The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson

 By Bruce Shawkey

It's been 34 years since Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show, so I'm considering this vintage. Here's an article about Johnny from a 1967 issue of TV Guide, just five years after he started hosting in 1962.

Johnny Carson stands and fidgets and is unhappy. The photographer stoops from his ladder perch aad cranks rapidly on a reflex camera, crying “Good” and “Very nice,” but he too is unhappy because of the invincible immobility of Carson’s face.

The star’s shoulders are angular under a powder-blue turtle-neck jersey and navy-blue blazer; his short black hair is laced with gray, and his eyes are small and alert. Now and again, he tricks himself into a laugh by joking with the bystanders, and the photographer—still cranking and shooting—shouts “Good!” and trips his shutter for the two-hundredth time.

The ordeal ends; Carson exits to the street, climbs into his waiting deep-green limousine, and sinks into the cushy grandeur of its black leather seats. He is still upset about the photo session. “Why can’t those fellows come over to the show and shoot while we’re taping?” he wants to know. “You can’t get any decent pictures standing somebody up against a backdrop and saying ‘Smile!’ Smile at what?”

At NBC, he ‘pops out of the car and confers with his chauffeur long enough for a sharp-eyed autograph hunter on the Sixth Avenue sidewalk to spot and intercept him. A tourist hurriedly snaps his picture as he writes. In the elevator waiting to rise, he’s discovered again, and debarks accommodatingly to confer the autograph. At the seventh floor, yet another fan—flustered at encountering him—gropes for pencil and paper and is rewarded with a signature.

Carson penetrates finally to his own office behind an unmarked door on the seventh floor of the RCA Building, NBC’s fading and comfortable old fortress in Rockefeller Center. He slips out of the blue blazer and into a turn: “Did you ever watch some of these autograph seekers? ‘May I have your autograph?’ ‘Sure, kid. Do you have a pencil?’ ‘Well, no,I don’t.’ ‘Well, here, we'll use mine. Got a piece of paper?’ ‘No, I don’t. Hey, Harvey! Got a piece of paper?’”

For two minutes, Carson is very funny, doing autograph shtick, slapping his pockets like a befuddled hayseed and shouting for pen and paper, flapping the lean arms and going banjo-eyed in an unbuttoned charade. He is reminded of a lady fan attending his night-club act at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, who shouted in the middle of it, “May I take your picture?” “Go ahead,” said Carson. “Do you have a flash bulb?” she asked. “I forgot to bring any tonight,” he had replied in mock exasperation. “Would you like a banana?”

The star sits on a golden-hued couch beneath three framed drawings: W.C. Fields, Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy. He is still thinking about the late-night competition: Les Crane is long gone; Dana has washed out; Merv Griffin is opposite The Tonight Show in only a few cities; the CBS stations are still running old movies but the network is casting about for a late-night-program idea against the day their film supply runs out; that leaves only ABC’s Joey Bishop, who did his undergraduate work on The Tonight Show. Carson murdered Bishop in the ratings when the ABC show first arrived, and though Bishop has been doing much better lately, Carson still holds a comfortable ratings lead. He might thus be expected to suffer gladly Joey’s competition.

“I don’t,” says the star firmly. “I want to bury him. I wish him great success—in the storm-door business.”

“But isn’t Joey a pal of yours?”

“I don’t really know him, except professionally. And right now, he’s the competition. Does General Electric want Westinghouse to make good? This kind of success can be a very tenuous thing. A little slip, then the atmosphere of failure starts to creep in, and it grows, and it’s hard to reverse it. Pretty soon you’re in a slide.” Isn’t that a bit paranoid, considering that NBC has always had the winning combination in the late-night field?

“NBC has the combination because first they got lucky with Paar and then they got lucky with me. There’s no easy formula for this kind of success. It’s a strange potpourri. It’s the reaction and interaction that goes on out there. Mostly, it’s what happens with the star.” The star lights yet another cigarette. “Actually, it’s like a chess game; you react to the previous move. If you get something going with an F. Lee Bailey, let’s say, you let it run; you want it to play.”

Yes, there are all sorts of ways to run a late-night talk show. Most of them wrong, says Carson. “You can get one guy from the Mattachine Society (an early national gay rights organization in the United States) and one heterosexual and supposedly you have the makings of a controversy. Or you can bring on a lot of wigged-out people and let them make fools of themselves. That’s no way to run a show. Also, you can crowd the panel with people—which is a kind of life insurance—but then the conversation goes in too many directions at once, everybody throwing in remarks, and pretty soon you’ve lost all focus. There have been times on The Tonight Show when we’ve gone to about 12:20 before the first guest came out.”

Carson is speaking vigorously, with a facility and contentiousness that he rarely displays on his show. The words come boiling out of him in a rich and sometimes profane fluency, so different from the restrained and hospitable ringmaster of The Tonight Show; so different from the unhappy man who had posed so stiffly an hour earlier; so different from the man encountered at New York parties, trying to dissolve into the wallpaper and thus avoid contact with strangers. One regrets suddenly that the photographer had wasted so much color film on that other Carson instead of this vital and animated one.

“NBC does repeats of old Tonight Shows on Sunday nights. That’s a stupid waste of time. Why don’t they take that time and do something more imaginative with it; turn it over to some young people with ideas and let them experiment with it.”

Ed McMahon enters and reminds Carson that they have promised to record some Tonight promotional announcements to be played over the credits of other NBC network programs. The two men leave Carson’s office, descend a flight of stairs to the sixth floor, and enter a tiny recording booth where an engineer awaits them. Their scripts are ready, but as the tape rolls, Carson and McMahon clown through their parts; still, the promos are completed in one take each, and 10 minutes later Carson is back in his office, reminiscing about his custodianship of The Tonight Show, which on Oct. 1 became a five-year tenure.

“Ed Ames came on once to show us how he’s learned to throw a tomahawk in the Daniel Boone series. We set up a target: the silhouette of a man painted on a wooden plank.” Ames had reared back, flung the tomahawk, and thunk! The audience gasped, held its breath, and was silent for a long moment. Then followed the longest sustained laugh of Carson’s term as Tonight host. By accident, Ames’. weapon had imbedded itself squarely in the silhouette’s groin—not a fraction of an inch to left or to right—giving Carson the chance to deliver one of his extended boyish takes.

In five years, the star has: pitched to Mickey Mantle, played catcher to pitching-star Bob Feller, wrestled Antonino Rocco, boxed Cassius Clay, played quarterback for the New York Jets, served as a target for a dart-throwing champion and flown in a jet with the Air Force’s Thunderbirds precision acrobatic team; and now he’d like to try a long, free-fall parachute jump.

He’s been bitten by animals, settled (with McMahon) an argument over the relative IQ’s of horses and pigs by bringing on two of the beasts and quizzing them publicly (the pig won). Introducing a Sara Lee commercial, he once wondered if anybody had ever actually seen Sara Lee, and speculated that she was probably . “some little alcoholic old lady in the Midwest who is half in the bag all the time.” The sponsor, he soon learned, had named the product after his young daughter and was not amused by Carson’s jest.

A comedy sketch based on Custer’s last stand turned into a nightmare when a bit player (supposedly the lone survivor) couldn’t get past his opening line and kept repeating, “Many moons ago .. .” The audience received the sketch in sullen confusion, and the incident has been recalled by the staff ever since with mingled gravity and amusement.

Such drab and mirthless moments were not uncommon on The Tonight Show until comparatively recently; Jack Paar’s mantle often weighed too heavily on Carson’s thin shoulders. The conversation frequently plodded ahead in a tired march to 1 A.M. Somewhere along the line—and the date cannot be pinpointed—Carson jockeyed himself into a fresh frame of mind, found a new confidence and ease, and suddenly was running a smoother and classier horse race than ever he had before.

Part of the new confidence (according to certain members of his staff) derives from his having taken on the NBC network in a David-Goliath wrestling bout last April and having exacted from them a new contract giving him a substantial raise, and reportedly a million-dollar life insurance policy, handsome residuals for repeats, and relief from having to pay his own replacements when he goes out on night-club dates. It derives, as well, from his scoring early victories against Joey Bishop and the deceased Las Vegas Show.

The star sits and smokes. “I can’t really account for any change, except that everything gets shaken down with time. You get more comfortable in your job. If I go for many weeks without a night off, I get dry and weary. Paar stopped doing the Friday night show, as you remember, and Hugh Downs frequently handled Monday nights. Seven-and-a-half hours a week is more than most television series do in a month. It’s not superhuman—it’s ludicrous.”

A Tonight staffer had said: “Johnny doesn’t relate well to controversy.” The star considers this, shakes his head and says: “I could go out there and say, ‘I think we should get the out of Vietnam’ or ‘Oh yes, I see by Forbes Magazine that the economy is... That kind of thing. The temptation is great sometimes to do that. Paar fell into that trap; Steve Allen fell into it. So did Arthur Godfrey and Dave Garroway.” The implication is clear that Johnny Carson does not intend to fall into it.

“It’s not my job to deliver opinions. You lose all entertainment value that way. I’m an intelligent man; I probably have a higher IQ than most of the viewers. After all, I went through four years of college and four months of Navy midshipman school. And that’s a rough course: celestial navigation, damage control; engineering.”

His IQ told him recently to fire the producer (Art Stark) who had worked with him since Who Do You Trust? days at ABC and hire as a replacement Stan Irwin, a Las Vegas showman and press agent. Carson hasn’t much to say about that, except: “Things are a little freer now, less tense. The chain of command is clearer. It was something I had to do and I didn’t enjoy doing it, but the decision was mine and I made it.”

It is 5:30. The Tonight Show taping is to begin at 6:30. Carson climbs into a yellow shirt and a beige suit and starts preparing himself mentally for the evening’s labors. The monolog is firmed up and jotted on cue cards; he has reviewed the guest list, noted each performer’s conversational interest and is ready to guide him gracefully into it.

At 6:15, he descends a rear staircase to the sixth-floor backstage area of Studio 6-B, looks in on the assembled guests who are sitting knee-to-knee in a tiny waiting room, then takes his place behind the curtain and smokes as The Tonight Show orchestra rams into the opening theme and Ed McMahon informs the viewers that “Johnny Carson will be with you in just 60 seconds.”

Then the introduction. Applause. He waits ... waits... lets it mount precisely to the properly expectant pitch—then strides outward into the glare, into the loving ambience in which he is most at home. (“Some people mistake shyness for cockiness,”’ he had said earlier in the day. “But there are people who are, for whatever reason, shy in crowds. So you get this ‘loner’ business.”)

No shyness now. The show moves with the accumulated finesse of five years’ practice; Carson is like a jazz player who decorates his choruses with spontaneous musical “quotations” —a few bars of witty allusion to classical and standard pieces; the star reaches back into a rich lode of old show-biz lore for burlesque bits, comic “takes,” and impressions of W.C. Fields, Stan Laurel, Jack Benny, Boris Karloff, George Jessel, Ed Sullivan, Gabby Hayes, Dean Martin, Robert Kennedy, Don Adams and a mythical Aunt Fanny.

For 90 minutes, at least, he is safe. (“I can’t go shopping at Christmas time, like everybody else. I have things sent here to the office. It’s almost impossible for me to get around New York easily. That’s why I stay home a lot.”) He has the peculiar misfortune of being more familiar to Americans than the faces carved faces on Mount Rushmore, and he is no better nor worse equipped to handle that role gracefully than most other decent and uncomplicated young men from Nebraska who happen to be earning around $25,000 a week.