Jay Leno rose from the obscurity of doing stand-up routines for miniscule audiences to hosting The Tonight Show.
As he recounts in his autobiography, Leading with My Chin, he gradually learned the comic profession’s tricks of the trade.
One of his early learning experiences happened when he was a guest on the Dinah Shore talk show.
The show’s talent coordinator asked about his “outcue.” What was his last joke, so the band knew when to play him off the stage? Leno, however, was hesitant to give away his last line, even to the band. “How about if I just say, ‘Thank you, thank you very much!’ Twice, OK? And that’ll be the cue.”
Unfortunately, Dinah Shore’s welcome was so warm, and the audience’s enthusiasm was so great for his first one-liner, that Leno lost his composure.
“Thank you, thank you very much!” he said.
The band leader, caught off guard, stubbed out his cigarette, waved the musicians into action, and ushered Leno off the stage.
Dinah Shore smiled happily, the audience went wild, and his scheduled interview was over before it even started.
“It was the most ridiculous slot of my career,” Leno wrote.
It’s a great story.
The only problem is that it didn’t actually happen. Or more specifically, it didn’t happen to Jay Leno.
As an investigative journalist discovered, the incident actually happened to another comic, one of Leno’s friends. Leno paid his friend $1,000 for the rights to use the story in his autobiography. As if it had happened to him.
James Frey’s remarkable memoir about drug addiction rehab, A Million Little Pieces, was propelled to the top of the bestseller lists 20 years ago, in no small part because of Oprah Winfrey’s enthusiastic endorsement. When it was revealed that much of the book was pure fabrication, Winfrey scorched him before her studio audience.
In 2001 George O’Leary began his dream job – head football coach at Notre Dame – only to be fired five days later when it became clear he had falsified details of his academic and athletic resume.
Rigoberta Mencha’s dramatic first-person accounts of massacres by Guatemalan soldiers brought her international fame, a visit to the Pope, and the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize.
Then it was learned Mencha had invented important details, such as the live burning of her brother. “My truth,” she explained, “is that my brother was burned alive.” Even though, in point of fact, it never happened.
As Os Guinness laments in his book Time for Truth, it’s increasingly hard to distinguish “my truth” – how someone chooses to paint reality – from Reality itself.
“We are all in the business of impression management,” he writes. “To be a person [today] is therefore to be a project. It is up to each of us to create and wear our own ‘designer personality’ – carefully crafting ourselves with resumes, skills, and appearances all chosen with the expertise and care of a Paris couturier designing a dress for a Hollywood actress on Oscar night.”
In other words, having “strong character” isn’t nearly as important as having a “striking personality.” And we wouldn’t want little details, like the truth, to get in the way of our best efforts at impression management.
When we open the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, it’s no surprise that we are immediately confronted by a different message: “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25).
Your life is not your own project. Your life is God’s project.
And life’s deepest joys come not from crafting self-promoting truths, but aligning ourselves with the One who is Truth itself.
That can be true for both me and you today.
And we don’t even have to pay a thousand bucks.
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