Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  But Alex was not his equal. She was a companion and a plaything, much younger, not as sophisticated or as intelligent or as experienced. Perhaps his marriage to Joanna had exhausted him and left him wishing for a relationship that posed less of a challenge, something that required less engagement. Often in those days we were present at the same occasions, but I can’t recall a time when Alex made her presence felt.

  It wouldn’t be fair to say that Johnny was indifferent to Alex’s wants, needs, moods, preferences, and so on. But after all, this was his fourth marriage, and even at his best, he never spent a lot of time thinking about others. There was a lot about the relationship that he seemed to conduct on autopilot. Their wedding, for example, on June 20, 1987, took place outside his home in Malibu, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a beautiful setting, as any guest could have told you. However, there weren’t any guests. Johnny wanted to avoid publicity, so there were no guests, just his brother, Dick, with Judge Hogoboom, the judge from Johnny’s arbitration in 1979, presiding. I wasn’t particularly upset at not being asked to attend—Johnny said that as long as he didn’t invite me, he could get away with not inviting anyone. I suppose this made sense at the time; after all, not even Alex’s parents were present, although a speakerphone was connected so they could listen from their home in Pittsburgh. Judge Hogoboom, I thought, assessed things perfectly. “It’s a perfect spot,” he felt, “but it felt a little bleak.” In retrospect, I should have seen that not only had the marriage ritual been downgraded in Johnny’s eyes, but so had our friendship. I was now among the people he was trying to get out of inviting to this wedding.

  The honeymoon was, if anything, even less romantic.

  Right after the wedding, Johnny and Alex headed to London for Wimbledon. The taking of vows is usually marked with the couple spending some time alone getting to know each other, but Johnny had gotten to know Alex plenty over the last two years. Besides, this was Wimbledon, which he hadn’t missed in ten years, and which he wanted me to attend, just as I had done for ten years. Why let a new bride change things? I guess Johnny and Alex got some private time together, if only because he and I spent less time together than we usually did on these trips. I was dating Mary Hart at the time, and because her Entertainment Tonight commitments kept her from attending all but the last few matches, I spent more time hanging with the guys and was excused from some of the usual couples-only shopping and dining events that I and whomever I was with typically spent with Johnny and whomever he was with.

  For the most part, we had a great week in London. There were no problems to deal with, and every night we had reservations at Annabel’s or the Guinea Grill or Santini. We were there with our old tennis pal Bob Trapenberg, who had a new girlfriend from South Africa, Ruan Lowe, who was a kick. Bob was a former tour tennis pro, a good friend to Johnny and me. He stayed wherever we were and had a car and driver for the week, generally fulfilling the role of the gentleman tennis player. Trap dressed fastidiously and always traveled first class. I provided him with the Wimbledon tickets and the NBC passes and he paid for all the rest.

  One day, when we were in the lobby waiting for a car to take us to the matches, a situation arose. Just us three guys, a sudden shortness of temper, no big deal. Johnny abruptly turned to me and right in front of Trap, making no effort to be discreet, asked if we were paying for Trap’s room and his airline tickets. I responded that Trap always paid his own way. Johnny was satisfied, but Trap was upset. Here was a man who played tennis with Carson almost every day. They were good friends, and Carson chose to ask an embarrassing question that implied that Trap was freeloading. Like Carson paid any attention to money anyway! Years later, the thought that Carson suspected Trap was sponging off of him still bothered the old pro.

  In truth, I didn’t pay much attention to what seemed like a bit of garden-variety nastiness from Carson, who had always been capable of marring a nice moment with a cutting remark. Perhaps I should have sensed it might be a harbinger of what was to come.

  After the Wimbledon finals, Mary and I left for a week in the French countryside, while Johnny and Alex left for Italy. We planned to meet at a yacht in a week’s time. Mary and I had a great week, traveling through the Côtes du Rhône vineyards, which run for more than two hundred kilometers down the Rhone Valley from the south of Lyon to just south of Avignon. The wines of the region are brilliant, and the steep, vine-covered slopes of the region are breathtaking. At the end of the week, Mary and I picked up two cases of wine to bring to the yacht. We were looking forward to the cruise.

  When we arrived in Ventimiglia—in those days, one always chartered a boat in Italy rather than France because the taxes were less and the paperwork was more efficient—we could see that the yacht, Parts V, was everything we had been told to expect, with opulent bedroom suites, Jacuzzi tubs, jet boats, WaveRunners, Jet Skis, inflatables, kayaks, and fishing and snorkeling gear. And as if anything else was needed to elevate our excitement, we would be spending the week cruising the incomparable Italian Riviera, the narrow coastal strip that lies between the Ligurian Sea and the mountain chain formed by the Maritime Alps and the Apennines.

  The setting was idyllic, but as we quickly recognized, the atmosphere was not. One unexpected factor was that Johnny’s brother, Dick, had joined the cruise. Dick’s wife had recently died, and I guess Johnny felt the trip would be good for him. This was a generous gesture on Johnny’s part, but on this occasion Dick was a fifth wheel if ever there was one, and a melancholy one at that.

  As soon as we arrived, I could sense a chill in the air. I had no idea what had transpired during their week in Italy, but Johnny was not happy. He was irritable; something was bugging him. One could only hope that, as on so many previous occasions, the mood would pass.

  Not that day. When we convened for dinner at nine p.m., we could see that Johnny was still cross. The chef on the cruise was reputed to be first-rate, and as dish after dish was presented to us, we could see that his reputation was justified. But Johnny was glowering. Alex then said something that he disliked, a remark so inconsequential that it didn’t even register with me. But Johnny looked her straight in the eye and said, “We’ve been married for three weeks. If you say something like that again, this marriage won’t last another three weeks.” It was as nasty a rebuke as I have ever heard, akin to a slap, and I don’t know why any of us remained at the table, particularly Alex. Dinner was, of course, ruined. We hurried through the food almost without tasting it, just to be able to escape the table.

  My mind flashed to another dinner I had with Johnny and Alex some months earlier back in California. I was with Joyce DeWitt, and as we were eating, Joyce wondered why Johnny had never strongly pursued a career as an actor. “You’d be a natural to play Puck in A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” she told him. “I think people would love to see you do something like that.” I knew Joyce meant this not as a mere compliment but as something she recognized in his presence and star power.

  But Johnny thought that she was just flattering him, something he had always hated. Usually he just brushed it aside, but on that night, he reacted with real disdain. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to Joyce, who obviously knew at least a little bit about what she was talking about. “My audience doesn’t want that. They don’t want to see me perform [that way], especially not Shakespeare.” His speech grew heated. He began lecturing her, instructing her. I kept thinking that any moment he would stop, but he continued in this stern, didactic way until Alex mercifully forced a change of subject. We left early that night, too, before dessert.

  The next day, sitting on deck, I spoke to Johnny. With a combination of concern and diplomatic chiding, I encouraged him to lighten up. “Geez, man, you’re on a yacht in the Mediterranean! Feel the sun! I don’t know what’s bothering you, but throw it overboard!”

  He laughed, although not very mirthfully. “You’re right,” he said. “You know I don’t have much of a talent for happiness. I never have.
My mother saw to that.” Somehow, here on the Riviera, he was feeling a howling Nebraska wind.

  “Well, come on—Ruth’s not on the boat.”

  By now I’d seen this a thousand times. The man who was caring, empathetic, sometimes even sensitive, could abruptly become nasty, cutting, cruel, and sometimes even despotic. Here we were on a beautiful yacht, and four people were trying to make one man happy. We were all deferential to his mood swings, and we were all trying to cheer him out of an unhappiness that had no obvious cause. It was as if four adults were ministering to one child. Of course Ruth was on the boat. Ruth was always there.

  The second day passed pleasantly enough. We stopped at a small island near Cannes for lunch and then headed over to the little town of Juan-les-Pins for dinner. Once described as “a pop-art Monte Carlo,” Juan-les-Pins had a carnival spirit that drew a young and noisy crowd. For many years, Restaurant le Vésuvio was a favorite of ours here. It was in the middle of town, with lots of action that added to the festive atmosphere.

  The yacht captain booked a table for dinner at nine p.m. The tender from Parts V brought us from the boat to the dock in town. As we alighted, the captain handed Johnny a walkie-talkie. “We will be waiting here at the dock at eleven-thirty to bring you back to the yacht,” the captain said, “but if you have any change in plans, call us.”

  Dinner was excellent. After we finished, Johnny, Alex, and Dick decided that they wanted to go back to the yacht, but Mary and I wanted to enjoy the town a while longer. “Just tell the crew to come back for us at two o’clock,” I told Johnny.

  “Sure,” he said, “but here, take the radio.”

  “No, you keep it,” I said. But he pressed it into my hands, and not wanting to create some comedy routine on the sidewalk, I took the radio. Mary and I walked around the picturesque town for a couple of hours and had a delightful time.

  We headed back a little before two. As we neared the dock, we could see several people standing by the yacht’s tender. One was Johnny. Holy shit, I thought to myself, what is going on?

  Before I could say anything, the captain of the ship was blurting his apologies. “Mr. Bushkin, I have told Mr. Carson that I was very sorry that I was six minutes late in arriving, but he refuses to accept my regrets.”

  “Fuck this,” snarled Johnny. “I didn’t pay $150,000 to have you late in picking me up. We will be leaving the boat tomorrow morning. Call your headquarters and have them arrange a flight from Nice to Los Angeles for the five of us. I will not stay on this boat any longer.”

  I was dumbfounded. We all were. Johnny had arrived at the dock at eleven-twenty-five, five minutes before the tender was due. At eleven-thirty-five he was so angry that he instructed Alex and Dick to leave the dock with him. Because he hated to shop and was not interested in going to a club, there was little for him to do while waiting for Mary and me. He refused all efforts by Dick and Alex to lighten him up, and he wouldn’t return to the dock where the tender was standing by. He just sat and fumed for three hours. As we boarded the tender, Johnny continued to harangue the poor captain, who was soon offering to have himself replaced by a captain who would fly in from London to salvage the trip.

  We spent the next few hours in the saloon of the yacht trying to reason with Johnny. By four a.m. he was willing to accept a new captain. At six a.m. he finally decided the old captain could stay, and we finally went to bed.

  “He’s insane,” I said to Mary as I crawled into bed. “We’ve got to find some way to get off this damn boat.”

  I slept past noon. When I woke up, I found out that Mary had already taken the tender to town and back. “Henry, I have such terrible news,” she said. “Entertainment Tonight called. There’s an emergency at the show, and they need me back immediately.”

  If there was one excuse Johnny was bound to accept, it was that there was an emergency at the show. We packed immediately. I’ll never forget the woeful look on Alex’s face as Mary and I escaped.

  This was the last vacation I took with Johnny.

  In 1985 Johnny asked me to talk to Ed Weinberger about giving his son Rick a job somewhere in Carson Productions. In Rick’s long up-and-down battle with alcohol, this was an up phase, and Johnny, who seldom interceded on behalf of his sons, hoped to encourage his progress. Weinberger took the request well and hired Rick to be the stage manager of Amen, which was just starting its run.

  Being a stage manager is a substantial job. Effectively the director’s right-hand man, the stage manager is in charge of schedules, scripts, props, and actors during the rehearsal process. He or she also records all of the director’s decisions about blocking, lighting, sound, changes in set design, wardrobe, and so on, and follows up to make sure that all of these directives are fulfilled. It is a key position, and if it’s not being performed well, the entire production notices.

  Unfortunately, Rick was not up to the job. He was habitually late for work and was often drinking on the job. Weinberger spoke to me countless times about the problem. His message was almost always the same. “Please talk to Johnny. I’d have fired him long ago if he wasn’t the boss’s son.”

  I did talk to Johnny. And Johnny always promised to talk to Rick.

  One day I got a call from Weinberger. “I fired Rick,” he said. “He came in drunk, and I threw him off the set. It’s done.”

  My immediate concern was about Johnny. “Did you call Carson and tell him?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” said Ed. “That’s your job. You tell him. And make it clear—he is not coming back.”

  “Come on, Ed, you’re not being reasonable.”

  “On the contrary, Henry, I’m the only one who is being reasonable.”

  This was a major problem. I immediately drove over to the Paramount lot to try to persuade Weinberger face-to-face. He was having none of it. “I put up with it for a long time, Henry. I gave Rick a lot of chances. If he was a stagehand who could just go fall asleep someplace, it wouldn’t matter, but he’s got responsibilities, and when he doesn’t do his job, it really does screw up the entire show.”

  I waited to tell Johnny until after he had finished taping that day’s edition of The Tonight Show and then drove over to the studio to break the news. Johnny’s reaction was predictable. “That fucking Weinberger!” he said. “The nerve of that asshole to fire my kid without talking to me first! Well, he’s gone. I’m firing him.”

  It took every ounce of diplomacy I could muster to remind him that this wasn’t Rick’s first offense: there had been many prior incidents that had been brought to his attention. “You were going to talk to Rick, remember?”

  The reminder quenched some of Johnny’s fire. “Yeah, well,” he said. “You know, it’s not easy being the son of a person like me.” I could see a sense of hopelessness overcoming him. It was clear that if he could have traded his entire fortune for a magic potion that would have cured Rick, he would have made that deal in a heartbeat. On some level, he obviously loved his son, but he had little ability to express it and certainly no capacity to help Rick fight the disease that had enveloped him in such a tight grip. “God, I wish I could be a better father. Tomorrow, I’ll go see Weinberger and get him to give Rick another chance.” I didn’t see any point in that, but neither did I see any point in trying to talk Carson out of it.

  The next morning Weinberger called Johnny and then told me how it went. “I told him that he was the boss, and he could hire or fire anybody he wanted. But I also told him that it was Rick or me. If he brought the kid back, I’d quit.”

  I don’t think anyone who had a financial relationship with Carson had ever challenged him so directly. Weinberger won, but I don’t believe the two of them ever spoke to each other again.

  Some five years after this crisis, on June 21, 1991, Rick was killed when his car plunged down a steep embankment along a paved service road near Cayucos, a small town north of San Luis Obispo. The story is that he had been taking photographs, and the car started rolling. On the first Tonight Show
after Rick’s death, Carson used the last segment of the show to share with his audience some of Rick’s photos. It had to have been difficult for Johnny to reveal a piece of his inner self, the sentimental side few were permitted to glimpse, and to do it while the pain of Rick’s sad life was still so raw.

  Later I heard that in the course of this difficult and emotional tribute, Freddy de Cordova, the longtime executive producer of The Tonight Show and Johnny’s trusted captain, saw that the program was about to run over its allotted time slot and, as he no doubt had done several hundred times before, he gave Johnny the signal to wrap it up. Afterward, Carson, furious that Freddy had tried to rush him through his tribute, banned de Cordova from the floor of The Tonight Show set and never permitted him to return. This was like telling a captain that he was no longer allowed on the bridge of his ship; de Cordova finished out the last year of Johnny’s tenure on the program as a nonperson. In his own twisted, dysfunctional way, Johnny was a very loyal father.

  As time went on, being Johnny’s lawyer meant playing a lot of roles and I became a business manager, overseeing not only Carson Productions, but also other investments (although not his stock portfolio) where Johnny took a position of equity in a company. Several of the deals, such as the television station we bought in Las Vegas, performed very well, and others were disappointing. Invariably, Carson’s interest in these projects was highest at the beginning, and he was frequently quite willing to promise to commit not only money but also time, which was often more valuable. The possibility of seeing or meeting Carson was often key to enlisting other investors or making the venture work. As I came to learn, however, no matter what Johnny would promise, we couldn’t depend on him to follow through. Although sometimes he surprised us.