by Ed McMahon
"No, no, I don't want to upset you."
Now I was insistent, "I went down, Joan and I . . ."
Johnny was trying to calm me down, saying solicitously, "I know you did. It's all right."
"Don't say . . . I know Joan. I went down there." Then I added proudly, "I held a baby gorilla."
Johnny finally realized he had to save me. "I couldn't go with you that week. You held a baby gorilla. And let's get her out here real quick . . ." And Joan came out to end that conversation.
Did I mention that I went down to the San Diego Zoo?
Although I never had a problem with my reputation, my kids did. They didn't think it was funny at all; they never laughed at Johnny's jokes about it. There's a good reason for that; not only did they have to put up with all types of remarks from both friends and strangers, they also had to live with the reality of my drinking at home. And at home it wasn't very funny. It's accurate to say that alcohol played an important part in the failure of my first two marriages. It didn't cause them to break up, but it exacerbated the problems that already existed.
Alcohol led to a lot of arguments. Things that otherwise would have had little meaning suddenly became important, and words that wouldn't have been said and probably weren't even meant were said. The more unpleasant it got, the easier it became for me to stay out at Michael's Pub or Jilly's drinking with Hernon and Jonathan Winters and sometimes Carson. The kids knew the part that alcohol played in the end of my marriage to their mother, and they didn't like the jokes.
It was because of the impact on my children that I sued one of the tabloid newspapers. Look, I understand that the trade-off for success in the entertainment industry is the loss of much of my private life. I accept that. During my career there have been many things printed about my private life that I didn't like, things that were very embarrassing to me, but I knew these papers had the right to print them. But when one of these publications printed made-up stories that were hurtful to my children, I had to take legal action.
Now, my taking action against a publication for writing that I had too much to drink may seem a bit like our first spokesmodel on Star Search, Sharon Stone, complaining that someone wrote she was too beautiful. I'd been telling my own jokes about my drinking for years. But in this case they went too far. They reported that I had consumed an entire bottle of scotch during a flight to London and had gotten so drunk and obnoxious that I caused a disturbance and then barely managed to stagger down the gangway at Heathrow. Every part of that story was fabricated. I wasn't on that airplane, I hadn't been to London in five years, I did not cause a disturbance, and I no longer drink scotch. Even then I might have just ignored the story had my daughter Katherine not come home from school crying. I don't know if her classmates teased her about it or she heard it on the news, but it affected her. People were saying that her daddy had done some bad things. I don't have much of a temper. Just about the only time I get angry is when someone is bothering my family. And then I get very angry. One night, for example, I was with my daughter Linda in P. J. Clarke's in New York. A man standing next to her started bothering her, repeatedly trying to put his arm around her.
I poked him in the chest so hard I knocked him to the floor. I remember exactly what I said to him, "It will not be necessary for you to touch me or any member of my family for the rest of your life. Do I make myself clear?"
I think I was probably just as angry about this tabloid story. In a sense, this paper was touching my daughter. I couldn't poke it in the masthead, so I sued for libel.
It was very easy to prove that the story was wrong. I simply produced my passport. That was evidence that I had not been to England. The source of the story, we discovered, was a friend of the writer, who had overheard a conversation in which someone said a person who looked like Ed McMahon had been drunk and disorderly on that flight. They assumed that if it looked like me, and he was drinking, it had to be me. They had no defense.
Winning damages was much more difficult. Libel means that a story damaged your reputation. Even though the story was a complete fabrication, how could I prove I had been damaged by being identified as a drinker when so much of my reputation was based on the fact that I liked to drink? In fact, the paper's lawyers actually claimed that this story improved my image.
In their defense presentation they showed the tape of that night I was a bit tipsy on the show. But the fact is that this story could have damaged my reputation. No matter how much I've had to drink, I've never bothered anyone and I've always been conscientious about my work. Only a lawyer for one of these publications would think that being drunk and unruly could improve someone's reputation. Just prior to the publication of this story I was discussing a show with a major studio. After the story was printed they lost interest in the show. Was that because of the story? Impossible to prove, but certainly the possibility existed. And as my lawyers, Neil Papiano and Barbara Derkowitz, wondered, how many nameless people were considering inviting me to a function or hiring me to host a show and didn't when they read that I was so drunk I practically fell down the gangway? Eventually we settled, and let me say I was happy with the settlement, but more important, I was able to show my daughter that the story was wrong.
My reputation made me an easy target for the tabloids. As part of the resolution of a lawsuit I had filed, one of the major tabloids had to inform me before they ran any story about me. That didn't mean I could stop it, but they had to at least attempt to check the facts with me. One evening I was at dinner with Charlie Cullen and the lawyer Paul Tobin. A Los Angeles sportscaster I knew came in with his date and we greeted each other. That was the extent of my interaction with the sports reporter. As I drove home that night, less than two hours later, the phone in my car rang. A reporter from the tabloid was calling to check out a story that I had been at this restaurant with two beautiful women, had been drunk, and had gotten into a brawl with this sportscaster over his date. I've known Charlie Cullen for more than forty years, and not only isn't he a woman, he certainly isn't beautiful. Oh, maybe in the right light he's nice-looking . . . The only way someone could have believed that I was with two beautiful women was if they had been drinking very seriously. And even with all the drinking I've done, I still don't know of any alcoholic beverage strong enough to turn Charlie Cullen into a beautiful woman.
I now have a new ending for Johnny's old joke "Ed isn't drinking anymore . . ." It's "Good." See, it's not a joke anymore. I gave up drinking for a beautiful woman—no, not Charlie Cullen—my wife, Pam McMahon. Before we married she told me, "I'd like to have you around for a long time, and that isn't going to happen if you keep drinking." Since I'd like to be around her for a long time, that made a great deal of sense to me, so I've cut down to a few glasses of red wine at the end of the day. And even that wine is for medicinal purposes—I'd feel awful if I couldn't have it.
I don't miss my drinking days. No matter how much I'd had to drink, I always believed I was perfectly in control. But I wasn't. The only regret I have is that when I was drinking I wasn't quite as sharp as I could have been. I think my edges were dulled. I may have accepted a little less from myself than I otherwise would have. And sometimes I wonder how much more I might have accomplished had I been completely in control for the last thirty years.
Years ago, I might have celebrated the fact that I had stopped drinking by lifting my glass and declaring, "I'll drink to that." But with all the problems caused by drinking excessively, I don't use that line anymore. My Christmas tree–climbing days are over.
Although the memory does linger on. My great friend Tony Amendola, the former president of D'Arcy McManus Advertising in St. Louis, has had two heart transplants. After the first one, I sent him a telegram reading, "Glad you're well. If I had known your heart was in such sad shape, I would have given you mine." To which Tony responded, "Your heart yes, your liver no."
7
One night we had a five-year-old spelling champion on The Tonight Show and Johnny was showin
g him some simple sleight of hand. He made a quarter disappear, then produced it from the little boy's ear. The young man tried to do it himself, then asked Johnny, "How do you make it really disappear?"
Without hesitation, Johnny told him, "You get married."
Our personal lives were always topics of discussion on the show, particularly our marriages and divorces. One night, for example, Doc complained, "I was out Christmas shopping for Johnny today. It's hard to buy for him because what can you buy for a man whose ex-wives have everything?"
One of the classic moments on the show took place the night before Thanksgiving, when Johnny asked Doc if he was going to help his wife stuff their turkey. "Noooo," Doc told him, "there is no Mrs. Severinsen."
"Oh, that's right," Johnny said. "I didn't mean to do that."
"The fact that I never helped her stuff her bird was one of our big problems," Doc explained.
"I thought that was your problem," Johnny laughed, then admitted, "You know, I forget all about that. We've been together so long that I forget sometimes where we are . . ."
"She's still stuffing the turkey," Doc added a little bit later, "but now it's with money."
"Well, it's nice to know you have no bitterness . . ."
There were many times when I wished my personal life wasn't so publicly known. It wasn't fun having my personal failures exposed on national TV. But Johnny and Doc and I knew that every person in our audience had problems of their own; they were watching us to be entertained, maybe to forget their problems, so whatever we were feeling inside, there was nothing we could do about it except bite the bullet and keep smiling. It was a lot easier to joke about these things than it was to live through them.
During the time we did the show I went through two very painful and very public divorces. Those were the kinds of things that made the newspapers, so we couldn't avoid talking about them, we couldn't pretend they didn't happen. At times my life was very glamorous—I did get to go to wonderful places and among my friends are some of the most talented people in the world. I know how fortunate I am, but no matter how exciting my life might have seemed to viewers, most of the time the things that concerned me on a daily basis were the same things that they were dealing with: trying to make my marriages work, raising my four kids—including my son Michael, who was very troubled— and earning enough money to pay the rent and make alimony payments.
As W. C. Fields might have said, "Ahh yes, my good friends, I believe very strongly in the sanctity of marriage." In fact, I believe in it so strongly that I got married three times! That was certainly never my intention. When I married Alyce Ferrell, I was twenty-two years old and I thought I was marrying her for better or worse, but definitely forever. I was raised a Catholic, for a long time I was a daily communicant, and I believed that you married for life. My parents did not have a good marriage, they separated several times; that had been tough on me. I didn't want my kids to have to live through that.
Alyce was a lovely person and a very attractive woman. She was petite, charming, very innocent, I thought, and vibrant. She had a lovely southern accent and traditional southern values. For a long time we were very good together: she made a beautiful home for our family, my friends loved her, and she was a wonderful mother to our children.
We started with nothing. For a time we lived on whatever I made that week on the boardwalk or in my dry-cleaning business. One of my proudest moments was when I was finally able to buy her a car for her birthday. I had it well planned. I had cut footprints out of paper and when she was sleeping I laid a path from the bed to the window. I had covered the window with paper and written HAPPY BIRTHDAY on it, but I had cut a hole out for the dot over the i. When Alyce followed the footprints to the window and looked through that hole, there was her car parked in the street. It had taken me days to get that parking spot. The car was used, it was all I could afford, but we were both thrilled.
The first house we owned was in Hialeah, Florida. I was on my way to Korea, she was pregnant with our third child, and I didn't want to leave her in an apartment, so we bought a house for eleven thousand dollars in Hialeah. Since my Marine Corps pay was only nine thousand dollars a year, that was a lot of money. When I came home we returned to Philadelphia, and eventually moved from the Drexelbrook apartments to a beautiful house in the suburb of Gulph Mills. Days after we moved in I got the call from Dick Clark's producer telling me to come to New York to audition for Who Do You Trust? , and my life changed forever.
I commuted to New York every day for eight years. When it looked as though The Tonight Show was going to last, we moved to Bronxville, just outside the city, into a larger house. We lived there until we separated and I moved with The Tonight Show to California.
I was much more a qualitative father than a quantitative one. There were a lot of nights, a lot of family dinners I missed. I don't just mean that I wasn't there; I mean that I really missed being there.
I tried to make up for it as much as I could by making the time we spent together special. When I was with my kids I tried to make life as much of a party as possible. A long time ago I started something I called "the sky's the limit." That meant when we were out for dinner they could order absolutely anything they wanted and as much of it as they wanted. To the kids it meant they could have the chocolate cake—and the ice cream sundae, or six ice cream cones—if that's what they wanted. I mean, you would die before you could eat all that, but just knowing for that one time in your life you could have as much of anything as you wanted made it special. You could have your cake and eat it too, and then have another cake if you wanted it. I did it with my four children with Alyce, I do it with my grandchildren, and now I'm doing it again with my beautiful adopted daughter, Katherine Mary.
We had several family traditions. On Christmas, for example, all their presents would be spread out around the living room—except their big present. That would be in another room. I was big on spoiling my kids. I tried to get them whatever it was they wanted, a bicycle or skis or a classical guitar; the sky was the limit on presents too. Once, I remember, more than anything else Linda wanted to get her ears pierced and Alyce didn't think it was a good idea. Linda wanted it so badly, she would buy pierced earrings, break off the stems, and glue them to her ears. Well, I talked Alyce into it and one Christmas her big present was in a tiny box. It was a pair of pierced earrings. I told her that the next day I was going to take her to have her ears pierced. So the next day we went to the doctor's office and as I was waiting outside she started screaming. I couldn't resist. "Sorry, Linda," I yelled to her, "but that's the price one must pay for beauty."
One of the best of our family traditions was spending the summers at our house in Avalon on the Jersey shore. A lot of our friends from Philadelphia bought property there, so it was like one large family gathering. At night we'd take long walks on the rickety old boardwalk or go to the ancient movie theater—I think we saw The Dirty Dozen a dozen times—and once each summer all the men would pile the kids and their friends into three big station wagons and the whole raucous mob would go to the amusement park in Wildwood. That was a big event; the kids would start talking about it in June. It seems to me that the main object that night was to see exactly how much junk food—popcorn, candy, ice cream, pizza—we could eat while going on every ride that turned your stomach in a new direction. Let me pause here to say one thing: if I never again, not even once more, ride on the Hell Hole, a ride that spins so fast that gravity pins you against the wall and reminds you never to combine ice cream and popcorn, that will be too soon. Sure, I sometimes missed events in the kids' lives, but we'll always have the Hell Hole.
The biggest tradition was our Fourth of July weekend gala. Our wedding anniversary was July 5, so to celebrate that we staged a big horseshoe tournament on the beach right in front of our house, pitting the bayers, the people who lived on the bay, against the beachers, the fine, upstanding human beings, the wonderfully giving, generous people who lived on the beach. We were beac
hers. We'd close off the block for the day, kids would get dressed in costume, people would mount floats on cars, I'd serve hot dogs, and my son Jeff would be the bartender. And the next day we'd hang a banner on our house announcing the winning team.
Another of the great Avalon traditions was my having problems with my boat. I like to think of myself as a skilled yachtsman. I like to think of myself that way, even if it isn't true. I always had a boat and at least once each season there would be some sort of minor boating disaster. I'd run aground, I'd run out of gas, I'd crash into something small. The truth is, as anyone who has ever owned a boat will tell you, it wasn't always my fault. One summer, for example, I got a beautiful Donzi, one of the greatest speedboats ever built, and my friend Bob Gillin and I were going to drive it from a New York yacht club to Avalon. We had a big party at the yacht club—Carson, Skitch Henderson, a lot of people from the show were there—and they piped us aboard my new boat and we were ready to cast off. Then Gillin had the audacity to ask me, "You did remember to get the charts, didn't you, Ed?"
Of course I did. I was prepared. I'd stopped at the local Gulf station and gotten their best road maps. I don't know what Gillin was complaining about that day; if that boat had gotten lost on any highway in New York state we would have been able to get back safely. And there was certainly a lot of water pictured on them.
At night, water looks pretty much the same. One evening Alyce and I and the Gillins took my boat to a waterside restaurant. We were all nicely dressed. During dinner the Gillins had an emergency at their home, and someone offered to drive them. Alyce went with them and I took the boat by myself. When I hadn't returned by two in the morning everybody got scared. They thought I had gotten lost and taken the boat out into the ocean. In the middle of the night several of my friends got into their boats and started searching for me. At sunrise they alerted the Wildwood police. Now there was a full-scale search going on for me.