink. But some were still surprised, given “The Tonight Show’s” reputation as a risk-averse home for celebrity chitchat and Leno’s self-made image as an abstemious workhorse.

Others say “The Tonight Show” is trying to loosen the reins on guest interviews that critics have long complained are stiff and overly prepared, with Leno often walking his way awkwardly through vetted topics. Stars too are protected more than ever, with publicists and managers increasingly dictating the terms of celebrity appearances.

“Spontaneity is something we’re always trying to achieve and never able to,” says one “Tonight Show” source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So maybe this does fuel a little spontaneity.”

Taken in that context, an air of backstage cool could represent a subtle edge over the talk show competition, most of whom are booking the same celebrity guests plugging the same movies and TV shows in the same rehearsed way. As Thompson puts it, “With all that competition, I think there’s a sense that you’ve got to make these people more interesting than they are.”

Asked about alcohol backstage, other show representatives were cagey too, as if not quite sure how the publicity gods were gauging the acceptability of social drinking these days.

A publicist for ABC’s “Politically Incorrect” said alcohol is on hand for guests, but no bar or bartender. At CBS’ “The Late Show With David Letterman,” there are just cookies and water backstage, said a show publicist, though like all shows, “The Late Show” understands to have drinks on hand for certain guests. Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” a celebration in part of regular-guy drinking life, hands out cups of beer to audience members. NBC’s “Late Friday,” a late-night showcase of stand-up comedians that used to be taped at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood, now shoots at NBC on a nightclub set that includes a bar. MTV’s “Spring Break,” which celebrates college drinking life, does so without serving alcohol to its participants, says a network spokeswoman.

“The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” tapes at 5, not exactly the drinking hour. Live television, one could say, meshed better with cocktail hours, while today’s talk shows (even those dubbed “late night”) are largely produced during daylight hours. “The Ed Sullivan Show,” for instance, went live each night at 8 for most of its run, while “The Tonight Show” hosted by Steve Allen was done live at 11:30 p.m. (Allen’s successor, Jack Paar, clashed with NBC over the network’s decision in the late 1950s to start taping “The Tonight Show” earlier in the evening so the network could edit out material it found objectionable.)

Ostensibly, there was no bar at “The Tonight Show” during Carson’s reign, but staffers and guests recall that anyone wanting a drink needed only to go to the prop man. “If you were friends with the prop man and you said, ‘I wish [I] had a drink,’ then one would show up in your dressing room,” says Buddy Hackett, a frequent “Tonight Show” guest.

“There was an incredible bar,” says Paul Block, a “Tonight Show” talent coordinator in the 1970s. Block describes a prop box that opened up to become a well-stocked bar. “He’d open it up an hour or an hour and a half before show time,” Block says of the prop man. “Anybody could walk up and avail themselves of its contents.”

Images of the drinking life--glamorized to maximum effect by the Rat Pack--were kept alive on television in various other forms, including Martin’s celebrity roasts of the 1970s and early ‘80s, which aired on NBC. Today, the nostalgia for these roasts lives on via compilation tapes and even a live re-creation, with actors preparing a Dean Martin roast of Bob Hope (in this case played by SCTV’s Dave Thomas) for the HBO Workspace in Hollywood on May 8.

Shows, “especially variety and game shows . . . reflect the mood of the people of those [eras],” says Chris Bearde, a television producer and co-creator with Chuck Barris of “The Gong Show,” the ineffably cheesy variety show that Barris hosted for much of its initial 1976-80 run. “Today you’ve got ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’ but it’s testosterone that people are on,” says Bearde. “It isn’t making [people] lighter, it’s making them more uptight.”

At “Laugh-In,” which ran from 1968 to 1973, co-hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin had full bars in their respective dressing rooms, says George Schlatter, the show’s executive producer. But it was only natural, Schlatter says, that social drinking, ingrained in the culture at large, would play itself out backstage.

“The bars closed at 2 and we shot until 3:30,” he says. “[Entertainers knew] that when the bars were closed, we were still open.”

Into the 1980s, other shows followed suit. “The Joan Rivers Show” ’had a better bar than Ma Maison,” remembers Vince Calandra Sr., a longtime talent executive dating to “The Ed Sullivan Show” who worked on Rivers’ failed 1986-87 talk show for Fox. “It was like a party. I never saw acts drink that much.”

A more sober atmosphere prevailed when Leno took over for Carson in 1992, but that has evidently loosened. Publicist Lori Jonas was at “The Tonight Show” recently with her client, actor Gary Oldman, when he was offered a drink. Jonas says Oldman refrained because “it’s so out there that Gary’s AA,” referring to Alcoholics Anonymous. “Nowadays so many people are AA.” Then again, Jonas and others concurred, doing “The Tonight Show” used to be an event, a festive occasion, while today it’s become just another stop on a PR tour the week your movie opens. In turn, the green room--long a microcosm of show business, headquarters for celebrity hangers-on--is these days as dynamic as an airport lounge an hour before takeoff.

“It’s fair to say [drinking] added to the enjoyability of the show because it became a party, and because the guests who came out were a little bit looser and they relaxed,” says Block, now an executive producer at Tech TV, a fledgling cable network. “Now if you want a drink, you have to go into your dressing room and come out smelling like booze.”

“There used to be bars in all the executive offices of most major corporations. The clock hit 4:30, 5 o’clock and out came the mixed drink for the before-dinner discussion,” says Brian Dyak, president and CEO of the Entertainment Industry Council, which puts on the Prism Awards for programming that accurately depicts drug and alcohol abuse. “The fact that it’s not on the air says that we’re probably more enlightened.”

More enlightened, yes. But more entertained?

Schlatter, who last week produced “The American Comedy Awards” for Comedy Central, recounts an exchange between Gobel and comedian Bob Newhart when the two were doing a show together. Gobel, says Schlatter, asked Newhart if he wanted a drink, but Newhart told him that he abstained before performing.

“You mean to tell me,” Gobel said, “you’re going to go out there alone?”