Back when Johnny Carson was hosting “The Tonight Show,” NBC used a handful of guest hosts to handle the load on Carson’s frequent days off. Some of those hosts knew they had leverage, so they started asking NBC for $25,000 per appearance, raising their pay considerably.

But Jay Leno didn’t. As he explained in an interview on Bravo TV’s “Inside the Actors Studio,” he continued doing the job for just $512 per show — the basic union scale. And he looked like a real chump, right?

“I said, ‘If I’m any good, it will come back later,’ ” Leno explained.
It shouldn’t come as a shock that the people at NBC decided in 1987 to make Leno the show’s permanent guest host, which certainly had to do with talent as well as his bargain price. But when Carson stepped aside less than five years later, Leno’s guest hosting gig made David Letterman and him the only logical successors.

Instead of having maybe half a dozen candidates for the job, Leno’s strategy essentially narrowed the field to two. And, of course, he ended up getting the job. Something tells me he has made enough money to overcome that original guest host discount.

What Leno did goes against typical negotiating advice — namely, squeeze the bosses for every penny you can — but he knew exactly what he wanted. He proved that he could do the job, not just once in a while, but every day for weeks at a time, when Carson was on vacation.

Letterman already had proved that with his own show, so he would have clearly been the logical successor if Carson’s guest hosts kept rotating. But Leno negotiated to get experience, so he would be qualified for a promotion when the time came.