First Lady Laura Bush during The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at the NBC studios in Burbank, California. (Reuters)

Burbank (Calfornia), May 20 (Reuters): US First Lady Laura Bush was warned by her mother-in-law never to criticise George W. Bush’s speeches, and the one time she did, he drove the car into the garage wall, she said yesterday.

Bush, on a two-day campaign swing on behalf of the President, gave a light-hearted interview to NBC’s The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, a frequent stop for presidential candidates and their surrogates eager for the exposure to the show’s 6 million viewers.

She poked gentle fun at her no-nonsense mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, wife of former President George Bush, saying it took a while for the two of them to bond.

This was after Leno said the former First Lady once squeezed his hand hard and told him to stop making all those jokes about her son.

“She was pretty intimidating,” the daughter-in-law said. “She was, for sure. She sure can be. She’s terrific, though. She’s a wonderful mother-in-law.”

In 1978 when George W. Bush was in an ultimately futile race for a congressional seat in Texas, the elder Mrs Bush warned her daughter-in-law to “never criticise George’s speeches.”

She took the advice “until one night we were driving into our driveway and he said: ‘Tell me the truth. How was my speech?’ And I said: ‘Well, it wasn’t that good.’ And with that he drove into... the garage wall,” she said.

Asked by Leno the last time she had a disagreement with the President, Laura Bush replied: “Jay, what happens in the White House, stays in the White House.” And as for whether she went out for a wild time in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, she said: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

Giving a glimpse of home life at the White House, Mrs. Bush said she and her husband get up at 5.30 am, he fetches coffee and they read the newspapers in bed. She said she is working out with a personal trainer, lifting weights and getting “quite buff.”

But when asked if she could beat Democrat John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, in a fight, Laura Bush gave him a smile and said: “Very funny.”