“Well, Henry Kissinger,” Johnny sneered, “why don’t you come to the party in case you have to mediate a new treaty?”
Great, I thought to myself. He wants me there in case there’s a mess that needs cleaning up. Now I had to go to a party where I really didn’t belong in case I had to play a role I thought I had outgrown: Henry Bushkin, the quicker picker-upper.
At long last, the Carsons arrived. They pulled up in the white Rolls-Royce Corniche that Johnny had given Joanna earlier that year, reparation for some earlier indiscretion. If nothing else, Joanna had helped Johnny redefine the Hollywood standard of an apology. He smiling, she hugging, they offered neither excuses nor explanations. It didn’t matter; just as his absence had been feared, their arrival as a duo had not been anticipated, and the guests were happily surprised as they gathered around, the women cooing and fussing over Joanna, the men backpatting and handshaking with Carson. Michael Caine draped his arm around Johnny’s shoulders, and Johnny responded with a wink. “You’re looking good and fit,” remarked Roger Moore, although Johnny, at six feet in height and in possession of a thirty-two-inch waist, had never looked otherwise.
“That jacket is amazing,” admired Tony Curtis, fingering a lapel. Indeed, this gift from NBC, a navy blue cashmere blazer with fourteen-carat gold buttons, was pretty striking, but no more so than anything else in Johnny’s bespoke wardrobe. Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart clucked like uncles. When it was my turn, I leaned in and under my breath asked, “Is everything all right?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he said with a smile.
Johnny absorbed the welcome in stride. By this point, he took his status amid this entertainment aristocracy for granted and wore the admiration lightly. With his athletic build, he stood as ramrod straight as when he had been a junior officer in the navy at the end of World War II. The cropped hair was salt and pepper, his eyes clear, the irises a piercing blue; he was probably more handsome now than in 1951 when he first brought his mischievous charm into a television studio in Los Angeles. He carried himself with more elegance than his younger self could have summoned. He wore no wedding ring. If you didn’t know how old he was (and he made no effort to disguise it), you probably would have guessed thirty-four or forty-four, but probably not fifty-four. In every aspect other than his age, this man looked like exactly what he was, king of the hill, top of the heap.
It was Johnny’s usual practice at parties to greet the host or hostess and then commandeer a friendly face and retreat to a quiet corner. That evening, Johnny, friendly and on form, relaxed and said hello to everyone. In my peacekeeper capacity, I stayed alert for signs of strain; it generally took little to capsize Carson’s mood, and who knew what state secret he was going to tell me later. But I sensed nothing untoward.
Soon enough, as happens at parties everywhere, the men gathered in one spot, and the women convened across the room. Johnny was at the center of the men, and Joanna of the women.
It was a very small and exclusive club to which these women belonged. They shopped at the same chic boutiques, ate at the same upscale eateries, had their hair and nails done at the same salon, rose and fell on the fortunes of their husbands. In the men’s group, the subject of the Carsons’ marriage was being consciously avoided; chances were better that one of the men would confess to pedophilia before he’d ask how things were going between Johnny and Joanna. Among the women, however, it was Topic A. The ladies plunged into the deep end, demanding to know if Joanna was okay. That was their code for asking if Joanna needed their help. These ladies were a formidable force when protecting one of their own. They had all seen friends being dumped by their superstar spouses, and these women were there to ensure that if such a thing did take place, those husbands would pay a heavy price.
Among the connections that held these women together was their membership in SHARE—Share Happily and Reap Endlessly—a foundation launched in 1953 by Gloria Franks, Jeanne Martin, and other powerful wives that helps and supports emotionally disturbed children. Like at an army base, where a wife’s status corresponds to her husband’s rank, Joanna entered this Old Hollywood community as a premier member of the club, and with her personality and intelligence, she was a particularly welcome one. A woman of the world, Joanna knew that it was risky for any wife to base her life entirely on her husband’s continued affections, and she sought to enhance her own status by getting involved with SHARE’s philanthropic efforts. She achieved this goal in no time, and before long, she’d become president of the organization. And that led directly to her split with Johnny.
SHARE’s big fundraiser every year is its Boomtown party, a huge event that features top-of-the-line entertainment, auctions, and special stagecraft. Every year the event is a whopping success, and every year there is pressure to top the previous event. Joanna began her tenure by volunteering Johnny to emcee the next Boomtown affair. But for whatever reason, Joanna had failed to ask Johnny first.
Big mistake. Johnny Carson was one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, but he hated being obliged to do something, and he resented being needed, especially by people close to him. It almost automatically brought out a harshness in him, a nastiness. When Joanna told him of her grand gesture, he told her to forget it; he’d hosted the event before, it was a lot of work, and he didn’t want to do it again. This led to words, which led to the separation, which resolved itself when Johnny capitulated. Why he yielded and how much he resented his surrender only he could say, and he never did. But as I learned the next day, the spectacular diamond bracelet Joanna had worn to the Mancinis was the price for the truce, and months later, the benefit would raise $500,000 for various worthy causes, with Johnny at the microphone. Still, he made it clear that he was still irked that Joanna had volunteered his services. “I was invited,” said Johnny in his monologue, with transparently faux joviality, “in the same sense that Spiro Agnew was invited to return the money.”
Once the backslapping had run its course, I could see Johnny growing restless. The eyes that could focus patient attention on Joan Embery’s chimps, nonagenarian nut-carvers, and vacuous starlets began flitting anxiously toward the door. As much as he felt like he belonged in the company of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart and other show business giants, he didn’t much care for their company. He often told me that all it took to turn the most electrifying film stars into dullards was to be around them for a while. But he felt that way around everybody. There were very few social scenes in which he was ever really comfortable, and dinner parties, unless the other guests were people he really liked, constituted real work for him; he was known to describe these events as torture.
Ed McMahon once said that Johnny “was comfortable in front of twenty million but just as uncomfortable in a gathering of twenty.” Praise from strangers soured him: too much of it was insincere or clueless, and he found it tiring to pretend that it meant anything to him. The artificial intimacy also grated; the fact that he was constantly in people’s homes made him a familiar figure in their lives, but they were never familiar to him.
Though attractive, popular, and charming, he was at heart a self-made Midwesterner—a habitual loner brought up to guard his emotional privacy. The year before, the playwright and critic Kenneth Tynan, a man Carson admired and might even have envied for his cool elegance and great anecdotes, mentioned in his New Yorker profile of Carson that someone had compared Johnny to the great Fitzgerald creation Jay Gatsby. Tynan dismissed the comparison, but I thought there was something there. Gatsby represented the American dream of self-made wealth and happiness, the spirit of youth and resourcefulness, and the ability to make something of one’s self despite one’s origins. He achieved more than his parents had and felt he was pursuing a perfect dream. Yet behind the façade, Gatsby was a lonely man. Drawn in broad strokes, that description also applied to the “King of Late-Night Television.”
Johnny relaxed a bit once he spotted Jim Mahoney, who was a partner with Paul Flaherty, another Carson confidant, in opera
ting one of LA’s top PR agencies. Some PR people are famously abrasive, always ready to fight with the media and protect their clients. Jim was the opposite, always the easy-going diplomat. He was talking with his close friend, the hotel heir Barron Hilton. Carson had often bent elbows at the Bel-Air Country Club in their company, and he headed in their direction. I discreetly followed, as did the longtime Tonight Show producer Freddy de Cordova, who commandeered us a seating area in the Mancinis’ den. Before long the jokes were flying. When a waiter came to get our drink requests, Johnny requested a glass of golden Montrachet, another sign of Joanna’s effect. Once a notoriously hard drinker, Carson had, under her influence, developed into a true connoisseur. But even though he now knew what wine to have, he still didn’t always know when he’d had enough. Drinking was always an adventure with Johnny; two drinks were enough to place Carson into a twilight zone from which could appear either a hostile, nasty, bad Johnny or a very funny good Johnny.
This night, thankfully, good Johnny emerged. “What movie star would you compare yourself to?” Hilton asked. “Lassie,” Johnny immediately replied. “We’re both lovable, and”—his eyebrows lifted, the corner of his lips turned down—“we both come when we’re called.” With this mock-affronted expression of disbelief, the impeccable delivery, and the punch line that pierced the nagging subtext of the evening, a deep, knowing, rueful laughter filled the room. Soon Johnny felt relaxed enough to take out some coins and perform several of the magic tricks he first perfected during the long Nebraska winters of his youth. A deck of cards providentially appeared, and Johnny stepped up his tricks. I was reminded of the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when we learn that Sundance couldn’t hit anything when he stood still and shot, but when he ran, tumbled, and dodged, his aim was uncanny. “I have to move,” Sundance explained. Carson standing in a living room making small talk was uneasy; Carson in performance, in front of a dozen pals or thirty million people watching the Oscars, was uncanny.
Jim Mahoney then asked Johnny if the oft-repeated story involving a guest appearance by Zsa Zsa Gabor carrying a white Persian cat was true. Gabor is said to have asked Johnny if he would like to “pet my pussy.” Carson reportedly replied, “I’d love to, if you’d just remove that damned cat!” No, it never really happened, although Johnny did give a wink and a nod to the notion that at some point he did get to pet the real thing. Mahoney, the old pro at relaxing people, kept tossing slow softballs that Johnny cheerfully knocked out of the park.
After a while, Joanna Carson gracefully glided over and invited Johnny to join her at the dinner table. Just for a moment I thought I saw him bristle, and my antennae went up. But the mood swiftly passed, and Johnny left the men’s club. But that was all right. The Mancinis had filled the room with friends of the Carsons’, and they were soon joined by Suzanne Pleshette and her husband, Tommy Gallagher. Suzanne had long been one of Johnny’s favorites, going back to one of her early appearances on the show, when the guest who had preceded her, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, kept patting Suzanne on the arm and trying to interrupt. “If you pat me on the arm again,” the starlet said to the doyenne of gossip columnists during the commercial, “I’m going to knock you on your can.” With her warm personality and bawdy sense of humor, she soon had Johnny laughing at stories about his good friend and her TV husband, Bob Newhart. When Suzanne asked Johnny and Joanna to join her and Tommy for dinner at Dominick’s the next week, he promptly agreed. Clearly the king was feeling happy.
Only once more did his mood darken—when Johnny explained to a few of the guys the reason why he was late. The cause had nothing to do with Joanna, at least not directly. Johnny was delayed because he was engaged in a prolonged telephone discussion with Jerry Staub, one of my law partners, over the rental house that he had abruptly just vacated, almost as abruptly as he had taken occupation just three weeks before.
“Get me a goddamn place to live,” an upset and angry Carson had demanded then. “I can’t fucking stand her. Get me a place to stay, because I’m moving out.”
“It’s going to be expensive,” I reminded him, perhaps needlessly, since he was presently holed up in his customary refuge, the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was hardly cheap. But no matter what it cost, the hotel wasn’t going to prove satisfactory in the long run. Johnny had his own tennis court at home, and although he got to play with former Wimbledon great Alex Olmedo when he booked a court at the hotel, he felt too exposed on a public court. He wanted privacy. “I don’t care what it costs,” Carson said. “Pay whatever they ask but get it quick.”
With price presenting no object, Marty Trugman—a well-regarded realtor who happens to be my cousin and a good friend of Johnny’s—cut a deal in no time. Fred Roven owned a gated property on Loma Vista in Beverly Hills that was very private and had the required tennis court. Marty got Fred to agree to vacate his home on a day’s notice. In turn, Johnny agreed to rent the place for three months at $25,000 a month and to pay the entire $75,000 bill up front for the place. Under ordinary circumstances, the cost would have been significantly lower, and Roven snapped up the cash.
But now that the crisis with Joanna had ended and Johnny had moved back home, he wanted his money back—a third of it, anyway. “I only stayed there for less than a third of the time,” he argued. “All I want back is a third of the money. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Sort of,” I tried to explain, “but not really. You can’t walk into a restaurant, eat a third of a steak, say you’re full, and ask for a third of the cost back. Besides, you signed a contract.”
Johnny waved me off; such legalities just didn’t square with his basic Midwestern sense of fairness. “Look, just be my lawyer and get the money back.” He insisted that I take up the issue with Fred.
“Carson can go fuck himself,” Roven replied, and there the matter ended.
After the party, standing outside the Mancinis’ home waiting for the valet to retrieve our cars, I bid Johnny and Joanna a good night.
“You’re coming over tomorrow at eleven?” he asked, referring to our standing tennis game. “Can you hang around a bit afterward? There’s something we need to talk about.”
“Sure. Care to give me a preview?”
“You’re going to New York next week to see Mike Weinblatt?” he asked, referring to the president of NBC Entertainment.
“Yeah, it’s time to get contract extension talks rolling.”
Johnny shook his head. “You need to tell him that I won’t be renewing. In fact, you need to tell him that once we do this year’s anniversary show, I’m going to quit The Tonight Show. I’m out.”
“What?” I was shocked. From time to time, Johnny spoke vaguely about what he might do when he was finished hosting The Tonight Show. Never had he made it seem like that moment might be imminent.
“Tell the boys that I’ve had enough. Their schedule is a wasteland, I have to maintain ratings without having a single worthwhile lead-in, and I have no confidence that the genius Fred Silverman will be able to yank his nuts out of the fire. Plus the grind is killing me.”
“They’ll fight like hell,” I said. “They’ll have just six months to find a new host.”
“That’s plenty of time,” he said adamantly. At that, the Corniche appeared. Johnny tossed the valet a twenty, and the newly reconciled Carsons motored happily into the night.
2
1970: Breaking In
JOHNNY CARSON, HIS famously puckish face obscured by sunglasses and disguised by distress, led a squad of men with downturned mouths and upturned collars through a rain-swept Manhattan evening. Carson strode purposefully, and his four followers hurried behind, dodging taxis and avoiding umbrellas and jumping puddles to keep pace. Their destination: a modest high-rise in the East Forties near First Avenue. Their mission: a dubious if not downright illegal cloak-and-dagger caper to enter an apartment to which they had no title, let alone keys. Their identities: Joe Mullen, a licensed New York private eye, straight out of Mickey
Spillane, serious and capable; Mario Irizarry, his tall, gaunt aide-de-camp, adept at lock picking and as conversational as a clam; and Arthur Kassel, my best friend. A security expert/crime photographer/police groupie with slightly grandiose ambitions, Arthur had made it his business over the years to befriend important people; and about a year earlier, at a police benefit, Arthur made friends with the event’s emcee, the host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson.
And then there was me, the last in line, the one hustling hardest to keep up, the one beset by worries—worried that I’d fall behind, worried that I’d collapse, worried that five hustling men in Manhattan who didn’t resemble the Knicks would draw the attention of the police. But everybody on the sidewalks had their heads down, and we didn’t stand out more than the average bustling New Yorker.
Sucking wind, I was glad when we finally reached our destination, although as we stood in the lobby, shaking the rain off our London Fogs, I began to feel a sense of panic taking hold. What was I doing here? I was a graduate of Vanderbilt University Law School! I had sworn an oath to uphold the law, not violate it, and breaking and entering in the state of New York is a felony. As if sensing my panic, Johnny looked over at me. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said reassuringly. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Trust me.”
And trust him I might have—after all, he was famous; he must know more than I—but then he turned to my friend.
“Arthur,” he asked, “are you packing today?”
Arthur nodded and patted his hip. “There’s nothing wrong with a little shooting,” he said, “as long as the right person gets shot.”
Breaking and entering while in possession of a deadly weapon: that’s a whole other class of felony in New York State.
In 1970 I was twenty-seven years old, born and raised in the Bronx, the child of a thoroughly middle-class couple, my mom the secretary to a union leader, my dad a salesman in the garment district. I attended Lehigh University, where I played on the varsity tennis team, and then went on to law school at Vanderbilt. There I acquired a law degree and a wife, a pretty blonde Nashville girl named Judy. Now we were back in New York, in a very nice apartment in Forest Hills, with a newborn son whom we loved dearly. I got a job as an associate at a small but competitive entertainment law firm, Beldock and Kushnick, with offices at 720 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, right near Central Park, and I was a happy man. I was no highflyer, but I felt good about where I was and where I was going. Entertainment law was constantly interesting, and I felt fortunate to be able to study by the side of Jerrold Kushnick, who was highly regarded in music industry circles. Among the firm’s clients were The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Frank Sinatra’s colorful longtime manager, Jerry Weintraub (who would later produce Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels). Brought in to replace an attorney who had left the firm to represent the affairs of Bette Midler, the firm wasted little time tossing me into the fray. My first case involved copyright infringement, and I won, which gave me the confidence any freshman lawyer needs as he begins his career, especially in New York City. Now the firm had entrusted me with executing all the contracts that were required by the producers of a big rock festival in Atlanta that was going to feature one of our up-and-coming acts, Grand Funk Railroad. I was a little fish in a relatively small current in the middle of an entertainment ocean, but I was excited. I had a wife I loved, a kid I adored, a job I found interesting—things were good. Then Arthur Kassel called.
Johnny Carson Page 2