Johnny Carson

• 1. Introduction

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  Johnny Carson stepped in front of a camera for the last time as host of The Tonight Show on the 22nd of May 1992, and three decades of American nights ended. For thirty years, the country had tuned in at 11:30 to watch a man from Corning, Iowa do what no one had done quite so well: make strangers feel at home in the dark. What made Carson the unchallenged king of late-night television? How did a boy who performed card tricks for the local Kiwanis Club become, in the words of his Peabody Award citation, "the most widely quoted American"? And why, after one of the most celebrated retirements in television history, did he essentially vanish from the public eye he had occupied for so long? The answers lie in a life that moved from Iowa to the Navy to Omaha to New York and finally to Burbank, shaped at every turn by the gap between a very private man and the very public persona audiences adored.

• 2. Iowa to the Pacific

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  John William Carson was born on the 23rd of October 1925, in Corning, Iowa, the second of three children. His father, Homer Lloyd "Kit" Carson, managed a power company. The family moved through Avoca, Clarinda, and Red Oak before settling in Norfolk, Nebraska, when Carson was eight years old.

  At twelve, Carson found a book on magic at a friend's house, ordered a mail-order kit, and began following his family members around the house saying, "Pick a card, any card." His mother sewed him a cape. His first formal performance was before the local Kiwanis Club, and by fourteen he was billing himself as "The Great Carsoni" at $3 a show.

  On the 8th of June 1943, Carson joined the United States Navy, receiving officer training through the V-12 Navy College Training Program at Columbia University and Millsaps College. He arrived on the USS Pennsylvania on the 14th of August 1945, the very day Imperial Japan announced its surrender. A torpedo bomber had already damaged the ship's stern, and once the Pennsylvania was in drydock, Carson was given the grim assignment of supervising the recovery of the bodies of 20 servicemen. He recounted the experience in an unpublished 1967 interview, saying, "Jesus, that was an awful experience. They'd been down there for 18 days by the time, and I want to tell you, that was a terrible job."

  His military career had a lighter moment too. Carson later said its high point was performing a card trick for James V. Forrestal, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. When Forrestal asked if Carson planned to stay in the Navy, Carson said no and told him he wanted to be a magician. Forrestal obliged by asking for a demonstration. That exchange taught Carson something he would carry for the rest of his career: that he could hold the attention of even the most skeptical and powerful audience in the room.

• 3. Classrooms and Small Screens

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  At the University of Nebraska, Carson joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and kept performing magic, now charging $25 per appearance. He started as a journalism major intending to write comedy, then switched to speech and drama because he wanted to be a radio performer. His senior thesis, titled "How to Write Comedy for Radio," was a compilation of taped skits from popular radio shows with Carson analyzing the comedic technique in voiceover. The thesis allowed him to graduate in three years, and he earned a bachelor of arts degree in radio and speech with a minor in physics in 1949.

  Carson began his broadcasting career in 1950 at WOW-AM and WOW-TV in Omaha, Nebraska. He hosted a morning television program called The Squirrel's Nest, which included a recurring routine involving pigeons on a courthouse roof reporting on political corruption. He supplemented his income as master of ceremonies at local church dinners attended by some of the very politicians he was lampooning on air.

  In 1951, the wife of an Omaha politician Carson had spoofed referred him to her brother, an influential figure in the emerging Southern California television market. Carson joined CBS-owned Los Angeles station KNXT. His low-budget sketch show, Carson's Cellar, attracted a famous fan: comedian Red Skelton. In 1954, Skelton knocked himself unconscious during rehearsal an hour before his live broadcast and called on Carson to fill in. Carson did, and Jack Benny, watching Carson imitate him on a program the following year, predicted that the young comedian would have a successful career.

  The primetime variety hour The Johnny Carson Show failed after one season, which sent Carson east to New York and to ABC's daytime quiz show Who Do You Trust? It was there that he met Ed McMahon, his future sidekick, and discovered his most natural gift: the ability to ad lib with guests in real time. The show became, by his own account, "the hottest item on daytime television" during his six years at ABC.

• 4. Tonight

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  NBC's Tonight had been on the air since 1954, when Steve Allen originated the format. Jack Paar followed Allen in 1957 and left the chair in 1962. NBC reached out to Carson while Paar was still on the air. Carson initially declined, put off by the prospect of interviewing celebrities for 105 minutes every day. Bob Newhart, Jackie Gleason, Groucho Marx, and Joey Bishop also said no. NBC finally got Carson to sign by early February 1962, and his first appearance as host was on the 1st of October 1962.

  McMahon followed from Who Do You Trust? as announcer and sidekick, and Skitch Henderson led the NBC Orchestra. McMahon's entrance call, "Heeeeere's Johnny!!!", became part of the American vernacular. Carson's trademark at the end of his monologue was a phantom golf swing aimed stage left toward the orchestra. When a monologue fell flat, the band would begin playing "Tea for Two" and Carson would dance a softshoe, turning the failure into its own kind of laugh.

  The Tonight Show's theme, "Johnny's Theme," was written by Paul Anka as a reworking of his own composition "Toot Sweet." Before taking over, Carson had written lyrics for the song, allowing him to claim 50% of its performance royalties. Those lyrics were never used on air, but the theme played continuously from Carson's first broadcast through his last.

  Film director Billy Wilder offered what became one of the most quoted assessments of Carson's talent: "By the simple law of survival, Carson is the best. He enchants the invalids and the insomniacs as well as the people who have to get up at dawn. He is the Valium and the Nembutal of a nation." Wilder added, "Every night, in front of millions of people, he has to do the salto mortale. What's more, he does it without a net. No rewrites. No retakes. The jokes must work tonight."

  On the 1st of May 1972, the show moved from 30 Rockefeller Plaza to NBC's studios in Burbank, California, to be closer to the celebrity guests Carson relied upon. The move coincided with other changes: from 1980, Carson hosted four nights a week rather than five, having negotiated a three-year deal that also shortened the program from 90 to 60 minutes.

• 5. Characters and Comedy

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  Carnac the Magnificent was a turbaned, mock-psychic character who could divine the answer to a question before the envelope containing it had been opened. McMahon would hand Carson a series of sealed envelopes, described as "hermetically sealed and kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnalls' porch since noon today". The bit had origins that pre-dated Carson: it traced back to a 1951 creation by Bob Arbogast in Kansas City, which migrated through The Tom Poston Show to Steve Allen's Tonight in the 1950s. Carson's version became something entirely his own, down to Carnac's ritualized entrance - always turning the wrong direction and tripping on the step up to Carson's desk. At the end of each sequence, Carnac would pronounce a comic "curse" on the audience, such as "May a flock of wild geese leave a deposit on your breakfast."

  Art Fern, Carson's own admitted favorite character, was a smarmy, toupee-wearing announcer for a sketch called "Tea Time Movie." The character began as a parody of California used-car dealer Ralph Williams before Carson settled on a high-pitched nasal voice reminiscent of Jackie Gleason's "Reginald Van Gleason III." Actress Carol Wayne made over a hundred appearances between 1971 and 1984 as Art's assistant, the Matinee Lady. After Wayne's accidental death in 1985, Carson kept Art Fern off the air for most of the following year.

  Other recurring characters included Floyd R. Turbo, a stereotypical working man in a plaid hunting coat who delivered satirical editorial responses; Aunt Blabby, a cantankerous elder modeled directly on Jonathan Winters' Maude Frickert; and El Mouldo, a failed mentalist who often ended his acts by begging the audience for bus fare. Each character gave Carson a way to inhabit a sensibility entirely different from his own polished host persona, and together they filled the show with a repertory-theater quality unusual in television at the time.

  In 1966, Carson and actress Eva Gabor played Milton Bradley's game Twister on air, and the game's sales immediately skyrocketed. The manufacturer had not made the game widely known before that broadcast.

• 6. The Geller Incident

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  In 1973, television personality and self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller appeared on The Tonight Show. Carson, having been a magician himself, was skeptical of Geller's claimed paranormal powers. Before the taping, Carson personally asked skeptical activist James Randi to help prevent any trickery. Following Randi's advice, the show's staff prepared its own props without informing Geller and did not allow Geller or his associates anywhere near them beforehand.

  When Geller arrived on stage, he appeared surprised to find that he was not simply going to be interviewed. He was expected to demonstrate his abilities using the show's own materials. He could not. He told Carson, "I don't feel strong," and expressed displeasure at feeling "pressed." According to a the 7th of November 2014, article in The New York Times by Adam Higginbotham, Geller later said, "I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated. I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That's it - I'm destroyed."

  The outcome confounded both Carson and Randi. The very next day, Geller was booked on The Merv Griffin Show, and his public profile grew rapidly. Geller himself attributed his rise to the Carson appearance: "That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller." As Higginbotham observed, to an enthusiastically trusting public, Geller's failure on air only seemed to make his gifts appear more genuine. The episode stands as one of the stranger episodes in Carson's long run - an attempted debunking that produced the opposite result.

• 7. Private Man, Public Life

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  Despite his ease in front of millions of viewers, Carson was deeply introverted off-camera. Dick Cavett recalled, "I felt sorry for Johnny in that he was so socially uncomfortable. I've hardly ever met anybody who had as hard a time as he did." Writer George Axelrod put it more pointedly: "Socially, he doesn't exist. The reason is that there are no television cameras in living rooms." Musician John Oates described watching Carson's transformation at airtime: "He was very subdued. But the moment the countdown started - 'three, two, one' - and the lights came on the camera, he was Johnny Carson."

  Carson married four times. His first marriage, to Jody Wolcott in October 1949, produced three sons - Christopher, Kim Arthur "Ricky," and Barry William "Cory" - before ending in divorce in May 1963. His second marriage, to Joanne Copeland on the 17th of August 1963, ended in a protracted divorce in 1972, with Copeland receiving a settlement of nearly $500,000 plus annual alimony of a hundred thousand dollars. His third marriage, to Joanna Holland, whom he spotted at the 21 Club in New York City in the fall of 1971, was announced without warning at the Tonight Show's 10th-anniversary party at the Beverly Hills Hotel on the 30th of September 1972. Their divorce settlement in August 1985 ran to 80 pages, with Holland receiving $20 million in combined assets. Carson himself later used the financial terms of that divorce as material in his monologues. On the 20th of June 1987, he married Alexis Maas, a marriage that lasted until his death.

  In May 1992, during his final broadcasts, Carson's middle son Ricky had been dead less than a year, killed in a car accident in 1991 while photographing nature. Upon Carson's return to air after Ricky's death, he delivered a lengthy on-air tribute to his son that ran over time. His producer, Fred de Cordova, gave Carson the signal to wrap up. De Cordova was banned from the studio floor for the remainder of the show's tenure.

  Carson opposed the Vietnam War and capital punishment and favored racial equality, but almost never stated these views on air. As he explained in 1970, "I'm on TV five nights a week; I have nothing to gain by it and everything to lose." He served as master of ceremonies for Ronald Reagan's 1981 inaugural gala at the request of Frank Sinatra, placing him at the center of American political life even while claiming to stand apart from it.

• 8. Retirement and Legacy

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  Carson left The Tonight Show on the 22nd of May 1992, at age 66. Several networks that aired late-night variety talk shows went dark for the full hour of his final broadcast as a tribute. The Tonight Show won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series later that year, driven in part by the penultimate broadcast featuring Robin Williams and Bette Midler as Carson's final two guests.

  In retirement, Carson was conspicuous mainly through his absence. He declined to participate in NBC's 75th-anniversary celebrations in 2002. He wrote humor pieces for The New Yorker. In May 1994, he appeared on Late Show with David Letterman in Los Angeles, emerging from behind a curtain to a 90-second standing ovation, then sitting behind Letterman's desk without addressing the audience, later citing acute laryngitis. That occasion turned out to be his last television appearance.

  Before his death, Carson regularly sent jokes to Letterman, who used them in his monologue. Letterman credited Carson as believing that Letterman, not Jay Leno, was his rightful successor. In his first broadcast after Carson's death, Letterman revealed that his entire monologue that night had been composed of jokes Carson had sent him.

  On the 23rd of January 2005, Carson died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of respiratory failure arising from emphysema. He had smoked as many as four packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day during the early years of The Tonight Show. His brother later recalled that during their final conversation, Carson kept repeating, "Those damn cigarettes." No public memorial service was held. His ashes were given to his wife, Alexis Maas.

  Carson's John W. Carson Foundation, created in 1981, received $156 million from a personal trust in August 2010 to support children, education, and health services. He donated $5.3 million in November 2004 to establish the Johnny Carson School of Theater and Film at the University of Nebraska, and his estate donated a further $5 million following his death. The minor planet 1981 EM4 was named 3252 Johnny in his honor, and the park across from the former NBC Studios in Burbank still bears his name.