For her latest return to Today, Hoda Kotb sat down with Jay Leno for a candid conversation about his role as the caretaker of his wife, Mavis.
“I enjoy her company. If I’m working on a car, she’d sit over there with a book and read. It was just very — well, it still is — very comfortable,” Leno said in the prerecorded segment aired on the Thursday, November 20, episode of Today. “Before she had this, I would always go home after The Tonight Show, cook dinner for her, and we’d watch TV. The only difference is now, you just can’t really talk about a lot of things.”
News of Mavis’ advanced dementia diagnosis broke when Leno filed for conservatorship of his wife in January 2024. The conservatorship was approved that April, and Leno has continued to take care of Mavis, whom he wed in 1980, since.
“The conversation, it’ll be, she’ll point to something and say something that doesn’t quite make sense. And I’ll go, ‘No, it’s good, honey. It’s alright,’” he shared. “You know, you hear a noise outside, [and she’ll ask,] ‘What’s that?’ [And I’ll say,] ‘You know, it’s fine.’ I sense she wants to be reassured that everything is okay.”
For Leno, one of the “toughest” parts of Mavis’ dementia battle so far was re-learning that her mother had passed away “every day for, like, three years.” He told Kotb, “And not just crying, I mean, you’re learning for the first time, and that was really tricky. Yeah, that makes it hard.”
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Despite the challenges, Leno works hard to maintain a sense of normalcy for his wife. “Her appetite’s really come back. I wish I could take her out and go out to eat and things like that, but you can’t, really,” he said. “We’ll get some help and we’ll take her out in the car and drive around and look at stuff, and she likes that, but I feel bad. You reach this point in your life where she’d love to travel, so I’m sad that she can’t do those things.”
In addition to watching travel and animal videos on YouTube, Leno said he also helps Mavis remember familiar faces using flashcards. While practicing one time, Leno said he had to remind her that they once had dinner at the White House with Barack Obama after Mavis didn’t recognize the former President.
Kotb went on to describe Mavis as a “fiercely independent person,” noting that she worked as a philanthropist and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
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“That’s part of it, because now she really needs me, and I like that. And I can tell that she appreciates it,” Leno stated. “And the idea that you get married and you take these vows, nobody ever thinks they’ll be called upon to act on them. You know, that part, ‘for better or worse.’ But even the worst is not that bad.”
When asked how Mavis shows her love for him, Leno told Kotb, “Well, by saying it. I can see the smile. I can tell when she’s happy, and that’s really it. As someone who’s in show business, I go home and I get an audience reaction every night. I please the person I’m entertaining. And she looks at me and smiles and says she loves me, I melt.”
In addition to discussing himself and Mavis, Leno briefly touched on his career, particularly why he chose to remove politics from his comedy. “Nobody wants to be lectured,” he explained. “When you’re on TV, you can play directly to your audience, and there’s a laugh track. But when you go to Indiana or Kentucky or any other place in the country, you’re always gonna have a third of the people who don’t agree with you politically. So why even go there?”
Today, Weekdays, 7 a.m./6c, NBC
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