“I do.”
“So what did I talk about?”
“You talked about everything last night—everything. Your mother, your family, your heartbreak over Joanne, a lot of stuff. But if you’re worried, just realize that I’m your lawyer; everything that is said between us is confidential and covered by attorney-client privilege. I would lose my license if during your lifetime I repeated it to a soul.”
I heard him laugh. “Well, Henry, I guess you’re my lawyer now. Can you come over this afternoon? I want you to file for divorce as soon as possible.”
3
1970: Calamity John
I WAS NOW OFFICIALLY Johnny Carson’s lawyer, an amazing turn of events, as astonishing as if I had won a lottery. But I didn’t have much time to savor my good fortune.
People have often asked me how the hell a young, wet-behind-the-ears lawyer got himself hired to represent one of the biggest names in entertainment. Well, I’ve described the how, but I don’t know if anyone can fully explain the why. All I know is that one of Carson’s favorite sayings was “It’s all in the timing,” and timing had a lot to do with what happened. I met Johnny at just about the moment he had begun to suspect that the icons who had been representing him hadn’t really done a very good job protecting his welfare. After that, all I can say is that I was then able to offer the qualities needed at the moment—earnestness, interest, willingness, and sufficient intellect.
And a certain tenacity. My first employers and mentors, Jerry Kushnick and Howard Beldock, taught me to be alert and always on the lookout for new clients.
In the New York of that era, lawyers tenaciously vied for clients, entertainment lawyers especially. From the moment I signed on as a young associate, my bosses drilled me in the techniques of client protocols. Never decline a case until I had spoken to them and never admit to a potential client a lack of expertise in any legal discipline. If Johnny Carson needed a divorce lawyer, my complete lack of expertise in matrimonial law was immaterial; I would just work like hell to turn myself into the best divorce lawyer in New York. My job was to go the extra mile to prepare myself and rely on the senior partners if I found myself in over my head. But pass up a client? Never!
You won’t be surprised to learn that things grew complicated fast.
As soon as we filed papers for divorce, Joanne hired Raoul Felder. To this day, Felder is feared and revered as one of Manhattan’s premier divorce lawyers, having represented Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Robin Givens, Richard Harris, Carol Channing, David Merrick, Riddick Bowe, and the less famous (and now former) spouses of such notables as Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Carl Sagan, Tom Clancy, Patrick Ewing, and Martin Scorsese. Just thirty-one years old in 1970, Felder was himself relatively new to matrimonial law practice, not quite yet the Duke of Divorce of tabloid fame. But he had spent nearly a decade in the trenches, first prosecuting cases as an assistant U.S. attorney, and then arguing appeals in federal court as a special assistant U.S. attorney; both posts usually draw lawyers who are aggressive, relentless, and whip smart.
Carson and I were perhaps fortunate that we encountered Felder when he knew only most of the tricks in the book, not every single one of them.
Felder promptly went on the offensive. He filed a brief that sought an alimony payment of $35,000 a month, an amount that was, as all the newspapers loudly reminded me the next day, the largest such payment ever sought in the state of New York. All at once it was clear that in the very first matter I was handling for my precious new client, I had hit the trifecta: I would be facing a matrimonial-law gladi ator in a case that would get played out in national headlines and that would involve unprecedented stakes, affecting my client’s wealth and reputation. Welcome to the major leagues.
The first step in the normal process of negotiating a divorce settlement is straightforward, or at least it is if people don’t lie. It involves taking an inventory of the couple’s property and then evaluating its worth. Once that’s settled, the parties figure out how to split things up. As we worked through that exercise, facts revealed themselves, little by little, like the layers of an onion. Curious facts. Disturbing facts. Like the fact that Johnny Carson wasn’t wealthy. Indeed, he had very little money.
He had little money because the people around him, whom he trusted, were serving him poorly.
He was being taken advantage of.
He was, by and large, alone.
And his life was a wreck.
The mess in his personal life was obvious. Carson was forty-five years old, had been through two marriages that had ended painfully, was the father of three sons whom he seldom saw, and he drank to excess nearly every night.
Plus, The Tonight Show, the cornerstone of his life, was not quite as solid as it appeared. The ratings were good and Johnny was popular, but behind the scenes there was turmoil. Carson had already fired two veteran producers, Art Stark and Stan Irwin. The current producer, Rudy Tellez, was on shaky ground, not only because of the quality of his work, but also because Rudy’s wife, Jeannie, who had long been a friend of Johnny’s, had accompanied Joanne when she went apartment hunting in search of a love nest and then leased the apartment for her in the Tellez name. Johnny didn’t feel entirely justified in taking out Jeannie’s betrayal on Rudy. On the other hand, did he really want to come to work every day and work with a man who would serve as a constant reminder of his wife’s faithlessness? Rudy may not have known he was on his way out, but the only thing that would have made it more obvious would have been somebody pinning a target on his chest.
But beyond the show, Johnny was underserved. In addition to having an executive producer, a star of Carson’s stature would often have a retinue of advisors. Among them would be an agent, whose job is to find the artist work and negotiate the terms of employment; and a manager, who would help plan the course of the performer’s career and who often finds opportunities for endorsements, investments, and other business opportunities to augment the performer’s income. Often the manager is a lawyer, but many performers have a separate attorney to provide advice and counsel. Many celebrities also solicit guidance from their publicists. The point is, the bigger the stars, the more people they have to advise them and look out for their interests.
Johnny Carson was badly underserved.
You’ve already met me, the lawyer. You know how unimpressive a résumé I had, but at least I was present.
Johnny also had an agent, at least nominally, at the William Morris Agency, then, as now, one of the major Hollywood talent agencies. But as I discovered when I began examining Johnny’s files, the agency had temporarily suspended working on Johnny’s behalf and had filed a claim against him for a commission on earnings that not only he had yet to receive but that also exceeded the amount he actually did bring home. This seemed insane to me. I couldn’t understand why Carson’s manager, Sonny Werblin, hadn’t cleared this up. The more I got into every aspect of Johnny’s financial life, the more mystified I became about what Werblin was doing.
From what I could tell, Johnny had poor luck with managers. His first managers were Al Bruno and Tom Shields, a Runyonesque pair, always chasing the broads and closing more bars than the Temper ance League. They worked hard for Johnny and believed strongly in his talent and his future; when Jack Paar quit The Tonight Show, they campaigned hard for Carson to get the job. Their persistence paid off, first when NBC decided to offer Johnny the job, and yet again, even more crucially, when ABC refused to let Carson out of his contract to host Who Do You Trust? The managers had to persuade NBC to use a parade of temporary hosts while they waited six months for Johnny’s liberation. But after all their effort, they made a big mistake: they allowed a sliver of daylight to come between their interests and Johnny’s. They let Johnny suspect that they were not completely committed to him when they signed Mike Douglas.
Mike Douglas may not be well remembered today, but he was a singer with a popular and successful ninety-minute talk show that was syndicated by Westinghouse Broadcas
ting. In most markets it was an afternoon or dinner-hour show that did not compete directly against The Tonight Show. Still, it had the same format, and being based in nearby Philadelphia, it drew guests from the same New York talent pool, so it always had the potential to book an act that The Tonight Show wanted or do a bit that was too similar to something The Tonight Show had been contemplating. Douglas was nothing like Carson; he was a crooner from the Big Band era, a thoroughgoing square, a blandly good-looking diversion for women forced by the constraints of motherhood or wifedom to stay at home. Neither witty nor handsome nor cool, he represented no threat to Carson, except that he existed. Because if he existed, there could always be some strange, perverse, bizarre, macabre, self-destructive way that NBC could imagine Douglas replacing Johnny.
Carson felt that Bruno and Shields were wrong to represent Douglas. It was like representing Bing Crosby and then signing Frank Sinatra; sure, they came from different generations and had distinct styles and personae, but you couldn’t say that there would never be a conflict. Indeed, there could be a lot of conflicts, and Johnny didn’t like it. As I would come to see again and again, Carson not only valued loyalty, he demanded it. And yet he was generally a fair man. Although he was angry that these agents had created the potential for a conflict, he didn’t think he had actually been neglected yet, and until that happened, Carson wouldn’t pull the trigger.
Of course, it didn’t take long. They booked Carson a gig performing at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach—two shows on Friday night, two shows on Saturday, and nothing but sky, beach, and luxury in between. The agents flew down with Johnny for the date, but then they disappeared. During rehearsal and sound check, it became evident that the sound system was on life support. This disturbed Johnny, as it would most performers who cared very much that they sound their best and that people who were paying to see them get their money’s worth. The hotel tried to reassure Johnny that the sound could be fixed, but time passed and no repairs were made. Johnny wanted Bruno and Shields to step in and perform the role that managers are paid to play, that of the heavy; the enforcer; the bad cop; the insane guy who yells, threatens, and implies dark consequences for his adversaries and all their future generations. But Johnny’s managers were not available to him in his hour of need. They had driven up to Fort Lauderdale with some newfound female friends.
At least they weren’t with Mike Douglas.
The first show got under way, and the sound proved no better than at rehearsal. Carson, furious, immediately packed his bags and left for New York. “Good luck finding those assholes!” Johnny said as he exited. Don Rickles, fortunately for him, was in the hotel playing the lounge, and the hotel immediately slotted him into the big room. He did not seem to have an issue with the sound.
As soon as Johnny returned to New York, he fired Bruno and Shields, and he never spoke to either of them again. He did, however, tell the story of that evening many times over the years, mostly because he loved the punch line. “The sound was so bad that the audience was getting restless,” he’d say. “There were twelve hundred angry Jews in that room. They got Jesus but they were not going to get me. I got the hell out of town as quickly as I could.”
Bruno and Shields were replaced by Werblin, now in his third year with Carson. David “Sonny” Werblin was a major executive, a certified “big macher.” Originally a high-status show business agent—he had served as the president of the TV division of the powerful MCA (Music Corporation of America) agency—he had gone on to become a major sports impresario. For part of the time that he represented Johnny, he was the minority owner and president of the New York Jets, and also owned Elberon Farms, a large stable where he bred and raced thoroughbred horses. Later he became chairman of Madison Square Garden. These are outstanding credentials, but it wasn’t as if Johnny had convened a search committee to find the best possible candidate to manage his affairs. Neither had the mighty Werblin surveyed the landscape and selected Johnny as a singular talent worthy of his ministrations. He was simply Johnny’s neighbor. One day Sonny ran into Joanne at the elevator, and when she came back, she suggested his name to Carson. As we shall see, Johnny might have been better off had he limited his interactions with his neighbor to borrowing sugar.
As I mentioned before, the first thing I discovered when we began our inventory of the Carson holdings was that Johnny had very little money, nothing like the sums a star of his stature would be assumed to have. He had no investments, owned no real estate, had no real savings—and this was a man who for more than a decade had been generously paid like the popular network television star that he was. What’s more, he had a second highly lucrative career doing his com edy act at nightclubs and concert halls. Obviously he lived lavishly and had a big overhead paying alimony and child support, but his lack of funds was shocking.
Carson had only one real asset: deferred compensation owed him by NBC. In 1967 his lawyer, Arnold Grant, a man described by a mutual friend as a “razor-sharp tax attorney” (and the husband of the former Miss America, television personality, and New York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson), negotiated a contract that was nominally paying Carson $100,000 a week to host The Tonight Show. That’s $5,200,000 a year, but Carson didn’t have access to even a tenth of that income. Instead, he was receiving $3,000 a week—that’s just $156,000 a year—with the rest being deferred. Grant, the brilliant tax attorney, negotiated this deal in 1967 when the income tax rate on big earners was 70 percent. The deal prevented the government from devouring Johnny’s income, but it left Carson with just enough to cover his admittedly extravagant expenses and nothing for savings or investment. NBC was delighted to oblige Carson’s wishes. The company wouldn’t have to pay the balance for decades, and then it would be in dollars that had been devalued by inflation. And if in some weird, unforeseen way the deal somehow turned out to be against NBC’s interests, the executives who negotiated the deal were going to be long gone when the bill came due.
The loser in the deal was Johnny. He was pocketing $3,000 for hosting five ninety-minute shows a week—or in other words, just $600 a program, which wasn’t much more than the $450 his celebrity guests were paid for their fifteen-minute guest spots. It’s true that the deal did shelter Johnny’s income from taxes, although there would have been other ways to do that: through investments that would have been more profitable, more productive, and less restrictive. It’s also true that the real value of the deal was as a hedge, a bet against Carson’s talent. Had he flamed out after a few years and become a pop-culture footnote like Jack Paar, then the deal would have been an insurance policy that would have protected his money and preserved his capital for the years after his popularity had evaporated. It was a very conservative strategy, a case of being prudent to a fault.
When I explained to him that there were other ways to handle his money that would have left him with more to spend, Johnny sadly shook his head.
“Arnold Grant told me that this would be the best thing to do, and I took his advice.”
Not until the bill arrived was Carson’s skepticism fully engaged. The lawyer charged Carson $250,000, which, thanks to the contract Grant had just negotiated, Carson did not have enough money to pay. The solicitous Grant then helped Carson acquire a bank loan to cover the fee. Carson took out the loan and then fired Grant. As with Bruno and Shields, he never spoke to Grant again.
To make matters worse, the William Morris Agency then chimed in and billed Carson for their 10 percent commission on the weekly $100,000 salary. Carson tried to explain to them that his real earnings were $3,000 a week, and that the rest of the dough was just a number on a promissory note that would sit in some safe until Johnny retired, at which time Johnny would be happy to pay the commission. Surely they completely understood that this was a tax ploy; surely they could wait to get their cut.
By 1970 things had changed. The top marginal tax rates on high earners had been reduced, and Johnny, a much bigger star than in 1967, was a beneficiary.
The new contract that Werblin negotiated ended the deferred compensation scheme and upped Johnny’s take-home pay to $30,000 a week, or $6,000 per show. Still, after paying the bills for his lavish lifestyle, Johnny had little money left for growth.
Little by little, however, it became clear that in hiring Werblin, Carson had repeated the mistake he had made with Grant: he found someone with a big reputation and invested his faith, and his earn ings, in that reputation. But Sonny did not have the patience or time to devote to his famous client. He had other fish to fry. Plus, it was a drag to live cheek-by-jowl with a client and his needy wife, each of whom could be relied upon to end one of their frequent arguments by stomping down the hallway and banging on Werblin’s door.
Sonny didn’t have the time. Sonny didn’t have the interest. Sonny didn’t have the patience.
Sonny should have quit.
But here’s the thing: Sonny was milking Johnny for too much cash.
Johnny Carson, famously dapper, wore a new outfit on his show each night. Like any good manager, Werblin recognized an endorsement opportunity. He negotiated a deal with Hart Schaffner & Marx to launch a new label, Johnny Carson Apparel. This was a very shrewd idea. Johnny wore new duds every night, and it wasn’t wasted on the men in the audience—or on the women who picked out the men’s clothing—that Carson always looked stylish and sophisticated.
But as I studied Johnny’s contracts, I was shocked to realize that he owned no equity interest in the new company. Instead, half was owned by the manufacturer and half by Sonny Werblin. Carson, in effect, was paid a salary to wear clothes from the company that bore his name, while the man he had entrusted with his affairs lined his own pockets. And the company was doing well; Johnny should have been building equity in the product plus pulling down a substantial income.
Johnny Carson Page 5