by Ed McMahon
Our first NBC orchestra leader, the great Skitch Henderson, was kind of a fop, always well dressed, allowing Johnny to kid him about his sartorial splendor. In contrast to Skitch, Doc Severinsen, who eventually replaced him, was an extraordinarily talented trumpeter who wore outrageously loud and sometimes bizarre outfits, which allowed Johnny to tell the audience, "I wouldn't wear that outfit to fondle Randolph Scott's saddle horn," or, "I wouldn't wear that outfit to a whale's hysterectomy." Tommy Newsom was the bland band member with absolutely no personality. As Johnny once explained, "We received the report today on Tommy's autopsy. There was no foul play; he died of natural dullness." These roles evolved over time and Johnny knew how to use them. Once, we did a parody of This Is Your Life, a popular show on which celebrated people were surprised by friends and relatives from their past. We did This Is Your Life: Tommy Newsom, but when the people from his past were brought out from backstage, they'd look at him, say, "No, that's not him," then turn around and leave.
These character traits were based on real life but magnified. Believe me, in real life Doc did not wear bright orange-and-yellow shirts with skintight paisley trousers. And in real life I didn't drink either . . . well, at least Doc didn't really wear those kind of clothes.
Hi-yoooo! I see those jokes still work.
Johnny created a character for himself just as he did for the rest of us. He was Peck's Bad Boy, the wide-eyed mid-westerner in the big town who might sometimes be naughty, but never nasty. And, just as with the rest of us, it was a character based loosely on fact. Being that character allowed him to get away with sexual innuendos that no one else on television could possibly have gotten away with. The same lines coming from me or almost anyone else would have seemed raunchy. But this behavior was acceptable from him; it was cute. Everybody understood that he wasn't really serious when he made outrageous remarks. One of the first nights Dolly Parton appeared on the show, she wore a revealing outfit, and she had a lot more to reveal than most other women. It was about as possible to overlook her breasts as it would have been to overlook the Grand Canyon. "People are always asking me if they're real," she told Johnny.
Not Johnny. That would not be polite. "I would never," he protested, "I would never . . ."
"I'll tell you what . . . ," Dolly continued.
" . . . I have certain guidelines . . . ," Johnny continued, then admitted, "but I would give about a week's . . . make that a year's pay, to peek under there."
Amply endowed women were such a staple of the show that we probably could have telecast highlights of their appearances as The Breast of Carson .
All together now, Hi-yoooo!
A beautiful actress named Carol Wayne appeared on the show semiregularly, playing the role of the sexy blond in sketches. Once, in a Teatime Movie bit, she came out carrying a model of a house in front of her chest, allowing Carson as Art Fern to ask the audience, "How would you like to get your hands on one of these?" Moments later she reappeared holding up several insurance policies, as supersalesman Fern suggested, "Take a look at what we cover with these policies," and then, with a twist of his mustache, added, "And then take a look at what we don't."
With Johnny, sex was always funny. On the show, I mean. His material was always suggestive, the kind of jokes boys would tell each other. "A wise man who has no chin," he once explained, "should learn to stroke something else." Or, "Here's a tip for women. A man is sexually interested in a woman if he stares up at her—from underneath a glass coffee table."
Carson understood how to use this character. He knew just how far he could go, how much he could get away with. A perfect example of that was his introduction of Lucille Ball at a dinner. As he told the audience, he had been asked to avoid the kind of suggestive remarks he often made on The Tonight Show . "And so," he concluded, "it gives me great pleasure to introduce our guest of honor tonight, Miss Lucille Testicle."
Maybe because we had spent so much time together, or maybe just because we were together so long, the fact is that Johnny trusted me. He knew I wasn't going to lead him down a bad path or steal his thunder or go for the jugular or take a cheap shot. Often during the show he'd glance over at me to see what I thought about whatever he was doing. Was the bit working? Should he keep going? And just as had happened on Who Do You Trust? my role on The Tonight Show expanded as it became clear that the audience enjoyed the relationship and repartee between Johnny and me. They were in on the joke: he was always the boss and I was always the employee, so when I did manage to get in the last word, all the millions of employees in the audience just loved it. I knew I had the greatest job in the world, I loved it, but my favorite part of the show was just after the monologue, when Johnny and I sat down at the desk. I would be in the swivel chair—that chair hadn't swiveled in a hundred years but it was always called the swivel chair—and we would ad-lib for five minutes. I loved waking up in the morning knowing that later that day I would be sitting with Johnny Carson in front of about ten million people and we would ad-lib five minutes of great entertainment and comedy.
I never knew what he was going to throw at me and I loved the challenge of trying to hold my own with the master. One night, out of nowhere, he started discussing a story he had seen on a National Geographic documentary. It was about a bird, the swit. "Listen to this," he said. "The swit flies its whole life, it's in the air the whole time. It just keeps flying. It mates in the air, it has babies in the air . . ." He went on and on about this little bird.
When he finished, I said, "Well, that's very interesting, but what about the shark?"
"What are you talking about, the shark?"
"Maybe the swit flies all the time," I continued, "but finally it lands on a branch and says, 'Whew, I'm glad that's over.' But the shark never stops swimming. The water has to flow in and out of its gills. If the shark stops swimming, it stops breathing, it dies. That's why sharks are so mean, they never get to stop swimming."
Johnny didn't know if I was kidding him or not. "Wait a second," he said. "You mean to tell me that at night the shark doesn't stop and rest?"
"John," I said, "how would a shark know night from day?"
Only twice in our years together did I intentionally disrupt a bit. One night we had a jaguar on the show and Johnny was supposed to feed it ice cream from a big ladle. Johnny was really terrific with animals and sometimes during these bits he would look as if he was really scared. Let me tell you the truth, sometimes he was really scared. These animals could be very unpredictable. I was amazed at some of the things he did. But this night, just as Johnny was scooping out the ice cream, I noticed blood dripping from the trainer's hand. He was trying to hide it, but I saw three deep bloody scratches. Interrupting Johnny, I said, "I don't think this cat is hungry."
Johnny glared at me. Actually, he glared right through me. The expression on his face was clear: are you out of your mind? What the hell do you think you're doing?
I indicated the trainer's hand. "I think he had some ice cream before the show." At first Johnny didn't understand and insisted on feeding this animal. "John," I said forcefully, "I don't think he wants ice cream."
Finally, Carson saw the trainer's hand. "Oh yeah," he said, "maybe he has had too much ice cream."
The second time I disrupted him was right in the middle of his monologue. Or rather, his attempt at a monologue. He was dying. Now, normally nobody died better than Johnny. As far as I know, he was the first comedian to make a joke out of the fact that his jokes were so bad. Maybe his best monologues were his worst monologues; certainly no one has ever been funnier about not being funny. In fact, the jokes he would make about his jokes were often much better than his jokes. But one night nothing was working, the jokes, the jokes about the jokes, the man was standing out there on what we called "the star mark" dying a slow death. Normally no one would walk into his monologue area; that was his sacred place. But I just couldn't resist. Like a coach helping a battered fighter, I went over to him and grabbed him by his shoulders and turn
ed him toward me. Obviously he was very surprised. "You can do this," I said earnestly, "I know you can. You're better than this . . . ," I pointed to the audience. "Don't let these people get you down. You're funnier than this." I gave him a gentle punch in the shoulder. "Now go ahead and do it!"
"Thanks," he said, laughing, "I needed that."
Johnny knew I was always there behind him. And the more dangerous the animal on the show, the farther behind him I was. In fact, the most persistent criticism I received through the years was for laughing out loud. Some people thought that I faked my laughter just to be supportive of him, that it was part of my job. That's absolutely not true. If I could fake that much laughter, I'd be the finest actor in the world. I admit it, I laughed a lot, and there was a reason for that: I thought Johnny Carson was very funny. Sometimes I did laugh very loudly at something other people did not find funny. But there was a good reason for that—and no, it was not my paycheck. Through the years Johnny and I spent a lot of time together offstage, and many of the things he said or did on the air, or some of his expressions, were funny to me in the context of our relationship. We did share some private jokes. For example, when we did a bit in which Johnny replied to viewer mail, I often told him, "Here's a letter from a little boy named Gordon from Linden, New Jersey." Now Johnny knew that the train I took to go home to Philadelphia went right past the Gordon's gin factory in Linden, New Jersey.
So Johnny would laugh whenever little Gordon wrote, adding, "He writes a lot, that kid, doesn't he?" I doubt anyone except me and Johnny got that joke, but we loved it.
Johnny and I had a little tradition: right before the show, I'd go into his dressing room for seven or eight minutes. Before every show. Sometimes Freddy de Cordova, our producer, or Bobby Quinn, the director, would be there, but a lot of the time it was just the two of us. We rarely talked about the show; we'd talk about anything else—marriage, divorce, sex, religion, science, the World Series, the world situation—but whatever it was, Johnny had something funny to say about it. Carson has the incredible ability to find humor in just about anything. He doesn't just say funny things; his normal way of thinking would be considered funny by most people. Now, sometimes during those conversations a risqué remark might accidentally have slipped out of his mouth or my mouth. Sometimes, in fact, the whole conversation was downright risqué. And so when we were onstage I might well have laughed at something other people didn't find that funny, but that laughter came from knowing him so well, from something private between us, or from what he'd said only moments before in his dressing room.
A lot of material that started in his dressing room would later show up on the air. When Johnny's divorce from his second wife was settled, one of the tabloids reported in a bold headline, CARSON'S EXTO GET $65,000 A WEEK. So I figured out how much that came to per hour. When I went into the show that afternoon everybody was scared to death to go near his dressing room. In all honesty, I must admit I wasn't looking forward to our daily meeting with great anticipation either. But at the usual time, I opened the door and kind of peeked in. He was sitting quietly behind his desk. "I figured it out," I said. "It's about $380 per hour, waking or sleeping."
"You so-and-so," he said, kicking his lamp off his desk. Under the circumstances, I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to do. But then he started laughing. Eventually that became a running gag on the show. Whenever the subject of marriage or divorce came up, one of us would look at the other and say quite distinctly, "Waking . . . or sleeping."
"Waking . . . or sleeping" became an inside joke that just about everybody in America was in on. But there were a lot of points of reference like that between us, and often what I was laughing at on the air referred to something that had happened in private.
I think the best way to explain why I laughed so easily at Mr. Carson is the line he had inscribed on a lovely watch he once gave me, the meaning of which will forever be known only to the two of us: "Don't look up, Mrs. Thompson."
Besides, why wouldn't I laugh? I had the best job in the world. I never went to a production meeting. If I wasn't involved in a sketch, I didn't even go to the rehearsal. I'd get to the studio in time to run through any commercials I had to do, but that was really all the preparation my job required. In fact, most of the time I didn't even know who our guests were going to be until I walked by the dressing rooms on the way to my office and saw their names on the doors. Before the show, I would check with Freddy de Cordova to see if there was anything I needed to know about that night's show; he'd tell me, for example, that Johnny was going to set fire to the studio in the third segment and that I should not try to put it out. But otherwise everything that happened on the show was completely fresh for me. And for that I was paid a wonderful salary. So I think the real question should have been, why didn't I laugh more?
One thing I did do for only the first twenty-seven years was the warm-up. Just before a TV show begins, someone, usually the announcer, comes out and spends a few minutes familiarizing the audience with the studio and getting them excited about what they are about to see. For example, I'd point out the APPLAUSE sign and explain that when it was lit they should applaud loudly, and then confide in them that Johnny had told me that when he retired that was the only thing from the set he wanted to take with him—and he intended to hang it in his bedroom. The job, as I tried to do it, was to turn a lot of individuals into a responsive group. I likened it to taking five hundred pearls and turning them into a necklace. However, on rare occasions, it turned out to be a noose.
Only once in my broadcasting career have I been fired, and that was because of something I said during the warm-up. When I was doing Five Minutes More, the wonderful schoolteacher-turned-comedian Sam Levenson appeared on my show several times and we became friends. When Sam was hired by Mark Goodson to host the quiz show Two for the Money, he hired me as his announcer. This was a big opportunity for me, a network show, as well as a regular paycheck.
During the warm-up one night, I told the audience, "Sometimes when you see a show like this you're a little tired, maybe a little shy, and you don't want to laugh out loud. If you were home watching, you'd be laughing. If you were on a bus with your sister, you'd be laughing. But since you're in a strange area, you don't know the people sitting next to you, you try to hold your laugh in. I must warn you about that. That's a very dangerous thing to do. Tonight, when you feel a laugh coming on, you must let it out. Please, do not hold your laugh in. It is a well-known medical fact that if you hold a laugh in, it will settle in your lower colon and that can be quite painful. Just the other night, for example, we had a lady here, a very large lady, in fact she was a very fat lady, she made the serious mistake of letting a laugh settle in her lower colon. It took four ushers to carry her out and I'm still waiting to hear from the hospital about how she's doing. So I implore you, ladies and gentlemen, do not let that happen to you. I am legally bound to tell you that we cannot be responsible if you hold in . . ."
Mark Goodson fired me because I said it was a fat lady. He thought that was disrespectful to the audience. I couldn't believe it. Several years later I hosted two quiz shows for Goodson and Bill Todman. Fortunately, I didn't have to do the warm-up on either show.
On The Tonight Show Freddy de Cordova would greet the audience and introduce me. "Here is the gentleman who is a big star of the show," he'd say, perhaps exaggerating a bit there, "a great friend and a man who has been known to take a drink. Watch now, you'll see him stumble out here . . ."
I was always greeted warmly by the audience. They felt that I was their guy on the show, the person they could sit down with and have a drink. Or two. Tonight Show audiences were always very excited. In many cases, they'd written months in advance for their tickets; they might even have planned their whole vacation around the show. They were always surprised by the set, and couldn't stop talking about it. It was much smaller than it appeared to be on television, the curtain was higher, the band was squashed into a small area. So, unlike man
y other shows, the purpose of the warm-up was not to get the audience involved but rather to calm people down.
The Tonight Show audience also had a role to play on the show. Members of the audience knew their lines. When Johnny said, for example, "This is a very strange audience," they recognized their cue and responded, "How strange is it?" Which allowed him to reply, "I'll tell you. Just before the show, a sweet, elderly lady came up to me and said, 'I'd like to capture you on canvas.' I said, 'You mean you'd like to paint my portrait?' She said, 'No, I've got an army cot in my Winnebago.' " At times, during his monologue, someone would yell out and Johnny would respond with a look or an ad-lib. He'd often refer directly to the audience, drawing in a deep breath, raising his eyebrows, tilting his head, and deciding, "You people are tough tonight. You're the kind of people who would send an Arrow shirt to General Custer." My job was to get everybody relaxed and comfortable, to make them feel welcome, but also to remind them to be on their best behavior because they were going to be seen by millions of people. "So if you're here with somebody you're not supposed to be with . . ."
I've always felt that the thing that made our audience so loyal is that they knew they were in on our big jokes. I used that knowledge to make them feel welcome. I'd tell them, "I'm really glad to be here 'cause just a little while ago I didn't think I was going to make it. I just felt so bad and I didn't want to come on and do a bad show for you folks. But the funniest thing happened. I called across the street to El Toritos, a little Mexican place, and they sent over the most delicious yellow soup I've ever tasted. Unfortunately, it was probably quite hot when they made it, but by the time they got it across the street it was quite cool. Funny, the way they'd seasoned it, they'd put the salt all around the edge of the container. A very nice girl named Margarita brought it over. I drank the whole thing down. I can't wait to get more of their soup . . ."