No wonder Johnny called her Lady Macbeth and “the toughest son of a bitch of them all.” He even blamed her for his failed marriages: “There is no goddamn way to please that woman,” he told me.
And when she died, he refused to go to the funeral. “The wicked witch is dead!” he told everyone.
Yet they found a big box in her house full of clippings from her son’s career. Johnny took that box and kept it in his bedroom closet for the rest of his life.
This was something Johnny and I had in common. I had the same thing with my father. I tried everything I could think of to earn his approval but got nothing. Not a single “attaboy” or pat on the head.
As a young boy on construction jobs with him, I’d work extra hard. I’d load the wheelbarrow with dirt, push it as fast and as far as I could, unload it, and rush back.
One time he said, “You keep that up and you’ll be built like Joe Louis.”
That was the closest my dad ever came to giving me a compliment.
When I shined on the football field—he did come to all the games with my mom—I thought, Well, when I get home tonight he’ll say, “You played a good game, son.” But . . . nothing. When the papers the next day would have glowing write-ups . . . still nothing. And when I made First Team All State, he didn’t say a word. I kept hoping that someday he’d tell me what a good football player I was, but he never did. He just didn’t know how to say it.
Men of his generation did not show affection easily. They didn’t hug or say, “I love you.” I would have settled for a hug. I would have killed for a hug. My dad lived to be ninety-five, and in the last few years of his life we talked a lot. When he finally said he was proud of me, it made me cry. It still does. I’m grateful that he lived long enough to say it.
—
JOHNNY’S RUN as host of The Tonight Show began on October 1, 1962, with Groucho Marx introducing him. The other guests that night were Tony Bennett, Mel Brooks, Joan Crawford, and Rudy Vallee. Skitch Henderson was the bandleader (later replaced by Doc Severinsen), and Ed McMahon was the announcer delivering his first “Heeeere’s Johnny!”
Johnny was an instant hit. Though he’d inherited the show from Jack Paar, he quickly made it his own. It was live on tape so they almost never stopped rolling or edited. In fact The Tonight Show was the closest you could get to live television. “I never want the show to feel too planned,” Johnny told me. “We create it while it’s on the air.”
The nightly monologue was written by a staff of four or five writers and blue-penciled by Johnny. But he wasn’t just an editor of other people’s material. He knew when a joke worked and when it didn’t and usually added some of his own. People stayed up to watch the monologue because they knew that everybody would be talking about it at the water cooler the next day. That’s why I insisted on doing a monologue when I guest-hosted. They looked at me like I was crazy, but I did it, including some of Johnny’s shtick, like doing a slow burn or tapping the mic when a joke bombed.
Johnny was at his best when the monologue wasn’t going well. The rule among comedians is, never acknowledge a bad joke. Just keep talking like nothing is wrong. But Johnny got laughs based on the fact that he wasn’t getting laughs. As Ed McMahon put it, “Nobody died better than Johnny.”
Once, when the audience actually booed, Johnny raised an eyebrow and said, “You didn’t boo me when I smothered a grenade at Guadalcanal.” It got so you wanted a joke to bomb so you could hear the saver, and some people said that he purposely put bad jokes in the monologue. But Johnny was too much of a pro for that. Once in a great while when even the saver failed, there was never a hint of flop sweat. Doc and the band would strike up “Tea for Two” and Johnny would break into a soft-shoe.
A lot of comedians don’t laugh. Johnny laughed. Fully, with genuine appreciation. I was always thrilled when I could make him laugh. If you were a comic and you did your routine and Johnny said, “Funny stuff!” or gave you the okay sign, you’d be flooded with bookings the next morning. If you looked over and he was wiping his eyes, your price doubled. If he was on the floor, it tripled. And if Johnny called you over to the couch, you were a certified professional comedian with a big career ahead of you.
Johnny understood that television is an intimate medium and made sure there was a slave camera aimed at him at all times. The director could go to it for close-up reaction shots—“looks,” Johnny called them. He drew you in by playing to that camera as if it were another person in the room. Like millions of other Americans, you’d lie in bed watching Johnny through your toes. He’d do a look right into the lens and suddenly you were accomplices.
I asked him about it once and he told me that he’d never forgotten seeing Oliver Hardy sigh directly into the camera in a silent film. Johnny decided to use the camera the same way. If a guest was boring or said something stupid, Johnny would stare into the lens with an expression that said, Do you believe this?
Well, just as Johnny had learned from Oliver Hardy, I used Johnny’s looks in my films, and he would always call me on it.
“You did my look!” he’d say, pretending to be annoyed.
“Yeah, I did. And I’m glad.”
—
JOHNNY DOMINATED his late-night time slot, beating all the talk-show hosts who challenged him, including Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Jerry Lewis, David Brenner, Arsenio Hall, Alan Thicke, and Joan Rivers. Joan had been a frequent guest on the show and was both the first woman to guest-host and the only permanent guest host. Having boosted her career, Johnny considered her a friend. He never forgave her after she jumped to Fox to host a competing show without telling him first. He felt betrayed and never spoke to her again. Joan’s show lasted a year.
My experience with Joan wasn’t fun, either. She had a vendetta against me because I’d said something critical about her. I privately told someone close to Joan that I didn’t think she was a nice person and that it isn’t funny to say nasty things about people who can’t respond. Of course it got back to Joan and she said vile things about me in a magazine interview, then hired a guy who looked like me to sit in the audience at her Vegas act. She’d introduce him as Burt Reynolds, berate him, and then kick him out. People kept asking me to respond, but I tried to take the high road. I managed to keep my mouth shut until one reporter too many asked for a comment and I blurted out: “I never answer female impersonators.”
—
JOHNNY WASN’T PERFECT. He had a temper, but thank God he never unleashed it on me. And he could really hold a grudge. There was a board in the office with names written in Magic Marker. One day I’m with Freddie De Cordova and I look up and see the list and I say, “Oh, a wall of fame,” and Freddie says, “No, these are people who will never be on the show again because they came on drunk or coked up or they went over the line with Johnny.” There were some big names on that wall who were banished forever on Johnny’s orders.
Johnny’s timing was perfect. In fact, there was a pillow in his office embroidered with the motto It’s All in the Timing. He was also a master straight man. He’d let you talk when you were on a roll or jump in when you needed help. He wanted you to succeed because he understood that if the guest scores, the show wins. It doesn’t matter who gets the laughs. He’d learned that from Jack Benny, one of the few radio comedians who allowed others to deliver punch lines. But it was still Johnny’s show and he never lost control. The official title was The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, just so nobody forgot.
At the same time, I loved to watch how he handled a difficult guest. If someone was drunk or over-the-top, he ended it with a well-aimed zinger. He once stopped Zsa Zsa Gabor’s rambling with “The Stage Deli just called. They want to nail up your tongue in the window.”
But he was gentle with ordinary folks, like the hundred-year-old woman with a black belt in karate or the birdcall guy or the man who made jewelry out of bird droppings. As far as I know, the
closest Johnny ever came to being mean to a civilian was with the lady who brought out her precious collection of potato chips that resembled animals. While Ed distracted her, Johnny crunched loudly into a chip. The poor woman whirled around with a look of horror on her face, until Johnny revealed that he had his own bowl of chips hidden behind the desk.
Though Johnny didn’t invent the late-night TV talk show, he perfected it. His monologue/guests/musical act structure set the pattern for every talk show that followed, just as Johnny set the mark for all other talk-show hosts.
For a long time he was the most familiar face on American television, but he never got overexposed. In fact he was an enigma. People were curious about him because they sensed there was more there than met the fisheye. The joke around town was that Johnny existed only on television, and at least once a week someone would ask me, “What’s Johnny Carson really like?” It became a national catchphrase.
What was Johnny really like?
He was a good man. Yes, he could be cold. But if he was your friend, he would lie down in front of something for you and he’d show you that he cared through countless acts of kindness. But wordlessly, and from a distance.
And he was loyal. Not long after we first met, Johnny invited me to his apartment for a drink. Ed McMahon was there and we all had a few too many. For no reason Ed started busting my chops. I don’t know where it came from—whether it was some kind of jealousy about my friendship with Johnny or what—but Ed was really on my case. Sober, he was Mister Congeniality, but he was also an ex-Marine and he was drunk. The insults kept coming, and they were hurting my feelings.
Just as I was about to take a poke at him, Johnny stepped in.
“That’s enough, Ed,” Johnny said.
Ed ignored him and kept on me.
“Ed, I want you to leave.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I want you to leave.”
Ed looked at Johnny like, “You’re taking his side over mine?”
Johnny looked back as if to say, “Yes, I am.”
Ed left.
I’ll never forget that Johnny did that for me.
Johnny didn’t handle alcohol well either. I won’t say he was a nasty drunk . . . more like dangerous. He was also a cheap drunk. Two whiskey sours and he’d be ready to take on the world, and he often tried. He’d pick fights with total strangers, and I heard that a contract was put out on him after he made a drunken pass at a mobster’s girlfriend.
In the New York days, he and Ed would do the rounds at P. J. Clarke’s, Sardi’s, Danny’s Hideaway, and Jilly’s, where one night at about two a.m. Johnny was sitting at the bar when Sinatra walked in.
Without looking up, Johnny said, “I told you twelve-thirty, Frank!”
When it finally dawned on Johnny that he had a problem, he cut way back and pretty much quit the hard stuff. After that, I never saw him drink more than a glass or two of wine.
—
JOHNNY WAS AT HOME in front of an audience but uncomfortable in a small group. “I’m good with ten million people, lousy with ten,” he often said. At parties you’d find him in a corner doing magic tricks for a few people. He explained it simply: “On the show I’m in control. Socially I’m not.”
He wasn’t on all the time like a lot of performers. Compliments embarrassed him. He knew who he was and didn’t need his ego stroked. People thought he was cold and aloof. But he wasn’t cold and he wasn’t aloof. He was shy, yet I think he was very secure. I don’t believe he envied or felt inferior to anyone. He hated publicity and seldom granted interviews. On the few occasions when he did one, it was an ordeal for both journalist and subject.
Johnny was a loner, but I don’t think he was lonely. He enjoyed his own company, spending his free time at solitary pursuits like astronomy. He had telescopes all over the house. He’d call you over and say, “Look at this!” Whenever someone asked him how he became a star, he’d say, “I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled.” He was also into photography, flying, scuba diving, playing the drums—he was a damn good amateur—and above all, reading. Johnny was curious about everything. He was one of the best-read people I’ve ever known, and there was hardly a subject he couldn’t discuss knowledgeably.
—
SOMEBODY ONCE SAID that Johnny did for divorce what Lucille Ball had done for pregnancy on I Love Lucy. First there was Jody Wolcott, his college sweetheart and the mother of his three sons. Then there was Joanne Copeland and then Joanna Holland. Johnny met Alexis Maas when she strolled by his Malibu beach house in a bikini. He was in his sixties, she in her thirties, but they were happy together because she thought he was funny. It helps a lot when your wife thinks you’re funny.
Though Johnny played the divorces for laughs on the show (“I heard from my cat’s lawyer. My cat wants twelve thousand a week for Tender Vittles”), he once admitted to me that his failed marriages were among his deepest regrets.
The first marriage produced Johnny’s only children, his sons Chris, Ricky, and Cory. He was a distant father to say the least, as aloof and uncommunicative as his own parents. Johnny’s brother Dick once tried to describe the Carson reserve. “Put it this way—we’re not Italian. Nobody in our family ever says what they really think or feel to anyone else.”
I think Johnny loved his sons, but like his mother—and my dad—he couldn’t express it. He knew that show business wouldn’t let him down, but he was never sure about people, even his own children, so he focused on his career at the expense of his family.
It took thirty-nine-year-old Ricky’s death in a freak accident to bring it out. Ricky was a professional photographer on assignment when his SUV rolled down an embankment. Johnny had never talked about his sons in public before, but on his return to the show after a period of mourning, he eulogized Rick and displayed his photographs. At one point he welled up and said, “He tried so darn hard to please.” He closed the show with Rick’s photo of a sunset. Johnny never talked about it with me, but there was obviously a lot of pain and regret there, and I don’t think he ever got over it.
—
FOR AS LONG AS I knew him, Johnny carried a gun. I assumed he had a permit, but we never talked about it. It was a snub-nose .38 that he packed in a holster or in his man-purse. He refused to have bodyguards despite a climate of danger for celebrities and constant death threats against him personally: Before killing John Lennon, Mark David Chapman had targeted Johnny.
Over the years, I’ve had death threats, too. I never went to the police about them. I just recognized that there were lots of crazies out there and kept a pistol in my car. My dad was a police chief and he put me on the range when I was fifteen, so I knew how to handle a gun. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to talk about that on The Tonight Show, so one night I said, “I have a gun!” and the audience laughed, but I’ll bet there was at least one wacko out there in TV-land who thought, Not screwin’ with him!
There was an incident when Johnny found a hand grenade in his driveway along with a note threatening his family and demanding a $250,000 ransom. Despite strong discouragement from the FBI, Johnny insisted on making the drop himself. It was a point of honor with him. The G-men followed from a distance as he dropped the “cash”—actually cut-up newspapers—in a Burbank Laundromat. When the blackmailer picked it up, they arrested him. The grenade turned out to be a dummy, just like the guy who put it there, who went to prison for five years.
Johnny didn’t kowtow to corporate brass or suck up to sponsors. Once, after a McDonald’s commercial claiming “over twenty million burgers sold,” Johnny said, “Gee, that’s what, fifty pounds of meat?” One Christmas he announced that General Electric, then the parent company of NBC, had sent him a card announcing that “in lieu of a gift, a GE employee has been laid off in your name.”
The Tonight Show was a money machine, one of the most profitable shows ever, and it produced a big
chunk of NBC’s profits every year. When Fred Silverman became president of the network in 1979, he publicly scolded Johnny for taking too much time off. Johnny’s response was to announce his retirement, causing the price of NBC’s stock to drop like a stone. The network did a quick one-eighty and gave Johnny more than he’d ever dreamed of: a three-year contract at $5 million a year—then the biggest salary in television and double his previous pay—plus sole ownership of The Tonight Show.
When Johnny began hosting The Tonight Show in 1962, it ran an hour and forty-five minutes and he worked forty-seven weeks a year. The show was reduced to ninety minutes in 1967 and to sixty minutes in 1980, with Johnny working four nights a week. Eventually he worked only three nights a week for twenty-five weeks a year. When he started, his salary was $100,000 a year. When he retired in 1992, it was $1 million a week.
Anyone who was alive and conscious at the time remembers his last two shows, though people are confused about which was which. It was on the next-to-last show—not the finale—that Bette Midler serenaded Johnny with “You Made Me Love You” and “One for My Baby.” Then Bette and Johnny fell into a duet of his favorite song, “Here’s That Rainy Day.” Robin Williams, the only other guest that night, later said that it gave him goose bumps. It was certainly one of the tenderest moments I’ve ever seen on television.
The final show, on the following night, May 22, 1992, drew fifty million viewers. Johnny showed highlights from past shows. His sons were in the audience and he addressed them before signing off: “I realize that being an offspring of someone who is constantly in the public eye is not easy, so, guys, I want you to know that I love you. I hope that your old man has not caused you too much discomfort.”
Johnny quit at the top of his game and left ’em wanting more. He told me that he preferred people asking him “Why did you quit?” over “Why didn’t you quit?” When he walked away, he walked away for good and stuck to his decision despite countless offers to appear on talk shows and sitcoms and awards shows, saying that he’d “rather sit in Malibu and watch the hummingbirds mate.”
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 14