Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  Sweat literally poured from me. There wasn’t very much I could do, short of making a very nasty scene that would turn me into a footnote in Oscar history: “Hey, isn’t that Henry Bushkin, the hysterical attorney who got into a fight with Jane Fonda?” The program had paused for a commercial break, the last one before Johnny was to appear. Then Joanna and I would have to slink away, and it would be the fucking inauguration all over again. Meanwhile Joanna was maintaining a ladylike calm. I’m sure she was just pooling lava to spew all over me later.

  “Take Jon Voight’s seats,” an usher suddenly interjected. “He’s not coming.” The kids were hustled to the available seats, Joanna and I hurried to two empty seats in the front row, and the usher was substantially rewarded, all seconds before Johnny, looking even more elegant and debonair than usual in white tie and tails, took the stage. As the applause fell upon him, he and Joanna exchanged big smiles. I was ready for a Scotch, a Valium, a nap, or all three.

  As it happened, in those days the Oscar ceremonies were held on a Monday, and on that particular Monday, March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. had wounded President Reagan in an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton. The Academy immediately postponed the ceremonies indefinitely, but when the White House announced that the president had survived and was in good condition, the Academy rescheduled the show for the following night. Rescheduling the event had a big impact on a lot of people: caterers, dressmakers, babysitters, and others, including Johnny, since about half his monologue dealt with Reagan. All through Tuesday, he and writers Mike Barrie and Jim Mulholland rewrote the monologue. On the night of the event, Johnny did just one Reagan joke, but it struck the perfect balance between irreverence and concern.

  “Reagan cut $85 million from the arts and humanities. This is his biggest assault on the arts since he signed with Warner Brothers.” Carson waited a beat and continued. “That should get him up and out of bed.”

  Later that night, after Ordinary People beat Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Elephant Man, Raging Bull, and Tess for Best Picture, I told Johnny the story about the seats. “That fucking Jane Fonda,” he said. “She’s never going to be on the show again.” His vehemence lasted until we all arrived at Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party at Le Dome, when Jane apologized for the earlier “misunderstanding” while seated with Johnny and Elizabeth Taylor.

  Although we had done a lot of planning, it took some time after Johnny signed his three-year deal with NBC before we could get Carson Productions up and running. Early on, Johnny casually dropped into a conversation a fact that had the potential to change everything. His financial handler, Fred Kayne, mentioned that the value of a new company is never higher than when it first opens its doors, when its potential is limitless, and everything about it has a rosy hue. “This would be the time to get yourselves acquired,” Fred wisecracked, “before the two of you do anything to fuck it up.”

  I mentioned that I had read that Coca-Cola had just bought Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin, and Jerry Perenchio’s company, Tandem Productions/Embassy Television, and were making further acquisitions in the entertainment field.

  “Oh, well, then you ought to talk to Don Keough,” Johnny said.

  “Who’s Don Keough?”

  “He’s the president of Coca-Cola,” Johnny said. “He and I go way back. We were in radio together back in Omaha when we were kids.”

  A few phone calls later, I was on a flight to Atlanta to meet with Don Keough and Roberto Goizueta, the chairman of Coca-Cola, who, as it happened, was also a big fan of Johnny’s. We had a terrific conversation. They thought Carson Productions, with The Tonight Show and a five-series guarantee, had amazing assets. They wondered if we might be interested in selling. “How about a swap?” I asked. “Carson stock for Coca-Cola stock.” We talked about a deal that would have delivered us $100 million, with the stock swap providing considerable tax advantages.

  “They have only one condition,” I reported to Johnny when I returned to LA. “They want you to make a five-year commitment to host The Tonight Show. They feel that if you left after three years, NBC wouldn’t feel any obligation to fulfill its commitment to buy five series, and with you gone, Carson Productions wouldn’t have any more leverage with the network. They’re probably right.”

  Again, the question of the divorce settlement raised its head. “Look, if I do a deal with Coke, does Joanna get half?”

  It was a simple question, but there was no simple answer. “We can take the position that because you are required to perform services, the stock you will be receiving is actually being earned over a five-year period. If you separate, we will take the position that $20 million is earned per year. If we conclude with Coke and you split within the year, I don’t think she’ll get more than $10 million. But again, if the issue gets before a judge, there’s no guarantee how the ruling will go.”

  There was one more thing, less a condition than a request. “Coke would also like you to consider being on their board of directors. It makes perfect sense: you’re a prominent man, and you’ll have a big stake in the company.”

  “Jesus, Henry, you know me better than that,” he said, laughing that the idea had even gone this far. “There’s nothing I would hate more. Make sure they know I’m flattered, but make some excuse.”

  Johnny thought about the offer for a long time, but the combination of a five-year commitment and the unsteadiness of his marriage was too much. We simply couldn’t eliminate the possibility that by the time he was ready to split with Joanna, he would have locked himself into a five-year commitment, and that for all that time, half of his compensation would be going to a woman who was no longer his wife. Very soon after we said no thanks, Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures. Having whetted their appetite with Carson Productions, I guess they just had to eat something.

  I can’t say that I was entirely pleased with Johnny’s decision. My 10 percent of the deal would have made me plenty rich. I couldn’t see it then, but in retrospect, this was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Johnny. Had we each just pocketed our share, we probably would have continued on much as we had done. But we didn’t grab the quick money. Now we would have to become moguls, and we would have to work together. Bit by bit, it would become evident that I was much more interested in succeeding at this than he was.

  Early in 1981 we hired John J. McMahon, known as J. J., the former head of West Coast production for NBC. J. J. was a terrific guy and very talented, and perhaps most important, Johnny liked him; more than once I heard there was a resemblance, in style as well as in features, to Carson. In one of his first moves that had my blessing, J. J. hired Bill Haber, one of the three founders of CAA, to act as an agent for Carson Productions. Hiring the heavyweight agency certainly seemed like a crafty move on McMahon’s part; we were CAA’s first corporate client, and it stood to reason that in order to make us into a successful example of their clout, they would enlist their talent-rich client roster of actors, writers, and directors in our cause. With access to top talent, lots of money, and tons of support, Carson Productions clearly had it all.

  The only thing it would ever lack was hits.

  Carson Productions launched its first series on NBC’s schedule in the fall of 1981. Lewis & Clark was a short-lived show in which a man from Queens, played by Gabe Kaplan, relocates his family to small-town Texas. It stunk. Airing on Thursday at eight-thirty against CBS’s popular Magnum, P.I., Lewis & Clark was pulled off the schedule after eight episodes, with the last five episodes of the show’s original thirteen-week commitment airing in the dead of summer.

  With Fred Silverman still looking for prime-time winners, NBC was quick with the hook and quick to throw up midseason replacements. At about the same time we learned that Lewis & Clark had been shit-canned, we were told that two other of our productions were given the green light to go on the air in February. Cassie & Company, an hour-long drama starring longtime Carson favorite Angie Dickinson as a private eye, proved so unappealing to viewers that the ne
twork dumped it after only four episodes. Teachers Only, a sitcom starring Lynn Redgrave, achieved only modestly greater success. “Last season,” wrote the television critic of the New York Times, “Lynn Redgrave departed from one situation comedy, CBS’s House Calls, reportedly because the producers would not allow her to breast feed her new baby on the set. She is now back in another situation comedy, Teachers Only on NBC, and it would seem that she should come up with another unusual excuse to get out of this one.” The show eked out eight episodes in 1982 and thirteen more in the spring of 1983 before being mercifully allowed to go to its unlamented rest.

  “Jesus, what do we have to do to get a hit?” a frustrated Carson griped one day. Suddenly Fred Silverman’s job didn’t look so easy. But as Johnny said from the beginning, he didn’t know what went into making a television series successful; he wasn’t even a particularly enlightened viewer. Johnny Carson performed on television, but he didn’t watch it all that much. And it wasn’t as though there were any obvious flaws in J. J.’s approach that left him vulnerable to second-guessing. From what we could see, J. J. was playing the game by the numbers. We had a fish-out-of-water comedy starring Gabe Kaplan, who was a popular comedian, and whose previous series, Welcome Back, Kotter, had been a big hit for ABC. We had a workplace comedy starring Lynn Redgrave, an appealing actress who had starred on a series that was a ratings success on CBS. We had Angie Dickinson, who’d had a big following on her police show, now starring in a private eye show. J. J. had good people behind the camera, too—proven performers in proven genres.

  It just didn’t work. In the coming years, McMahon would double down. He got NBC to air a four-hour miniseries about a lusty studio executive called The Star Maker starring Rock Hudson, which received mocking reviews, and another series, Partners in Crime, about two female private detectives played by Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter, again two proven TV stars. The show, said the New York Times, “may be the top contender for this year’s Dumbest-Show-of-the-Season award.” Perhaps TV audiences had grown bored with these familiar approaches; before too many more years, Steven Bochco’s ensemble shows, such as NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues, would revolutionize TV dramas.

  But in the meantime, everything we put out was DOA, and the name Johnny Carson was attached to every one of these stiffs.

  Negotiating a landmark contract and becoming the unofficial head of a production company certainly elevated my status in most of the circles in which I traveled, but it was still the case that if Johnny called, I answered. During our annual Wimbledon trip in 1981, I caught some sort of a bug and got sick. For two or three days I just sacked out in my room at Claridge’s. I missed the matches, and I didn’t care.

  And certainly Johnny didn’t care. But what was on his mind was a tennis match he had set up, in which he and I were to face the team of Dick Enberg, the great sportscaster who was, as usual, covering Wimbledon for NBC, and Bob Blackmore, the network’s head of sales. The match, months in the making, was to be played at the Queen’s Club, the renowned private sporting club in West Kensington that is second only to Wimbledon in prestige in Great Britain.

  Carson called the night before the match to see how I was feeling. He wanted to be sure I would play. Although I was improving, I still felt like crap, but I told him I would be ready for the match. Frankly, I thought it would be easier for me to say I’d play. If I said I wasn’t feeling well enough, Johnny would summon the hotel doctor and subject me to a battery of remedies; all I wanted to do was sleep.

  We arrived at the Queen’s Club before the duo from NBC, Johnny in his customary white shorts (he never wore anything but white), me in sweats. We went through our warm-ups, but I was going through the motions. Johnny kept trying to pump me up, but I had no energy. Once the game started, though, I was running my ass off all over the court. Back for lobs, up for drop shots. As far as I could tell, the only thing Johnny did was shout the word “Yours!” We lost the first set 6–3, and I can’t imagine how we got three games.

  “We’ve got to do much better this next set,” Johnny told me at the changeover. I was doing the work, and here he was telling me “We’ve got to do better.” It was laughable, but on the court he had no sense of humor. On the contrary, he could become quite testy when he lost. All I wanted was for him to have a good time.

  The second set turned out well for us. Johnny started to play good, smart tennis. He was in the right spots and making shots. Most important, he started to serve well. If Johnny was able to hold serve against the opposition when we played doubles, we always had a good chance, and we won the second set 6–4.

  That, thankfully, was enough. We lost the last set but it was because I was totally out of gas; Johnny continued to play great, and that was enough. He cracked jokes and bought drinks at the clubhouse. Later he held court in the NBC tent, an enclosed pavilion inside the Wimbledon Club grounds where celebrities could hang out. Johnny ruled the room. I was back in bed, exhausted, but happy that the boss had been appeased for another day.

  12

  1982–1985: Homme et Femme

  JOHNNY MAY NOT have done much to save his marriage, but he certainly was upset about the impending divorce. I could hear it in his monologue. “I went to see my butcher the other day, Murray Giblets. I said, ‘How do you pick a good turkey?’ And he says, ‘You ought to know. You’re a three-time loser.’ The audience groaned or tittered nervously. They weren’t sure how to react. Johnny had become a fixture in their homes by being consistently light; he was never guilty of opening a vein. This one, however, he couldn’t let go of. “My giving advice on marriage,” he cracked, “is like the captain of the Titanic giving lessons on navigation.”

  Like boxers in their respective corners—she in Bel Air on St. Cloud Road, he at the beach house in Malibu—the Carsons prepared to duke it out. Until a settlement could be reached, the court ordered Johnny to pay $44,600 a month in support. Joanna, claiming her expenses were actually several times that, had requested $220,000 a month. “I heard from my cat’s lawyer,” Johnny reported in his monologue. “My cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.”

  Personally, I was sorry to see them divorce. It was inevitable now that my relationship with Joanna would change, and I regretted that. From the beginning she had been one of my biggest supporters, and she was a great friend to Judy. And once Judy and I split, Joanna introduced me to Joyce DeWitt, with whom I enjoyed a happy relationship for several years. Ostensibly Joanna introduced us because Joyce was looking for a lawyer, but I don’t think Joanna was that naive. I liked Joanna, and I owed her a lot, going all the way back to the time when she advocated my move to LA.

  But once the Carsons’ domestic situation soured, it was clear where my loyalties and responsibilities lay. Joanna and I became natural adversaries. If you work for the Hatfields, you can’t pal around with the McCoys. I don’t know if Joanna feels the same today as she did right after the divorce, but she was angry with me and blamed me for Johnny’s decision. “We’d talk,” she told the journalist Paul Corkery for his 1987 book, Carson: The Unauthorized Biography, “and as we started delving into his world, so to speak, he was very agitated and aggravated. I knew then that I was dealing with two personalities, his, and Henry Bushkin’s.” She said she “never knew who was calling the shots,” Johnny or me, whom she describes as being “even angrier than her husband.”

  Was she right? I don’t think so. From where I sat in the relationship, it seemed like Johnny always called all the shots in the end, although that’s the kind of thing that I suppose can look very different from the outside. Surely Johnny took a lot of my advice, which may have made me look like his Svengali, and I’m also sure there were times when Johnny used me as a shield and allowed me to take the heat for decisions he made; I thought that was part of my job. But it’s also true that Judy and I were going through a divorce, and Judy and Joanna had similar objectives, although Joanna’s were on a far grander scale, just as Johnny and I had similar objectives. The women sought
to value the new Carson companies at the highest possible amount in order to increase the worth of their community property and their portions of the settlements. Johnny and I had the opposite objective. Were there times when I said something that persuaded him to take a hard line after he had led her to believe he would be more accommodating? Very possibly. But I really did less persuading and more giving information. Johnny had generous impulses; I’m the one who often had to explain how much they would cost. He would then decide. I was genuinely sorry that they split up, but all I ever wanted, one way or the other, was for him to be happy.

  Unlike Johnny’s divorce from Joanne, there was never a possibility that I would handle the suit. I took care of the earlier divorce pretty well, but now the stakes were far too high and the situation far too complicated for a man of Johnny’s wealth and stature to hire anyone other than an expert. Our first choice for representation was Miles Rubin, a very gentlemanly lawyer. We thought Johnny would work well with the low-key Rubin, and we thought the other side would respond well to quiet professionalism on our part. We didn’t sense that a war was in the offing; Joanna wasn’t going around town bad-mouthing Carson. The two of them were talking almost every day. “Johnny would talk about the issues,” Joanna admitted in an interview after the divorce. “We just never resolved them.”

  But I suppose Joanna could afford to be friendly to Johnny because she hired a bully to represent her. Arthur Crowley was a hard-nosed lawyer. The legendary producer Robert Evans hired Crowley when Steve McQueen and Evans’s ex-wife Ali MacGraw wanted to adopt the son she had when she and Evans were married, and Crowley proceeded to build up a foot-wide dossier on McQueen that was apparently enough to derail those hopes. Evans called Crowley “the toughest Irish attorney west of Chicago.” Fair enough, I thought, but why limit it to the Irish? Crowley, who had a bald dome like Adlai Stevenson and a five o’clock shadow like Richard Nixon, learned to play rough by staring down the studios in the Confidential libel trial of 1957. Crowley represented the notorious scandal magazine in a case brought by the State of California, no doubt at the behest of the studios, contending that the magazine was lying when it published articles about the stars who drank excessively, took illegal drugs, and slept around with members of the same or opposite sex. Crowley said fine, we’ll see if the magazine was lying or not. He subpoenaed more than a hundred stars, including Elvis Presley, Clark Gable, and Maureen O’Hara, ordering them to testify about the behaviors in question. It’s said that half of Hollywood immediately went on vacation in Acapulco. The studios, thinking that maybe the lawsuit idea wasn’t such a good idea after all, had a word with the prosecution, who essentially then dropped the matter.