After suffering ‘serious burns’ in his garage, Jay Leno hopes to recover in a few weeks
Jay Leno was so burned Wednesday, he asked for help to change his bandages. The host of NBC’s Tonight Show had a small flame on his arm after being scalded while taping the opening half of an episode of the Late Show from his Upper West Side apartment around 7:20 p.m.
Leno was standing beside “a few ginkgo trees,” as he notes in a note printed on his Facebook page, when a prop — a prop? — caught fire.
“I was taping the opening half of the show, and got a little bit of the prop (prop?) which had caught fire,” he wrote. “I had my arm up, which is one of my arm sleeves. I started to change it, and I started to sweat.”
Leno said he left NBC for about a week as he was treated in a hospital for burns over 60 percent of his body. He said he had a “serious burn” from an accident on Nov. 18.
“I had to change the bandages, put on new ones,” Leno said, “and go through some really heavy burn rehab.”
He added that he will recover in a few weeks, although, “It’s going to take me a couple of months to find out what I got burned.”
Leno, 60, was the first person to broadcast from the set of the NBC comedy “The Tonight Show” on a regular basis in its 32 years on the air. He won a Primetime Emmy in 1976 for singing “Mighty Aphrodite” on Saturday Night Live and in 1987 was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
He also hosted The Jay Leno Show, which featured an offbeat, edgier program than his current talk show. NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno has been taped at CBS Studios in New York since 1971, and Leno’s current show has been taped since 2010 at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where he lives. The two shows are considered a rare, and often-repeated, treat for
