One night, after I'd spent a long day taping a series of commercials for independent banks, making a guest appearance on a quiz show, working out my schedule for our next season with the producers of Star Search, finalizing plans to cohost the Thanksgiving Day parade, doing an interview with a reporter about the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, looking at clips for the Bloopers and Practical Jokes show Dick Clark and I would be taping later that week, meeting with NBC executives about a Christmas special they wanted me to host, and finally, appearing with Mr. Carson for about the 3,965th time on The Tonight Show, I was having dinner with my close friends Don and Barbara Rickles. "You know, Ed," Rickles said philosophically, "you just have to find a way to get on TV more often. If this goes on too much longer, people are going to forget what you look like."
Sometimes I think that the only shows on television that I haven't done are Sermonette and America's Most Wanted.
In preparation for my career in professional broadcasting, I enrolled in a broadcasting club the summer after graduating from Lowell High. Essentially, this was a thirteen-week course held at Boston's Emerson College in which we learned basic broadcasting techniques. My class met once a week, on Thursday night. The instructor was a former Shakespearean actor who emphasized clear and precise speech and taught us how to modulate our voices so that even the patrons in the back row could understand every word. I began the course by taping my first commercial, a spot for a mythical product called Praise linoleum. In the deepest, most eloquent tones I could muster, I promised, "You'll like the way Praise displays linoleum." Thirteen weeks later I did the commercial again, this time incorporating everything I'd learned. There was no doubt I had improved; I was finally able to sound just as William Shakespeare would have if he had been selling linoleum.
During the daytime that summer I worked on a construction crew building culverts and digging ditches at Ft. Devens. The men on my crew were tough, hardworking middle-European immigrants who enunciated mostly one word, the F-word. The F-word was used in every possible context: it was used as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and pronoun; it was used as a preposition and conjunction; it was used in all tenses; it was used to modify itself. At times it would be used five times in the same sentence. As far as I was concerned, using the F-word was proof that I was a man. So all week long I'd use it like an "F-word" sailor, then on Thursday night I'd get out of my filthy clothes, put on a suit and tie, and attend my class. I'd stand in front of the microphone and explain, "Now I would like to show you something rather impressive . . ."
At work, I'd try to practice what I'd learned in class. Instead of saying, "Please tell that 'F-word' guy to get that 'F-word' truck over here," I'd say, "Is it possible that we might have that truck here by three o'clock?" The guys on my crew loved it; they loved to hear me speak good. Whenever a laborer from another crew came by, they'd tell him, "You gotta hear this 'F-word' guy talk." Then they'd turn to me and tell me, "Do some of that talk."
To which I would respond, "And what is it that you wish me to say?"
"Yeah, that's it. Man, you sure speak 'F-word' pretty."
"That is very kind of you." That summer I stopped cursing. I don't think my kids have ever heard me use foul language. I make one exception, when that word is absolutely necessary in the punch line of a great F-word joke.
With my years of experience in Katie's parlor and my certificate of attendance from the broadcasting club, I was ready to break into big-time radio. Many of the jobs left vacant when men went into the service at the beginning of World War II could be filled by women, but radio sponsors wanted men, whose voices dripped with authority, reading their commercials. A local station, WLLH, held open auditions for announcers in the high school auditorium. Hundreds of males showed up, but I didn't know why they bothered. I knew this job was mine. I had it nailed. I'd been preparing for it my whole life. In my mind I was already a professional.
When I was hosting Star Search, this is the story I told those performers who did not win their competition. I went to the audition and, to my shock, I finished second. The station hired a kid named Ray Goulding. I'd like to describe how I felt when I heard the results of the audition, but as I've explained, I had stopped using that language.
As I later discovered, the only reason that Ray Goulding won the job was that he was better than I. In fact, he was so good that he soon got a better job in Boston, where he met Bob Elliott and they formed the legendary comedy team Bob and Ray. When Ray Goulding left WLLH, the station manager remembered that I had finished second and offered me the job. So as I told the competitors on Star Search, my whole career is proof that in show business you don't always have to come in first.
At WLLH, the Synchronized Voice of the Merrimack Valley, I was on the air each night for six hours. Just like in my parlor, I introduced records, read the news, sports, and weather, and did interviews, features, and all the commercials. Although it was basically a one-man show, I figured out how to do live remotes from the Hofbrau House, a dance club with a full orchestra eleven miles away in Lawrence. After a nice and easy introduction, I put a sixteen-inch acetate record on the turntable, which would fill about twenty-five minutes of airtime, then got in my car and raced to the Hofbrau House. When the record ended, I'd go on the air to introduce the orchestra: "While Dick Stabile is off in the service of his nation, lovely Grace Barrie takes baton in hand and leads the orchestra in that age-old question, 'Who?' " As the band played a set, I'd get back in my car and race back to Lowell in time to resume programming when they finished.
I was eighteen years old. All it had taken to enable me to break into radio was the greatest war in the history of mankind. Being on the radio was every bit as exciting as I had always imagined it would be. I loved every minute I was on the air. I loved the challenge, the spontaneity, the improvisation, every bit of it. I think I could have—I know I could have—very happily spent the rest of my life talking to a small part of the world from a glassed-in studio, but then they went and invented television. I was present at the birth of commercial television. I've spent my lifetime working inside that box, fifty years, half a century. In that time I've hosted or appeared on just about every type of program, and if I haven't actually been on the air more than anyone else, I'm certainly among the top three or four. But after all that, in my heart I still consider myself a radio man.
Everyone in radio was aware that television was coming. One of the most popular attractions at the 1939 World's Fair had been a demonstration of television. But no one really knew what to do about it. No one could even guess what type of programming would be successful, or even whether people would accept it in their homes as they had radio. Some journalists predicted it would be little more than an interesting gimmick. Most often television was described as radio with pictures.
But almost instantly people realized it was much more than that. It allowed people for the first time to bring every entertainment medium that ever existed into their own home. People who had never seen a major league baseball game could watch the World Series. People who hated opera could see as much of it as they desired. When television first became available, the screens were small and often disguised as more traditional pieces of furniture; almost all programming was produced locally and broadcast in black-and-white; and the biggest attraction was Milton Berle, a comedian who, among other things, ran around dressed as a woman.
While I was a student at Catholic University I'm not sure I recognized immediately that television would eventually change the world, but one important thing about television immediately became apparent to me: it was going to be a lot easier for me to get a job in television than in radio.
I got my first job in television the old-fashioned way: my father had a friend in the business. Years earlier my father had been a partner in an Atlantic City boardwalk booth with a wonderful man named John McClay. They used to stage phony arguments over the value of a prize to convince winners that the broken or scratched lamp they'd picked was actually the most expensive prize. John McClay Jr. had been on radio station WCAU in Philadelphia, but when that station decided to make the big move into TV, he had become their program manager. In April of my senior year in college I went to see him to apply for a job, any job, at the station. "When you graduate," he told me, "come on up and we'll find something for you to do around here." That's the way television worked in 1949.
Although I was very excited, I told John that the only way I could afford to take a job in television was to first spend the summer selling slicers on the boardwalk. The real money was in gadgets, not television. When the sun shined I knew I could earn as much as a thousand dollars a week, and if I was careful and saved enough, I could be on television. We agreed I'd start my TV career in the fall.
While I was in Philadelphia I responded to an ad for a place to live. I rode the trolley out to a new development called Drexelbrook and put down a twenty-five-dollar deposit on a beautiful two-bedroom apartment that would be ready to be occupied in September. That was the last twenty-five dollars I had to my name, but as it turned out, that was one of the best investments of my life.
During the summer of 1949 I earned enough money on the boardwalk in Atlantic City to become a television star. In late August John McClay Jr. told me that WCAU was going to try a daring experiment: they were going to broadcast a program during the day and he offered me a job as cohost. Now, you have to understand, no one had ever seen me on TV, no one knew if I had any talent at all, but that didn't matter. My talent was that I was available and I could afford to work for seventy-five dollars a week. That was enough. Besides, putting on a TV program during the day was considered pretty revolutionary; while people were at work or doing something at home they could have the radio on in the background, but it was very questionable that they had time to stop whatever they were doing during the day to watch television. Besides, at that time there were fewer than two million television sets in the entire country; probably a majority of them were in bars, and the bars were mostly empty during the day.
John McClay Jr. told me that the format of the show was anything that would fill three hours and cost nothing to produce. So the "something to do around here" that he had promised to find for me turned out to be my own show. The station actually had to pay me less to be on the air than to work behind the scenes. That's how fast people became television personalities in those days.
My first show, The Take Ten Show, named after the channel number, went on the air at noon, September 12, 1949. Rather than using a catchy stage name, like most other performers, I did something far more daring—I didn't use any name at all. I never identified myself on the air. I'm not really sure why I did that, perhaps to protect my family if I was terrible, but it worked. Scattered viewers began wondering who the guy on that show in the afternoon was.
My cohost was a veteran nightclub and vaudeville comedian named Bob Russell, and we did anything we could think of to fill three hours daily. We did contests, interviews with anybody willing to come on the air—including the tree surgeon who sawed off the branch on which I was sitting during the interview, which ended with my falling onto an unseen mattress—we had local models doing fashion shows; I remember we had a young bricklayer who wanted to be in show business named Al Martino on the show—we introduced him as "the Singing Bricklayer" and we had him sing several songs while constructing a brick wall. We used our imagination and creativity to fill the time. The whole world was open to us, as long as it didn't cost anything. In retrospect, I think it is fair to say that we were the best show on the air during that time period. We were also the only one.
My style in those days was to not have any style, which was a forerunner for later years, when my talent was to make it appear as if I had no talent. Like most television performers in the early days, even though I was the cohost and producer of my own show, I didn't own a TV set. I didn't make enough money doing television to buy a television set. But our neighbor across the street, the bandleader at the Warwick Hotel, did have a TV set. Pennsylvania's blue laws prohibited the hotel from serving liquor Sunday nights, so that was his one night off and he would take his wife out for dinner. I volunteered to baby-sit his kids so I could watch his TV. I don't really remember, but I think the first TV show I ever saw was Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town. I watched Bert Parks hosting the quiz show Break the Bank. But the person who most impressed me was Dave Garroway. Garroway wore a bow tie and big glasses and had the most casual style, but most of all he was incredibly polite. I liked that about him, and I decided to pattern myself after him. So I spoke softly and I was very polite and very nice to all my guests. I wanted viewers to feel comfortable having me in their homes.
I had no idea how I looked on television. I wouldn't see myself on television for years because every program I did was live and it was much too expensive to make the rudimentary film known as a kinescope. If Alyce wanted to watch my show, she would have to go into the local drinking establishment and convince the barkeep to turn it on. If a Phillies baseball game was being broadcast, she didn't have a prayer. Often she would bring Claudia, who was almost four, into the place with her and the two of them would sit at the bar watching the show. Claudia had no concept of what television was; to her it was real life, just a lot smaller. Once, for example, I did a duet with a girl singer. We sang "Walking My Baby Back Home," and as we finished the number, we strolled off the set arm in arm. Well, Claudia just started crying hysterically; she thought I'd left her mother for another woman and she would never see me again.
The show was everything the station had hoped it would be, three hours long and cheap. I thought I was doing okay, but after we had been working together for about three weeks, my cohost decided we had to have a serious conversation. We weren't friends; we had just been teamed by the station. We went out into the parking lot and sat down on a barrier. "Ed," he began, "believe me, I'm telling you this as a friend. I'm telling you this to help you. I don't think you're right for TV, I think you should stay in radio . . ." I didn't have the right personality for television, he explained, I didn't seem to have any charisma. I listened to him because he was a TV veteran, he'd been in the business hours longer than I had. And who knows what would have happened if I hadn't been too busy doing the television show to realize I shouldn't be on television.
After several weeks the station gave me my own show. My show, now called Take Ten, went on at 5:30 in the afternoon; unfortunately, I was on opposite the most popular show on television, the classic puppet show hosted by "Buffalo" Bob Smith, Howdy Doody.The most incredible thing about my show was that there were no strings attached. The station really let me do just about anything I could figure out how to do. These were the pioneering days of television, when anything was possible. We were inventing it as we went along. There was a tremendous sense of creative freedom; viewers didn't seem to care what was on TV, as long as the TV was on. The real star of television was the television set. People would watch whatever was on, and when the broadcast day concluded—the "11 o'clock news" went on at nine o'clock—and the test pattern was being shown, they were so fascinated they would watch the test pattern. I didn't know how good I really was, but I knew for sure I was more entertaining than a test pattern.
This was the ultimate on-the-job training experience. I learned what worked on television by doing it on television. I'd have singers and dancers, Girl Scouts selling cookies on roller skates, fire eaters; I'd do cooking segments and interview authors about their books; we had animals ranging from dogs who balanced plates to baby elephants. One of the first major acts I had on the show was the Clooney Sisters, who agreed to appear on my show to promote their upcoming concert. I interviewed them and then they sang a few songs. Getting the Clooney Sisters was a big coup for me. Only after they appeared did I realize, wait a second, they weren't doing me a favor; they actually wanted to be on television! I just hadn't realized how important a television appearance could be to someone trying to sell or promote something. I mean, it wasn't as important as radio, but it certainly helped. Until that time I didn't even know what a public relations person did, and I didn't know how important they could be to me. Eventually PR people began offering me their clients as guests on my show—I didn't even have to plead with them.
It was on Take Ten that I did my first commercials. I think that the first television commercial I ever did was for a pants presser. The gimmick was that you would insert this device inside your pants and it would stretch your pants enough so that while they were hanging in the closet all the wrinkles would come out. To figure out how this thing worked I had to go downtown to Wanamaker's department store to watch the salesman demonstrate "this amazing new product that actually stretches the wrinkles out of your pants while you are sleeping! Forget about steam irons . . ."
Certainly among the most memorable segments on The Tonight Show were the things Johnny did with animals and reptiles and insects. For me, that started in Philadelphia. A small circus was in town and we were going to have a performing bear on the show. Before the show, I was rehearsing a commercial for Dole pineapple juice when the bear's trainer mentioned to me, "Oh, he'll probably want some of that."
I stopped. All the instincts that had been honed in the carnival suddenly sharpened. I asked, "You think the bear'll drink this?"
"Oh sure, he loves it," the trainer said, then added, "He can even hold the glass."
There was a God. "You're kidding me!" This was just too good to be true. This cute bear drank the sponsor's product. If I had had this bear working with me on the boardwalk, I would've been a millionaire. Viewers would enjoy it and the sponsor would love it, and if the sponsor loved it, the station manager would love it and I would love it. We rehearsed the spot with the bear, and sure enough, he actually drank the pineapple juice from a glass. It was unbelievable.
I rewrote the commercial to feature the bear. "Our wonderful bear, Rosco, would just love some of that delicious pineapple juice," I said when we were on the air, "wouldn't you, Rosco?" I poured a glass of juice and he picked it up with his paws and drank it. "See, even bears know . . ." And then Rosco let out the loudest, deepest growl I had ever heard. Rosco wanted more juice. I mean, he really wanted more juice. I leaped out of the way. The bear growled again, louder. I held up the juice can and tried to look sincerely into the camera, as I had been taught, and said, "I guess you'll find that one glass isn't enough . . ."
Today almost all programming is produced by independent production companies, but in the early days of television the local stations produced most of their own programming. The performers worked directly for the station, and often appeared on several different shows. So after Take Ten proved to be a success, WCAU began assigning me to some of its other shows. Six months after my first appearance on television I was starring on four different shows, which ran twelve times a week; I was actually on the air seven hours and forty-five minutes a week. Another six months later I was doing thirteen different shows a week, had been honored as Philadelphia's Mr. Television, and the local chapter—actually the only chapter—of the Ed McMahon Fan Club had almost one hundred active members. It was just about impossible to watch television in Philadelphia for more than a few minutes and not see me.
It's nice to know that some things never change.
I did just about every type of show on the station. Several nights a week I hosted the Million Dollar Movie, and just like Johnny Carson's Teatime Movie host Art Fern, I would do six minutes of commercials after five minutes of an old movie. For forty-five minutes every morning of the workweek I hosted the breakfast show, Strictly for the Girls. At noon each day I played the role of Aunt Molly's mischievous nephew on the homemaker's program Home Highlights, a role that consisted of my sampling Aunt Molly's cooking and asking silly questions to our guests. Wednesday nights I served as emcee for a quiz show with musical entertainment called Cold Cash, during which I stood in front of a freezer filled with Birds Eye frozen foods and the station's cash; viewers would phone in to win that cash by answering questions. Saturday mornings I was the chief clown on the station's most popular program, a circus show called The Big Top. And Sunday nights I hosted a series about submarine warfare called The Silent Service.
Strictly for the Girls was the first breakfast show in television history. Breakfast chat shows had been very popular on radio, but nobody knew if viewers would be interested or have time to watch TV in the morning. I produced, wrote, and starred in the show, which really served as a prototype for the local morning shows produced in just about every major city. We had a little combo, a set divided into several different areas in which I would do interviews or commercials or our guests would perform, and several regularly appearing members of WCAU's morning family. At that time one of the most elegant shows on TV was a talk show broadcast from New York's famed Stork Club. That show opened with a shot of champagne being poured into a glass and an engraved place card inviting the viewer into the club. Strictly for the Girls opened with a similar shot, except that we showed steaming hot coffee being poured into two big mugs bearing the name of our sponsor, Horn & Hardart cafeterias, and a handwritten card welcoming viewers to the show. And then I would sing a song with our band.
That's correct, I would sing. And I could do it without building a brick wall! I was sort of a saloon singer; the more time you spent in the saloon, the better I got. I might not have had the most beautiful voice in the world, but I could carry a tune across a stage. In fact, years later I would star in several musicals in summer stock. When I played Buffalo Bill in Annie Get Your Gun, I got to sing the show business anthem "There's No Business Like Show Business." My breakfast show audience seemed to like my singing, although admittedly people don't require music in the morning to be as good as music later in the day.
At first we lured an audience into the studio with free coffee, donuts, and prizes, but the show very quickly became hot and we actually had people fighting for tickets. And the prizes. My favorite segment on the show was called "The Big Three," in which I would sit around a table and interview three preschool-age children. For example, I would ask these kids, "When should a girl marry?" Their answers might include, "If she ever kisses a boy," "Not until she's six years old," and "I hate girls and I'm never gonna get married."
Once I asked a little boy, "Do your mommy and daddy take care of you?"
"Well," he replied, "it's mostly my mommy."
"Well, does your daddy help?"
"Sometimes," he admitted, "but my mommy's mad at him because he pees in the bathtub."
The Big Top was my first network show. It was created by Charlie Vanda, who had been one of the creative giants of radio and had been hired to make WCAU a major television station. Originally Charlie hired me to be the ringmaster, which was just perfect for me. Having spent several summers touring with carnivals and circuses, I knew how to be a ringmaster. I even went out and bought a red coat, top hat, and whip. But a few weeks before we were scheduled to go on the air, Charlie took me out for dinner and broke the bad news to me: the CBS network had a commitment to give Jack Sterling, who was very hot on radio, a television show. The network wanted him to be the ringmaster. Charlie knew how disappointed I was, and said something like, "Ed, I've seen a lot of your work. Have you ever thought about being a clown?"
So I became a sad clown. That's a character description, not a comment on my disappointment. Was I really disappointed? Absolutely. I think everyone wants to be the ringmaster, the person who cracks the whip, rather than one of the clowns. I'd been a leader my entire life. In college I had been freshman class president; I ran my own bingo operation before I was eighteen; I was the youngest salesman on the boardwalk; during military training I was the platoon leader; and I'd become a marine officer and a hotshot fighter pilot. I wasn't used to being second. But it was a good job and it gave me an opportunity to be on network television. So I became a clown, and I probably vowed to myself that I would never take the number-two spot again.
Little did I know.
Clowns are made up, not born. My character consisted of a bald wig with a fringe of red hair, big round white eyes and a white mouth, a painted-on brown beard, thick black eyebrows, heavy glasses, and, most important, a big bright-red nose that blinked on and off and read HELLO! HELLO! I wore an emerald green opera cape with scarlet lapels, the traditional oversize trousers held up by huge suspenders, and different colored shoes on each foot.
A lot of people mistook me for Clarabell, the clown on The Howdy Doody Show, who "spoke" by honking a horn. Now, I had a nose that lit up and blinked HELLO! HELLO! and I was wearing a green opera cape. How easy could it have been to mistake me for someone else?
The show opened with a shot of my bald head, on which was printed THE BIG TOP. As I raised my head, I turned on my nose. Originally the nose was also going to carry the CBS logo, but perhaps a blinking nose did not precisely fit the image William Paley was trying to create for his TV network.
I believe it was William Shakespeare who noted that there were only thirty different clown bits in the world, but somehow I had to come up with fifty-two three-minute gags a year. I was the leader of the clown troupe Ed McMahon and His Merry Band of Clowns. I wrote and produced all the clown bits. If we had to cut the bit to fit the time slot, I directed it as we did it. Like all the classic clown acts, we did only sight gags, so our bits would not have worked as well on radio. My partner in mime was a wonderfully talented actor named Chris Keegan and, basically, he was the pratfall guy. I was the victor; he was the victim. If a rock fell in the pool right in front of me, the water splashed on him twenty feet away; if he moved over and stood next to me and dropped another rock in the pool, it would still splash all over him.
If I was holding a ladder and turned around, he got hit in the head with it. If we were both eating a banana, the gorilla ate his banana. If I fell off the high wire, I fell on him. Once we did an elaborate gag about finding the surprise in a box of cereal. It was supposed to end with Chris's finding a pony in the box. The first box supposedly contained cold cereal; when he opened it up, it was filled with steaming dry ice. The second box supposedly contained hot cereal; when he opened it up, it was on fire. The third box contained a ton of cornflakes, as well as another clown sitting on a pony; when he opened it up, the cornflakes fell on him and the pony ran over him. In rehearsal it worked perfectly. But when we did it on the air, the flames in the hot cereal caused the cornflake dust to ignite. While we were running around stamping out the fire, the pony panicked. It ran out of the box and knocked over both me and Chris. I fell and my nose started blinking on and off. But somehow Chris saved the gag—he managed to get buried by the cornflakes.
I wore my nose proudly for eight years on The Big Top. I rarely had fewer than four shows on the air in Philadelphia. In addition to the shows, I was also doing commercials for local car dealerships and banks and supermarkets, so I got to be pretty well known in the city. I was the big cheese in Philadelphia, although in Philly it is probably more appropriate to call me the big cheesesteak. For the first time in my life I was a little bit of a celebrity. Well, there are no classes in how to be a celebrity. You just do the best you can, try to be nice to everyone, and hope that you don't get run over by the pony in the cereal box.
I've always been so pleased that people enjoy my work enough to want my photograph or signature that I always find the time to pose for a picture or sign a piece of paper. But one evening in Philadelphia, after I had started doing five minutes of commentary on the eleven o'clock news broadcast, I was having dinner with my close friends Bob and Marti Gillin when a pleasant woman approached our table and explained, "I really enjoy watching you on the air."
"Thank you very much," I said modestly. "That's very kind."
"You went to college with my brother," she continued, "and I was just wondering if you could come over and say hello to some people."
Well, I always try to please people, so I walked with her over to her table. As she introduced me, she added, "He went to school with my brother at St. Joe's . . ."
I kept smiling. I knew exactly what had happened. The sports reporter on the newscast was a talented kid named Jack Whittaker, who had graduated from St. Joseph's University in Philly. And Whittaker looked a lot like me, except for our height, weight, and hair color. I nodded to the group and began doing what I call tap dancing; I moved lightly around the subject without ever getting into specifics. "St. Joe's was a wonderful place to go to school," I agreed.
But all of a sudden she looked at me and drilled me with the question, "Who'd you have for philosophy?"
"Well, you know," I began, fumbling for an answer, "I had a lot of different teachers at that fine school. It was a while ag—"
Sternly, she said, "You never forget your philosophy teacher."
Now everyone at the table was staring at me and I knew I had to respond to this woman. I had to stop dancing. As warmly as I could, I said, "I'm afraid you've made a little mistake. People make it all the time. They think I went to St. Joe's but I didn't. My friend Jack Whittaker went to St. Joe's and . . ."
She said very evenly, "You didn't go to St. Joe's?"
"Oh, believe me, I would've loved to go there. It's a wonderful place. But see, I wanted to go to drama school . . ."
"You don't even know my brother, do you?"
"No, I don't, but if I met him, I'm sure . . ."
With a sneer in her voice, she continued, "I suppose somebody as important as you went to one of those big fancy Ivy League schools like Harvard or Yale. Catholic schools weren't good enough . . ."
I wanted to dive into a hole. "No, no, that's not true at all. I went to Catholic University. I didn't go to St. Joe's, but I really would've loved to have gone there . . ."
As I walked away from that table I heard people muttering words like "liar" and "stinks" and "big shot." This incident upset me; I don't like to see anyone get their feelings hurt, even if I had nothing to do with it. And, in fact, in poor lighting, on a seven-inch screen, I could see how it might be possible to confuse me and Jack Whittaker. But what I still couldn't understand was how people could mix me up with Clarabell.
I don't think anyone anticipated how rapidly television would become an integral part of our lives, make radio seem obsolete, and just about destroy the movie business. Edward R. Murrow accurately described television as "the five-ton pencil." It had the kind of mammoth power to create stars overnight, to shift public opinion, to educate, to inform, and, mostly, to entertain. The people working in television in those early days didn't have time to worry about doing it right; we were much more concerned with just getting it done. With very small budgets, we had to be creative, find ways of using the unique technical opportunities television offered. On the news programs, for example, we had neither the time nor the money to film stories, so what the producers did was put still photographs on easels and pan, or move the camera, from right to left or up and down to give the illusion of motion, or a stagehand would flip through a series of photos as the newscaster read the story.
Everything on the East Coast was done live, not just the breakfast shows but even the most prestigious dramatic programs like Playhouse 90. The most popular programs were kinescoped and these grainy films were flown overnight to be shown the next day on the West Coast. Doing live television meant there was no going back: if you made a mistake, you lived with it and did your best to make something out of it, developing the technique to deal with whatever happened. Many performers currently on television never had to learn how to do that. Dick Clark was doing a live special a few years ago and one of his guests, a well-known television actor, flubbed a line. Instead of continuing, he turned to the director—now this was on live TV—and said, "Let's stop and do it again."
Television became sophisticated very fast. The difference in the way things could be done in 1949 and the way they had to be done by 1952 was enormous. In 1949 we were the new kids in town, just looking to put on a show and hoping somebody would watch. Three years later we were a serious business. As soon as it became obvious how profitable television would be, the radio networks just poured money into its development.
I was one of the biggest stars on television in Philadelphia, one of the nation's top five media markets, by the time I was thirty years old. But just when the network decided to transmit my show beyond Philadelphia—CBS was going to broadcast Strictly for the Girls throughout the Northeast—I was recalled to serve in Korea.
When I returned I didn't exactly have to start all over again—I still had my blinking nose and mismatched floppy shoes—but every other program of mine was off the air. WCAU ran a big campaign advertising my return: "Guess who's back? Ed McMahon! And look who's got him! WCAU!" But they had almost nothing for me to do. Television had grown substantially during the time I was gone. The normal broadcast schedule now ran the full day, from early morning till late at night. The eleven o'clock news was finally being broadcast at eleven o'clock. The station's programming was built around network sitcoms, westerns, and dramas. Some of the biggest stars of television, like Milton Berle and Howdy Doody, were not as popular as they had been. So WCAU created a late-night show for me titled Five Minutes More, which they broadcast during the last five minutes of the eleven o'clock news.
Basically, it was my playtime. I had five minutes to do absolutely anything I wanted to do. I could do serious or humorous pieces, I could interview guests, I could start a fund-raising campaign, or I could simply do an essay about whatever was on my mind. It was my show and doing it every night was about as much fun as I've ever had on television.
As always, I had a very small budget. About the only thing I could afford was creativity. Once, I remember, Ginger Rogers was in Philadelphia to publicize a new movie. In those days the movie studios were terrified of television and most of the big stars were contractually prohibited from appearing on TV. But I had always been a big, big Ginger Rogers fan and I wanted her on my show. Finally I convinced her husband, Jacques Bergerac, to allow her hand to come on the show. Not Ginger Rogers but Ginger Rogers's gloved hand. When we went on the air, viewers saw me sitting on a stool holding a white gloved hand that protruded from behind the curtain. "This is the hand of Ginger Rogers," I said softly. "Look how delicate it is, how graceful. It is the same kind of grace we've become accustomed to seeing when she dances . . ." Viewers never saw Ginger Rogers, she never said a word, but the entire five minutes was all about her.
Five Minutes More was as much like a daily television column as I could make it. I wrote and produced the entire show myself, but I tried to make it as much as possible like a visual Robert Benchley piece. For example, I opened the show one night with the camera slowly panning a photograph of the famed Philadelphia Mummers' band marching in the annual parade, as the band's music was heard playing in the background. "This is a Mummers' marching band," I said solemnly, "and this year this incredible group of musicians will mark the tenth consecutive year they have marched in the Thanksgiving Day parade . . ."
As I began explaining that the Mummers were a very special charitable organization, my stage manager, a great man named John Heatherton whom I often used on the show, came out wearing headphones and interrupted me. "Sorry to bother you, Ed," he said, "but what do you want me to do with that band that's waiting out in the hall?"
I stared at him for a moment, then gently placed my hand on his shoulder and asked, "Now, John, how long've you been in this business?"
"Almost four years."
Searching for the proper words, I explained, "See, I know what you saw on the monitor made it look as if there was a band in the studio, but actually it was just a photograph and a recording."
"Oh, yeah" he replied, nodding, "I get it. That was just a recording. That was great the way you did that. It sure sounded real to me. So, what do you want me to do with that band out in the hall?"
"John," I sighed, "let me try to explain this to you. There is no band in the hallway. See, in show business you try to create an illusion, you try to create an atmosphere, and if you do it well enough, people will believe. So when I told the viewers that they were looking at the Mummers' band and played a record, the idea was to make people believe the entire Mummers' band was right here in this studio. But they're not here. Look around, do you see them?
"No, I don't . . . ," he said.
"Of course you don't . . ."
". . . 'cause they're out there in the hall."
That was it; I'd had it with him. "Okay, John, have it your way. The entire Mummers' band is here. If you want to believe that, it's fine with me. I hope that makes you happy."
"So then you want me to send them home?"
"Yes, John, please," I agreed. "Why don't you just go out there and tell the band to go home."
He turned and yelled offstage. "Okay, go ahead and send them home."
I faced the camera. "I'm sorry for that interruption, ladies and gentlemen, but sometimes in doing this program . . ." and as I continued, the Mummers' band, in full regalia, marched across the stage playing loudly.
That didn't stop me. I just raised my voice above their music and continued to explain about how difficult it was to create an illusion successfully.
Sometimes I didn't know what I was going to do on the show an hour before airtime, but I always managed to come up with something. One night, when I was really desperate, I did a variation of an old vaudeville joke: I interviewed a talking bull. As it turned out, though, this animal was bull-headed. I explained to my audience that just before the show he had had an argument with his owner and had decided to get even with him by not speaking. Naturally, the owner and I were terribly embarrassed, and we finished the show with a sincere apology. Then the owner walked out of the studio.
But just as we were going off the air, the bull shouted at the owner, "If you don't come back right now, I'll never speak to you again."
I was always searching for something new. One night I did a remote interview with a singer outside the studio. As we discussed his career, a faked shoot-out took place right behind us. I never noticed it; I just continued with the interview. People were running, ducking behind cars, firing at each other, and I was asking calmly, "So how did you decide to become a singer?"
Actually, we had a problem with that bit because someone called the police, who arrived in force ready for a fire fight.
I used a lot of photographs. Once, to illustrate an essay about the beauty of a woman in motion, I mounted a sexy photograph of Marilyn Monroe on a piece of paper and jiggled it at the right time. That's where imagination became important—I was hoping people would imagine she was actually moving. I opened a show about handicapped people overcoming their disabilities with a photograph I'd cut out of a magazine of blind pianist George Shearing's hands. "These are the hands of George Shearing," I explained. "He has never seen them."
Alyce, our kids, and I were still living in Drexelbrook. I'd become extremely friendly with the builder and owner of the complex, the great Dan Kelly. It was from Dan Kelly that I learned about generosity and grace. Dan Kelly's joy in life came from sharing his success with others. Dan owned racehorses and on occasion would give me a solid tip. Once, he gave me the proverbial sure thing, and I was so excited about it that I went on the air and shared that tip with my listeners. It is possible I asked them not to tell anybody else. But approximately half the entire population of Philadelphia bet on the horse, which drove down the odds. The horse won, and paid about a quarter.
Once, I organized a campaign to outlaw the lyric to "Muskrat Ramble." I went as far as to propose a law making it illegal to write or perform the words to any Dixieland tune. I also organized a fund-raising campaign to save Admiral Dewey's flagship, which was rotting in the navy yard. My five minutes of whimsy at the conclusion of a serious newscast became very popular. I tried to give people something a little lighter, something that would contrast with the often sad news stories they had just heard, with which to end their day. The whole program, with John Facenda and Jack Whittaker doing the news and my hosting the last five minutes, worked very well and was very successful.
But as much as I enjoyed doing Five Minutes More, it wasn't enough to keep me busy. At most it took only a couple of hours a day to write the show and gather whatever props I needed. As everyone in the entertainment industry knows, once you pick up the stuffed elephant, there just isn't too much else to do. So I started commuting to New York City, the center of the television industry, to meet talent agents, make the rounds of the big advertising agencies, and audition for commercials. I didn't really know how to advance my career in television, except to keep doing exactly what I had been doing but to try to do more of it.
Several talent agents encouraged me. They told me they thought I had "it," although they couldn't describe precisely what "it" was. But whatever "it" was—a genial manner, an Irish wit, an amiable personality—apparently I had a lot of "it," and it seemed like only a matter of time before I found the right opportunity to use "it."
Several months after I began my daily train trips into New York, I got my first network job. I was hired to replace the host of Bride and Groom, which was canceled almost immediately after I was hired. Like so many television shows of that period, Bride and Groom was based on a successful radio show. Although NBC had already canceled it when I was hired, the network had to run it for six weeks until a replacement was ready. People got married on the show, and we gave them all sorts of great gifts; a TV set, a refrigerator, a two-week Caribbean honeymoon. In fact, one couple got married only for the gifts, and the staff joked that their marriage ended before the kinescope aired in Hawaii. My job was to interview the happy couple, their relatives, and guests at the wedding. One of my more probing questions was "How did you meet?"
On radio it was simple to create a fantasy wedding, the peaceful chapel somewhere in a wooded glen, the beautiful bride and handsome groom of a listener's dreams . . . but the harsh reality of television's bright lights destroyed the fantasy. The set was a cheap imitation of a chapel, some of our happy couples were less than truly beautiful, and it was difficult to maintain the ethereal atmosphere when I had to remind our viewers, "We'll be right back with our happy couple after this word from Drano."
Making it just a bit more difficult for me was the producer, who hated the show and continually made bawdy comments into my earpiece as I conducted interviews. "I'm here with the proud groom . . . ," I began.
To which the producer might have added, ". . . who married that horse for her money."
Or, "And we're very pleased to give our newly wedded couple their first gift. A beautiful . . ."
". . . paper bag he can put over her head, 'cause that's the only way he's gonna . . ."
Years later people wondered how I could sit with Mr. Carson and deal so comfortably with some of the surprises with which we were confronted. The answer is, I learned on shows like Bride and Groom.
As a favor to Dan Kelly, I used the experience I'd gained in Korea creating clubs to turn his struggling restaurant into the exclusive, very successful Drexelbrook Club. We served good food, we offered good music and good dancing, and most important, because we were a private club we could legally serve liquor on Sundays. Eventually I hired my father to be in charge of the liquor supply. He kept track of what the club had on hand, did the ordering, and supervised the bartenders. It was great for both of us: he felt useful and was able to spend time with his grandchildren, and I knew he was safe.
Drexelbrook was an ideal place to live. There were about twelve hundred apartments, most of them occupied by young successful families. Dan Kelly liked me and when I was recalled by the marines he'd promised to have a place for me when I was discharged. When I got back to Philadelphia, he had saved one of the best apartments in the entire complex for my family. It was a beautiful threebedroom apartment on the end of one building, open on three sides, with a beautiful view. But this particular apartment turned out to be so important in my life primarily because the guy who lived in the adjoining apartment was Dick Clark.
Dick Clark had begun his career in television as a newscaster in Utica, New York. But when he moved to Philadelphia, TV executives thought he looked too young to be taken seriously, so they offered him a job as a radio disc jockey. His local program, American Bandstand, became so popular that ABC decided to televise it nationally. By 1950 Dick Clark was doing seventeen hours of live television weekly—a music show in the morning, Bandstand in the afternoon, and commercials at night. Two years later he made his first ABC network appearance, doing a Tootsie Roll commercial on Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club.
By the time I moved in next door, Dick Clark's dance show, American Bandstand, was the hottest show on television. Every teenager in the country watched it every afternoon, including my lovely daughter Claudia. But of all the millions of teenagers in the country, only Claudia McMahon's bedroom wall was flush against Dick Clark's bedroom wall. Claudia attended a Catholic girls' school that forbade its students from going on Bandstand; just imagine how frustrating that was for her. But she would baby-sit for the Clarks and each week Dick would bring home the top ten records for her.
Alyce and I got to know Dick very well. I remember in those days he looked so young, so very young. And maybe I'm making this up, but I seem to remember that there was a portrait of him hanging over his fireplace, and in that painting he appeared to be just a little older than he was at that time. But Dick was so popular that the legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow interviewed him on his program, Person to Person. Person to Person was sort of the 1950s version of a Barbara Walters interview program. Each week, from an easy chair in his studio, bathed in cigarette smoke, Murrow would interview a well-known person in their own home by remote control.
The technology was not like it is today. There were no such things as lightweight minicams or mobile units; the CBS crew practically had to install a studio in Dick's apartment, so we had thick cables and wires and big cameras all over the place. It was a very big deal at Drexelbrook. All the Philadelphia newspapers were doing features about the show. Dan Kelly, who thought the daily mail delivery was a sufficient reason to throw a party, figured this would be great publicity for the club, so after the show he threw a big party for Dick Clark's family and the CBS crew. And if a few reporters happened to wander in, that was not a bad thing either.
During the party Dan asked me to get up onstage and entertain his guests. Me? Entertain a group of CBS television producers and a crew? Naturally, I was a bit shy about it, but somewhere, from some deep hidden reservoir, some place so deep I didn't even know it existed, so very deep that . . . It's a good thing that no one was standing in the direct path between me and the microphone, so there were no serious injuries. "Ladies and gentlemen," I began, "our wonderful host, Dan Kelly, felt this evening would not be complete without something in the way of entertainment
. . . so if there's anything in the way of entertainment here right now, let's get it out of the way and start the show."
Several talented performers living at Drexelbrook performed, I told some jokes, bantered a bit with the audience, led some sing-alongs, and everyone had a fine time. Now, besides the daily American Bandstand, Dick Clark hosted a Saturday night network dance party from New York. The producer of that show was a man named Chuck Reeves. After the party Reeves complimented me on the easy way I handled the show and asked, "Have you ever thought about going to New York?"
"Just about every second of every minute of every hour of every day," I said, "but other than that . . ."
Chuck Reeves promised to keep me in mind. Now, in show business lingo, that meant one of two things: either I was never going to hear from him again, or he was going to introduce me to this skinny comic genius from Nebraska with whom I would work for the next thirty-four years. I figured it was more likely I would never hear from him again.
Dick Clark's Saturday night show was broadcast from the Little Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street. During the week, a half-hour quiz show titled Who Do You Trust?, starring Johnny Carson, was broadcast from that studio. Chuck Reeves's office was down the hall from the office of Art Stark, Trust's producer. Soon after the Person to Person party, Reeves overheard Stark telling Carson that his announcer, Bill Nimmo, was leaving to host his own game show and they had to find a replacement right away. Reeves remembered me. As legend has it, Reeves leaped up and yelled to Stark, "I got the perfect guy for you! He's in Philadelphia, but I'll have him here tomorrow." At least that's the way the legend is told in my house.
Reeves didn't know how to contact me, so he phoned Dick Clark. Ironically, a few days earlier we had moved out of Drexelbrook into our own home in a place called Gulph Mills. Dick Clark did not have my new phone number. It was unlisted, but Dick, a wonderfully talented man who continues to complain that he got me a job that lasted thirty-four years and never got a commission, asked if there was a listing for Claudia McMahon. For her thirteenth birthday, I had gotten Claudia her own phone. Dick called that number and one day later I was walking into Johnny Carson's office in the Little Theatre.
I don't think I had ever seen Who Do You Trust?, but I had seen Johnny Carson. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, where he had starred in a fraternity production of the classic drama She Was Only a Pharaoh's Daughter, But She Never Became a Mummy, Carson had hosted a show, Carson's Cellar, first on WOW-TV in Omaha, then on KNXT in Los Angeles. After that show was canceled, he hosted a quiz show called Earn Your Vacation, and when that was canceled he was hired as a writer by Red Skelton. In rehearsal one day, Skelton suffered a minor concussion and could not do his live show that night. Carson went on in his place—and was so good that CBS gave him his own prime-time variety show.
Sometimes while I was rehearsing for Five Minutes More, we'd have a TV on in the background. No sound, just the picture. So I saw Jell-O presenting The Johnny Carson Show for several weeks before I ever heard his voice. I was fascinated by his facial expressions and body language. Perhaps because he was one of the greatest monologuists and adlibbers in comedy history, Johnny Carson has always been underrated as a physical comedian. But as I watched him on the monitor—even before he hired me, which enabled me to have a wonderful career during which I have earned millions of dollars, for which I will be eternally grateful and never say anything but the most loving things about him— he reminded me of some of the great comedians of silent movies.
Eventually I turned on the sound. From the very first time I heard him, I knew he was an original talent. I remember watching as he opened his show by auctioning off the television camera. "You can throw away your old Brownie," he explained. "Shoot your own TV programs, and then complain about them."
The first full sketch I ever saw him do was set inside the Trojan horse. He was with two other Greek soldiers; they were wearing those big metal helmets with feather plumes, shields, boots with buckles, and their mission was to rescue Helen of Troy. The punch line was such a non sequitur that most people still don't get it. As one of the soldiers got ready to leave the horse, Carson stopped him. "Not that way," he said. "Go out the rear end."
The soldier looked at Carson and said, "You tried a chicken and the chicken didn't work. You tried a pig and the pig didn't work. What makes you think a horse will work?"
I can still hear Carson's voice as he replied, "You know, a horse they just might go for."
It was so dumb that I couldn't stop laughing. The Johnny Carson Show was eventually replaced by The Arthur Murray Show and ABC hired Carson to host the afternoon quiz show Do You Trust Your Wife? Apparently the answer was no, because the format was changed and the title became Who Do You Trust?
Johnny Carson was very much the same person the day we met in 1958 as he was when we did the last of thousands of shows together in 1992. The interview was brief and totally professional; he was direct, polite, and private. When I walked into his office, he was standing with his back to the door, looking out the window at the Shubert Theatre directly across the street. Four giant cranes had blocked Forty-fourth Street and were hoisting a new marquee for the theater, which was replacing the traditional tivoli lights that spelled out the name of the current production. I stood at the other window as workmen started hanging the title of a new play, letter by letter. "Times Square'll never be the same after this," he said, indicating the marquee. "This is gonna be the new look for everybody."
Gradually, we realized the marquee was announcing the arrival of JUDY HOLLIDAY IN THE BELLS ARE RINGING.
Finally, Johnny Carson turned to face me. In the thirty years Mr. Carson and I did The Tonight Show together, I most enjoyed the first segment, a five-minute slot during which Johnny and I would sit at his desk and chat about absolutely anything of interest. It was never rehearsed. I just loved that spot. It was an opportunity for me to engage in witty repartee with the most clever, accomplished performer I had ever seen, in front of about ten million viewers. I had to be ready for anything. And this was the very first conversation we ever had. "So Ed," he asked, "what are you doing down in Philadelphia?"
I told him about all my shows.
He nodded, then asked, "Where'd you go to school?"
"Catholic University," I said, "in Washington, D.C. I studied speech and drama."
"That's great," he said, "very interesting. Hey, thanks for coming up. I really appreciate it." We shook hands and I walked out of the office. I've waited for elevators for a longer time than this meeting took.
Producer Art Stark took me into the studio where rehearsals were in progress. Carson came in a little while later and they put the two of us on camera to see how we looked together. I looked tall, he looked smaller. "Thanks for coming up, Ed," Stark said. "We'll get in touch with you."
I got back on the train to Philly convinced I'd blown the audition, although I didn't know what else I could have done to impress them. Maybe I shouldn't have been so tall? I was disappointed. It was obvious to me that Carson was a rising star, and I thought it would have been fun to work with him. Besides it was a paying job. Who Do You Trust? figured to be on the air for another two seasons at least. A broadcasting year is similar to a dog's year; it's a multiple of a normal year. The life span of most television programs is less than four years, so two good years on a national program was very desirable. I went home convinced I had been rejected.
For three weeks I didn't hear from anyone. That is the loudest silence you will ever hear. It meant I had not gotten the job. At the same time, one of the companies in Philadelphia for whom I did commercials had chartered a plane and was giving away trips to Europe as a sales promotion. The gimmick was that Alyce and I would be along on the trip. But Alyce didn't want to go; we had just moved into our new home and she had too much to do. We decided I would take Claudia. For some reason, though, I just didn't feel comfortable about making the trip. It didn't feel right. The day before we were to leave, a Friday morning, I decided not to go. Literally minutes after I'd made that decision, Art Stark called and said casually, "Ed, we'd like you to wear suits because we want to emphasize your size. The fact that you're a big guy, you know, will play well against Johnny. Johnny's kind of slight, so he likes to wear sport clothes . . ."
I was a little confused. "What are you talking about?" I asked.
"Didn't anybody call you?" he continued. "You got the job. You start Monday."
All of which is how putting down my twenty-five-dollar deposit on an apartment in Drexelbrook when I didn't have any money proved to be the shrewdest move I've ever made in show business.
On October 13, 1958, I went on the air with Johnny Carson for the first time. My job was to introduce the contestants, do the commercials, and occasionally have a brief conversation with him at the beginning of the show. I don't remember being the slightest bit nervous when the show went on the air. It didn't even occur to me that it might lead to something else. My biggest hope was that it would lead to a paycheck every other Friday.
The first time I walked onstage to introduce our next contestants and hand the questions to Johnny, he established the nature of our television relationship, which would last more than three decades. At that time one of the most popular comic strips was "Mandrake the Magician," and Mandrake had a big, big manservant, a gentleman's gentleman, named Lothar. When I came out Johnny pretended not to see me and then turned suddenly and jumped back, as if I had surprised him. "Lothar," he said, "you startled me."
That was it: big guy and little guy, boss and employee, star and announcer. One night on The Tonight Show, I remember, he started discussing a newspaper column that had described him as cold and aloof. This was something we never discussed, but I knew this kind of criticism bothered him. "You see that thing in the paper today?" He complained, "They're writing the same old thing. Johnny Carson is cold and aloof. Ed, how long have we been together?"
"It'll be twenty-one years this October."
"That's right, so you know me pretty well. Tell me the truth, really now, do you think I'm cold and aloof?"
To which I responded, "No, my Lord." Now, that line descended directly from the first thing he ever said to me. The audience laughed because . . . because it was funny. And it was funny because it described completely the TV relationship between us that began on Who Do You Trust?
The game was the least important aspect of Who Do You Trust? Exactly like Groucho's quiz show, You Bet Your Life, it was simply a vehicle that allowed Johnny Carson to show off his genius. The format was simple: a couple was asked three questions of increasing difficulty and value and had to agree on an answer. The most they could win was about $150. For example, they might have been asked, "Which mountain is taller, Mt. Everest or Mt. McKinley? Who do you trust?" Believe me, our contestants were not chosen for their intellect. We had people on the show who were so nervous that they were stumped by questions like "How many children do you have?"
The quiz was really nothing more than an excuse for Carson to conduct interviews with unusual people and participate in demonstrations. The stranger, the better. Among the contestants we had on the show was a woman who dressed her parrots in historical costumes—Napoleon squawked—we had lots of singing pets; once we had a woman who tossed alligators. Several contestants claimed to have been abducted by Martians or were themselves Martians. Johnny loved people with strange tattoos in unusual places. Inventors were always coming on with unusual inventions. One contestant had invented panties for cows. Another man had invented padded pants with a built-in derriere; he brought a special large size for Johnny, who made a perfect model. Another inventor demonstrated shoes with springs attached to the bottom and Carson bounced across the stage. One of our most memorable contestants was the owner of Hubert's Flea Circus, a Times Square emporium. He brought with him a complete miniature circus, including his star, Gypsy Rose Flea. I mean, he had this tiny little trapeze, little swings, an invisible high wire. You should have seen these little fleas, because nobody else did. "Look!" he told Johnny, as he supposedly put his fleas through their act. "You see that? That was unbelievable! A triple flip. He's never done that before."
Carson admitted he'd missed it.
One of the few performers turned down for the show was a singer named Tiny Tim. He came into the office for an interview wearing lipstick, eye shadow, heavy makeup. Art Stark thought he was much too strange even for our show.
Who Do You Trust? was perfect for Johnny Carson. It gave him the chance to work out so many of his memorable expressions and reactions. No matter how strange a guest was, no matter how ridiculous his story, Johnny played it straight, as if he were talking to a perfectly normal person. About the furthest he would go to express some doubt about a guest was raising his eyebrow. He was just great at finding the humor in the most ordinary things. Just after the big quiz show scandals erupted, when it was discovered that contestants on big shows like The $64,000 Question were being given answers, one of our contestants tried to give Johnny a little doll. He recoiled as if the doll were on fire. "A little bribe, huh?" he said. "Five years on the show and I knew something had to happen . . ." Then he sort of whispered to her, "See, all that stuff is given backstage . . ."
Carson was willing to do just about anything for a laugh. He was very athletic and really knew how to use his body. If he had to be skinnier for a bit, somehow he became skinnier. On every show we had at least one demonstration in which he participated. We had an archer who shot an apple off Johnny's head, a karate expert who taught him how to break a board with his forehead, weight lifters, people trying to break hula-hoop records, a woman contortionist who tried to set the world record for supporting her weight on her hands with her feet behind her head—then tried to twist Johnny into a pretzel. We had a gymnast who showed him how to jump on a trampoline—and Johnny jumped straight out of the top of the TV screen.
The thing about Carson was that he was good at this stuff; with a little practice he could pretty much master whatever it was he was doing. I learned very quickly that he was the most facile, accomplished man I'd ever met. He could do a little bit of everything. When we would be talking in his dressing room he might be drumming with two pencils, rolling a half-dollar between his fingers, hiding cards. He could even tap dance a little; few people know this, but he once won an Arthur Murray jitterbug contest. Sometimes he seemed a little apprehensive about doing things, at least he played it that way, but he always ended up doing it. We had an expert fly caster on the show try to drop a lure inside a tire, and he was so nervous he missed—so Johnny showed him how to do it.
Long before Ed Ames tossed his famous hatchet between the legs of a silhouette on The Tonight Show, one of our contestants taught Johnny to toss a battle-ax, and Johnny hit the center of the target with his first throw. He was terrific with kids. Kids used to come on and demonstrate how to hop around on a pogo stick or ride a unicycle, and naturally Johnny failed in the funniest ways possible. Then he would just glare at those kids with his steely blue-eyes glare. I'm telling you, if there was a tub of water around he would fall into it, if our guest was demonstrating how to make a pizza we would end up in a flour fight, and no pie ever went unthrown.
This show also gave us the chance to develop our characters and our on-air relationship. Even then Johnny looked like the naive choir boy from the Midwest who had innocently wandered into the big city. He was often shocked, oh, terribly shocked, at some of the things people said. He loved double entendres, sexual innuendos, anything he could get away with. That was the main reason we had couples as contestants. I remember one couple we had on who confessed they had met while she was on her honeymoon with another man. The great singer Rudy Vallee came on with his new bride, who was much, much younger than him. She was a beautiful, very sexy girl, and when Johnny asked her what it was like being married to an older man, she admitted, "Oh, it's great, I keep him up all night."
Almost immediately he made me his foil and by doing so made us a team. On the air I became the big guy who drank too much and ate too much, the good-time guy, hail-fellow-well-met. I was "Big Ed," then "Big Ed, who is the announcer on this show only because he never passed the bar. In fact, Ed has never passed any bar." And just off camera he was always doing little things to cause me problems, things like setting my script on fire. I did a billboard at the top of the show; each of the six sponsors that day had a copy line: "Swans Down cake mixes, the cake mixes you can swear by." But the sponsors changed all the time, so I had to read this opening from a script. And almost every day, as I started reading, he'd set fire to the bottom of my script. I had to get through the opening before my script burned up. I had to read as fast as I could. Some days a copy line like "Nabisco crackers are so good and salty you can eat the whole package" was reduced by fire to something like "Nabisco crackers. Eat 'em." By the end of the opening I was trying to read charcoal.
Who Do You Trust? was as much a training ground for me as it was for him. I did all the commercials live, and I learned how to deal with just about anything that could happen on the air. And Carson made sure anything that could happen did happen. One afternoon, just as I was ready to demonstrate how easy it was to use cake mix, he walked by my prop table and "accidentally" hit the leg, knocking my bowls and mixers and cake mix on the floor. Now, I am not saying that Mr. Carson hit that table leg intentionally, which resulted in prolonged laughter from the studio audience, but I wouldn't bet my Bud against it.
Most of the time, I was able to get through my commercials. I had my professional dignity to uphold, but occasionally even I would make a mistake. I was doing a spot for StayPuff softener. This was long before Pampers had been invented, when mothers had to pin diapers on their babies. Mothers always had to be very careful not to stick their baby with the pin when putting the diapers on. I had two piles of diapers; the pile washed in StayPuff was much fluffier. I was supposed to say, "StayPuff makes it so easy to pin these diapers on . . ." Well, I don't know what Carson had done to distract me—actually that might have been the day he crawled under the camera and gave me a three-match hotfoot while I was doing the spot—but whatever he did, I wasn't paying attention and I said, "StayPuff makes it so easy to pee . . ."
Well, in those days you couldn't say that word on TV. The censors were so strict that if you read the alphabet you were supposed to leave out that letter. Carson was laughing so hard he left the theater. But I'll tell you how he would have described this scene. In his most innocent tone, he would have said, "The organist was laughing so hard he couldn't play his organ . . ."
I understood that my job was to support Johnny Carson. I didn't tell the jokes, I set up the jokes. I didn't get the laughs, I helped him get the laughs. Johnny and I never discussed this; we didn't have to. We were smart enough to see how well our relationship worked. At times I had to consciously stop myself from responding to something he said; I'd always had my own shows, I'd always been free to say whatever popped into my mind. But after a few weeks I had slipped quite comfortably into the role of straight man, his second banana. And as he got to trust me more and more, he gave me more to do. He began to depend on me, and my role expanded greatly.
We became great pals. When we started working together he was living in Harrison, New York, about an hour outside the city, and his first marriage was breaking up. So, often, after the show instead of going home he'd suggest we get something to eat and drink. And drink. And sometimes toward the end of the week he'd ask me to spend the weekend with him in Ft. Lauderdale. I believe there is a word for people who say no when the boss suggests dinner—and that word is "unemployed." Besides, my marriage wasn't doing all that well either. Alyce was very unhappy about all the time I was spending in New York. She would much rather I had remained Mr. Television in Philadelphia and not tried to expand my career in New York. I remember negotiating with her on the phone, telling her that Johnny wanted me to go to Florida with him and that the producer thought it was a good idea.
That was a tough time for me, too. I was a practicing Catholic, I often went to Mass on my way to New York, and I believed completely that as a Catholic I married once and for life. But gradually my marriage to Alyce was breaking down. If I have one regret in my life, it is that often my career prevented me from being with my kids. I always tried to be there for important occasions, but the truth is I missed a lot of the day-to-day family life. I wasn't there when my son Jeff was born, for example, because we had just started taping Who Do You Trust? and we were doing two shows that day. Jeff was born between shows.
Johnny and I spent a lot of time together, much more than we would in later years, but our friendship was forged then. We'd spend nights going from restaurants to bars, places like Michael's Pub and Danny's Hideaway and Sardi's and Jilly's and P. J. Clarke's. We had the adventures that two young successful guys on the town in New York City who enjoyed a bit of libation might have, actually a lot of libation, we libated all over the city. And at times the fact that I was big and, as a marine, in great shape prevented us from having even more public adventures. We got to know each other very well; we learned a lot about each other's feelings and values, what hurt us, what made us happy. We came to understand how each of us thought, and most important, we really liked each other, we had a good time together. The intimacy that developed during the four years we did Who Do You Trust? was essential to the success of The Tonight Show.
Who Do You Trust? was pivotal in my career. As soon as I started appearing on a daily network program in New York, I began getting all types of offers for shows and commercials in Philadelphia. One of the most interesting was an opportunity to do my own late-night show. NBC was getting very nervous that Jack Paar, the controversial Tonight Show host, was going to quit. So the network requested that each of the O & Os, the local stations that they owned and operated, find a potential replacement for Paar. The NBC affiliate in Philadelphia picked me, and I created a late-night show titled McMahon and Company. I did the show for six or seven months, while commuting to New York. Which is not the story of how I ended up on The Tonight Show.