Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  During this time, he was linked with many attractive women, including Eartha Kitt, Peggy Lee, and singer Joanie Sommers. Another was Angel Tompkins, a slinky blonde for whom the word nubile was invented and for whom clothing wasn’t. A fixture in Playboy, she had featured roles in films with Gene Hackman, Lee Marvin, Elliott Gould, and other stars. I crossed paths with her as she was leaving Carson’s apartment one morning, and while I was sure she was slipped in undetected by Joe Mullen the night before, she took no precautions in leaving; after all, if I could see her, so could detectives hired by Joanne’s attorney, Raoul Felder. “You’re nuts to be doing this and to be so careless,” I said. “If Felder finds out, you could be screwed.”

  “Fuck him,” said Johnny. “A stiff prick has no conscience.” And he would not discuss it further.

  Several weeks later, I asked what was going on with Ms. Tompkins. I told him it was relevant to the case, but really I was just being nosy. I was surprised to hear that he had dumped her. “She’s done,” he said. “She’s in some sitcom, and she said in an interview that we were dating. Well, we’re not.” Just to reiterate, I started to review the relevant passage in New York matrimonial law for him, but he waved me off. “I know the ground rules,” he said. “In fact, I told her my lawyers made me give her the ax because of her big mouth.” In reality, discretion was always his rule, and he enforced it ruthlessly. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “I won’t screw up again. The furthest thing from my mind at this moment is getting involved with another woman.”

  That lasted until the moment he met Joanna Holland.

  Tall, with jade-colored eyes and long, lustrous dark hair, Joanna was a thirty-one-year-old model. Raised in New York in an Italian family, her first husband was the handsome, raffish Tim Holland, who had fashioned a career gambling, playing golf in stakes matches, and winning backgammon tournaments (between 1968 and 1973 he was the world’s reigning backgammon champion). Though happy at first—Joanna was certainly impressed with the glamorous lifestyle she and Tim enjoyed in Biarritz, Monte Carlo, and St. Moritz—they divorced in 1966.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Holland later told People magazine. “Our lives didn’t mesh. She wanted someone who went to business and worked. I played golf.” After the split, Joanna began supporting herself and her son, Tim, in their small but elegant Park Avenue apartment by modeling for such celebrated designers as Donald Brooks, Geoffrey Beene, and Mollie Parnis, who takes credit for introducing the couple one evening at the 21 Club, where Johnny was dining with Parnis, Freddy de Cordova, and Jack and Mary Benny. “I was flirting like a sophomore,” Johnny later said. In the opinion of Parnis, “Joanna was much more sophisticated than Johnny.”

  Sophisticated indeed, the decidedly upmarket Joanna was no trifle. “Dark haired, of medium height and voluptuous build,” an obviously smitten Kenneth Tynan would later write, “the third Mrs. Carson is the kind of woman, bright and molto simpatico, whom you expect to meet, not in Bel Air, but at a cultural soiree in Rome.” (Something about her brought out the continental in writers: in the Hollywood Reporter, George Christy said she had “the sexiest strut this side of Montmartre.”)

  The men she dated were substantial figures. Prior to meeting Johnny, Joanna had been involved romantically with the chairman of the Hertz Corporation and other highly successful men who could and did spend extravagantly in their pursuit of a woman with her class and beauty. One former boyfriend, having loved and lost, forgot that he was supposed to behave like a gentleman. He sued Joanna, claiming the large sum of money he had provided to furnish her apartment was a loan. Joanna’s position was that the money was unambiguously a gift. (Later it fell to me to defend Joanna and then settle the case. Johnny parted with some cash to make the man go away.)

  Some people have muttered that Joanna was a gold digger, but that was not a shrewd or subtle or insightful assessment. Joanna realized she had been dealt a hand full of high cards and that for the benefit of herself and her son, she was determined to play the hand brilliantly. And she did.

  Joanna had style, she had class, and I thought she’d be terrific for Johnny. Certainly in the beginning of their marriage she very much was. And, not long after they started dating, I could see that Joanna had fallen in love with him. She was not naive. She was a smart and sophisticated woman who understood from the start what she was getting into, in no small measure from the tutelage she received during her first marriage. Johnny’s lifestyle—the boozing, his infinite attraction to women and their overwhelming interest in him—was well known. In the singles game, Johnny was the ultimate “get,” and he enjoyed his status. No matter to whom he was married, no matter how happily, when an alluring woman came within range, the instinct for new adventure was an impulse he saw little need to restrain. In the realm of women, it was Johnny’s world. He had the pick of almost anyone.

  So with all of this as a backdrop, I was more than a little astonished when over dinner Johnny said to me, “I think Joanna is the one.” It took me several beats to absorb this news until I finally pointed out, perhaps a little stupidly, “You’re still married to Joanne. And the way the divorce is going, it will be at least a year before you’re not married to her.” I had no interest in standing in the way of Joanna per se, but I knew that if the relationship became public, it was going to cost Johnny a vastly larger sum to free himself from Joanne. But, as I was to discover so many times, the realities I feared mattered nothing to Johnny Carson when there was something he wanted. “Please just get it done. No more meetings on the subject. Give Joanne what she wants and end it.”

  From my point of view, the proceedings should have ended long ago. Joanne had been caught in an adulterous relationship. That was grounds for divorce. There were no custody issues. There was property to divide, alimony to negotiate, but she was a young woman who had a somewhat successful television career and had previously been an airline stewardess; it should have been an easy settlement. But it wasn’t. Raoul Felder, defining his style as a matrimonial litigator, was intransigent, and Joanne, unfortunately, was hysterical. She phoned Johnny and harangued him, and then phoned me and harangued me. She showed up at NBC in an inebriated condition to annoy and provoke him. It got to the point where we had to move for restraining orders.

  Sometimes her behavior made me feel that I was in over my head. Once I sought the advice of the great lawyer Louis Nizer, who had briefly represented Carson, as well as Charlie Chaplin, Salvador Dali, and many other famous clients. I was happy I did; he was the Yoda I had been hoping for.

  “Nothing is more bitter than litigation between husbands and wives,” he told me. “The nastiness and anger exceed that of any other relationship. Don’t get caught up in it. Leave all the emotions to the psychiatrists. Focus on creating an equitable settlement.” It was very sound advice; even more flattering, Nizer called me a few weeks later to see if I would be interested in joining his firm. I wasn’t.

  The turning point came when Joanne, for whatever reason, replaced the militant Felder with the even-keeled, highly professional Morton Bass. Once he got involved, the case resolved itself. We agreed that Joanne would receive the sum of $6,000 per month until she remarried or until Johnny’s death (which she did, until Johnny died in 2005), as well as a pretty nice little art collection. It was a fair settlement, but given the millions Johnny was earning at the time, I think I did a damn good job for him.

  The case did not end without a further outburst. On the very day in June 1972 when the divorce settlement was to be put on the record at the Bronx Supreme Court, Joanne fired Bass and introduced her new attorney. The judge would have none of it and made it clear that if she did not approve the settlement, there would be severe repercussions. Joanne came to her senses long enough to recant, and the settlement was approved. As part of the deal, Carson had agreed to pay Bass $35,000 for his fees. I gave him the check at the courthouse once the settlement was approved.

  Now that the path was clear for Carson to marry Joanna, the question be
came whether he should. The two of us sat down and had a talk. “Are you sure?” I asked him. “Do you know what you’re really getting into?” I felt ridiculous, playing the cliché role of Pa Walton. Who was I to advise Johnny to be cautious? I was not yet out of my twenties, in practice for only four years, and married myself a mere four years (less than a quarter of the time Johnny had spent as a husband). Both Johnny and Joanna had been around the block and knew perfectly well what they were doing. Who was I to intervene?

  Happily, Johnny took it well. He wasn’t much interested in my advice to wait a bit until the fallout from his divorce had settled, but he did indulge my request to call Joe Mullen and have him do a thorough background check on Joanna and her family.

  Joe’s dossier was quite thorough. The details of Joanna’s marriage to Tim Holland and their subsequent divorce were covered. Her later relationships with rather affluent men were scrutinized. She lived with her son in a well-furnished Park Avenue apartment. Her mother, Linda, and brother, Peter, were very much part of her life. Nothing in the report caused Johnny any concern.

  Which was good. I certainly wasn’t rooting against her. I liked her, I got a kick out of her mother, and I thought her brother was a good guy. And so it was on with the show. With two wives behind him, Johnny quietly proposed to Joanna and was delighted when she said yes.

  Just two things remained. Determined to avoid the predictable media insanity, Johnny made it very clear that he wanted the marriage to Joanna to happen in complete secrecy—CIA dark ops! No leaks! And it had to happen soon. In one month, NBC was throwing a party for Johnny at the Beverly Hills Hotel honoring his tenth anniversary as host of The Tonight Show, and Johnny wanted to surprise everyone by announcing that he and Joanna were married—not just engaged, but actually married—at that event.

  The most obvious clue that a couple intends to marry is to be found on display at city hall, where the couple has to take out a marriage license, and where loose-lipped clerks on columnists’ payrolls are happy to leak the news. Therefore, the first key to having a secret nuptial is to engage the cooperation of a romantic judge who will keep the paperwork out of the usual traffic. As it happened, my cousin, Richard Trugman, was a lawyer in Los Angeles, and he arranged a lunch for me at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills with Judge Mario Clinco, a superior court judge at the Santa Monica courthouse. Fortunately, Judge Clinco was not only romantic but also a bit starstruck, and he was only too happy to help America’s biggest TV star prevent his special day from being ruined by a media melee. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll keep the license application and the marriage certificate in my chambers until after the event has been announced. The press will be none the wiser until Johnny breaks the news.” Carson was so pleased that he graciously invited Judge Clinco and his wife to the upcoming party, where he made sure the three posed for numerous photographs together. It had all been something of an organizational nightmare but we achieved success.

  But with the wedding day at hand, a lone detail remained unaddressed: the prenuptial agreement. Nobody was more aware than I was that Johnny’s important affairs had been badly handled in the past, and I was determined to make sure this matter was correctly concluded. The new marriage was governed under California law and California is a community property state, which meant that in the event of divorce, in the absence of some other arrangement, the couple would split their estate in half.

  I really wanted Johnny to make some other arrangement. Joanna was a fine woman, but there was no reason on earth that she should get half his dough. Prior to the wedding ceremony, I tried repeatedly to get Johnny to focus on this issue, and I knew he understood its import completely. He was the highest-paid performer in television. He was bringing a fortune to the union; her assets were negligible. A proper agreement was essential to protect everything he had earned over all his previous years of hard work. It was also designed to protect the bulk of what he would go on to earn.

  I prepared the agreement for Joanna to sign. She was waiting for it; her counsel was standing by ready to review the papers, and she had expressed no resentment about making such an arrangement. And why would she? The amount we had proposed to settle upon her in the event of divorce was extremely generous, and Joanna, a sophisticated woman, knew it. Whatever destiny had in store for them, she and her son would be very secure.

  It was Johnny who balked. Trugman and I had gone over the prenuptial details with Carson repeatedly, and he had yet to sign. Finally, with time running out and guests on the verge of arriving, Johnny shook his head. “This is no way to start a marriage,” he said. “Tear the goddamn thing up.”

  I was stunned. I had been Johnny’s lawyer for slightly more than two years, which was not yet enough time to say, as I later certainly would have, “What the fuck are you doing?” Instead, I argued as best I could. “A prenuptial agreement is just common sense. A man like you needs one. Joanna understands. She has no problem with it. She expects it! Honestly, this could really come back to bite you in years to come.”

  “I hear you, Henry,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.”

  In desperation I played my hole card. “Remember that first night we talked in Jilly’s? Remember how terrible you are at marriage?”

  “I remember,” he said. “But I don’t care.”

  I did the only thing I could. I wrote him a letter that required his acknowledgment, which stated that against all advice to the contrary, he was going forward with the marriage without the prenuptial. He countersigned the letter. I next called his accountant in New York, Warren Shine. I insisted that Shine make notes of the conversation so that I had some further protection for this massive mistake.

  “You know, Johnny, Henry’s right,” Shine said. “Why, the tax implications . . .”

  “Piss off, Warren,” Johnny said, and hung up the phone. Then he turned to me.

  “Why the hell did you tell Shine about the marriage?” he yelled. “This could ruin the surprise at the party. You better make sure he keeps his fucking mouth shut.” With that, the matter ended. Johnny had no regard for the potential cost of this failure; the only thing on his mind was the surprise.

  At least for the moment, he had his bride, he had his marriage, and he had his surprise. The next evening, as Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Burt Reynolds, Rowan and Martin, and hundreds of other guests looked on, Johnny Carson cut a twelve-foot-high cake in celebration of his anniversary and then made an astonishing announcement.

  “A lot of columnists have been asking why me and my gal haven’t set a date for the wedding, so I think I will tell you that we were married at one-thirty this afternoon.” Johnny then leaned down and kissed Joanna. Flip Wilson, wearing his Geraldine drag, kissed Johnny. Noting that all three of Johnny’s wives had names that started with the same letter, Bob Newhart concluded, “Obviously Johnny didn’t want to have to change the monograms on the towels after every marriage.”

  The secret had been kept, romance had triumphed, the laughs were plentiful, and the party rocked. No marriage ever had a more promising beginning.

  In time, when the marriage ended and the divorce was settled, this romantic gesture would cost Johnny $35 million.

  5

  1972–1978: Stairway to Paradise

  IN A LONG-ANTICIPATED move, The Tonight Show left New York in 1972 for Los Angeles. Although the television industry had been cradled in Manhattan, building on the infrastructure of the creative and technical talent and investment that had produced radio, significant segments of the industry had by 1970 located in LA, especially the big sound stages where most of the TV series were filmed. Nearly everything having to do with entertainment, including most of the game shows, was now being produced in the studios in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley, leaving the news broadcasts and the talk shows in New York. Three of those programs—The Tonight Show on NBC, The Dick Cavett Show on ABC, and The Merv Griffin Show on Westinghouse—were produced within blocks of one another, and
the battle for guest stars was intense. The bookers could hardly avoid duplicating one another; in the meantime, on the opposite coast, a mother lode of talent was idling by the pool.

  There was another factor: New York was becoming an increasingly stressful place to live, with crime, strikes, disruption, and deteriorating conditions leaving people feeling beleaguered and depressed. Johnny, who liked the time he spent in Los Angeles early in his career, was perfectly happy to kiss the Big Apple good-bye. As he told an interviewer, “At this point in my life, I enjoy playing tennis, enjoy going to the beach. I lived in New York seventeen years; I like the idea, as corny as it sounds, of a yard and a house. Maybe that’s the old Midwestern values, but I like being able to walk outside in the morning and sit around; you can’t do that in New York.”

  But my question was: What about me?

  Even after Johnny had moved across the country, he still counted on me to handle all his issues, including that period when divorce proceedings with Joanne were being conducted in New York and his wedding plans with Joanna were being made in LA. In the year following his relocation, I made sixteen round trips to Los Angeles. It wasn’t that much of a hardship. Flying in those days was easier and more pleasurable—so loose was security that a passenger could not only take a gun on an airplane but little bottles of shampoo as well—and it was always a pleasure to leave whatever was going on in New York and get out into the Southern California sun. My cousins, Richard and Marty Trugman, gave me a warm welcome whenever I showed up, as did the staff of the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel, whose costs I passed on to Carson. No matter what else was going on, we met every day and played tennis at the hotel or the Bel-Air Country Club. More and more with each trip, I could see myself living in that environment.