The hidden facet of Johnny Carson | USAEMALL.com

It may not look like much now, but once upon a time, Stage 1 at the Burbank Studios was where the king of comedy held court, addressing his subjects at the end of each day. Johnny Carson presided over not just late night, but American popular culture.

“Johnny Carson was the biggest star in America,” said writer Mike Thomas. “Movie stars, rock stars, I don’t think anybody was bigger than Johnny, because he was on night after night after night.”

Thomas’ new book is “Carson the Magnificent,” a biography of Carson his late friend Bill Zehme started.

Everybody who was anybody appeared on “The Tonight Show,” and 17 million Americans tuned in – many from their beds. It was Johnny Carson vs. sleep, and sleep usually lost. “It did!” said Thomas. “I think Johnny brought a lot of people peace at the end of the day. People love to laugh, but I think he gave them hope that the world would go on the next day no matter what was happening.” 

His audience – more than triple the size of all three current network late-night shows combined – made him the national agenda setter of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.  “Johnny would say things and do things that became water cooler conversation the next morning,” said Thomas.

It also made Johnny the pre-eminent Hollywood talent broker for several generations. Fifty-seven years after comedian Robert Klein made the first of his 97 appearances on “The Tonight Show,” he’s still grateful for the rocket fuel career boost that Carson’s imprimatur provided. “He’s one of the most important people in my life, and we were not personal friends,” Klein said.  

For his career, Klein said Carson was the most important: “Appearances on that show were everything. I am a creature of ‘The Tonight Show.’ That was the vertebra of my career.”

Comedian George Wallace knew what was on the line when he did Carson: an invitation to “The Tonight Show” was a necessary bullet point on his resume – and each appearance was a climb up comedy’s Everest. And then, when the routine would end, comedians would look nervously at the desk, waiting to see if Carson gave then the OK. “Always got that,” said Wallace.

I asked, “Were you looking for it?” 

“Hell, yeah. I was looking for it!” he said.

But what he was also looking for was a gesture from Carson to come over to the couch. “I didn’t get that,” he said.

Forty years later, this big-time comedy headliner still feels he didn’t make the “Tonight Show” summit. I asked, “What did that mean to get called over?”

“That meant that you’re in,” said Wallace. “You got called over, you’re in the club.” He said the fact that he did get that “kinda hurts today.”

All that power, rested in the hands of a complicated man: master connector at work, cold and aloof at home. “I think there were two Johnnys to a certain degree,” said Thomas. “On screen, impossibly cool guy. But there was also the side of Johnny that was introverted off-screen. I think some of the aloofness may have been introversion.”

In Mike Wallace’s classic “60 minutes” profile in 1979, Carson acknowledged the dichotomy. He said, “If I pulled out my old high school annual book and read some of the things, people might say, ‘Oh he’s conceited, he’s aloof.’ Actually that was more shy. See, when I’m in front of an audience, it’s a different thing.”

Life with no audience was challenging for Carson. He was married four times. “Johnny needed to be married for some reason; he needed to be with someone,” said Thomas. “He didn’t need to stay married. They would fall out. Johnny’s behavior would pry them apart. They just never lasted.”

But actress Dyan Cannon has a different story to tell. “Aloof and cold? Never.” She described him as “Warm, open, willing. I’ve never known anyone like him. I’ve never known anyone like Johnny.”

And this from a woman who was married to Cary Grant. “Cary was more of an enigma,” said Cannon. “Much more of a, ‘Can I approach him or can’t I?’  But people would approach Johnny as if he were family.”

“So, it was a different kind of star?” I asked.

“There was nobody as big a star as Johnny.”

In a “Tonight Show” episode from October 1985, where Cannon and Carson are chatting, she flustered the normally unflappable Carson as she held his hand. “Hi, sweetheart,” she said.

“We’ve gone out a couple of times, right?” he said.

Cannon erupted in laughter – as did Cannon today, re-watching the video. “He still makes me laugh,” she said.

Asked what exactly was going on there, Cannon laughed again: “Well, you will never know! You will never, never know!”

“You gotta give me a little somethin’ here.”

“Oh, no, I don’t!” she laughed.

To hear her tell it, this was not a man who had trouble understanding women. “How do I describe a relationship where you’re so intimate with somebody, and yet, you haven’t been intimate physically? We were closer than that.”

I asked, “Would you describe it as a love affair?”

“Yes, absolutely, a love affair,” Cannon said. “Absolutely. Real love. Physically, we were never together. But spiritually, we were.”

“In some ways, it sounds like you’re describing the love of your life?”

“Isn’t that interesting?” said Cannon. “Wow. Hope you’re hearing this, Johnny!”

Maybe Carson was just like so many of us, full of contradictions … only ours aren’t examined by millions under the brightest lights our culture has to offer. Whoever Johnny Carson was, safe to say, in our deeply fragmented culture, there will never be another.

As Mike Thomas put it, “We’re all siloed. We’re all watching things that either confirm our own biases or that are attuned to our own specific sense of humor. There will never be that communal experience again where people watch the show at the same time and then talk about the show the next day. It was a communal experience. That was part of the magic of Carson: community.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “Carson the Magnificent” by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas

      
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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Ed Givnish.