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Jay Leno Makes Rare Comment on Being Granted Conservatorship of Wife Mavis Leno Amid Her Dementia
Jay Leno has entertained millions of people over the years. But little has mattered as much as keeping the love of his life smiling.
"Nothing was more fun than making my mom laugh or pleasing my mom," the comedian told Oprah Winfrey in 2002. "So I've transferred that to my wife. Now don't get it confused: I don't see my wife as my mom. But making her happy or making her laugh is a priority."
Luckily for Jay, who's turning 75 on April 28, Mavis Leno always thought he was pretty hilarious.
"I know there are certain things that will always make my wife laugh—like anything involving the cat," Jay continued. "If she's feeling sad, I will take the cat, go in the other room, and the cat and I will have a discussion. It's usually, 'No, you can't have a dollar.' Then the cat meows. I say, 'Yeah, I'm sure the Kitty Council has a lot of power to make me do that.' And then I hear her laugh!"
But while the former Tonight Show host had that material down to a science, the last several years of caring for Mavis as she battles advanced dementia have required a new routine.
"It's basically what we did before,” Jay said recently on In Depth With Graham Bensinger of their ongoing togetherness. "Except now I have to feed her and do all those things. But I like it. I like taking care of her. She's a very independent woman, so I like that I'm needed. And I need to be there."
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Mavis' condition became public in April 2024 when Jay filed to establish a conservatorship over his wife's estate.
Mavis was "in agreement" with the arrangement, her attorney said in court at the time, and was "receiving excellent care with her husband, Mr. Leno."
And the 78-year-old's spouse been happy to live up to the vows they exchanged on Nov. 3, 1980. (Which, incidentally, was also Jay's parents' anniversary, and Mavis, as she told the Los Angeles Times in 2014, was "crazy about" her in-laws.)
"When you get married, you sort of take a vow, ‘Will I live up to this? Or will I be like a sleazy guy if something happens to my wife, I'm out banging the cashier at the mini mart?'" Jay reflected on In Depth. "No, I didn't. I enjoy the time with my wife. I go home, I cook dinner for her, watch TV and it's okay."
Actually, the whole "in sickness and in health" part factored heavily into their decision to tie the knot when they did.
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Mavis Nicholson went to Los Angeles' famed Comedy Store one night in January 1976 to network. She did not expect to be swept off her feet by one of the comics.
Who, incidentally, she thought was "gorgeous."
"I was writing comedy with some partners," Mavis recalled to the LA Times in 2014. "Friends kept saying, 'You have to hang out at the Comedy Store and the Improv, you'll meet people who can give you jobs. The first time I went, they sat us front row center—that means you're this far from the comic. And there was Jay."
And there was his latest girlfriend to be born on Sept. 5.
"The interesting thing is," Jay told the Times, "I've probably lived with five women, and every one of them was born on the same day. I can look at a woman and go, 'September 5.' I don't know why that is. I don't look for a woman born on September 5, I just wind up attracted to them."
After he performed that night, Mavis recalled, she went to the bathroom, not realizing all the comedians would be congregating toward the back of the club. Jay, having already guessed her birthday, approached her and the rest is history.
"I had made up my mind when I was little that I would never get married or have children," Mavis said, "so I had no agenda."
The start of their courtship coincided with Jay's career beginning to take off. So, eventually, "I had this insurance policy," Jay said, "and I thought if something happened to me, my girlfriend wouldn't be covered, but if we're married, we're covered, so...we might as well get married. Not the most romantic."
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His future wife was just as practical, forgoing his offer to get her an engagement ring at the time since they had just bought a house because, she explained, "I'm not that kind of person." (Though she didn't mind the massive diamond he gave her years later.)
Mavis also didn't think she was the marrying kind, but was "insanely in love" with Jay, she said. The self-described "voyager" compared a previous long relationship to an island she spent time on before sailing along—and "with Jay, I realized all this time I'd been sailing, he was the destination."
Neither did it hurt that, over the years since, "he made me laugh till I almost died many times in the course of a lifetime."
But a couple can't be laughing all the time.
"From day one, he just saw me," Mavis said. "He thinks the same things are important that I think are important, the same things are wrong that I think are wrong. We have the same temperament, and we understand each other completely."
So while George Clooney recently raised a few skeptical eyebrows when he said he and wife Amal Clooney have never had an argument in their 11 years of marriage, Jay might be more inclined to nod in agreement.
"There's really nothing worth fighting about," Jay told the LA Times. "I mean if you marry someone who is not crazy, that's the first step. Because everything emanates from that. So when the wife says, 'I have to do this.' 'Well, is this that important to you? All right, then.' It doesn't matter that much, so why argue?"
If there was any turmoil, it was within. "People always say, 'Work on a marriage,'" noted Mavis. "I think if you work on knowing your own faults and trying to correct them, you're not going to have to work on your marriage."
Another important thing Jay and Mavis were on the same page about was their decision to remain a family of two.
"Neither of us really wanted kids, so that was fine," Jay told Oprah in 2002. "We've been able to date a lot because of it."
Either he'd fly home from gigs right after performing or, if he was going somewhere "interesting," Mavis would come with him.
"I can say, 'Honey, you want to go to Vegas tonight?' If we had kids, it would involve the sitter and this and that," Jay explained. "Before I got The Tonight Show, we were on the road together all the time. I'd be onstage for an hour and a half, then we'd go have the rest of the time to ourselves."
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Once he started hosting the Burbank, Calif.-based Tonight Show in 1992, the first years were admittedly hard for Mavis.
"All of a sudden, Jay had this day job, and every person on the planet was asking him for something," she recalled to the LA Times. "So I thought, I'm going to be the one who doesn't ask for anything. Then it gave him relief at home, but that can also feel like distance."
That rough patch made them stronger in the end, though, because, Mavis noted, "however steadfast your feelings for each other, your life circumstances are going to go all over the place."
But she also didn't just sit around in the meantime.
A longtime women's rights activist and philanthropist, she became chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan in 1997, work that was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
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And Jay couldn't have been prouder.
"I've always wanted a situation where people would go, 'Oh, that's Mr. Mavis,'" he told Oprah in 2002. "That would make me laugh."
You know what they say about something being funny because it's true.
"I've done what I want to do, and now it's my turn to help her," Jay added. "It's a matter of priorities, and it makes the marriage better."
And as he quipped to the LA Times in 2014, "I always look for qualities in women that I don't have. I am attracted to the do-gooder, the rescue-a-cat type."
To which Mavis assured that Jay was "the most do-gooder type in the world."
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So it was no surprise that, when Jay left The Tonight Show in 2009 and then controversially returned as host in 2010, Mavis was his fiercest defender amid the flak he got for seemingly going back on a deal to pass the torch to Conan O'Brien.
"This is a subject I’m very, very angry about to this day," she shared on 60 Minutes a few weeks before Jay left his late night post for good on Feb. 6, 2014. "It made me angry because there was this perception that for some reason Jay had decided to give up the show. It was like he gave the show to Conan and then he took it back. That was not what happened, okay? That was not what happened."
That moment in time is the stuff of Hollywood-feud legend, but both Lenos maintained their stance that nothing Jay did was as sneaky or nefarious as he was often portrayed by some of his fellow comedians.
The famed gearhead hardly retired post-Tonight, maintaining a busy stand-up schedule and hosting Jay Leno's Garage on CNBC from 2015 until 2022.
Some injuries—he suffered burns in a 2022 fire, broke his collarbone and some ribs in a motorcycle accident in 2023, and broke a wrist and injured an eye falling 60 feet down a hill—may have temporarily slowed Jay down here and there, but he has remained hale enough to care for Mavis full-time (with professional help).
"When you have to feed someone and change them and carry them to the bathroom and do all that kind of stuff every day, it's a challenge," he told Graham Bensinger on In Depth. "And it's not that I enjoy doing it, but I guess I enjoy doing it."
It's being there for all of it that "defines a marriage," Jay observed. "I mean, that's really what love is. That's what you do. I mean, I'm glad I didn't cut and run. I'm glad I didn't run off with some woman half my age or any of that silly nonsense. I would rather be with her than doing something else."
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And while there are days where Mavis doesn't recognize her husband of 44-plus years and she can't reminisce about all the fun times, it's clear how good they had it.
In addition to admiring his values, "I thought he was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. I still do," Mavis told the Times in 2014. "And certainly, he was the funniest."
As she emphasized, "It's really important to think the same things are funny. And the good examples Jay's and my parents' happy marriages undoubtedly contributed. I think a lot of people have a very unrealistic idea of what a long relationship will be like."
Check out all the famous couples who've been making it work for at least 50 years:
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Dolly Parton & Carl Thomas Dean
She's a superstar performer known around the world. He was a private man who stayed away from the spotlight. But before his passing in March 2025, they built a marriage that lasted more than 56 years. "I like it when people say, 'How did it last so long?'" Dolly told ET Canada in December 2022. "I say, 'It's stay going.' There's a lot to be said about that. So we're not in each other's face all the time. He's not in the business, so we have different interests, but yet we have the things we love to do together. So it was meant to be. He was the one I was supposed to have and vice versa."
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Samuel L. Jackson & LaTanya Richardson Jackson
There's no breaking the bond of these college sweethearts. "In the beginning, we always said the most revolutionary thing that Black people could do was stay together, raise their children with the nucleus of having a father and a mother, since everybody likes to pretend that that's not the dynamic of the African American family," LaTanya told People in March 2022. "That it's just children out here being raised by women, which we know is false. In order to change that narrative, we made a decision to say, ‘We are going to stay together no matter what. We'll figure it out.'"
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Bonnie Bartlett & William Daniels
When you find joy in life's daily activities, Bonnie says your marriage could last forever. "We're very happy," she told People when celebrating 72 years of marriage in January. "We sit in this house and we do things. He reads his New York Times and he does Cameos mostly. And we do conventions and things like that. We just like to be with each other. And we would do anything for each other."
Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Ron & Cheryl Howard
These high school sweethearts celebrated their 50th anniversary in November 2020. "There's no technique," Ron told People just one year earlier. "There's no tactic other than communication is really important. You have to learn to communicate and have difficult conversations in constructive ways."
Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images
Christopher & Georgianne Walken
After meeting during a production of West Side Story in the '60s, this couple continues to savor every moment together with gratitude. "Every once in a while, I'll be looking out the window, and I'll think, 'I feel pretty good,'" Christopher told New York Times Magazine in February 2022. "My bills are paid, my wife is healthy, the weather's nice. That's really all I care about: when, apropos of nothing, I happen to look out the window and think, 'This is good.'"
Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Alan & Arlene Alda
After 65 years of marriage, the couple has found their groove away from the spotlight in Long Island, New York. In an interview with The New Yorker, Alan said he and his wife enjoy playing chess during the day and ladder ball before dusk. Then, it's a nice dinner and a quality TV show. It's not noisy in the country," he said in June 2022. "I don't have to show up places. Places come to me."
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for TCM
Martin & Janet Sheen
Through sickness and in health! After Martin recovered from a heart attack and nervous breakdown in the late '70s, he recalled a few words his wife told him. "It was very serious, and she handled it like a pro," he told Closer Weekly in 2016. "She had me laughing in the most dire circumstances. She said, 'Don't take yourself so seriously.' Every day is a celebration with this dame."
David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Lily Tomlin & Jane Wagner
After meeting in 1971, Lily and Jane have been inseparable. When asked to share advice for other couples, Lily kept it simple. "We all have a secret," Lily told reporters in 2019. "It's just the secret is that you're committed and care and you want it to work out. You don't want to walk away from something that's important."
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