One of the first deals I did for Carson in Los Angeles was actually in Las Vegas. During the seventies, the same well-funded legitimate interests, personified by Howard Hughes, that were cleaning up at the hotels and casinos were putting money into other enterprises. Having known serious development for only about twenty-five years, Las Vegas was suddenly a booming metropolis that offered major business opportunities to anybody who had cash available. With my advice, Carson headed a group of investors who bought the local television station KVVU. The ownership name was changed to Carson Broadcasting.
This marked an important milestone in our relationship. It was the first major investment that Johnny made where I was the chief architect of the deal; there would be many more, to our mutual enrichment. Our group bought the station for $1 million. Not too many years later, we sold it for $25 million, landing a far larger jackpot than any high roller in a casino ever did. For me, there was also the satisfaction that I was serving my client well. It was a deal that stood in sharp contrast to the Johnny Carson Apparel arrangement designed by Sonny Werblin.
With Carson as the cornerstone and unrivaled number one client, the law firm prospered, and in 1976 we opened impressive new offices at 2025 Century Park East in Century City. Johnny came by for a visit. Inspecting my office, Johnny said, “You know what you need here, Henry? A red phone.”
“A red phone?”
“A red phone. Like the one used to communicate between the White House and the Kremlin. A dedicated line that only I know the number to and that only you can answer. Or Carrie, if you’re out. A phone where I can always reach you.”
I had the line installed the next day.
Before long, Johnny and Joanna and Judy and I were all great friends. Not surprisingly, Judy was at first shy when she was with Johnny, but after moving across the country so her husband could work for the man, she agreed that it would make sense to get to know him better. Johnny made it easy by inviting us over for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Reserved and very attractive at five feet seven inches, with brown hair and a very good figure, Judy was the prettiest girl in the world in my opinion. She certainly made a great impression on Carson.
Rick Carson was present when Judy first met Johnny. He was recently released from Bellevue and the navy, and Judy was able to draw him into the conversation in a way that impressed Johnny. Indeed, in the years to come, Judy would develop a rapport with Rick that Johnny really appreciated. Judy was also able to go toe-to-toe with Johnny in the smoking arena (butt-to-butt doesn’t sound right). Over time, he grew quite fond of Judy, and little by little began including her in his jokes. It would take a full two years before I knew that he really accepted her, which he signaled by pretending to make a pass at her one night after a few drinks at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes on the French Riviera. (At least I think he was pretending.) Indeed, there was a period when Johnny was quite fond of a lot of people in the Bushkin circle. He liked playing tennis with Marty Trugman. He enjoyed the company of Judy’s dad, Max Beck, a great deal. On one amazing day, at Johnny’s instigation, he drove Max, me, and Scotty in the Rolls down to Long Beach to see Howard Hughes’s fabled wooden airplane, the Spruce Goose. The tour was conducted by none other than Hughes’s right-hand man, Robert Maheu, at a time when the plane was not open to the public. Very cool.
But at the heart of this little social set were two couples, the Carsons and the Bushkins. The two men took care of business together, and the two women worked on charity projects together. The two men played tennis together, and the two women shopped together. The two couples dined together, weekended together, traveled together. Some of those trips rank among the most memorable moments of my life.
The summer of 1976 was the hottest summer London had experienced in at least 350 years, with fifteen days in a row exceeding 90 degrees. It just so happened that Judy and I were coming to London to meet Johnny and Joanna during those fifteen days. The plan was to spend a week in London at the Wimbledon Championships, and then go on to the South of France. Originally we were all going to stay at the elegant Inn on the Park Hotel in the Mayfair section of London, but Johnny wanted no part of it. Too many NBC execs would be at that hotel. NBC was broadcasting the tournament, and the Inn on the Park had become a virtual satellite of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Leaving us at the Inn on the Park, he booked rooms at the Dorchester.
When Judy and I arrived in London from New York (where we had deposited Scotty at sleepaway camp), we went directly to the Inn on the Park and unpacked and changed our clothes. We had a posh room that was well air-conditioned.
Johnny and Joanna had flown in from Los Angeles and had arrived earlier than we did. As soon as we settled in, Judy and I crossed Hyde Park to join Johnny and Joanna for a late supper. The stifling heat made the short walk seem endless, and we were sticky and thirsty by the time we got there. A great landmark hotel, the Dorchester had a magnificent, brightly lit marquee outside and marble columns and enormous chandeliers in an awe-inspiring lobby inside. What it didn’t have was air conditioning. The minute I entered, I knew Johnny was going to be unhappy. The lobby was an inferno. When I asked for Johnny’s room, the sweaty receptionist told us to go right up. “He said to go right in—he’s left the door unlatched.”
We walked into the magnificent drawing room of his six-room suite and found it to be strangely empty. “Johnny?” we called.
“I’m in here,” we heard him reply. We followed the voice into a bathroom, where we found the King of Late Night sitting naked in a tub filled with ice and water. “I don’t care what you have to do,” he said, “but get us the hell out of here tomorrow. Charter a 747 if you must, but get us out of Dodge.” It was a very funny scene. Fortunately David Tebet, NBC’s vice president for talent, arranged for room air conditioners to be installed the next day. The Carson six-room suite was then made livable, and everyone got to enjoy seeing Chris Evert defeat Evonne Goolagong in a three-set thriller, and Björn Borg top Ilie Năstase in straight sets.
Dave Tebet, by the way, was one of the best executives who ever worked with Carson, and his capabilities were widely recognized. Freddy de Cordova said that Tebet’s title should be “vice president in charge of caring.”
The president of CBS, Robert D. Wood, called Tebet “the ambassador of all NBC’s goodwill, which he sprinkles around like ruby dust.” An executive with the network since 1959, Tebet recruited such talents to the network as Michael Landon, James Garner, Dean Martin, and Carson himself; Tebet led the campaign within NBC to hire Johnny for The Tonight Show. A solver of problems, a stroker of egos, a fountain of compliments, Dave was the guy who calmed stars down when they were throwing tantrums, the guy who paid people off after stars misbehaved, the guy who gently broke the news to stars that their series had been canceled. Rumor had it he was authorized to bestow an endless array of gifts whenever he thought it appropriate, and Tebet was famously generous to people who helped him. Using NBC’s connection to RCA—the network was owned by the electronics and appliance company—Tebet was said to give away color TV sets “like Rockefeller tossed around dimes.”
“Mark my words,” said Johnny, “when I die, the graveside services are going to be interrupted when a truck pulls up and delivers a color television from Dave Tebet.”
As much as I was looking forward to the vacation and the tennis and all the rest, coming to London meant rewarding myself with a special treat: a brand-new Aston Martin. At the time, I was a shareholder in the Panther Car Company, which imported sports cars from Great Britain into the United States, and Bruce Kallenberg, the head of the company, helped me negotiate the endless red tape regarding modifications related to fuel and emissions and so on that were involved in acquiring the Aston. I paid roughly 13,000 British pounds for it, at a time when the pound was worth about $2.50. I was over the moon when I arrived at the Aston Martin Sloane Street showroom and found a pale silver Volante coupe waiting, a smashing two-seater with a V-8 engine. Every day, Judy and I were the embodiment of arrogant American
s as we rolled up to the tournament in our fantastic, brand-new, air-conditioned British sports car. And we loved it.
Johnny had been provided a suitable car by NBC, a Daimler limousine. It was air-conditioned, too, but only if you rolled down the windows.
We decided to take a break from tennis one day and arrangements were made to have lunch at the Angler’s, a charming inn situated on the Thames River about an hour outside of London. It was still brutally hot, but the hope was that the drive would help cool us down. Judy and I drove out in the Aston, and we arrived cool and fresh about twenty minutes ahead of Johnny and Joanna, who arrived wet and cranky. Lunch was a disaster. Angler’s was charming, but it had no air conditioning, and we couldn’t get out of there soon enough.
Judy and I took our time on the way back, stopping in small towns to do some leisurely antiquing before deciding to head on back. About halfway to London, we spotted a disabled vehicle pulled off to the side. The closer we got, the more it looked like Johnny’s Daimler. “Holy shit!” we exclaimed in unison. “It’s Johnny!”
Immediately we turned around and went back to help. Not only was the car disabled with a flat tire, but there was a tussle going on between Johnny and the driver. Each was grappling for control of the lug wrench in order to change the deflated tire. The instant Johnny saw me, he said, “I’ll pay you twice what you paid for the Aston Martin if you give me your sonofabitch car right now.” Not waiting for a reply, Johnny snatched the wrench. “Get back in the car,” he commanded the driver.
“Please, sir, I can change the tire.”
“The hell you can!”
“Sir, please—I have been trained.”
“Trained to do what? Trained to keep us baking in a steel prison while you try to figure out how to work a jack? Now I know how Alec Guinness felt in Bridge on the River Kwai!” He stripped off his shirt and went to work. “Anybody here know how to whistle the ‘Colonel Bogey March’?”
Meanwhile, I quietly ushered Judy, Joanna, and Tim into the air-conditioned Aston and sent them back to the air-conditioned hotel rooms, while I went back and observed the biggest TV star in America spend his vacation as an amateur mechanic.
Once Johnny conquered the flat, we headed back to London, three men in a rolling oven, the disgraced driver sulking in the backseat, a Yank lawyer hanging his head out of the window like a terrier, and a steamed and steaming chain-smoking TV star behind the wheel. The arrival of the shirtless Carson at the door of the august Dorchester was a sight to behold.
Just a few months after that trip to London, Johnny and Joanna received an upsetting gift: what appeared to be a live hand grenade was found near the front gates of the Carson home. The note that was attached said, in effect, that unless Carson put a laundry bag full of $250,000 in hundred-dollar bills in a trash container at a specified location in the San Fernando Valley, harm would come to Johnny’s family. The line I remember vividly was “Do not insult our intelligence by dismissing this matter.”
As it turned out, the grenade was a fake, but the threat was treated as real. The kidnappings of Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963, John Paul Getty III in 1973, and Patty Hearst in 1974 were still vivid in everyone’s memories. The decision was made to go through with the drop in the hopes of catching the would-be kidnappers.
Although the note specified that Johnny make the drop personally, the authorities were staunchly against the idea. It was possible that this was an elaborate ruse designed to lure Johnny into a place where he himself could be kidnapped or placed in physical danger. “Please, Johnny, leave this to us,” urged the Feds. “We’ll put an officer in your car, and he’ll make the drop. It will be safer that way.”
“Safer for me,” said Johnny, “but riskier for Joanna and Tim. The note specified that I make the delivery. I don’t see any point in pissing him off over such a minor point. Don’t you think the son of a bitch will know what I look like? It’s not as if he hasn’t seen me before.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t allow that.”
“Allow?” Johnny raised a skeptical eyebrow in the way that usually caused laughter to break out in millions of America’s homes, except no one here was laughing. “Look, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll deliver the money. You concentrate on catching the asshole.”
The plan was hatched. Johnny was to drive his car with his trusty .38 pistol by his side (Johnny had a carry license for the gun; I never asked, but I bet Arthur helped him get it). A helicopter was stationed four thousand feet overhead to watch him every second. At that height, the aircraft could not be heard or seen. Instead of cash in the trash bag, there was cut-up paper stacked and wrapped in 125 bill-sized bundles.
At an appointed time, Johnny received a phone call at the NBC Studios in Burbank. He was instructed to take the cash up Lankershim Boulevard, then turn left on Oxnard Street and pull into the parking lot of a Spanish-style apartment building and leave the suitcase in a phone booth in the front of the self-service laundry. Johnny followed the instructions to the letter and then drove away. Within minutes, the bag was picked up by a twenty-six-year-old German national named Richard Dziabacinski, who was immediately arrested. Very soon after, the cops apprehended his wife, who was waiting at a local motel. He eventually pled guilty to a charge of attempted extortion and was sentenced to a year in prison and five more on probation.
As luck would have it, a young couple named Richard and Linda Culkin had just finished doing their laundry when they saw Carson dropping the bag at the phone booth. Hoping to get an autograph, they ran after Carson, if only momentarily, because the same team of police who captured Dziabacinski immediately arrested the Culkins. The mistake seemed pretty funny at first, but then it became clear that the poor Culkins were abused by the police. Eventually they were released with apologies, and Johnny made some gesture of regret, although I do not know what it was. I hope it was more than one of Dave Tebet’s televisions.
The police not only hid Carson’s role in the drama, they, in fact, denied it; the official statement said specifically that Carson was never in the car. But he did take part without a moment’s hesitation. “He’s got brass balls,” one agent said in admiration, and he did.
I don’t think Joanna ever forgot how fearlessly Johnny put himself personally on the line to protect her and her son. When things soured between them, her gratitude for his unquestioning love for her during this time nonetheless did nothing to keep their marital dispute on a fundamentally respectful plane.
Johnny was a little more cautious after this incident, most notably refusing to eat any food that had been sent to him by fans. Indeed, a few years later, his secretary became extremely ill after eating some homemade taffy sent in by a fan; it turned out that some laxatives had been added. After John Lennon was murdered in 1980, police found a hit list of targets among the belongings of the assassin, Mark David Chapman. Carson’s name was second on the list. Naturally Johnny shrugged it off, along with the suggestion that he hire a bodyguard. But thereafter, whenever he was in the car, he carried his gun.
A memorable example of the way Joanna reciprocated Johnny’s affection took place the following year, when Johnny was invited to Harvard University to receive the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year award from the school’s famed theatrical society. I’m not sure why Johnny accepted; the weekend promised a student-written-and-produced comedy as the crown jewel set among a series of speeches, banquets, conferences, seminars, and receptions, all taking place in Boston in February. In short, it was not the sort of thing that usually appealed to him.
Still, it was Harvard, and the previous recipients included Bob Hope, Paul Newman, Bill Cosby, Robert Redford, Jimmy Stewart, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, and Warren Beatty, so it wasn’t as though he’d be slumming.
In honoring a celebrity, the group was, of course, trying to attract publicity and attention, and with the choice of Carson, they surely exceeded all hopes. Wherever he went on campus he was trailed by a horde of students, regular citizens, and news media. E
very Hasty Pudding event was filled to bursting, and no matter where we turned, there was nothing ordinary: self-conscious Harvard boys tried to impress him with labored repartee; erudite dons tried to figure out who he was; and inquiring reporters, student and pro alike, pestered him with such questions as “What is Charo really like?” and “Why have you switched from wearing a Windsor knot to a four-in-hand?” The banal Q&A did yield one memorable exchange: a journalist asked, “What would you like your epitaph to be?” Johnny paused for a moment, then replied, “I’ll be right back,” his standard commercial-break handoff. His answer got a big laugh. (Alas, since Johnny was cremated, the epitaph never got chiseled into stone.)
It would be an overstatement to call this experience an ordeal, but for Johnny, who generally suffered fools not gladly (or almost not at all), sustaining fake sociability and bonhomie for hours and hours was taxing to the max. I saw it and tried to help, as did Dave Tebet. But it was Joanna who was aware of every tiny tic in his mood, who stood close to him and stroked his hand and touched his back, who deflected the most gauche comments and deflated the biggest boors.
Some years later I was reading an article in which Joanna’s friend, the actress Ruta Lee, observed that “Joanna’s very accomplished at being a woman. I admire her femininity—her accommodation to men. It’s as if she made a study of how Josephine handled Napoleon. She just has a wonderfully sensitive approach to men.” When I read Ruta’s comments, I thought of how Joanna supported Johnny so lovingly at Harvard.
In between the close of the daytime schedule and the start of the ceremonies in the evening, there was downtime, and I saw Johnny and Joanna strolling arm in arm back to their rooms at Eliot House on the campus. They looked very happy. That night, after receiving the award, Johnny delivered one of the funniest monologues of his career, one that kept all the bright kids and brilliant professors of Harvard in stitches. “Thank you,” he said, expressing his gratitude for the award. “This was the first time I’ve scored on a college campus since 1949.”
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