Johnny Carson, King of Late Night
In the turbulent world of television, where 10 years is an eternity, JOHNNY CARSON was, for 30 years, host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC. He won 6 Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award, was elected to the Television Academy Hall of Fame, and won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I watched his show for a few minutes at 11:30 on hundreds of nights and, in an uncertain world, found “The Tonight Show” consistently comforting. Johnny Carson would tell a joke and then do a little golf swing. He’d fiddle with some pencils at his desk. Yet there was also a certain mystery about Johnny.
Watching Carson’s late night successors, the way they moved and laughed and got us to laugh seemed overly polished, all the mystery stripped away. I always wondered: ‘Who was Johnny Carson? Why was Carson so successful, and what was he really like, to those who worked with him?’ This piece is an effort to answer that question.
Start with the voice. Johnny had a wonderful voice, deep and clear. He was quick on his feet, good at making faces — mock-shock and the slow burn — and he knew how to make people laugh. Though he could be courtly and warm, he always had a wisecrack ready.
Right from the start, Johnny knew what he wanted for the show. He asked Ed McMahon to serve as his foil and right hand man. He hired Doc Severinsen to run the band. He got Paul Anka to write him a theme song. In Ed McMahon, Johnny found the ideal sidekick — a man with a booming voice and childlike delight in Johnny’s humor. Ed was a big, tall guy, slow and not-too-bright, setting off Johnny’s graceful movements and quick wit. Ed never tired of starting every show by saying: “Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!” Johnny was always just a little late coming out from behind the colored curtain, as if he’d gotten lost back there. But he looked happy to be on stage and as he’d do his opening monologue, from time to time, Ed would chime in with a booming: ”You are correct, sir!”
The monologue had a lot of topical humor and political stuff. Johnny knew the crucial thing about political humor, which was: never push a political agenda of your own. As long as he didn’t pretend to have the answers, he could satirize Presidents, Prime Ministers, Popes — anyone.
The studio — NBC-Burbank Studio, Stage 1 — was smaller than it looked on TV, and taping “The Tonight Show“ was an intimate process. Johnny would banter with the studio audience during commercial breaks, using earthy language he couldn’t use on the air. When a man in the audience yelled during a commercial break “Hey, Ed — nice suit!” Johnny grabbed his own suit lapel and asked in perfect mock-offense: “What’s this? A piece of shit?” Johnny took the most amateur crack in the world — “Hey, Ed — nice suit!” — used it as a set-up for a laugh, and made the guy in the 14th row feel he was Johnny’s partner.
Ed McMahon was always there if a comedy bit wasn’t working or if Johnny needed a minute to gather himself. Johnny could throw Ed a line, and Ed would ad lib until Johnny was ready to take back the show, with a wisecrack. By the time Johnny said “Now, let’s see,” he knew exactly where he was going.
It was a whole little family on “The Tonight Show.” You had Doc Severinsen, who wore flashy clothes, played a mean trumpet, and bantered with Johnny. Checking out a new Doc Severinsen outfit, Johnny would ask, “Get that off the Avon Lady?” When Doc was off doing a concert or filling in for Ed McMahon, Tommy Newsome, Doc’s arranger, led the band. Tommy was plump, red-faced and tongue-tied. Johnny called him “Mr. Excitement.”
Tommy Newsome could be funny in spite of himself. Once, Johnny interrupted a floundering monologue to ask Tommy why he always stood with his hands clasped behind his back. Tommy said “Vapor lock!” and blushed. The audience roared.
Before Johnny Carson, hosts on TV had almost always tried to ignore the jokes that fell flat, the bits that didn’t work. Part of the way a host was judged to be a pro, to have mastered the medium, was how smoothly he ignored the microphones and cameras around him, and brought out the next one-liner, or the next animal act, while pretending everything was fine.
Carson was different; when the monologue was floundering, he might reach out into space, pull the boom mic to his grinning face and say, “Attention, K-Mart shoppers!” We at home laughed a little anxiously, not wanting to admit we shopped at K-Mart. Johnny laughed more heartily. He was telling us that watching bad jokes die feels like working at K-Mart. Johnny was a pioneer in joking about how badly a joke had bombed. He seemed to revel in roasting bad material, getting a secondary laugh from the audience that hadn’t reacted the first time around. This was not good for comedy in general, because it encouraged comedians to feel they could go on stage with bad material. But it worked beautifully for Carson.
Johnny had been born in Iowa in 1925 but moved with his family to Norfolk, Nebraska when he was eight. Carson’s father was a lineman with the power district, climbing telephone poles for a living. The Carson family lived in a big frame house. Johnny and his brother Dick skinny dipped in the Elkhorn River and played pranks. Johnny learned magic tricks in Norfolk, and got his first paying jobs at the local Elks and Kiwanis Clubs. He used to lie on the floor marveling at how well Jack Benny did his radio show.
After working as a deejay at the University of Nebraska, Johnny knew he wanted to get into show business. He was a pretty good drummer, and a skilled magician — but being a radio host or comedian was what he most wanted. In 1950, he found work in Omaha in both radio and TV.
In 1951, Carson left Nebraska for the West Coast, and hosted a show at KNXT Los Angeles called “Carson’s Cellar.” The show never had a big audience — but one of its fans was Red Skelton, who hired Carson to write for The Red Skelton Show. A few times, Carson guest-hosted Skelton’s show, and he stayed with Red Skelton until 1962. From 1957–1962, Carson also hosted the show “Who Do You Trust?” and learned more about what worked and didn’t work on television.
The hours right before “The Tonight Show” taped were tense for Johnny. He didn’t want to hear small-talk from the staff; there was work to do. He went over and over the jokes, so that just a word or two from the cue cards were enough to trigger the whole joke. Guests on the show who stopped by to chat with Johnny, or to get a preview of the questions he’d ask them on the air, learned that Johnny didn’t have time to chat, and wouldn’t reveal his questions. He wanted the exchanges on the air to be fresh and unrehearsed.
Johnny got death threats, and desperate people tried to sneak into Johnny’s work space, pleading for publicity. So, after a while, Johnny had uniformed Burbank police officers with him in the hours before a taping. Like Secret Service officers around a president, they tried in vain to be inconspicuous, and made the man they served seem more remote.
People around Johnny marveled at the way this rather shy man could go on stage night after night after night, even when he had a bad cold or was in a surly mood, or there was tragedy or chaos breaking out around him. No matter how morose John Carson was a few minutes before air-time, when the red light on the TV camera went on, the gregarious, quick-witted “Johnny” came out, and you’d never guess he was under any strain.
(Carson made it look so simple that a string of other comedians tried and failed to host talk shows of their own. First because all the A-List guests wanted to do “The Tonight Show.” But second because they couldn’t ad-lib and glide over the screw-ups the way Johnny could. There were always awkward dead moments on their talk shows, and one night when Dennis Miller was hosting his show and everything went wrong and after Miller got visibly flustered on the air, he got a call after the show from a regal Johnny Carson who said, “It’s not as easy as it looks, is it kid?”)
If Johnny expected a great performance from himself each night, he also expected a lot from his writers. He wanted every writer, every day, to submit three jokes funny enough to make the opening monologue. Johnny collected all the jokes, selected the best of them, and refined the wording to fit his own style and speech patterns. Then he sent the monologue jokes off to be put on cue cards.
The writers sidled over to the cue card area, eager to see which of their jokes had made the monologue. If two straight days went by with none of his jokes making the final cut, the writer was on thin ice with Johnny. If it happened three days in a row, the writer might be fired. Many “Tonight Show” writers arrived on the job able to write jokes in their sleep, but wilted under the pressure of having to write three jokes a day that Johnny Carson found funny. It was no good to protest to Johnny that a writer’s job was hard. He believed a pro makes difficult things look easy, and if you can’t do that, you have no business calling yourself a pro.
Now, if Johnny liked your joke and put it in the monologue, and it bombed, he was very nice about it. That wasn’t the writer’s fault. The joke should have gotten a laugh. Something in the delivery of the joke was wrong, and Johnny would tinker with it, try to figure how to use the joke again, in some other form or context.
One of the difficult things that Johnny made look easy was to make sexual innuendos strong enough for the audience to enjoy but gentle enough so they wouldn’t get bleeped by the network. “The Tonight Show” was filmed “live on tape” which meant that, if needed, it could be edited by the show’s producers or by NBC’s Standards and Practices Department. NBC didn’t want to have to edit it, so Johnny walked the line. Johnny asked Madeline Kahn if she had any phobias and she said “I don’t like balls coming toward me.” Johnny paused, milking that line for all it was worth, and then replied “I’ve heard that’s called ‘testi-phobia.’”
There’s a legend that Zsa Zsa Gabor had a little cat in her lap one night on the show, and turned to Johnny and purred: “Would you like to pat my pussy?” to which Johnny is said to have replied: “I will if you’ll move that damn cat!” There’s no record of any such exchange but once when Johnny had Jane Fonda on the show, she asked him if it had happened. The audience roared as Jane told the story. Johnny didn’t deny flat out this exchange with Zsa Zsa. But he put on his shocked face, milked the laugh for all it was worth, then drawled: “No, I think I would recall that.”
One night in 1977, Johnny had Dolly Parton on as a guest, and Dolly herself raised the issue of her breast size. After noting that people often asked her if she’d had them enlarged, Dolly said, ”I tell you what, these are mine.” To which Johnny, looking very square in a gray checkered suit and big blue tie, said “I have certain guidelines on this show. But I would give about a year’s pay to peek under there.” When Jack Nicklaus and his wife appeared on the show, Nicklaus talked about how he prepared for a golf tournament. Carson turned to Mrs. Nicklaus and asked ‘And what do YOU do while Jack is preparing?’ The proper Mrs. Nicklaus said “I rub his balls for luck,” then flushed as the audience hooted. Carson paused, then said, “I bet that makes his putter stand up.”
Johnny did silly gags, dressing up in a loincloth like Tarzan, or wearing a black cape and a huge hat, pretending to be a swami, but he was also content to be the straight man for other performers, and let them say the outrageous stuff. Johnny, drumming with his pencils at the desk, would break into a grin and say simply: “I did not know that.”
All kinds of entertainers, especially comedians, wanted terribly to appear on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” As appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” had been in the 1950’s, being on Johnny’s show was a sign you’d arrived. It gave you national exposure, and allowed you to raise your rates.
Johnny had two levels of acceptance for entertainers. If you performed adequately, Johnny was very polite, and you got your round of applause. But when you were done, they cut to commercial, and that was it. Maybe a quick visit from Johnny after the show to thank you for stopping by. The rejection wasn’t personal, it was professional, but Johnny was firm. He had a very sure sense of what kinds of performance he wanted.
But if you were really good, then the camera cut to Johnny beside himself, laughing, and then when you were done, instead of going to commercial, Johnny beckoned you over and you sat in the chair right next to his, and bantered, and that was absolute heaven for an entertainer. If you were right next to Johnny, you were likely to be invited back. With that little wave, the summons to the chair next to his, Johnny had anointed you, and all the insiders in the industry, the agents, talent scouts and casting directors, would know it by tomorrow morning.
Johnny had mostly celebrities on the show. Some were first-rank entertainers from Vegas and others were nervous up-and-comers and Johnny had a deft sense of how to handle each one, how to help each of them find their proper place. Johnny went against our expectations. Don Rickles would come on the show, a master of insult humor, berating Johnny for marrying bimbos and not inviting Rickles on the show more often, and Johnny made Rickles even more funny by acting shy and proper with him.
After one outrageous Rickles remark too many, Carson moved back in, but he didn’t say “That’s enough, Don.” Johnny crossed us up by telling Don Rickles: “I miss you on this show” — giving Rickles the chance to hit him again with “ALL it takes is a CALL!”
Johnny was very good at interviewing children, could sense how much ribbing they would enjoy. When the occasional intellectual came on, you realized how smart and thoughtful Johnny was. (He brought the philosopher Ayn Rand on the show and asked her: “Can you give us some basic idea of objectivism, and the principles of philosophy that you believe in?”)
He was also very good at interviewing regular Americans, grannies who had knit an enormous sweater or experts on turkey-gobbling. Carson might ask one of them: “Do you watch my show?” And if they said “No, I don’t stay up late unless it’s something important,” Johnny laughed from the gut. He loved being put in his place like that.
Like millions of other children through the years, I was only allowed to stay up and watch Johnny and “The Tonight Show” when I was sick and not going to school the next day. I’d watch, not catching many of the adult references, but soaking in the humor, learning how to do an impression of Richard Nixon or of a drug-sniffing dog stoned on marijuana.
One little boy came on the show, and Johnny asked him “Have you ever seen this show?” The boy replied “When I was up vomiting and all that stuff.” Johnny, chuckling hard, replied: “We like to get’em sick early, and then they grow up with the show.” Johnny might have liked a prime-time show but accepted the fact that his show went on the air at 11:30 at night when a lot of TV viewers were already in bed. He cracked, “We at the show have done a lot for the birth control movement.”
He often joked about how much divorce had cost him in alimony payments. He once did a parody of “Mister Rogers Neighborhood” where Mr. Rogers in his cardigan sweater explained to the boys and girls how a philandering husband could be taken to the cleaners by a shyster lawyer. Another time when Carson remarked that he didn’t perform as a magician anymore, Jonathan Winters noted: “You’ve been able to make two wives disappear.” Carson doubled over with laughter.
Once when a quite elderly guest came on, Carson said to him “I know you’ve been married to the same woman for 69 years. That is marvelous. It must be very inexpensive.” And the guest, the crowd and Johnny all laughed together. He was never much impressed by the size of his bank account. (“The only thing that money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.”) He drove a Mercedes but wasn’t lavish in his tastes.
Johnny’s first wife was named “Joan,” his second was named “Joanne” and his third was “Joanna” — he’d tell people he just didn’t want to change the monogram on the towels. The truth was that only his fourth wife truly accepted that Johnny Carson was married to his television show — and that fourth marriage was the only happy marriage he ever had. Carson used to say “If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.” Also: “Married men live longer than single men. But then married men are a lot more willing to die.”
Carson would have been welcome at any party in America, but he rarely went out. He spent a lot of time at home in Bel Air and at the NBC Studio in Burbank. He might attend an A-list Hollywood party. Arrive with a shy smile, circulate with excellent posture, eyes twinkling. He’d kid a scantily-dressed young lady about her outfit, but he was no Romeo. Ambitious women threw themselves at him; but Johnny kept his distance. He was pleasant to talk to, but when he wasn’t hosting “The Tonight Show,” Johnny was only slightly more funny or interesting than the average man. He was off stage now.
In the early 1980’s, there was some trouble between Carson and the singer Wayne Newton, but for a guy who told risqué jokes about famous people five nights a week, Johnny had remarkably few enemies in the celebrity world. If the jokes themselves were sometimes a little mean, the delivery was not. Johnny just found the foibles of famous people to be funny, and he thought public figures should be able to take a joke.
Who was going to succeed Johnny Carson was a question which made NBC executives very nervous, because they had to expect a dive in the ratings. For a time David Brenner seemed the heir apparent. Brenner was a working-class Jewish guy from Philadelphia who could both say funny things and say things funny, and did a lot of TV comedy in the 70’s. Johnny had David Brenner on the Tonight Show many times, always making Brenner perform a 6-minute set before he could sit down and chat. It was demanding but flattering. Johnny made Brenner feel he loved his material, loved to have six minutes to sit back and laugh, to be another member of the audience.
But David Brenner’s career faded and all through the 1980’s, Johnny remained the host of “The Tonight Show.” Johnny’s protégé Joan Rivers almost became the next host of “The Tonight Show.” By 1983, Johnny had announced she would replace him. But in 1986, before Johnny was done, Fox offered Joan Rivers a talk show to run opposite Johnny, and compete directly with him. When she took the Fox offer without consulting Johnny, he was furious. Joan called Johnny Carson twice to explain, but he wouldn’t take her call.
Johnny’s 4,531st and last Tonight Show taping was on May 22, 1992. When he came out from behind the colored curtain for his opening monologue on NBC-Burbank Studio, Stage 1, Johnny still had that wide-eyed grin, as if he was on stage for the first time. At the end of the show, Johnny looked squarely at the camera and said: “And so it has come to this. I… am one of the luckiest people in the world. I found something I always wanted to do; and I have enjoyed every single minute of it. I want to thank the gentlemen who’ve shared this stage with me for 30 years. Mr. Ed McMahon — Mr. Doc Severinsen — and — you people watching. I can only tell you that it has been an honor and a privilege to come into your homes all these years and entertain you… I bid you a very heartfelt good night.”
It’s hard to think of any other American performer as famous as Johnny Carson who retired so gracefully, in good health and stayed retired. Johnny retreated into his privacy. He didn’t come back, as so many stars have done, and do smaller versions of his act, on cruise ships or in Las Vegas. Ed McMahon, impressed by how much Johnny’s knew about astronomy, suggested Johnny host a lightly humorous show about star-gazing. But Carson never made a serious move to do that TV show, or any other.
On January 23, 2005, Johnny Carson died of emphysema, at the age of 79. A chain smoker, he’d been saying since the 1970’s, “These things are killing me.” His will left money to the Carson Cancer Center, and for a Johnny Carson Theater at Norfolk High School. Johnny also left $5,000,000 to the University of Nebraska.
Other comedians struggled to express how they felt about Carson’s passing. Jay Leno spoke of Carson’s grace and dignity, about how polite Johnny had been in a cut-throat industry. Leno saluted Carson for his pitch-perfect sense of how far to go, for always being hip enough to be interesting, but never too far ahead of the crowd.
David Letterman said Johnny Carson had been like a public utility, always there. After his retirement, Carson had sometimes sent Letterman jokes, and Letterman said getting jokes straight from Johnny was like getting Christmas money when you were a kid. Letterman talked about what it was like as a teenager, turning on “The Tonight Show” and finding Johnny wasn’t hosting that night, it was a guest host. The disappointment was only soothed by knowing Johnny would be back, he would always be back. But now he wasn’t coming back.
Johnny Carson had joked about how death would impede his career: “For days, the hair and fingernails continue to grow — but the phone calls taper off.”