January 23, 2005
Johnny Carson, America's Late-Night Host for Decades, Dies
By RICHARD SEVERO
The New York Times
ohnny Carson, the droll, easy-going comedian who dominated late-night television for 30 years, becoming a national institution tucking millions of Americans into bed as the host of ??The Tonight Show,? has died, NBC announced today. He was 79 years old.
The cause was emphysema.
Mr. Carson took over ??The Tonight Show? from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily surrendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, between 10 million and 15 million Americans could not sleep weeknights unless they were reassured by the durable and droll Mr. Carson. The critic Bill McKibben called him the ?nation??s emotional thermostat, readjusting our mood every night so we could go to sleep.? Billy Wilder, the film director and wit, regarded him as ??the valium and nembutal of the nation.?
During his reign, Mr. Carson was one of the most powerful performers on television, discovering new talent, rescuing old performers from oblivion and earning millions of dollars for his network, the National Broadcasting Company. In his heyday he generated approximately 17 percent of the network??s total profit and was, by any reasonable assessment, its most lustrous star since Toscanini. He held an overwhelming majority of the late-night viewers in the palm of his hand and his show was the biggest single money-maker in NBC history.
In a celebrated New Yorker profile, Kenneth Tynan said of Mr. Carson that he practiced ?the art of the expected.? Americans were reassured when Doc Severinsen, the show??s bandleader, would start up the show??s bouncy theme song (written by Paul Anka and Mr. Carson himself), Ed McMahon, the jovial announcer, would intone ??Heeeeere??s Johnny? and prepare to guffaw at every joke Mr. Carson ever told, and the dapper host would appear to deliver his nightly monologue, a tour de force that the critic Les Brown called ??America??s bedtime story.?
In his monologue and in his time, Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides (Vice President Dan Quayle was a favorite target), as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easy and celebrities who talked too much.
All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Carson??s Nixon-Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedys. The public could not say whether they were on Johnny Carson??s side or he was on theirs. All they knew was they liked him and felt they knew him, an audacious claim not even his wives and next door neighbors cared to make. White, male and Protestant, Mr. Carson??s scrubbed Midwestern presence was so appealing that he succeeded in unifying a fractious nation that otherwise seemed ununifiable.
Just as frequently Mr. Carson turned his agile wit on himself: on his numerous unsuccessful marriages and pricey divorces; his powerlessness at the hands of Con Edison workers who worked under his apartment window on Manhattan??s East Side when he tried to sleep (he claimed they were carting New York away, piece by piece, to New Jersey); and on his vulnerability to the people who employed him.
Mr. Carson guarded his political views as carefully as he did his private life, insisting that the only message of his show was entertainment. But his credibility with the American public was such that his monologues were carefully monitored by politicians mindful that no politician who became a frequent target of Johnny Carson could long survive in public life. It did not help Richard Nixon when Mr. Carson??s monologue produced some of the funniest Watergate jokes around. Nor did it help when Mr. Carson trained his sights on former Senator Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado who found allure in both the presidency and in women he did not happen to be married to. Mr. Carson??s jokes about Mr. Hart??s extramarital activities were surely not the only reason his political fortunes evaporated in 1992 but they were repeated often enough to have played some part.
??You get the feeling that Dan Quayle??s golf bag doesn??t have a full set of irons,? Mr. Carson said of another target. He also joked that Jerry Brown, the former Democratic governor of California and presidential aspirant, admitted he tried pot in the 1960's ??but didn??t exhale.? When George H. W. Bush was president, Mr. Carson told as many anti-Bush jokes as time would allow, among which was ??Read my lips: no new promises.?
Each monologue contained between 16 and 22 jokes, the work of a talented stable of writers and Mr. Carson himself. As well turned as the jokes were, it was Mr. Carson??s style and timing that put them over, seemingly without effort. He was also a master at milking laughs out of bad jokes and bad audiences. He took the monologue seriously; so much so that back in the 1960's, he conducted a one-man slowdown to make certain that viewers saw them.
In 1965, NBC decided to broadcast the show at 11:15 p.m. Eastern time. This brought the start of the Carson show into conflict with the late news broadcasts of local stations around the country, many of which had only recently been expanded to half an hour. Thus, the top of the Carson show was not seen in many cities, including San Francisco. When Mr. Carson learned this, he refused to appear before the camera until 11:30 p.m., which meant that Ed McMahon, his Tonto and announcer, and Skitch Henderson, his music director before Doc Severinsen got the job in 1967, had to back and fill until 11:30 p.m. NBC resisted, then again capitulated, and the program was aired at half-past 11, just as Mr. Carson wanted.
When Mr. Carson finished his monologue he would pantomime a golf swing and sit behind his desk, where he would drum his cigarette and later a pencil while his guests performed. Mr. Carson worked hard to see to it that the rest of his show was just as compelling as his monologue. His biggest single audience, estimated at 58 million, turned in on Dec. 17, 1969, to watch Tiny Tim, the falsetto singer, marry a woman known only as Miss Vicky.( The couple later divorced.)
Another memorable moment occurred one night in 1963, when Mr. Carson had as a guest Ed Ames, an actor-singer who played an Indian named Mingo on the television series ??Daniel Boone.? Mr. Ames was there to teach Mr. Carson a thing or two about how to throw a tomahawk and he brought along a cardboard image of a sheriff as a target. In his demonstration, Mr. Ames threw the tomahawk across the stage, and it imbedded itself deeply in the sheriff??s crotch. The audience was in an uproar; people were literally falling out of their seats with laughter.
When Mr. Ames went to remove the tomahawk, Mr. Carson held his arm and the uncontrolled laughter commenced anew. As the laughter subsided, Mr. Carson looked at Mr. Ames and said, ??I didn??t know you were Jewish.?
Other shows over the years highlighted Mr. Carson??s Mighty Carson Art Players, who engaged in all manner of nonsense; Art Fern, a Los Angeles salesman from whom nobody would ever want to buy a used car; Aunt Blabby, a contentious and gossipy old lady; Floyd Turbo, who always wore a mackinaw and was a member of the Silent Majority; and Carnac the Magnificent, the all-knowing seer. Mr. Carson, in costume, played all these characters and each had a following.
There also were skits that were repeated in one form or another, including segments from ??The Edge of Wetness,? which examined Mr. McMahon??s drinking habits. The foils to which Mr. Carson returned time and time again included his doctor, Al Bendova; his accountants, H.& R. Goniff; and his lawyer, Bombastic Bushkin (for a while, he actually had a lawyer named Bushkin). Among the favorite targets of his jokes were Avon ladies, hairdressers, wombats, Gentle Ben, prune juice, kumquats and his longtime producer, Fred De Cordova. Mr. Carson could also appear believable and serious. He once announced that there was an impending shortage of toilet paper in the United States, with the result that supermarket chains all over the nation reported a run on the product.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Carson also played host to a string of marsupials, spiders, serpents, felines (some rather large, playful and unpredictable), creative canines, canny birds and at least one elephant. He also wrestled Antonino Rocca, played baseball with the Yankees?? Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, became a human canvas for a painter, Walter Gaudnek, and, on one occasion, parachuted from an airplane, doing a 10,000-foot free fall before he pulled the ripcord -- all to get a laugh and thrill his viewers. He did not tell NBC beforehand what he was going to do.
Johnny Carson was particularly generous to his fellow comedians; appearances on ??The Tonight Show? built, enhanced and prolonged the careers of many funnymen and women. Buddy Hackett, Alan King, Don Rickles and Robert Klein were frequent guests. Among those whose careers were helped by appearances were Woody Allen, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, David Brenner and, of course, his successor, Jay Leno.
Mr. Carson was renowned for promoting new comics and bright young talent like Barbra Streisand and David Letterman, but he also kept the spotlight on stars of yesteryear, like James Stewart and William Demarest, and made sure they were treated humanely on the air.
Mr. Carson also was instrumental in changing some of the bedrock ways in which television operated. When ??The Tonight Show? moved, at his insistence, from Rockefeller Center in New York to studios in Burbank, Calif., it was a move that meant years of jokes about Burbank . It meant a realignment of American pop culture from East Coast to West Coast, from Broadway to Hollywood, from the appearance of stars from the theater to stars from the movies.
Another important pop culture change affected in part by Mr. Carson was the redefinition of what constitutes ??live? television. Once ??The Tonight Show? ceased to be aired live from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. and instead was taped in the early evening Pacific time, the show lost some of its spontaneity and sense of danger that live performance brings (and also a half-hour of its running time). The practice of taping is now the norm and virtually all live entertainment programming on national television has become a thing of the past.
John William Carson was born Oct. 23, 1925 in Corning, Iowa, one of three children born to Homer L. (Kit) Carson (no relation to the western hero), a manager for Iowa & Nebraska Light & Power, and Ruth Hook Carson, an extroverted homemaker who had a flair for theatrics, although she never worked in show business professionally. Johnny had a younger brother, Richard, who became a television director and directed ??The Tonight Show? for a time, and an older sister, Catherine.
In 1933, the family moved to Norfolk, Neb., which is where Johnny grew up unremarkably, except that he was painfully shy. He played under his front porch, went fishing in the Elkhorn River, wasn??t very good in sports (in contrast to his father, who led the power company??s softball team and was a formidable tennis player) and enjoyed his friends but really didn??t mind being alone. He was a somewhat better than average student but his teachers knew that his grades did not reflect his true intellectual capacity. He was far from being poor; his parents were well enough off to plunk down $38.75 for a new Schwinn bicycle in the depths of the Depression and he could be seen tooling about Norfolk. He noticed, when he was in the fifth grade, that he could call attention to himself by telling amusing stories and liked the feeling.
When he was 12 years old, he read ??Hoffmann??s Book of Magic? and liked it so much that he was sent away for a mail order magic kit. All his energies immediately went to mastering card tricks and other feats of prestidigitation and he performed for his family any time he could get one of them to watch. He was intrigued by the stories he had read about the great magician of the 1920's, Harry Houdini, and was similarly fascinated when a traveling magician who called himself ??Mortoni? came to his town to perform.
Johnny decided he would be known as ??The Great Carsoni? and that is precisely what his mother embroidered on a black cloth that he draped on a magician??s worktable she gave him when he turned 13. He used it when he made his professional debut, at age 14, before the Norfolk Rotary Club, a successful performance, for which he earned $3.
Magic wasn??t his only interest. On Sunday evenings he would lie on the floor in front of the family radio and listen to Jack Benny. Johnny Carson??s original style and timing were derived from Mr. Benny and Mr. Carson always acknowledged it. As a boy, Johnny would commit Mr. Benny??s best gags to memory and recite them the next day in the school yard.
He sent away for a course on how to be a ventriloquist and, mindful of the laughs Edgar Bergen was getting with Charlie McCarthy, began to practice that along with his magic. He wrote a humor column for his high school newspaper and, as his interest in things theatrical grew, he became a part-time usher in the local Granada movie house. He delivered furniture after school to make extra money but always found time to perform feats of magic for his friends.
He graduated in 1943 as the class historian. Jenny Walker, one of his teachers, signed his yearbook, ??You have the ability to make people laugh. You will go far in the entertainment world.? And Larry Sanford, one of his closest friends, wrote, ??John, if you don??t get killed in the war you??ll be a hell of an entertainer some day.?
Soon after graduation, he was inducted into the Navy, sent to midshipmen??s school at Columbia University, and spent what remained of World War II as an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, serving in the Pacific.
After the war he entered the University of Nebraska, where he was active in student theatrical productions -- he played Cleopatra in a college farce titled ??She Was Only a Pharoah??s Daughter but She Never Became a Mummy,? and also appeared in what was supposed to be a serious television production called ??The Story of Undulent Fever.? It was early television and unseen by many students at the university; hardly anybody had a set and the signal could travel no more than 50 feet from the camera taking the picture.
While in college he tried to sell vacuum cleaners door to door but abruptly quit, saying, ??I couldn??t stand the rejection.?
He convinced the university to let him write his senior thesis on comedy writing. It consisted of a tape that contained material used by the leading comics of the day with Mr. Carson??s explanation of why what they said was funny.
While still in college, Mr. Carson worked part time for radio station KFAB in Lincoln, Neb., for which he created a comic western. After earning his bachelor??s degree in 1949 (after only three years) he got another radio job, at WOW in Omaha, for which he was supposed to do interviews. In those days, national celebrities made tapes available to local radio stations in which the celebrity??s writers would prepare questions for local interviewers, then the tape would run and the prerecorded answers would be given by the celebrities. Listeners came to feel that this was a hokey idea and the custom was abandoned in the early 1950's.
But when Mr. Carson was assigned to ??interview? Patti Page, the singer, he changed the questions considerably. He was supposed to ask her when she started singing but instead asked, ??I understand you??re hitting the bottle pretty good, Patti -- when did you start?? To which Miss Page??s prerecorded voice replied, ??When I was 6, I used to get up at church socials and do it.?
In 1951, he moved to Los Angeles, getting a job as a staff announcer at KNXT-TV. Most of the work was routine but he persuaded the station to give him a Sunday afternoon comedy show called ??Carson??s Cellar.? In those days, few people bothered to watch television in the afternoon. During one telecast, a furtive figure ran by in the background. Mr. Carson advised his viewers to pay it no mind; it was only Red Skelton and there just wasn??t time that day in Carson??s Cellar to have Mr. Skelton perform.
As it happened, Mr. Skelton was home that day, watching Mr. Carson in action and thoroughly enjoying what he saw. The next week he showed up unannounced and demanded to be seen and heard. Soon, other established comedians, including Groucho Marx and Jack Benny, turned up to participate in a show they thought was funny even though it did not have the budget to pay them a fee. ??Carson??s Cellar? was not kept by KNXT but Mr. Skelton thought so highly of Mr. Carson??s work that he hired him as a writer of his own comedy show, then on the CBS Television Network.
One day in 1954, Mr. Skelton injured himself doing one of the strenuous stunts for which he was noted. It was only two hours before air time and producers were hard-pressed to find a substitute who could just step in. They gave Mr. Carson a chance and he did so well that CBS offered him his own show. The result was ??The Johnny Carson Show.? Mr. Carson??s talent was there but the show could not figure out a way to exploit it. It went through seven writers and eight directors before it folded, ignominiously replaced by ??The Arthur Murray Party? in which the dance instructor and his wife twirled interminably.
Mr. Carson, moved to New York and spent months doing guest performances on various shows in a campaign to rebuild his career. One of the shows was ??The Tonight Show,? whose host was Jack Paar. Mr. Carson??s campaign was successful and in 1957 he was hired as the host of ??Who Do You Trust?? an ABC network show that featured a lot of interaction between host and guests and which also featured Ed McMahon as its announcer. He worked at this for five years.
In March 1962, the emotional, excitable Jack Paar decided to leave ??The Tonight Show,? which he had inherited from the comedian Steve Allen and of which he had been the host for five years. Mr. Carson was offered the job, accepted it, but could not start work for six months because ABC would not release him from his contract. Various performers appeared in that half year -- among them Art Linkletter, Robert Cummings, Joey Bishop, Jerry Lewis, Groucho Marx, Donald O??Connor, Jan Murray, Soupy Sales, Mort Sahl, Steve Lawrence, Arlene Francis, Jack E. Leonard, Hal March and the team of Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy. The show??s ratings plummeted, but within a few months after taking it over, Mr. Carson not only restored the ratings enjoyed by Mr. Paar but improved on them.
Mr. Carson??s salary rose exponentially. By 1969, it had risen to about $20,000 a week. But he did not get to keep all that money. His divorces were expensive. Joanna Holland, a former model who was Mrs. Johnny Carson from 1972 to 1982, got more than $20 million in cash and some property. The former Joanne Copeland, who was Ms. Holland??s immediate predecessor and Mrs. Johnny Carson No. 2, got $200,000 cash and a yearly ??salary? of $100,000. His first wife was Jody Wolcott, his college sweetheart, who complained that she did not get enough. His fourth wife was Alexandra Maas.
Asked how he became a star, Mr. Carson once replied, ??I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled.? Pressed further to analyze his own success, he said he worked hard on his own timing. ??I have an affinity for editing and pacing,? he said. And when he invited other funny people to be his guests on his show, his policy was simple: ??I make them look as good as I possibly can.? Tony Randall, a frequent guest, described Mr. Carson??s ability to get a good interview out of him as ??diabolical.?
There were times over the 30 years of Mr. Carson??s stewardship when ??The Tonight Show? seemed to lose ground and appear in danger of appearing passe. But Mr. Carson kept working the material and the ratings would always rise again. Many talented performers tried to best him in the same time slot, including, at one time or another, Joey Bishop, Joan Rivers, Dick Cavett, Arsenio Hall and Merv Griffin. He beat them all.
Although Mr. Carson??s relationships with other performers were usually cordial, a notable exception was his feelings toward Joan Rivers. He originally thought so much of her that he made her an occasional guest host of ??The Tonight Show.? She then got her own show on Fox that competed with his. This would not have bothered him but he learned about it not from her personally, but only after a public announcement was made.
Mr. Carson was secure enough in his power that he never appeared to curry favor with sponsors, television executives or politicians and audiences seemed to appreciate him for asserting such independence. NBC tried to rein him in over the years.
In 1979, NBC President Fred Silverman began to complain publicly that Mr. Carson took too much time off and that he ought to rely less on repeats of past shows.
Just as publicly, Mr. Carson promptly announced his intention to quit the show as soon as his contract expired. A frightened network then capitulated as he knew it would, giving him even more time off than he had before, perhaps even more than he needed; it knew that even Mr. Carson??s reruns made every other late-night competitor seem puny. Mr. Carson was asked if this suggested that NBC was in trouble and he replied, ??that??s like saying the Titanic had a small leak.?
NBC was purchased by General Electric toward the end of Mr. Carson??s tenure and he showed his new bosses no more mercy than he had the old ones. He did not like General Electric very much because, he felt, the company was did not treat his show very well.
On the occasion of the Christmas season of 1991, he did a monologue in which he announced that GE had sent him a holiday card which announced that ??in lieu of a gift, a GE employee has been laid off in your name.?
Asked why the NBC logo was a peacock, Mr. Carson said he did not know but speculated that it might be because GE ??couldn??t find a multicolored weasel.? He liked to call GE ??the conglomerate with a heart.?
Although Mr. Carson was called the last man America sees before it goes to sleep, he zealously guarded his private life, remaining something of a mystery man. Despite all the millions of words of gushy admiration written about him and his mastery of the television medium, no one really claimed to have any sense of who he was away from the cameras. Betty Rollin once wrote that Mr. Carson off-camera was "testy, defensive, preoccupied, withdrawn, and wonderfully inept and uncomfortable with people.? Kenneth Tynan concluded that talking to him privately was like "addressing an elaborately wired security system.?
Mr. Carson rarely talked to his guests after his show and he hated parties . Although he was impeccably polite, he tried to confine his off-camera sightings to the tennis courts at Wimbledon. ??My bugging point is low,? he said. ??I??m not gregarious. I??m a loner. I've always been that way.?
Except for periodic gigs in Las Vegas, Mr. Carson made few appearances outside his own show. In the late 1950's, he appeared in plays produced for ??Playhouse 90? and the ??U.S. Steel Hour? and in the 1980's, he won much acclaim as the smooth master of ceremonies on several nationally televised Academy Award ceremonies. He had a small role in one poor movie, ??Looking For Love? (1964). He consistently refused to appear in sitcoms, which he called ??death.?
Someone once asked Mr. Carson what he would like his epitaph to be.
He thought for a moment and reached for the traditional line of a talk-show host:
??I??ll be right back.?
