Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  Being hard-nosed was one thing; when I represented Johnny in his second divorce, I thought Joanne’s counsel, Raoul Felder, was hard-nosed, but he also had a charming side, and I rather liked him. I think Crowley took pleasure in being a prick. Mel Tormé once called him “the meanest man I have ever met,” and in this case, I think the Velvet Fog spoke for almost everyone I knew. Arthur was also sort of the house counsel for the SHARE ladies. One of his other clients was Judy. Soon it became clear that Miles Rubin was simply too nice to be in this fight, and we hired Norman Oberstein, who could be counted on to be as hard-nosed as he had to be.

  This was a complicated case. Because there was no prenuptial agreement, a lot of issues, such as when community property ceased to exist and when separate property rules prevailed, had to be litigated. The entire matter was contentious. In a normal marriage, the day the couple stops cohabitating is the day when income ceases to be community property. Joanna naturally wanted a later date, while Johnny wanted an earlier one, but in this marriage, Johnny left and came back so often that it was difficult to fix a date. Furthermore, if he left and stayed at their Malibu residence, can that really be said to be leaving? An even more difficult problem involved valuing all of the assets that Johnny had built up over the years. Ownership of The Tonight Show was a tremendous asset, and Joanna was certainly entitled to her fair share. But was Joanna really entitled to a 50 percent share of something that had great value before she married Johnny? How were we to value Johnny’s decade of stardom that predated their marriage?

  Answers to these and other questions were eventually hacked out, but Crowley made sure that the entire process was a painful and acrimonious ordeal. A lot of the terrain that Crowley covered in his grueling depositions was expected and unavoidable; it would have been silly to think that private investigators hadn’t vacuumed up every hint of Johnny’s infidelities, and forcing Johnny to sit there and acknowledge so many incidents as they were monotonously entered into the record was part of the punishment. But there were uglier and more embarrassing moments—allegations of physical and emotional abuse, of drunken misbehavior, most of them deliberately exaggerated or maliciously misinterpreted, many of them baseless and false—that were raked over simply for the purpose of shaming or annoying Johnny. Crowley then went over financial documents relating to the various Carson companies, questioning him in numbing detail about the minutiae of the data that had been entered, stuff that Johnny hadn’t personally prepared and probably didn’t understand, but on the advice of counsel, had signed his name to, in precisely the same way you and I have blithely signed tax forms or mortgage papers that may as well have been written in Sanskrit. “This is all about Crowley padding his fees, isn’t it?” Johnny ranted. “How much do you think this will cost me? Christ, he’s going to have a field day dissecting the companies. Maybe you were right. We should have sold the goddamn thing to Coke when we had the chance.” Mercifully, I declined to point out that had he signed a prenuptial agreement in 1972, he would not be undergoing this trial. But he knew. He knew.

  Crowley’s lowest blow came when Carson was permitted to return to the St. Cloud residence—still his property, remember, and something that certainly could remain so after the settlement—to collect some clothes and other personal items. When Johnny arrived, he discovered that Crowley had posted armed guards throughout the premises to ensure that he didn’t try to take anything that didn’t belong to him. None of them knew what was his and what wasn’t; they were just there to crowd him. It was a nasty thing to do. Soon Johnny began to refer to Crowley as the Master of Misery. “Who the fuck does this prick go home to? He’s such a lousy bastard.” Crowley was getting inside Carson’s head, which might have been his tactic all along.

  It wasn’t as though the fight was always one-sided. Johnny’s counsel was able to make it clear that he would be happy to reveal at trial the understanding Mrs. Carson enjoyed with Hammerman Brothers, her jeweler of choice when an apologetic Carson needed to buy the aggrieved Joanna a sparkling something to make amends. After she pointedly wore the bauble a few times in his presence, she would send it back to the Hammermans. They would send her a check for the refund minus their percentage and sell the thing again. They profited, she built her own little nest egg, and Johnny was none the wiser. I’m sure Joanna was embarrassed when this was discovered. But then again, the money was all community property when these transactions took place.

  But these small satisfactions didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The divorce from Joanna was more harmful to Johnny than I thought it would be. I had never seen the man so disturbed. He was bitter and angry with Joanna, not because she wanted his money—she was going to get plenty of money under any settlement, many millions—but because she had effectively authorized her lawyer to torture him. The intensity of his reaction was alarming, and I wasn’t the only one who was worried. One day Bobby Quinn asked me if I thought Johnny was capable of hurting Joanna. What could I say? I had seldom seen Johnny behave violently, but when he got drunk, he became unpredictable, and if he was willing to punch Tom Snyder for no good reason, what else might he be prepared to do when he was feeling so emotionally threatened? My mind flashed to the .38-caliber pistol that he carried on our raid on Joanne Carson’s love nest, a gun he still carried in the glove compartment of his car, a gun he once actually pulled and waved at a shocked-shitless camera crew from a local TV station that decided it would be good fun to tailgate Carson’s Corvette down Pacific Coast Highway. It made me sick to think about it.

  Quinn and I worked out a plan. Bobby would hang with Johnny at the studio after the show until he was in a good enough frame of mind to go home. Later I would drive over to his home and make sure he was okay. This tag team approach worked; he seemed less enraged.

  Less enraged, perhaps, but still different. Johnny changed during the divorce proceedings, and I don’t know if he ever entirely changed back. He was always capable of being a miserable prick. The nasty remark, the stony silence, the surprising indifference—they had been part of his repertoire ever since I knew him, but they were usually interruptions in a generally more genial mood. Now these stormy moments came more frequently, and there was an overall harshness, an impatient intolerance, that wasn’t there before. His profitable clothing business, for example, closed up shop, in part because it required Johnny to model the clothes in advertisements. Johnny no longer had the patience to spend a day or two modeling in return for the couple of million dollars the clothing deal earned him, and he no longer needed the dough. In one of the final sessions, which took place at the Playboy Mansion, the photographer said, “Now smile!”

  “Don’t ever say that to me again,” snarled Johnny, walking off the shoot. “You’re fired.”

  He became oddly imperious. For example, now that he resided in Malibu, he became determined to build a sea wall, which involved heavy construction and required the acquisition of a permit from the Coastal Commission before work could commence. Johnny had my firm prepare the application papers, but before the commission could even review the application, he ordered his contractor to start work. He ended up being fined thousands of dollars for his lack of patience, and although he was clearly in the wrong, he was angry at them.

  It even got to the point where it seemed like he couldn’t recognize a joke. Somehow we learned of an Ohio company called Here’s Johnny Portable Toilets, which advertised its product with the slogan “The World’s Foremost Commodian.” Carson didn’t think that was funny and ordered me to sue the company to make them stop. Ultimately we spent about $500,000 to win less than $40,000 in damages. The case went to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and the favorable decision for Johnny is often quoted on the subject of trademark protection. To me, it didn’t matter that we won. I thought it made him look mean and small.

  Nowhere was the change in personality more evident than on the tennis court. John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors are the most competitive tennis players I’ve ever seen, but
Carson comes in third. He was always capable of indulging his petulant, sore-loser side, but during this period, his language became nastier, his anger more demonstrative, and his line calls more bold. Longtime tennis buddies now frequently found that their schedules were full.

  One day we were playing doubles with Willie Shoemaker, who was not only a great jockey but also a tremendous overall athlete. Willie’s partner that day was Bob Trapenberg, a former pro who now taught tennis. He was for a time one of Johnny’s closest friends, and although Willie was all business, “Trap” kept setting Johnny up to look good. It was the definition of “customer tennis.” On that day, however, Johnny wasn’t finding himself able to reap Trap’s largesse. After missing an easy forehand for about the third time, he heaved his racquet high into the air. It landed just inside the pool, about two feet from where Shoemaker’s wife, Babs, was sunning herself. Needless to say, the match was over. Johnny offered a terse apology and stormed off in his Mercedes.

  My friend Hank Greenberg, the Hall of Fame slugger, sponsored me for membership in the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. In turn, Hank and I sponsored Johnny for membership. Hank was as great a gentleman on the court as Johnny was not. He played with us on several occasions, but Hank very soon tired of Johnny’s curses and self-serving line calls. Before long, when I would invite Hank to join us, he politely declined. That became typical of many members at the club. Johnny had such a mystique, though, that no one would ever question any of his line calls, no matter how egregious they seemed; people just didn’t play with him anymore. After several years of membership and relatively few games, Carson resigned.

  “My personal life has been exactly like this year’s Academy Awards,” joked Johnny during his monologue at the Oscar ceremony in 1984, the last one he would emcee. “It started off with Terms of Endearment, I thought I had The Right Stuff, it cost a lot to Dresser, then came The Big Chill and for the last month I’ve been begging for Tender Mercies.”

  One by one, the dramas of those days came to an end. My divorce from Judy became final. She was awarded $23,000 per month and received the house in Beverly Hills. Valued then at $3 million, it’s surely worth more than $10 million today. Like Joanna, Judy was represented by Arthur Crowley, whose flamethrower approach probably cost me $500,000 in fees. (By the way, I think Johnny was right about Crowley pursuing certain inquiries just to raise his fees, which were high anyway; he charged $500 an hour, and double on Sundays—like a plumber.) None of that money went to Judy, but it aggravated the tensions between us. For years after the divorce we did not speak.

  After the failure of Partners in Crime, the fifth Carson Productions series to bite the dust, J. J. McMahon was fired. He was a friend and a good guy who worked hard and deserved better, especially from the supposedly omnipotent CAA, which instead of bringing us their elite talent as we had hoped, used Carson Productions as a dumping ground for the junk their clients couldn’t get rid of. In fairness, it must be said that J. J. had some successes. During his tenure, Carson’s Comedy Classics, 130 half-hour programs edited from old Tonight Show broadcasts, were sold into syndication for a sweet $26 million.

  Also, Carson Productions was able to team up with Dick Clark Productions to produce TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes, a hit that earned us a lot of money and no esteem. The big problem, though, wasn’t the hits or flops that he did sell; it was the many, many shows he put into development that never sold, to NBC or anyone else. There was a sense that we were losing traction, that our big potential was dissipating, and that we were becoming just another production company.

  “The big difference between us and Norman Lear’s company or MTM is that they have their own people creating shows,” I said to Carson one night. “We’ve been depending on CAA, and they’ve been bringing us dreck.”

  “Well, look around. Maybe somebody like Jim Brooks or Larry Gelbart is available.”

  Those two weren’t, but J. J.’s luck ran out when we finally had a chance to hire someone of a similar caliber. Edwin “Ed” Weinberger was a true giant among sitcom writers and producers, and he seemed like just the sort of talent who could help us restore our luster. Everyone at the company had hoped it would have turned out differently for J. J., no one more than Carson. He found that he hated being a boss when being a boss meant firing friends, even in a case like this, when J. J. was sent off with a golden handshake.

  For a man who actually fired a lot of people during his career, Johnny sometimes found it hard to do the deed. Once he summoned me to his offices at NBC—summoned, as in “drop everything you’re doing and get over here.” It turns out that Johnny, who never carried a wallet but usually kept $1,500 to $2,000 or so in cash on his person, had noticed that at the end of every week for the last month or so, he would be at least $700 to $1,000 light. “Get some surveillance cameras in here,” he demanded. “I want to catch the son of a bitch who’s stealing from me.”

  Michael Hattem of Brentwood Communications managed to conceal two cameras in hollowed-out books, and within days we caught his dresser, a union guy who was responsible for taking care of Johnny’s wardrobe, pilfering the money. Johnny was very proud that he had solved the mystery, but he never fired the culprit. He liked him too much as an employee. Instead, he sat him down and told him that as long as he didn’t steal anymore, Johnny would give him another $300 to $400 week. A complicated and strategic result: at once generous and lenient, but conflict averse. Johnny didn’t want to lose an excellent valet just because he was an untrustworthy thief. He was not about to change things that worked.

  Unnoticed among the problems of its high-profile but underperforming television division, the movie division of Carson Productions enjoyed a critical and box office smash straight out of the gate. We produced The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasdan’s comedy-drama about members of the baby-boom generation feeling their first intimations of mortality. With a terrific, top-selling Motown-based soundtrack and a cast that included such present and future stars as Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, William Hurt, and Jeff Goldblum, it ended up receiving Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Kasdan), and Best Supporting Actress (Close).

  Oddly, the picture almost didn’t get made, at least not by us. When we first received the screenplay, Marcia Nasatir, who was running the company, loved it, as did I. Mike Ovitz, head of CAA and the future king of Hollywood, hated it and argued hard against our involvement, but fortunately we managed to outvote him. The other person who didn’t much care for the film was Carson. Johnny dutifully assumed the role of producer while the film was in development and went to screenings of the rough cuts and other meetings, but he did not like the process, and he did not like the film. He thought the movie was okay, but saw no greatness in it.

  Coming off The Big Chill, I thought we had achieved an important success that we could build upon. We produced one more film called Desert Bloom. Like The Big Chill, it had an excellent cast featuring Jon Voight (my absent friend from the Oscars!) and Ellen Barkin. Although it enjoyed some critical success, it did no business. At that point, Johnny insisted that the film division be shut down. I thought he was crazy, but the decision was made. As I had seen when he declined to make a commitment to the Aladdin, when he declined to make a commitment to Coca-Cola, and when he closed the clothing business, making money beyond a certain point held very little interest for him. To him, making movies was a distraction. He didn’t like it, he didn’t want to try to get good at it, and he wasn’t willing to hand it off to someone. He just shut it down.

  The wrangling with Arthur Crowley continued, injuring both parties. Joanna was embarrassed after Crowley demanded that she receive a $220,000 monthly allowance; it made her look like a gold digger, although really, it was a normal-size request for a woman whose husband was as rich as Carson. Nor did Crowley do her much good when he demanded more than half of their community property, arguing the principle of “celebrity goodwill,” in which he maintained that Johnny’s brand was enhanced during and because of the marriage
to Joanna, and that therefore she deserved more. More than the actual earner? The doctrine was specious and the PR aspect atrocious; all Crowley succeeded in doing was to make the classy Joanna Carson look grasping. She began to lose a lot of friends, even some SHARE women who admired her attributes but whose husbands’ work was somehow related to Johnny. Her experience could be summed up by a run-in Joanna had one day with Joan Rivers.

  “I hope we will still be friends after this is over,” Joanna said.

  “No, sorry, dear,” the always candid Rivers replied. “My relationship with Johnny is far too important to risk it on a friendship with his ex.”

  Still, there came a day when Johnny finally threw in the towel. “This is too much,” he said. “I’ve got to clear my head. Tell Norman to get me out. Fuck the cost.” And so it ended.