For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  "Wrong!" Mr. Carson would respond immediately, and then follow with an insult, "bumper breath." Or Methuselah breath, manifold breath, mooseface, six-cigarette, three-martini-lunch breath. Thirty years we got away with material like this, thirty years!

  "You mean there's more?" I said, shocked, thus proving my acting lessons had not been wasted. "I can't believe it." He would then read the new list. "You know you've done something wrong if a pedestrian is waving to you . . . from the hood of your car." That's where my "Wow!" proved valuable.

  Johnny often said, "We started doing this show on October 1, 1962. The second night they ran a Best of Carson." Wrong! Boss breath. I've been waiting a long time to write that. When we started doing the show, we were on five nights a week for an hour and forty-five minutes. But as the show became more successful it was shortened. In 1967 it was reduced to ninety minutes, and in 1980 to sixty minutes. Eventually Johnny began working only four nights a week and we used guest hosts. And then we used more and more guest hosts. And then he worked three nights a week. We were in the enviable position of being paid more money to work less. With that in mind sometimes I wonder why Johnny bothered to retire. If things had kept moving in the same direction, eventually we wouldn't have had to be there at all, for which they would have paid us a fortune.

  We used so many guest hosts that in my warm-up I would ask the audience for volunteers to be the guest host. And then I'd give them a date. It seems as if at one time or another just about every major star in show business hosted the show. The record for serving as guest host most often belongs to Joey Bishop, who filled in for Johnny 206 times, far more than anyone else, at least until NBC started using permanent substitutes. Sometimes viewers forget how many major stars sat in Johnny's chair: my friend Frank Sinatra did it twice; Harry Belafonte, Rickles, and Newhart; Jerry Lewis filled in for a week; Flip Wilson, Groucho, David Brenner; Joan Rivers became a permanent guest host until she . . . left; Roger Moore; Sammy Davis hosted for a wonderful week; Leno and Letterman; Dick Cavett; Bob Hope had a young singer named Barbra Streisand as his guest; Alan Sherman had a young comedian named Bill Cosby; even Kermit the Frog hosted the show.

  For many years I worked with every guest host. NBC wanted me there to provide continuity when Johnny wasn't working. In later years that became a problem, because Johnny wanted me there when he was there and the network wanted me there when he wasn't there. And I wanted to start taking a little more time off. NBC finally decided I would continue to work with guest hosts. Fine with me, I said cooperatively, then I'll take my time off when Johnny's there. But just one thing, I added, please, you tell that to Mr. Carson. So they told Johnny and it worked out fine: for the last few years of the show I worked only with Johnny.

  Working with so many different guest hosts served to remind me how brilliant Carson was. Night after night Johnny made it look so easy; he made it look as if anyone could do it. But it wasn't easy; it was a job with extraordinary pressure. Hosting a program being watched by ten million people without a script is a very difficult thing to do. My friend Don Rickles, for example, hosted several times. There are few people in show business with more courage than Rickles. Rickles once told Frank Sinatra, "Frank, be yourself. Stand up and hit somebody." But whenever he hosted the show, he got so nervous that he would perspire more than anyone I've ever seen. Buckets of sweat poured off him. By the time he got to "Good evening," he was soaking wet. He used to kid about it himself, saying, "Don't mind me, I'm working on Guam." And at every break during the show he would ask me, "Was that good? Was that funny?"

  Naturally I was as reassuring as I could be to my good friend. "Excuse me," I'd say supportively, "did you say something?" Or, "That was great, Don, much better than anything Kermit the Frog did."

  To some degree every guest host was nervous. Most of them expected to be nervous and knew how to inject that nervous energy into their performance. Bob Newhart used to say that the only time he really got nervous was when he wasn't nervous. But usually movie actors, people who were not used to performing live, got the most nervous. The most nervous of them all was Roger Moore. Roger Moore was at the height of his success as James Bond when he hosted the show. I mean, he was the epitome of sophistication. James Bond personified. Before we went on the air, he grabbed me by the arm, dug his fingers into my skin, and asked, "Ed, please, don't leave me alone out there. Please stay with me." He was absolutely frantic. But on the air, his professionalism took control and he was wonderful.

  When working with a guest host, I did feel more responsible for the show than I did when Johnny was there. The guest hosts looked to me for security, for direction, and I had to provide it. They thought of me as the guy who knew where all the bathrooms were. Just as when I was working with Carson, I tried to be there when needed and be quiet when I was not needed. It's just that the guest hosts needed me more. One night, for example, when Newhart was hosting, his good friend Robert Morse from How to Succeed in Business was his guest. Both of them are very talented, very funny men, but together nothing happened. They were having a wonderful time, they were breaking each other up, but the audience was just staring at them. It was about as exciting as the narration for home videos. They did two segments, about ten minutes, without getting a laugh. Finally, mercifully, the segments ended and we went to a commercial. Coming out of the commercial Bob Newhart was supposed to introduce the musical act, an organ player.

  Unfortunately, and sometimes things like this happen, the organ caught fire. I don't mean the organist was great; I mean smoke started rising out of it. Freddy de Cordova told Newhart, "The organ's on fire. Do two more segments with Morse." This was a real problem. The two of them had already done their best material and that hadn't worked at all. Now it really got bad. They were just filling time. Newhart had this forlorn look on his face; he knew how bad it was going. Finally, I had to step in. After one of them finished another long uninteresting story, I laughed, but only politely, and suggested, "Gee, have you two ever considered putting out a book of these stories?"

  I think when Johnny took a night off he knew he was leaving the show in good hands with me and Doc and Tommy and Freddy. I mean, the man took an occasional night off once or twice a week, what could really happen? I mean, what was the guest host going to do, insult the pope? Well, actually, there was that one night when the host David Frost and his guest Robert Shaw were discussing Pope Paul VI's position on abortion. "Well," Frost said, "there's supposed to have been an occasion in the nineteenth century when [the Pope] said in the afternoon, 'I'm not infallible.'

  And then at seven o'clock he said, 'I'm sorry. I made a mistake. I am infallible.' "

  As the only graduate of Catholic University on the show that evening, I declined gracefully to get involved in that one. I just did my job, knowing for sure that no one could debate the virtues of Alpo. But I did wonder exactly how Johnny must have reacted when someone told him that everything on the show had been fine, except for that little comment that alienated the entire Catholic Church.

  Sometimes the guest hosts did use the show to discuss serious social topics. When Harry Belafonte hosted the show for a week in 1968 he invited many of the greatest black entertainers to be his guests, but also people like Senator Robert Kennedy and the Smothers Brothers. Tommy Smothers, whose criticism of President Johnson and the Vietnam War was well publicized, admitted that he believed President Johnson was indisputably the best president that the country had at that moment. Later in the show Belafonte mentioned that he'd enjoy appearing on the Smothers Brothers' controversial show, to which Tommy Smothers replied, "I'm sorry, but we don't allow any of that interracial stuff."

  Of all the guest hosts I worked with, the one I most enjoyed was Muppets star Kermit the Frog. That was one of the few times we had an interspecies host. At least Kermit did not break out in flop sweat like some of our other hosts; instead he broke out in warts. That was the night I really had to use everything I'd learned in my acting lessons. I decided to deal with K
ermit as if he were a real frog, as if I were talking to a real frog. Not that I would normally discuss anything of importance with a real frog, but I treated Kermit as if he were a real frog who could speak. And it worked very well. But during the show I did hope that one of my old marine drinking buddies would tune in and see me conversing pleasantly with a frog. I knew if they did, one of two things would happen: either they would think I had finally flipped because I was talking to a frog, or it would look to them as if I were speaking to a frog and that hallucination would cause them to quit drinking.

  During one segment, Kermit read a few household cleaning tips from a book, enabling me to say, "You know, it's not a fat book, I mean the pages are tiny but . . . by golly, that's a great book for a frog to be reading because everything in the world you'd ever want to know about household hints is in this book."

  "You are wrong, dishwater breath," Kermit replied, marking the only time in my life that I have been insulted by a puppet, although admittedly in Philadelphia I was outrated by Howdy Doody.

  During his monologue on our twenty-ninth-anniversary show, Johnny, who was suffering from a bad cold, quoted the classic line "The show must go on." Then he turned to me and asked, "Who said that?"

  "The man who owns the theater," I suggested. The Tonight Show did go on for almost thirty years, through marriages and divorces and earthquakes and wars, and during that time just about every significant actor or performer appeared on the show, as well as numerous politicians, experts, and ordinary strange people. And when you've done thousands of shows as Johnny and I did, and had thousands of guests, and performed in thousands of bits, the shows begin to run together in my memory. Sometimes, when I watch The Carson Comedy Classics I see myself doing things I have absolutely no memory of ever doing. And sometimes I laugh out loud when I hear myself laughing out loud. So it's very difficult for me to recall favorite moments or favorite shows. But there are days and nights that stand out in my memory.

  For example, no matter what some people have said, I really don't claim credit for making Richard Nixon president of the United States. Oh sure, perhaps I helped a little. Politically, I would call myself an American, meaning I've always voted for the candidate rather than by party affiliation. In 1968, when Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey, a man I greatly admired, I voted for Humphrey. But when a potential candidate for the presidency asked for my help, I was pleased to give it. And believe me, if you're ever in that situation, feel free to call on me.

  In 1968, when I was living in Bronxville, New York, one of my neighbors, a delightful man named Clint Wheeler, was working as an adviser to Richard Nixon. This was before Nixon had announced he was going to run; it was even before Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not run. In the first televised presidential debates, in 1960, Nixon looked tired and unshaven compared to the handsome Jack Kennedy, and claimed later that his poor makeup cost him that election. Well, by 1968 politicians understood the importance of looking good on television. So when Nixon was scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show, Wheeler asked me to meet with him and offer some advice.

  We met in his Fifth Avenue office. It was the middle of summer, and although the air-conditioning was on, there was a fire burning in the fireplace. "I'm going to be on your show," he explained, "and I just wonder if you have some ideas how I can make sure I come across well."

  Today media consultants are paid thousands of dollars to answer that question. But this was a subject on which I was an expert. I'd been in television almost as long as there had been television. "The most important thing to do when you're on television is to include everybody," I advised Nixon. "Make contact with the people who are watching at home as well as those people in the studio. This isn't live theater; you have to play to the camera. Include everybody. Try to find common emotions, things that people watching at home can relate to. If Johnny asks you how you feel about something, you might tell him that you have the same feelings that every person in the audience has felt at one time or another."

  Here I was, trying to teach Richard Nixon how to be warm. "And when you do," I continued, "point straight into the camera, because you're pointing to ten million people."

  We spent about an hour together. The last thing I told him was that when he walked out from behind the curtain he should shake hands with me. "I'm the announcer, I'm not the boss, I'm the next guy down. A lot of people identify with me. If you ignore me, they think you're ignoring them. When Barry Goldwater was on the show, he didn't bother to shake my hand. Now Barry Goldwater is a nice man, and he certainly didn't mean to slight me, but people noticed and they didn't like it."

  The first thing he did on the show was walk straight over to me and shake my hand firmly. When Johnny asked him the question to which everyone wanted the answer—was he going to make another run for the presidency—he replied, "Actually, I think you ought to run for president. Let me tell you a few things. I'm an expert on how to run for president. Not how to win, but how to run . . . First let me tell you your assets. You're young . . . you come over on television like gangbusters. And boy, I'm an expert on how important that is."

  "You're not gonna lend me your makeup man, are you?" Johnny asked.

  "No," Nixon replied, "I'm going to lend him to Lyndon Johnson." In fact, Nixon hired The Tonight Show's makeup man to work with him during the 1968 campaign. And when he won the election, I was asked to produce the inaugural gala. The inaugural gala was very different in 1968 than it is today. It was much smaller, much less important. I don't believe it was even televised nationally. But I agreed to do it—I mean, this was a request from the president-elect of the United States—and I put together a wonderful show.

  I'll also never forget the night that the Reverend Martin Luther King appeared on the show, just a few months before he was assassinated. Because he was such a charismatic world leader, it was sometimes easy to forget that he was also a human being. The Tonight Show format allowed people to show a side of their personality not usually seen in public. Dr. King explained that he had flown home to the United States from Russia that afternoon. "And as soon as we started out, they notified us that the plane had mechanical difficulties and that kept us on the ground . . . Well, finally we took off and landed, and whenever I land after mechanical difficulties, I'm always very happy. Now, I don't want to give you the impression that as a Baptist preacher I don't have faith in God in the air; it's simply that I've had more experience with him on the ground."

  Just about the only movie star who refused every invitation to be on the show was Cary Grant, who told Freddy de Cordova that he wanted to be remembered for his performances. But for many other film stars, just like politicians, the show was an opportunity to reveal aspects of their personality rarely seen by their fans. Burt Reynolds, for instance, claims his appearances on The Tonight Show turned him into a big star by allowing him to show his irreverent, self-deprecating side, which he then displayed in films like The Longest Yard. The movie star whose appearances I most enjoyed was James Stewart. One of the reasons we got along so well was that we both were military pilots who had stayed in the reserves after the wars. I'm sure we must have talked about flying, although I don't really remember that. Everybody knew James Stewart as a brilliant actor, but few people knew that he wrote poetry until he started reading his poems on the show. I mean, these poems were not classic literature; instead they were warm, sometimes funny, and always heartfelt. One of the very few times I saw tears in Johnny's eyes was the night James Stewart read a poem about his dog who had died. Stewart eventually published a collection of his poems, which became a big best-seller. One night, he explained that he and his wife, Gloria, had just returned from a trip to Africa, the one place in the world Johnny had always wanted to visit, and he had written a poem about it. "Lake Berengo is a body of water," he read, "its surface smooth as glass. But getting to Lake Berengo is a genuine pain in the ass."

  I also saw tears in Johnny's eyes the night Michael Landon, who was dying of cancer, made his las
t appearance on the show. That was a tough, tough night. Michael Landon was a wonderful person and he and Johnny had become very good friends. We all knew he was dying, but on the show that night he displayed extraordinary strength and courage. He insisted that he was going to beat the disease; who knows if he really believed that or not. Maybe he was in denial, maybe it was his way of bolstering his confidence, or maybe it was just his way of coping.

  Several years later I saw the same kind of courage displayed by my son Michael in the weeks before his death.

  One night I will certainly never forget was the night I got nervous. Now, I never got nervous. Maybe I got a little nervous when I was selling pots and pans and a young woman wearing only her robe sat down on the bed next to me and the robe opened a little bit. And maybe I got a little nervous when the North Koreans were aiming at me, but I never got nervous on The Tonight Show. That show was at its best when things went wrong, when the jokes weren't funny or the sketches fell apart, so what was there for me to be nervous about? That the jokes would be funny? That Johnny and I would follow the script? So I never got nervous on the show. Except this one night. I sang on the show once, just before I opened my nightclub act, and I wasn't particularly comfortable that night. But that wasn't the night I was nervous. The only time I got nervous was the night I appeared on the show as a guest. My movie, Fun with Dick and Jane, had been released and I had gotten very nice reviews. One reviewer said I was so good in the picture that he didn't even realize it was me. Now how about that for a good review! But that night Johnny said, "We have a movie star in our midst," and he interviewed me about the picture. Actors got nervous when they came on the show because they had to be themselves, they couldn't hide inside a character. I was always myself on the show; this time I had to be an actor. Johnny was terrific; he treated me very seriously. But you know how nervous I was?