by Ed McMahon
Carson admitted he'd missed it.
One of the few performers turned down for the show was a singer named Tiny Tim. He came into the office for an interview wearing lipstick, eye shadow, heavy makeup. Art Stark thought he was much too strange even for our show.
Who Do You Trust? was perfect for Johnny Carson. It gave him the chance to work out so many of his memorable expressions and reactions. No matter how strange a guest was, no matter how ridiculous his story, Johnny played it straight, as if he were talking to a perfectly normal person. About the furthest he would go to express some doubt about a guest was raising his eyebrow. He was just great at finding the humor in the most ordinary things. Just after the big quiz show scandals erupted, when it was discovered that contestants on big shows like The $64,000 Question were being given answers, one of our contestants tried to give Johnny a little doll. He recoiled as if the doll were on fire. "A little bribe, huh?" he said. "Five years on the show and I knew something had to happen . . ." Then he sort of whispered to her, "See, all that stuff is given backstage . . ."
Carson was willing to do just about anything for a laugh. He was very athletic and really knew how to use his body. If he had to be skinnier for a bit, somehow he became skinnier. On every show we had at least one demonstration in which he participated. We had an archer who shot an apple off Johnny's head, a karate expert who taught him how to break a board with his forehead, weight lifters, people trying to break hula-hoop records, a woman contortionist who tried to set the world record for supporting her weight on her hands with her feet behind her head—then tried to twist Johnny into a pretzel. We had a gymnast who showed him how to jump on a trampoline—and Johnny jumped straight out of the top of the TV screen.
The thing about Carson was that he was good at this stuff; with a little practice he could pretty much master whatever it was he was doing. I learned very quickly that he was the most facile, accomplished man I'd ever met. He could do a little bit of everything. When we would be talking in his dressing room he might be drumming with two pencils, rolling a half-dollar between his fingers, hiding cards. He could even tap dance a little; few people know this, but he once won an Arthur Murray jitterbug contest. Sometimes he seemed a little apprehensive about doing things, at least he played it that way, but he always ended up doing it. We had an expert fly caster on the show try to drop a lure inside a tire, and he was so nervous he missed—so Johnny showed him how to do it.
Long before Ed Ames tossed his famous hatchet between the legs of a silhouette on The Tonight Show, one of our contestants taught Johnny to toss a battle-ax, and Johnny hit the center of the target with his first throw. He was terrific with kids. Kids used to come on and demonstrate how to hop around on a pogo stick or ride a unicycle, and naturally Johnny failed in the funniest ways possible. Then he would just glare at those kids with his steely blue-eyes glare. I'm telling you, if there was a tub of water around he would fall into it, if our guest was demonstrating how to make a pizza we would end up in a flour fight, and no pie ever went unthrown.
This show also gave us the chance to develop our characters and our on-air relationship. Even then Johnny looked like the naive choir boy from the Midwest who had innocently wandered into the big city. He was often shocked, oh, terribly shocked, at some of the things people said. He loved double entendres, sexual innuendos, anything he could get away with. That was the main reason we had couples as contestants. I remember one couple we had on who confessed they had met while she was on her honeymoon with another man. The great singer Rudy Vallee came on with his new bride, who was much, much younger than him. She was a beautiful, very sexy girl, and when Johnny asked her what it was like being married to an older man, she admitted, "Oh, it's great, I keep him up all night."
Almost immediately he made me his foil and by doing so made us a team. On the air I became the big guy who drank too much and ate too much, the good-time guy, hail-fellow-well-met. I was "Big Ed," then "Big Ed, who is the announcer on this show only because he never passed the bar. In fact, Ed has never passed any bar." And just off camera he was always doing little things to cause me problems, things like setting my script on fire. I did a billboard at the top of the show; each of the six sponsors that day had a copy line: "Swans Down cake mixes, the cake mixes you can swear by." But the sponsors changed all the time, so I had to read this opening from a script. And almost every day, as I started reading, he'd set fire to the bottom of my script. I had to get through the opening before my script burned up. I had to read as fast as I could. Some days a copy line like "Nabisco crackers are so good and salty you can eat the whole package" was reduced by fire to something like "Nabisco crackers. Eat 'em." By the end of the opening I was trying to read charcoal.
Who Do You Trust? was as much a training ground for me as it was for him. I did all the commercials live, and I learned how to deal with just about anything that could happen on the air. And Carson made sure anything that could happen did happen. One afternoon, just as I was ready to demonstrate how easy it was to use cake mix, he walked by my prop table and "accidentally" hit the leg, knocking my bowls and mixers and cake mix on the floor. Now, I am not saying that Mr. Carson hit that table leg intentionally, which resulted in prolonged laughter from the studio audience, but I wouldn't bet my Bud against it.
Most of the time, I was able to get through my commercials. I had my professional dignity to uphold, but occasionally even I would make a mistake. I was doing a spot for StayPuff softener. This was long before Pampers had been invented, when mothers had to pin diapers on their babies. Mothers always had to be very careful not to stick their baby with the pin when putting the diapers on. I had two piles of diapers; the pile washed in StayPuff was much fluffier. I was supposed to say, "StayPuff makes it so easy to pin these diapers on . . ." Well, I don't know what Carson had done to distract me—actually that might have been the day he crawled under the camera and gave me a three-match hotfoot while I was doing the spot—but whatever he did, I wasn't paying attention and I said, "StayPuff makes it so easy to pee . . ."
Well, in those days you couldn't say that word on TV. The censors were so strict that if you read the alphabet you were supposed to leave out that letter. Carson was laughing so hard he left the theater. But I'll tell you how he would have described this scene. In his most innocent tone, he would have said, "The organist was laughing so hard he couldn't play his organ . . ."
I understood that my job was to support Johnny Carson. I didn't tell the jokes, I set up the jokes. I didn't get the laughs, I helped him get the laughs. Johnny and I never discussed this; we didn't have to. We were smart enough to see how well our relationship worked. At times I had to consciously stop myself from responding to something he said; I'd always had my own shows, I'd always been free to say whatever popped into my mind. But after a few weeks I had slipped quite comfortably into the role of straight man, his second banana. And as he got to trust me more and more, he gave me more to do. He began to depend on me, and my role expanded greatly.
We became great pals. When we started working together he was living in Harrison, New York, about an hour outside the city, and his first marriage was breaking up. So, often, after the show instead of going home he'd suggest we get something to eat and drink. And drink. And sometimes toward the end of the week he'd ask me to spend the weekend with him in Ft. Lauderdale. I believe there is a word for people who say no when the boss suggests dinner—and that word is "unemployed." Besides, my marriage wasn't doing all that well either. Alyce was very unhappy about all the time I was spending in New York. She would much rather I had remained Mr. Television in Philadelphia and not tried to expand my career in New York. I remember negotiating with her on the phone, telling her that Johnny wanted me to go to Florida with him and that the producer thought it was a good idea.
That was a tough time for me, too. I was a practicing Catholic, I often went to Mass on my way to New York, and I believed completely that as a Catholic I married once and for life. But gradually m
y marriage to Alyce was breaking down. If I have one regret in my life, it is that often my career prevented me from being with my kids. I always tried to be there for important occasions, but the truth is I missed a lot of the day-to-day family life. I wasn't there when my son Jeff was born, for example, because we had just started taping Who Do You Trust? and we were doing two shows that day. Jeff was born between shows.
Johnny and I spent a lot of time together, much more than we would in later years, but our friendship was forged then. We'd spend nights going from restaurants to bars, places like Michael's Pub and Danny's Hideaway and Sardi's and Jilly's and P. J. Clarke's. We had the adventures that two young successful guys on the town in New York City who enjoyed a bit of libation might have, actually a lot of libation, we libated all over the city. And at times the fact that I was big and, as a marine, in great shape prevented us from having even more public adventures. We got to know each other very well; we learned a lot about each other's feelings and values, what hurt us, what made us happy. We came to understand how each of us thought, and most important, we really liked each other, we had a good time together. The intimacy that developed during the four years we did Who Do You Trust? was essential to the success of The Tonight Show.
Who Do You Trust? was pivotal in my career. As soon as I started appearing on a daily network program in New York, I began getting all types of offers for shows and commercials in Philadelphia. One of the most interesting was an opportunity to do my own late-night show. NBC was getting very nervous that Jack Paar, the controversial Tonight Show host, was going to quit. So the network requested that each of the O & Os, the local stations that they owned and operated, find a potential replacement for Paar. The NBC affiliate in Philadelphia picked me, and I created a late-night show titled McMahon and Company. I did the show for six or seven months, while commuting to New York. Which is not the story of how I ended up on The Tonight Show.
4
One evening the actor Fernando Lamas, who had quite a reputation as a ladies' man, was a guest on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson liked him a lot. He said that he thought it had been very brave of Lamas to come to America without speaking the language and try to make it in the motion picture industry. After praising him for his courage and dedication, Johnny asked him why he pursued such a difficult career.
Lamas told him, "It was a good way to meet broads."
Johnny laughed, nodding his head as if the answer had been obvious, then said, "You know, Nietzsche couldn't have said it better."
Nietzsche? Nietzsche! After the show I went into Johnny's office and asked him, "Where the hell did Nietzsche come from?"
Johnny just shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "It was just back there somewhere."
I worked with Johnny Carson for thirty-four years. During that period I think the longest we ever went without doing a show together was four weeks. Besides four years of Who Do You Trust? we did 6,583 Tonight Show s. And the guy never failed to surprise me or entertain me.
Sometimes I think television was invented just to display the talents of Johnny Carson. No one has ever mastered it as he did, and it was my privilege to be sitting by his side in the swivel chair that didn't swivel, and then move down one seat onto the couch as the big movie star came on to promote a picture, then move down another seat when the zoologist came on and put the Goliath beetle on Johnny's hand and watched it crawl up his arm, and then another seat when Johnny brought out the farmer who created jewelry from animal droppings, and finally move onto a folding chair when the author came out for the last three minutes, for all those years.
NBC's Tonight Show dated back to 1951, when it debuted as a late-night variety show titled Broadway Open House, hosted by comedian Jerry Lester and his pulchritudinous sidekick, Dagmar. Maybe television was really invented for entertainers like Dagmar, whose two biggest talents could not be appreciated on radio. As Johnny once ad-libbed about a guest during a commercial break, "She could have nursed Wyoming." Then Steve Allen hosted the show for almost four years, introducing great performers like my friends Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and Andy Williams, and doing parody sketches like "What's My Pain?" When he left, the network didn't have any idea what to do with the time slot; after experimenting with Ernie Kovacs for a few months, they created a really terrible news, interview, and gossip show called America after Dark, with Jack Lescoulie and Al "Jazzbo" Collins. That failed, so in desperation they hired Jack Paar. Paar, a low-key comedian who had hosted several radio and summer replacement television programs, described himself as "Lawrence Welk without music." Paar saved The Tonight Show, and maybe all of live late-night television.
Paar made The Tonight Show the hottest program on the air. People started staying up to watch the show because they knew the next day everybody in their office would be talking about it. He brought together a wonderfully eclectic mix of talent, combining an offbeat group of regular guests, people like Cliff Arquette playing a folksy character named Charley Weaver, pianist-curmudgeon Oscar Levant, and "ditsy" comedienne Dody Goodman, with great young performers like Jonathan Winters, Joey Bishop, Diahann Carroll, and Carol Burnett, and still managing to attract big stars like Jack Benny, George Burns, Red Skelton, and Jerry Lewis. Part of Paar's appeal was his unpredictability. You didn't want to miss his show because you never knew what he might do. He made front-page headlines for weeks, for example, when in the middle of a show he announced he was quitting, then walked off the stage because network censors had cut out a joke in which he had used the phrase "WC," meaning a water closet or bathroom, without consulting him.
His return got one of the highest ratings in television history, even if the entire history of television was then only about fourteen years. My show in Philadelphia, McMahon and Company, came on right after Paar. He was a tough act to follow, particularly on my limited budget. The "and Company" was my piano player and whomever I could convince to sit for an interview. My guests ranged from the legendary actress Helen Hayes to an elderly woman who played her head; she actually banged her hand against her skull to produce an identifiable version of "I'm Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover."
After hosting The Tonight Show for five years, "the King"— as Jack Paar called himself, explaining, "overstatement is very funny"—decided to quit for real. "You can only work a field for so many seasons in a row before it becomes barren," he said. "I don't think Paar's half acre is completely worn out, but it has gotten a little dry lately."
Paar was so popular and controversial that the media doubted anyone could really replace him, but Paar himself decided that Johnny Carson, who had filled in for him as host on occasion, was "the one man who could or should replace me." Paar retired at the end of March 1962; NBC hired Carson to succeed him starting the following October. While Carson fulfilled his Who Do You Trust? contract at ABC, a succession of guest hosts including Bob Cummings, Jan Murray, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Jerry Lewis, Arlene Francis, Groucho Marx, Soupy Sales, and Art Linkletter filled in during the summer.
To this day I don't know how I got the job as Johnny Carson's Tonight Show announcer. I've never asked him and he has never told me. I do know how badly I wanted the job. We had become very close friends, but I think one of the reasons for that was that we rarely, if ever, spoke about business. We just had a good time together. After it was announced that Johnny Carson had been hired to replace Paar, I heard all kinds of rumors about who his announcer would be. The story that seemed most plausible was that NBC was pressuring Carson to keep Paar's announcer, Hugh Downs, as a way of making viewers more comfortable with the change, whereas Johnny wanted to take me and producer Art Stark from Who Do You Trust? Apparently a deal was made—again this is all rumor—allowing Carson to hire me if he agreed to accept a producer already under contract to the network. This was NBC's way of maintaining some control over the show. So Perry Cross became producer of The Tonight Show, Hugh Downs replaced Dave Garroway as host of The Today Show, and I got the announcer's job.
I found out about i
t late one night at Sardi's. Johnny and I were sitting at the bar celebrating . . . celebrating the fact that we were sitting at the bar, when he said casually, "You know, Ed, I've been thinking, when we take over the show . . ."
"Whoa," I said. "Now just back up a little bit. Did you say, when we take over the show?"
"Yeah, of course. Of course you're going with me. Didn't you know that?"
I looked at Johnny gratefully and said those four lovely words most appropriate at a moment like that: "I'll drink to that!"
There had been several announcers on The Tonight Show: Gene Rayburn had worked with Steve Allen, Hugh Downs with Jack Paar, and each of them had fulfilled quite a different role on the show. I had no idea what I was supposed to do beyond showing up on time wearing a clean shirt. About the only thing I knew for sure was that I would be doing a lot of live commercials. I'd learned while working on the boardwalk that the best way to make something look natural was to rehearse the hell out of it, that the more you did it, the less it looked like you'd ever done it before. I'd met Hugh Downs while he was cohosting a morning homemakers' show, The Home Show, with Arlene Francis, and he graciously invited me to spend time with him in studio 6B at Rockefeller Center, the studio in which The Tonight Show was done.
For several weeks I went over there in the afternoon and rehearsed that night's commercials with him. I got to know the crew, and I learned the very complicated, technical aspects of doing commercials, like where to stand. I mean, there really was no training period for this job; I just had to do it. All those Thursday nights I'd spent at the Emerson College Broadcasting Club really had very little value— unless, of course, we got Praise linoleum as a sponsor.