Carson the Magnificent, by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas (Simon and Schuster, 336 pp., $30)
In 2006, the cable channel TV Land surveyed the greatest catchphrases in American television. The winner? “Heeeeerrre’s Johnny!” the nightly words, spoken by sidekick Ed McMahon, that brought out Johnny Carson to start another episode of The Tonight Show, the still-running NBC late-night franchise that he hosted for 30 years and which remains indelibly identified with him. Even today, 32 years after Carson presided over his last Tonight Show and nearly 20 years after his death, the phrase endures, no doubt assisted by Jack Nicholson’s sinister spin on it in The Shining.
In his posthumously published new biography, Carson the Magnificent, Bill Zehme reports that “a recalculation of [Carson’s] small-screen hours cautiously translated, in conventional terms, to more than 2,500 movies broadcast live.” As no less a small-screen authority than Walter Conkrite put it, Carson became “the most durable performer in the whole history of television.” Cronkite himself was dubbed the Most Trusted Man in America, but as Zehme writes, “all forthcoming evidence could suggest that Second Most may better apply.”
Johnny Carson lingers in memory for those who came of age when the mere sound of his voice signaled a division between one day and the next. He took the reins of The Tonight Show in 1962 from the gifted but volatile Jack Paar at the talk-show-host classic age of 36—young enough to be fresh but not so young that no one cares what you have to say. A native Nebraskan, he seemed the quintessential everyman in his lack of pretense, though he was also urbane and ironic in ways not common back then, even among television stars. Over his years at the helm, he evolved from hip young hotshot to something like a talisman of security and stability, back when Americans might still believe that they could possess and control such things.
Carson the Magnificent’s appearance marks the culmination of a melancholy publishing saga. Zehme, who died last year after a long battle with cancer, was a widely admired author of magazine profiles, most prominently for Esquire, and biographer of Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman. In 2002, he scored a professional coup: a one-on-one interview with the reclusive Carson, now ten years removed from The Tonight Show and virtually all public appearances. The profile gained added poignancy when Carson died in 2005. A longtime Carson obsessive, Zehme spent years laboring on his opus and completed most of it, but his declining health stopped him short of the finish line. His friend Mike Thomas, biographer of Phil Hartman, has completed what New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman called “one of the great unfinished biographies.”
Readers of the now-finished biography might be less impressed. Though Carson the Magnificent is exhaustively researched and not lacking in insight, it is so sprawling and disorganized, both in writing style and structure, that its effect is often disorienting. We don’t even begin to learn about Carson’s Nebraska upbringing until about 100 pages in, and his career unfolds in zigzagging fashion until the book’s back third, when the story finally acquires something like a sequential coherence.
Rather than a conventional biography, Carson the Magnificent is organized like a shambolic magazine feature, with scene shifts galore and parenthetical asides intruding to the point of distraction. Zehme was a writer of enviable professional reputation, but here he seems unable to marshal his material effectively; it’s the proverbial case of the journalist emptying his notebook. The narrative proper clocks in at less than 300 pages, but it feels longer.
Carson’s career launched in the original television era, analog and pre-Internet. He was on weeknights at 11:30 on the East Coast. If you chose sleep instead, so be it; there was always tomorrow. About midway through Carson’s run, yesterday became viewable, too, through the advent, starting in the mid-1970s, of home video recorders—first the Betamax, then the market-conquering VHS, or VCR. Even at Carson’s final curtain, in 1992, YouTube, smartphones, streaming, and on-demand viewing were a long way off.
As a host, Carson seemed to know everything and nothing at once. But for equal-opportunity one-liners ripped from the headlines, he avoided politics. He talked each night with show business stars, athletes, and other noteworthy or unusual figures, while willingly making himself the butt of comebacks, put-ons, and tricks. Even when duped, he wore an ironic camouflage that suggested a voluntary aspect to his being clowned. It was not quite the same thing as being in on the gag (even if he was). Rather, it suggested an ability to retain one’s humor, even when the joke was on him. This was the essence of Carson’s authority: not his control over everything that transpired but his control over himself amid everything that transpired. It would also lead to a long-running fascination with who the “real” Johnny Carson was.
“Johnny established a persona in which he was always a little bit outside of what he was doing, whether a sketch or monologue,” longtime Tonight Show writer Michael Barrie told Zehme. “In that sense he wasn’t fully committed to it and could comment on it as he went along. He made the audience his partner in a way, so he could never really lose.”
This aesthetic served him best when confronting the comic’s timeless dilemma: how to recover when your material lands with a thud. In Carson’s case, he would pause, deadpan, and look at the audience expectantly. He was standing alone, bombing in front of millions, but with all the archness that his midwestern-ness could muster, his expression suggested: “Don’t you people get it?” At his best, he could be as entertaining with bad jokes as with good ones.
“I still, believe it or not, have dreams in which I am late for The Tonight Show,” Carson told Zehme in 2002. “It’s a performer’s nightmare, apparently. . . . I’m having to go on and I’m not prepared.”
That scenario was apparently confined to dreams. Over 30 years, Carson set an enviable standard of professionalism and consistency, in no small part because of his seeming ego-lessness. “He never ‘presented’ himself,” said his second wife Joanne. “He was just there.” This was true of Carson the emcee, but he was a performer, too, pulling off numerous impersonations and creating recurring characters ranging from smarmy movie presenter Art Fern to superpatriot Floyd R. Turbo, and, most memorably, “the great seer, soothsayer, and sage, Carnac the Magnificent.”
When he gets around to it, Zehme’s portrait of the Nebraska upbringing and of Carson’s parents, the taciturn father and the intense and never-quite-approving mother, who, he writes, gave Carson “life minus adoration,” may be the best part of the book. It was in Nebraska that Carson developed his lifelong love of magic, dubbing himself the Great Carsoni. Zehme also plumbs the personal life of this most private of stars, chronicling the four marriages, distant parenting of three sons (one lost as a young man in an auto accident), drinking bouts, and the stubborn reality that his work came first, his family second.
“We are not just losing a comedian,” TV critic Tom Shales wrote, as Carson’s retirement loomed. “We are losing a continuum.” Carson’s penultimate show, Thursday, May 21, 1992, offered a glimpse of that continuum. Though a farewell broadcast would air on Friday, the Thursday program was the last in the usual Tonight Show format. The final guests: Robin Williams and Bette Midler, both outdoing themselves. The program is remembered for Midler’s rendition of “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” but a less-noted moment came earlier, when she sat and discussed old songs with Carson, who allowed that one of his favorites was “Here’s That Rainy Day.” He and Midler then sang part of it together. It was both a tender moment and a generational marker, a reminder of what the departing Carson was taking with him.
When he signed off the next evening with, “I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight,” David Letterman, for whom Carson was a lodestar, found himself struggling to believe it was really happening; Johnny was still better than everyone else. With the subsequent competition between Letterman and Jay Leno, chronicled in Bill Carter’s The Late Shift, late night fractured into warring fiefdoms, as Letterman and Leno battled for shares of an audience that Carson had possessed for himself. The two rivals seemed to understand the significance of their diminished stature before their audiences did: the breaking up of a larger unity of which television had been only a part.
Carson was an avatar of that unity—even if one believes, as it is fashionable to do, that it was all illusory. It was the unity of a small television universe, with a few choices; of a connected culture, in which anyone of genuine distinction was known to all; and of an intelligible national life, of a people knitted together by certain common rituals, habits, and dreams. Just before going to sleep, millions of them put on Johnny Carson, who, with laughter, confirmed it all for another day.
Top Photo by Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images