One evening the actor Fernando Lamas, who had quite a reputation as a ladies' man, was a guest on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson liked him a lot. He said that he thought it had been very brave of Lamas to come to America without speaking the language and try to make it in the motion picture industry. After praising him for his courage and dedication, Johnny asked him why he pursued such a difficult career.
Lamas told him, "It was a good way to meet broads."
Johnny laughed, nodding his head as if the answer had been obvious, then said, "You know, Nietzsche couldn't have said it better."
Nietzsche? Nietzsche! After the show I went into Johnny's office and asked him, "Where the hell did Nietzsche come from?"
Johnny just shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "It was just back there somewhere."
I worked with Johnny Carson for thirty-four years. During that period I think the longest we ever went without doing a show together was four weeks. Besides four years of Who Do You Trust? we did 6,583 Tonight Show s. And the guy never failed to surprise me or entertain me.
Sometimes I think television was invented just to display the talents of Johnny Carson. No one has ever mastered it as he did, and it was my privilege to be sitting by his side in the swivel chair that didn't swivel, and then move down one seat onto the couch as the big movie star came on to promote a picture, then move down another seat when the zoologist came on and put the Goliath beetle on Johnny's hand and watched it crawl up his arm, and then another seat when Johnny brought out the farmer who created jewelry from animal droppings, and finally move onto a folding chair when the author came out for the last three minutes, for all those years.
NBC's Tonight Show dated back to 1951, when it debuted as a late-night variety show titled Broadway Open House, hosted by comedian Jerry Lester and his pulchritudinous sidekick, Dagmar. Maybe television was really invented for entertainers like Dagmar, whose two biggest talents could not be appreciated on radio. As Johnny once ad-libbed about a guest during a commercial break, "She could have nursed Wyoming." Then Steve Allen hosted the show for almost four years, introducing great performers like my friends Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and Andy Williams, and doing parody sketches like "What's My Pain?" When he left, the network didn't have any idea what to do with the time slot; after experimenting with Ernie Kovacs for a few months, they created a really terrible news, interview, and gossip show called America after Dark, with Jack Lescoulie and Al "Jazzbo" Collins. That failed, so in desperation they hired Jack Paar. Paar, a low-key comedian who had hosted several radio and summer replacement television programs, described himself as "Lawrence Welk without music." Paar saved The Tonight Show, and maybe all of live late-night television.
Paar made The Tonight Show the hottest program on the air. People started staying up to watch the show because they knew the next day everybody in their office would be talking about it. He brought together a wonderfully eclectic mix of talent, combining an offbeat group of regular guests, people like Cliff Arquette playing a folksy character named Charley Weaver, pianist-curmudgeon Oscar Levant, and "ditsy" comedienne Dody Goodman, with great young performers like Jonathan Winters, Joey Bishop, Diahann Carroll, and Carol Burnett, and still managing to attract big stars like Jack Benny, George Burns, Red Skelton, and Jerry Lewis. Part of Paar's appeal was his unpredictability. You didn't want to miss his show because you never knew what he might do. He made front-page headlines for weeks, for example, when in the middle of a show he announced he was quitting, then walked off the stage because network censors had cut out a joke in which he had used the phrase "WC," meaning a water closet or bathroom, without consulting him.
His return got one of the highest ratings in television history, even if the entire history of television was then only about fourteen years. My show in Philadelphia, McMahon and Company, came on right after Paar. He was a tough act to follow, particularly on my limited budget. The "and Company" was my piano player and whomever I could convince to sit for an interview. My guests ranged from the legendary actress Helen Hayes to an elderly woman who played her head; she actually banged her hand against her skull to produce an identifiable version of "I'm Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover."
After hosting The Tonight Show for five years, "the King"— as Jack Paar called himself, explaining, "overstatement is very funny"—decided to quit for real. "You can only work a field for so many seasons in a row before it becomes barren," he said. "I don't think Paar's half acre is completely worn out, but it has gotten a little dry lately."
Paar was so popular and controversial that the media doubted anyone could really replace him, but Paar himself decided that Johnny Carson, who had filled in for him as host on occasion, was "the one man who could or should replace me." Paar retired at the end of March 1962; NBC hired Carson to succeed him starting the following October. While Carson fulfilled his Who Do You Trust? contract at ABC, a succession of guest hosts including Bob Cummings, Jan Murray, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Jerry Lewis, Arlene Francis, Groucho Marx, Soupy Sales, and Art Linkletter filled in during the summer.
To this day I don't know how I got the job as Johnny Carson's Tonight Show announcer. I've never asked him and he has never told me. I do know how badly I wanted the job. We had become very close friends, but I think one of the reasons for that was that we rarely, if ever, spoke about business. We just had a good time together. After it was announced that Johnny Carson had been hired to replace Paar, I heard all kinds of rumors about who his announcer would be. The story that seemed most plausible was that NBC was pressuring Carson to keep Paar's announcer, Hugh Downs, as a way of making viewers more comfortable with the change, whereas Johnny wanted to take me and producer Art Stark from Who Do You Trust? Apparently a deal was made—again this is all rumor—allowing Carson to hire me if he agreed to accept a producer already under contract to the network. This was NBC's way of maintaining some control over the show. So Perry Cross became producer of The Tonight Show, Hugh Downs replaced Dave Garroway as host of The Today Show, and I got the announcer's job.
I found out about it late one night at Sardi's. Johnny and I were sitting at the bar celebrating . . . celebrating the fact that we were sitting at the bar, when he said casually, "You know, Ed, I've been thinking, when we take over the show . . ."
"Whoa," I said. "Now just back up a little bit. Did you say, when we take over the show?"
"Yeah, of course. Of course you're going with me. Didn't you know that?"
I looked at Johnny gratefully and said those four lovely words most appropriate at a moment like that: "I'll drink to that!"
There had been several announcers on The Tonight Show: Gene Rayburn had worked with Steve Allen, Hugh Downs with Jack Paar, and each of them had fulfilled quite a different role on the show. I had no idea what I was supposed to do beyond showing up on time wearing a clean shirt. About the only thing I knew for sure was that I would be doing a lot of live commercials. I'd learned while working on the boardwalk that the best way to make something look natural was to rehearse the hell out of it, that the more you did it, the less it looked like you'd ever done it before. I'd met Hugh Downs while he was cohosting a morning homemakers' show, The Home Show, with Arlene Francis, and he graciously invited me to spend time with him in studio 6B at Rockefeller Center, the studio in which The Tonight Show was done.
For several weeks I went over there in the afternoon and rehearsed that night's commercials with him. I got to know the crew, and I learned the very complicated, technical aspects of doing commercials, like where to stand. I mean, there really was no training period for this job; I just had to do it. All those Thursday nights I'd spent at the Emerson College Broadcasting Club really had very little value— unless, of course, we got Praise linoleum as a sponsor.
No one knew what The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson would be like, including Johnny Carson. The show had changed completely with each host; Steve Allen was great in sketches, Paar was a terrific interviewer. In late summer Johnny took producer Perry Cross, all the writers, his brother Dick Carson, who would direct the show, and me to Ft. Lauderdale, where we sat around the pool and planned the show. Actually, I sat around the pool; they planned the show. Johnny Carson didn't just show up to do the show; that was my job. He created and produced it. He wrote jokes for the monologue, worked with the writers, planned the sketches. I don't think viewers ever realized how completely the show was a reflection of his personal vision.
During that Florida trip, some of television's most wonderful characters—Teatime Movie host Art Fern, Aunt Blabby, the great mentalist El Moldo, and the seer from the East, Carnac the Magnificent—came to life. My contribution to this meeting was primarily to get a great tan.
On October 1, 1962, Johnny Carson and I did The Tonight Show for the first time. I can assure you, that first night we did not think that we were going to become "part of the fabric of America," as Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Archibald MacLeish later claimed, or that we were to become "history's most effective contraceptive," as journalists wrote. Which, by the way, is one of the rare times that calling someone a contraceptive is meant as a compliment. In our wildest fantasies that first night, we never dreamed that the show would generate one hundred million dollars a year in advertising revenues, accounting for one-fifth of NBC's annual profits, and become so much a part of American culture that Johnny would cause a national shortage of toilet paper simply by mentioning that supermarket supplies were running low.
No, that first night all we were hoping for was that we would be good enough to be renewed. Paar had done the show for almost five years, and from the vantage point of the first day, that seemed like an impossibly long run. The network didn't seem to have too much confidence in us; they didn't bother to upholster parts of our set. The set was built on a platform several inches high, and for several years the front of that platform was bare, revealing the nails and hinges that held the whole thing together. I was so insecure about the show's staying on the air that for the first two years I continued to commute from Philadelphia, and even after I finally moved to New York, I rented a house for two more years instead of buying. Just in case.
Johnny and I never discussed my role on the show. But the afternoon of our first show, as we were going down to the stage, I said, "John, I want to discuss something with you. How do you see my role down here tonight?"
"Ed," he told me, "I don't even know how I see my own role. Let's just go down there and entertain the hell out of them." That was the only advice I ever got from him and, in retrospect, it was probably the best possible plan. The show, and our roles on it, evolved over time. About the only thing I can think of that didn't change at all from our first show to our last show was my introduction of Johnny Carson.
Very few performers in history have been linked forever to one phrase. George Burns, for example, will always be remembered for his line "Say goodnight, Gracie." Quote the phrase "And that's the way it is," and everyone knows you're quoting Walter Cronkite. Jimmy Durante was known for his mysterious closing, "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." "It's always something" immediately brings to mind the great Gilda Radner. Well, I've probably been associated with more phrases then anyone in show business, but the first one, the best known, and the line I am continually being asked to repeat is . . . "Heeeeere's Johnny!"
As a spokesperson for American Family Publishers, I have the pleasure several times a year of calling people to tell them that they have won several million dollars. Sometimes they refuse to believe either that I'm Ed McMahon or that they've won a fortune. So when that happens, I ask them their first name. Richard. "How 'bout this," I say, "Heeeeere's Richard!" That's when they believe me.
While preparing for the first show, I was trying to think of a way of opening that would be distinctive, something that would set me apart from other announcers. Normally, the only opportunities an announcer has to make his presence known are the opening and closing of the show. Hugh Downs, for example, had a great phrase, ". . . and I'm yours truly, Hugh Downs." But I just couldn't come up with a good gimmick for myself. Then, literally about five minutes before we went on the air, it came to me. I used to host the NBC radio show Monitor, and one of our correspondents was the fine reporter Robert Pierepoint. When I introduced him, I would elongate the r, Rrrrrobert Pierepoint. So I decided to do the same thing when I opened the show. And it stuck. It was immediate. On my way to the studio the next day, literally the next day, people recognized me and imitated that phrase. But in all the years Johnny and I were together, he never mentioned it.
The second phrase instantly connected with me is the mellifluous rallying cry "Hi-yoooo." John Paul Jones rallied his sailors with the memorable phrase "I have not yet begun to fight." Nathan Hale became immortal with his last words, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Me? I got "Hi-yoooo." And when I walk down the street, I still get it . . . over and over and over and over. It wasn't even my phrase. It came from our associate producer, John Carsey. One night after we'd been doing the show for about six or seven years, we had a terrible audience. It happened sometimes. Fortunately, no one reading this book was there that night, so I feel free to be critical. But these people . . . I don't know where they came from. Maybe The Merv Griffin Show. During the first commercial break, Johnny and I exchanged glances; we knew it was going to be a grim night. But Carsey, standing off camera behind me, suddenly gave a slight rallying cry, the kind of upbeat, energizing, thrilling cry that the old wagon master, John Wayne, might have given to signal the hundreds of covered wagons to begin the great trek westward over tall mountains and through fields of . . . Carsey said, "Hi-yoooo." I picked it up and repeated it loudly and the audience responded immediately, and that night that audience was miraculously transformed from a sad, dull group to a wonderful audience of which any of us would have been proud to have been a member. It became the rallying cry of the Tonight Show audience. I used it often, but especially on those rare occasions, those once-in-a-great-while moments, when one of Mr. Carson's witticisms received a less than favorable response. I would cry out, "Hi-yoooo," knowing that my cry would be echoed by the entire audience, that their voices would rise as one to remind Johnny how much he was appreciated, even if his joke really smelled up the joint.
I just didn't realize I'd have to hear it several million times. Or more. I loved it, I loved the fact that it allowed the audience to participate in the fun, to be part of the show. And I still enjoy hearing it. One of the nicest moments of my life took place when I served as the grand marshal of the Orange Bowl parade. I was introduced at the game and as I walked out onto the field at least fifty thousand people greeted me with the loudest, most affectionate "Hi-yoooo" anyone has ever heard.
Of course, as soon as I appeared on television informing viewers, "You may have already won ten million dollars," "Hi-yoooo" practically disappeared and people began greeting me by asking, "Hey, Ed, where's my money?"
Johnny and I did the show for thirty years. Just imagine that, thirty years. That's seven different presidential administrations. The Kennedy assassination. Watergate. The entire space program. The Vietnam War. Seven marriages between us. And not a single world championship for either the Boston Red Sox or the Chicago Cubs. The world changed drastically while we were on the air. When we started doing the show there were no such things as color televisions, portable telephones, personal computers, microwave ovens, or VCRs. By the time we left the show, people all over the world were able to misplace the remote control for their color televisions, couldn't figure out how to replace the batteries in their portable phones, had no idea why their computer insisted it had no memory left, kept burning popcorn in the microwave, and were totally unable to program their VCRs.
Hi-yoooo!
It wasn't just that new things were invented during that period; there were fundamental changes in American society, and one of the reasons The Tonight Show remained popular for so long was that we were able to change with the times. When we first went on the air we weren't permitted to use words like "pregnant." We had to use phrases like "with child." Once when Johnny and I were doing a question-and-answer bit, I said to him, "Now here's a query from . . . ," and I got a memo from standards and practices, the network censor, telling me not to use the word "query" because it sounded too much like "queer."
I'll tell you how much television had changed. Decades after that incident, Jane Fonda was on the show one night and said to Johnny, "I've got to ask you something. You were just talking about Zsa Zsa Gabor. My son said she was on your show one time, she came here with a cat on her lap, and she said to you, 'Do you want to pet my pussy?' My son said that you said, 'I'd love to, if you remove that damn cat!' Is that true?"
Johnny nervously drummed his pencil on his desk until the laughter had subsided, then said with a sigh, "No, I think I would have recalled that."
My role on the show never was strictly defined. I did what had to be done when it had to be done. I was there when he needed me, and when he didn't, I moved down the couch and kept quiet. The farther down the couch I moved, the quieter I was. I did the audience warm-up, I did commercials, for a brief period I cohosted the first fifteen minutes of the show with our orchestra leader, Skitch Henderson, and I performed in many sketches. On our thirteenth-anniversary show, Johnny and I were talking at his desk and he said, "Thirteen years is a long time."
Long enough for me to recognize my cue. "So," I asked, "how long is it?"
"That's why you're here," he said, probably summing up my primary role on the show perfectly, and then he continued, "It's so long that when we started Gladys Knight was using training Pips." My job was to be the straight man, the sidekick, a role honored in show business tradition as the second banana. There is an old story that a straight man was walking along the beach when suddenly he heard someone screaming, "Help! Help! I'm drowning." And when he heard that he stopped and turned and said, "You mean to say that you're drowning? "
I had to support him, I had to help him get to the punch line, but while doing it I had to make it look as if I wasn't doing anything at all. The better I did it, the less it appeared as if I was doing it. When you're a performer there is a great desire to try to please the audience. Even though I understood and accepted completely that my role on the show was to support Johnny, I still wanted to hold my own. I've often been asked how I felt about being Johnny Carson's sidekick, his second banana. The answer is that I wanted to be the best damned second banana it was possible to be. I wanted to do the job better than anyone had ever done it before. I wanted to create a role that no one could duplicate. If I was going to play second fiddle, I wanted to be the Heifetz of second fiddlers.
Playing straight man to Johnny Carson was a privilege. I'm an intelligent man. I knew how talented he was. I knew I couldn't do so many of the things he did so easily. I couldn't play that range of characters. I couldn't create Carnac. I couldn't do imitations. I didn't want to jump off platforms or let tarantulas crawl up my arm. I didn't mind playing a supporting role. In fact, I relished it, I loved it.
In all honesty, I think I did it well too. Anyone who has ever tried to play this role knows how difficult it is to do. Basically the only rules of the job are that the sidekick never gets the girl or to shoot the bad guy. The most difficult thing for me to learn how to do was just sit there with my mouth closed. Many nights I'd be listening to Johnny and in my mind I'd reach the same ad-lib just as he said it. I'd have to bite my tongue not to say it out loud. I had to make sure I wasn't too funny—although critics who saw some of my other performances will claim I needn't have worried. If I got too many laughs, I wasn't doing my job; my job was to be part of a team that generated the laughs.
In fact, it was much tougher for me to work without Johnny than it was to be with him. When we started doing the show, we were on the air from eleven-fifteen P.M. till one A.M. Then Johnny found out that many local stations didn't pick up the network feed until eleven-thirty. So for the first fifteen minutes, he couldn't use his best material. Finally he decided not to do that segment at all. Skitch Henderson, our natty bandleader, and I cohosted the show for those fifteen minutes. Years later, when Johnny was having problems with NBC, or negotiating his new contract, he came down with a bad case of the NBC flu about an hour before we went on the air and was unable to work that night. I had to host the show. Most of the time I didn't even know who was going to be on, much less have time to prepare.
That was the toughest job in the world. I had to be good, but I couldn't be too good. I had to make it look as if I was enjoying myself, but I also had to make it clear I wasn't enjoying myself that much. My goal was a lot of loud smiles. If the producer complimented me, I never knew if he meant I had been funny or had been just not funny enough.
I can remember only one time when I was working with Johnny that I went too far. In fact, I'll never forget it. One night Johnny carefully explained to me that scientists at Cal Tech had just completed a multimillion-dollar study about mosquitoes and they had found that for some reason mosquitoes were particularly attracted to extremely "warmblooded, passionate people."
Instinctively, I said, "Whoops, there's another one," and slapped my wrist.
I knew even before my wrist stopped stinging that I'd gone too far. Johnny was glaring at me with his steely blue eyes. "Well, then," he said, reaching down and picking up a can of insect spray the size of a fire extinguisher, with which he had intended to spray himself, "I guess I won't be needing this five-hundred-dollar prop then, will I?"
It was obvious to everyone in the audience exactly what had happened. And they enjoyed it a lot more than I did. Johnny had managed to salvage something from the setup, but I knew how angry he was with me. Not so much because I'd gotten the laugh, but rather because I'd ruined the bit. And he was right to be. After all the years we'd worked together, it should have been obvious to me that he was setting up a joke, a joke that was not written for me to get the laugh. Now, that was not the only time Johnny got mad at me; when you work together as closely as we did for as long as we did, it is inevitable that there will be some bad times. I'm sure there must have been some shows when he thought I was too strong, I'm sure of that, but when that happened I knew it too. There were nights when I asked myself, did I go too far? Did I step outside my role? Never for one moment in thirty years did I forget that it was Johnny's show.
Our relationship survived a lot longer than several of our marriages. The amazing thing is how many really good nights we had together. All kinds of stories have been written about our relationship, but the simple fact is that Johnny and I liked each other and respected each other. Maybe the fact that two men who worked together liked each other didn't make very exciting headlines, but it was true. When Johnny was between marriages, for example, he would occasionally spend a weekend at my house. He slept in Claudia's room so often that he gave her a picture on which he'd written, "To Claudia, Some time you must sleep in my bed." Johnny and I could not possibly have worked so well together on the air if we didn't genuinely like each other off the air. The viewing audience is too smart to allow us to fake a friendship for any period of time.
The audience knew that Johnny was the boss, and the rest of us were employees. And since almost all of our viewers had bosses of their own, they understood and identified with that relationship. We had the same problems with our boss on national TV as they had in the office. And that served as the foundation for a lot of humor. For example, one night Johnny and Doc Severinsen got into a discussion about the correct pronunciation of the poinsettia plant. Johnny contended it was pronounced "poin-set-e-a," while Doc claimed it was "poin-set-a." The next night Doc brought a note from a noted professor of linguistics supporting his claim. Johnny took it very well. "That's very interesting," he told Doc, "but do me one favor. Why don't you ask that expert if the correct pronunciation is 'unemployed,' or 'unemployed ' ?"
On one of my favorite shows Johnny and I got into a very silly conversation that ended with my taking a pair of scissors and actually cutting off the bottom half of his tie. It was exactly what so many viewers must have dreamed of doing to their boss, but they also knew there were consequences. Johnny just looked at me, looked at the remains of his tie in disbelief, looked at me, again at the tie, all the while waiting for the audience to stop laughing. He got every laugh possible out of that long pause. When they finally quieted down, Johnny said to me, as if there were only one possible explanation for this behavior, "Oh, you must have just sold a pilot film."
After more laughter, he added with incredulity, "I've been wearing this tie for seven years."
"Well," I told him confidently, "you'll never wear it again."
Johnny never objected to someone else getting the laughs—in the right situations. On The Tonight Show each of us had a primary role to play; Johnny was the host, ready to welcome a variety of talented and interesting people and pretty much willing to try anything. I was the big party guy who did the commercials and ate a lot and drank a lot and occasionally put down the boss. For example, in his monologue one night, he told the audience, "Ed only drinks on special occasions. Like when he sees wall-to-wall carpeting." Once, when he was actually donating blood on the show to remind people to give blood, he lifted his head and said, "Ed's is the only blood with a ten-minute head on it." My drinking was always good for an ad-lib; once, when a kinkajou started sniffing at my leg, Johnny decided, "He's obviously attracted to the scent of olives." On another show, Joan Embry from the San Diego Zoo brought on a bear, who started sniffing at the cup of iced tea I always had. But as the bear started lapping at it, Johnny warned Joan, "You better get him away from that or he'll go into hibernation for a year."
Our first NBC orchestra leader, the great Skitch Henderson, was kind of a fop, always well dressed, allowing Johnny to kid him about his sartorial splendor. In contrast to Skitch, Doc Severinsen, who eventually replaced him, was an extraordinarily talented trumpeter who wore outrageously loud and sometimes bizarre outfits, which allowed Johnny to tell the audience, "I wouldn't wear that outfit to fondle Randolph Scott's saddle horn," or, "I wouldn't wear that outfit to a whale's hysterectomy." Tommy Newsom was the bland band member with absolutely no personality. As Johnny once explained, "We received the report today on Tommy's autopsy. There was no foul play; he died of natural dullness." These roles evolved over time and Johnny knew how to use them. Once, we did a parody of This Is Your Life, a popular show on which celebrated people were surprised by friends and relatives from their past. We did This Is Your Life: Tommy Newsom, but when the people from his past were brought out from backstage, they'd look at him, say, "No, that's not him," then turn around and leave.
These character traits were based on real life but magnified. Believe me, in real life Doc did not wear bright orange-and-yellow shirts with skintight paisley trousers. And in real life I didn't drink either . . . well, at least Doc didn't really wear those kind of clothes.
Hi-yoooo! I see those jokes still work.
Johnny created a character for himself just as he did for the rest of us. He was Peck's Bad Boy, the wide-eyed mid-westerner in the big town who might sometimes be naughty, but never nasty. And, just as with the rest of us, it was a character based loosely on fact. Being that character allowed him to get away with sexual innuendos that no one else on television could possibly have gotten away with. The same lines coming from me or almost anyone else would have seemed raunchy. But this behavior was acceptable from him; it was cute. Everybody understood that he wasn't really serious when he made outrageous remarks. One of the first nights Dolly Parton appeared on the show, she wore a revealing outfit, and she had a lot more to reveal than most other women. It was about as possible to overlook her breasts as it would have been to overlook the Grand Canyon. "People are always asking me if they're real," she told Johnny.
Not Johnny. That would not be polite. "I would never," he protested, "I would never . . ."
"I'll tell you what . . . ," Dolly continued.
" . . . I have certain guidelines . . . ," Johnny continued, then admitted, "but I would give about a week's . . . make that a year's pay, to peek under there."
Amply endowed women were such a staple of the show that we probably could have telecast highlights of their appearances as The Breast of Carson .
All together now, Hi-yoooo!
A beautiful actress named Carol Wayne appeared on the show semiregularly, playing the role of the sexy blond in sketches. Once, in a Teatime Movie bit, she came out carrying a model of a house in front of her chest, allowing Carson as Art Fern to ask the audience, "How would you like to get your hands on one of these?" Moments later she reappeared holding up several insurance policies, as supersalesman Fern suggested, "Take a look at what we cover with these policies," and then, with a twist of his mustache, added, "And then take a look at what we don't."
With Johnny, sex was always funny. On the show, I mean. His material was always suggestive, the kind of jokes boys would tell each other. "A wise man who has no chin," he once explained, "should learn to stroke something else." Or, "Here's a tip for women. A man is sexually interested in a woman if he stares up at her—from underneath a glass coffee table."
Carson understood how to use this character. He knew just how far he could go, how much he could get away with. A perfect example of that was his introduction of Lucille Ball at a dinner. As he told the audience, he had been asked to avoid the kind of suggestive remarks he often made on The Tonight Show . "And so," he concluded, "it gives me great pleasure to introduce our guest of honor tonight, Miss Lucille Testicle."
Maybe because we had spent so much time together, or maybe just because we were together so long, the fact is that Johnny trusted me. He knew I wasn't going to lead him down a bad path or steal his thunder or go for the jugular or take a cheap shot. Often during the show he'd glance over at me to see what I thought about whatever he was doing. Was the bit working? Should he keep going? And just as had happened on Who Do You Trust? my role on The Tonight Show expanded as it became clear that the audience enjoyed the relationship and repartee between Johnny and me. They were in on the joke: he was always the boss and I was always the employee, so when I did manage to get in the last word, all the millions of employees in the audience just loved it. I knew I had the greatest job in the world, I loved it, but my favorite part of the show was just after the monologue, when Johnny and I sat down at the desk. I would be in the swivel chair—that chair hadn't swiveled in a hundred years but it was always called the swivel chair—and we would ad-lib for five minutes. I loved waking up in the morning knowing that later that day I would be sitting with Johnny Carson in front of about ten million people and we would ad-lib five minutes of great entertainment and comedy.
I never knew what he was going to throw at me and I loved the challenge of trying to hold my own with the master. One night, out of nowhere, he started discussing a story he had seen on a National Geographic documentary. It was about a bird, the swit. "Listen to this," he said. "The swit flies its whole life, it's in the air the whole time. It just keeps flying. It mates in the air, it has babies in the air . . ." He went on and on about this little bird.
When he finished, I said, "Well, that's very interesting, but what about the shark?"
"What are you talking about, the shark?"
"Maybe the swit flies all the time," I continued, "but finally it lands on a branch and says, 'Whew, I'm glad that's over.' But the shark never stops swimming. The water has to flow in and out of its gills. If the shark stops swimming, it stops breathing, it dies. That's why sharks are so mean, they never get to stop swimming."
Johnny didn't know if I was kidding him or not. "Wait a second," he said. "You mean to tell me that at night the shark doesn't stop and rest?"
"John," I said, "how would a shark know night from day?"
Only twice in our years together did I intentionally disrupt a bit. One night we had a jaguar on the show and Johnny was supposed to feed it ice cream from a big ladle. Johnny was really terrific with animals and sometimes during these bits he would look as if he was really scared. Let me tell you the truth, sometimes he was really scared. These animals could be very unpredictable. I was amazed at some of the things he did. But this night, just as Johnny was scooping out the ice cream, I noticed blood dripping from the trainer's hand. He was trying to hide it, but I saw three deep bloody scratches. Interrupting Johnny, I said, "I don't think this cat is hungry."
Johnny glared at me. Actually, he glared right through me. The expression on his face was clear: are you out of your mind? What the hell do you think you're doing?
I indicated the trainer's hand. "I think he had some ice cream before the show." At first Johnny didn't understand and insisted on feeding this animal. "John," I said forcefully, "I don't think he wants ice cream."
Finally, Carson saw the trainer's hand. "Oh yeah," he said, "maybe he has had too much ice cream."
The second time I disrupted him was right in the middle of his monologue. Or rather, his attempt at a monologue. He was dying. Now, normally nobody died better than Johnny. As far as I know, he was the first comedian to make a joke out of the fact that his jokes were so bad. Maybe his best monologues were his worst monologues; certainly no one has ever been funnier about not being funny. In fact, the jokes he would make about his jokes were often much better than his jokes. But one night nothing was working, the jokes, the jokes about the jokes, the man was standing out there on what we called "the star mark" dying a slow death. Normally no one would walk into his monologue area; that was his sacred place. But I just couldn't resist. Like a coach helping a battered fighter, I went over to him and grabbed him by his shoulders and turned him toward me. Obviously he was very surprised. "You can do this," I said earnestly, "I know you can. You're better than this . . . ," I pointed to the audience. "Don't let these people get you down. You're funnier than this." I gave him a gentle punch in the shoulder. "Now go ahead and do it!"
"Thanks," he said, laughing, "I needed that."
Johnny knew I was always there behind him. And the more dangerous the animal on the show, the farther behind him I was. In fact, the most persistent criticism I received through the years was for laughing out loud. Some people thought that I faked my laughter just to be supportive of him, that it was part of my job. That's absolutely not true. If I could fake that much laughter, I'd be the finest actor in the world. I admit it, I laughed a lot, and there was a reason for that: I thought Johnny Carson was very funny. Sometimes I did laugh very loudly at something other people did not find funny. But there was a good reason for that—and no, it was not my paycheck. Through the years Johnny and I spent a lot of time together offstage, and many of the things he said or did on the air, or some of his expressions, were funny to me in the context of our relationship. We did share some private jokes. For example, when we did a bit in which Johnny replied to viewer mail, I often told him, "Here's a letter from a little boy named Gordon from Linden, New Jersey." Now Johnny knew that the train I took to go home to Philadelphia went right past the Gordon's gin factory in Linden, New Jersey.
So Johnny would laugh whenever little Gordon wrote, adding, "He writes a lot, that kid, doesn't he?" I doubt anyone except me and Johnny got that joke, but we loved it.
Johnny and I had a little tradition: right before the show, I'd go into his dressing room for seven or eight minutes. Before every show. Sometimes Freddy de Cordova, our producer, or Bobby Quinn, the director, would be there, but a lot of the time it was just the two of us. We rarely talked about the show; we'd talk about anything else—marriage, divorce, sex, religion, science, the World Series, the world situation—but whatever it was, Johnny had something funny to say about it. Carson has the incredible ability to find humor in just about anything. He doesn't just say funny things; his normal way of thinking would be considered funny by most people. Now, sometimes during those conversations a risqué remark might accidentally have slipped out of his mouth or my mouth. Sometimes, in fact, the whole conversation was downright risqué. And so when we were onstage I might well have laughed at something other people didn't find that funny, but that laughter came from knowing him so well, from something private between us, or from what he'd said only moments before in his dressing room.
A lot of material that started in his dressing room would later show up on the air. When Johnny's divorce from his second wife was settled, one of the tabloids reported in a bold headline, CARSON'S EXTO GET $65,000 A WEEK. So I figured out how much that came to per hour. When I went into the show that afternoon everybody was scared to death to go near his dressing room. In all honesty, I must admit I wasn't looking forward to our daily meeting with great anticipation either. But at the usual time, I opened the door and kind of peeked in. He was sitting quietly behind his desk. "I figured it out," I said. "It's about $380 per hour, waking or sleeping."
"You so-and-so," he said, kicking his lamp off his desk. Under the circumstances, I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to do. But then he started laughing. Eventually that became a running gag on the show. Whenever the subject of marriage or divorce came up, one of us would look at the other and say quite distinctly, "Waking . . . or sleeping."
"Waking . . . or sleeping" became an inside joke that just about everybody in America was in on. But there were a lot of points of reference like that between us, and often what I was laughing at on the air referred to something that had happened in private.
I think the best way to explain why I laughed so easily at Mr. Carson is the line he had inscribed on a lovely watch he once gave me, the meaning of which will forever be known only to the two of us: "Don't look up, Mrs. Thompson."
Besides, why wouldn't I laugh? I had the best job in the world. I never went to a production meeting. If I wasn't involved in a sketch, I didn't even go to the rehearsal. I'd get to the studio in time to run through any commercials I had to do, but that was really all the preparation my job required. In fact, most of the time I didn't even know who our guests were going to be until I walked by the dressing rooms on the way to my office and saw their names on the doors. Before the show, I would check with Freddy de Cordova to see if there was anything I needed to know about that night's show; he'd tell me, for example, that Johnny was going to set fire to the studio in the third segment and that I should not try to put it out. But otherwise everything that happened on the show was completely fresh for me. And for that I was paid a wonderful salary. So I think the real question should have been, why didn't I laugh more?
One thing I did do for only the first twenty-seven years was the warm-up. Just before a TV show begins, someone, usually the announcer, comes out and spends a few minutes familiarizing the audience with the studio and getting them excited about what they are about to see. For example, I'd point out the APPLAUSE sign and explain that when it was lit they should applaud loudly, and then confide in them that Johnny had told me that when he retired that was the only thing from the set he wanted to take with him—and he intended to hang it in his bedroom. The job, as I tried to do it, was to turn a lot of individuals into a responsive group. I likened it to taking five hundred pearls and turning them into a necklace. However, on rare occasions, it turned out to be a noose.
Only once in my broadcasting career have I been fired, and that was because of something I said during the warm-up. When I was doing Five Minutes More, the wonderful schoolteacher-turned-comedian Sam Levenson appeared on my show several times and we became friends. When Sam was hired by Mark Goodson to host the quiz show Two for the Money, he hired me as his announcer. This was a big opportunity for me, a network show, as well as a regular paycheck.
During the warm-up one night, I told the audience, "Sometimes when you see a show like this you're a little tired, maybe a little shy, and you don't want to laugh out loud. If you were home watching, you'd be laughing. If you were on a bus with your sister, you'd be laughing. But since you're in a strange area, you don't know the people sitting next to you, you try to hold your laugh in. I must warn you about that. That's a very dangerous thing to do. Tonight, when you feel a laugh coming on, you must let it out. Please, do not hold your laugh in. It is a well-known medical fact that if you hold a laugh in, it will settle in your lower colon and that can be quite painful. Just the other night, for example, we had a lady here, a very large lady, in fact she was a very fat lady, she made the serious mistake of letting a laugh settle in her lower colon. It took four ushers to carry her out and I'm still waiting to hear from the hospital about how she's doing. So I implore you, ladies and gentlemen, do not let that happen to you. I am legally bound to tell you that we cannot be responsible if you hold in . . ."
Mark Goodson fired me because I said it was a fat lady. He thought that was disrespectful to the audience. I couldn't believe it. Several years later I hosted two quiz shows for Goodson and Bill Todman. Fortunately, I didn't have to do the warm-up on either show.
On The Tonight Show Freddy de Cordova would greet the audience and introduce me. "Here is the gentleman who is a big star of the show," he'd say, perhaps exaggerating a bit there, "a great friend and a man who has been known to take a drink. Watch now, you'll see him stumble out here . . ."
I was always greeted warmly by the audience. They felt that I was their guy on the show, the person they could sit down with and have a drink. Or two. Tonight Show audiences were always very excited. In many cases, they'd written months in advance for their tickets; they might even have planned their whole vacation around the show. They were always surprised by the set, and couldn't stop talking about it. It was much smaller than it appeared to be on television, the curtain was higher, the band was squashed into a small area. So, unlike many other shows, the purpose of the warm-up was not to get the audience involved but rather to calm people down.
The Tonight Show audience also had a role to play on the show. Members of the audience knew their lines. When Johnny said, for example, "This is a very strange audience," they recognized their cue and responded, "How strange is it?" Which allowed him to reply, "I'll tell you. Just before the show, a sweet, elderly lady came up to me and said, 'I'd like to capture you on canvas.' I said, 'You mean you'd like to paint my portrait?' She said, 'No, I've got an army cot in my Winnebago.' " At times, during his monologue, someone would yell out and Johnny would respond with a look or an ad-lib. He'd often refer directly to the audience, drawing in a deep breath, raising his eyebrows, tilting his head, and deciding, "You people are tough tonight. You're the kind of people who would send an Arrow shirt to General Custer." My job was to get everybody relaxed and comfortable, to make them feel welcome, but also to remind them to be on their best behavior because they were going to be seen by millions of people. "So if you're here with somebody you're not supposed to be with . . ."
I've always felt that the thing that made our audience so loyal is that they knew they were in on our big jokes. I used that knowledge to make them feel welcome. I'd tell them, "I'm really glad to be here 'cause just a little while ago I didn't think I was going to make it. I just felt so bad and I didn't want to come on and do a bad show for you folks. But the funniest thing happened. I called across the street to El Toritos, a little Mexican place, and they sent over the most delicious yellow soup I've ever tasted. Unfortunately, it was probably quite hot when they made it, but by the time they got it across the street it was quite cool. Funny, the way they'd seasoned it, they'd put the salt all around the edge of the container. A very nice girl named Margarita brought it over. I drank the whole thing down. I can't wait to get more of their soup . . ."
Every audience worried that Johnny wouldn't be hosting the show that night. "Boy," I'd begin, "I don't know how to tell you this, but we have a real mix-up tonight. The girl who does the scheduling went out to lunch and had three martinis. When she came back to set up the schedule she got the whole thing screwed up. So Johnny, Doc, and I are all here on the same night."
The more personal the warm-up seemed, the better the audience responded. If someone coughed, for example, I'd pause and sympathize with them. "Oh, that's a terrible cough," I'd say. "I'm sure we must be selling something for that. Oh, we're selling Formula 44 tonight, we'll get you some. Formula 44 . . . You ever wonder what went wrong with all the formulas from one to forty-three?"
Finally I'd introduce Doc Severinsen. "I call him Tiffany Lips, he calls me Golden Throat. Tommy Newsom, what can I say about Tommy Newsom?" I would wonder and then pause as if I were trying to think of something, then pause a little longer, then start to say something but stop. "Well, nothing actually." The band would play, and we would open the show.
Doc, Tommy, Skitch, Freddy, the band, the crew, our guests, the writers—we all played important roles in the show's success, but The Tonight Show had the longest run of any entertainment program in television history because of one person, and that person was the beautiful and gracious Aunt Blabby, the amazing El Moldo, the incredible Carnac, the frenetic Art Fern, the sincere Floyd R. Turbo, and the innocent and slightly naive man from Nebraska, Johnny Carson. Johnny brought to The Tonight Show a blend of extraordinary abilities. He was a terrific stand-up comedian, a fine interviewer, a great ad-libber, and he had perfect comic timing, and he built the show around these abilities.
Johnny did not write his monologues; with everything else he had to do that would have been impossible. The writers would submit fifty or sixty jokes and he would pick the jokes he wanted, find a thread, and weave them together. But the jokes really just served as a starting point for his nightly conversation with America. Generally, the monologue included jokes from several different categories. For example, there were always a few topical jokes, allowing Johnny to comment on the day's news. "Teachers in Newark, New Jersey, are striking for higher pay," he'd explain. "I don't know, I think they need it. Apparently they have to pay for their own bullets."
He did a lot of political jokes, but he was an equal opportunity comedian. Even after watching him for three decades, people still didn't know his politics. When Republican president George Bush attempted to relate to inner-city kids by showing them how to fly cast, for example, Johnny said, "He also showed them how to signal from their schooners when they run out of Grey Poupon." And when Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright was forced to resign because he'd circumvented House rules by making thousands of dollars selling his book to supporters, Johnny suggested, "Part of his deal was that he would resign if the committee bought ten thousand copies of his book."
You didn't appreciate that joke? As Johnny would say in this situation, "You're the kind of people who would give condoms to pandas."
The targets of his monologue were often things viewers could relate to in their own lives, from the company cafeteria—"I asked the waitress what was on the menu today. She said it was a dead fly"—to the company itself—"I got a Christmas card from General Electric today. It said, 'In lieu of a gift, a GE employee has been laid off in your name.' " After the laugh, he added, "I guess that joke blows my chance of being employee of the month."
And somewhere in just about every monologue, he'd make reference to me or Doc or Tommy. "Ed drinks a lot but he never gets in trouble," he told the audience one night. "If he gets a little loud, a friendly bartender pours two warning shots over his head."
When a joke or several flopped, which happened on occasion, the audience would groan or, on occasion, even hiss. That was their role in the monologue. It's difficult to explain a groaner. But if you heard one, you'd groan. Johnny would respond, "Hoo-kay," and continue bravely ahead. "Never buy jokes from people on the street," he might explain after several jokes had died. "Give 'em a quarter, but never buy a joke from 'em."
And each night, he'd finish the monologue with one of TV 's best-known and imitated gestures—a golf swing. I have absolutely no idea why he started doing that golf swing. Maybe he thought it would help him beat Paar.
Now you know how to recognize a groaner.
The thing that made Johnny such a good interviewer was that he listened to his guests, whether he was speaking to Martin Luther King or Tiny Tim, and he responded directly to their answers. He didn't just ask a list of questions, he had a conversation. Before the show, a talent coordinator would interview the guests and suggest what we called "islands of conversation." For example, "Ask him about the night he slept under a pregnant elephant." But most often, Johnny wouldn't get to these notes; he'd find something that interested him and go to that. When guest hosts would ask me how to do the show, I'd tell them, "In hosting this show you have to have the curiosity of a child and you have to listen, because your next question is in the last answer. And if you don't ask it, the audience is going to feel deprived." The first night a legendary comedian hosted the show, our guest was the brilliant Scatman Crothers, who was then starring in Chico and the Man. He was the perfect guest; he'd been in show business for two hundred years, he'd performed at Lincoln's inauguration, and he was a great storyteller. So he told the guest host, "Boy, I'm nervous tonight. You know, in my career I've done just about everything. I was in vaudeville, I was in burlesque, radio, television, I've done just about everything you can do in show business, but you know what, until tonight I was never nervous."
That is technically known in the world of professional straight men as a slam dunk, the perfect setup. There is only one possible response to that statement. And obviously Scatman Crothers had his answer ready for that question. He may have had a whole routine built around that question. But we will never know because the nervous host asked him, "So how long do you think Chico and the Man will go on?"
Like so many guest hosts, this comedian was so concerned about his next question that he just didn't listen. Johnny listened, which allowed him to deliver the perfect ad-lib. I'm going to tell you a show business secret: some ad-libs are more ad-libbed than others. Sometimes ad-libs are actually scripted, but Johnny rarely resorted to prepared material. He didn't need it. Most of the funniest things he ever did could not have been planned. I'll give you an example. The first time Muhammad Ali appeared on the show, when he was still known as Cassius Clay, he was in training for his first major fight at Madison Square Garden. No one knew too much about him, but his brash personality, his poetry, his ability to name the round in which he was going to knock out his opponent, and his insistence that he was the greatest had made him very controversial. Johnny asked him what he would do if his opponent, Doug Jones, beat him.
In his own shy, humble way, Ali replied, "If Doug Jones beats me, I'll get down on my hands and knees, crawl across the ring, kiss his feet, tell him, 'Man, you are the greatest,' then go to the airport and get the next jet out of the country."
By the time the laughter had died down, Johnny had the perfect response. "Yeah, but you just can't go in that ring with all that insecurity. I mean, you do that, and he'll kill you."
Johnny could get more out of less than any performer I've ever seen. One night we had a woman accordion player on the show and just as she was about to perform, she confided to Carson, "Well, Doc said . . ." Then she looked over to the band and asked Doc Severinsen, "You told me I could call you Doc?"
That's all Johnny had to hear. "He's not a medical doctor," Johnny explained. "Did he tell you he was a medical doctor? Did he try that old routine about being a medical doctor again? We've had some problems about that here in the studio . . ."
People generally agree that Jack Benny, whose character was the cheapest man in the world, got the longest laugh in radio history when he replied to a robber's demand, "Your money or your life . . . ," with complete silence. And then more silence. The longer the silence lasted, the louder the laughter. Finally, when the robber began repeating his demands, Jack Benny interrupted him and said, "I'm thinking it over."
I think Johnny Carson got the longest laugh in TV history the night Ed Ames, who played an Indian named Mingo on the series Daniel Boone, demonstrated how to throw a tomahawk. Ames was supposed to teach Johnny the correct way of tossing a hatchet by throwing it at the outline of a man drawn on a large wooden board, then Johnny would try it. But when Ames threw his hatchet, it landed right where a man should not be struck. I mean, bull's-eye. Let me describe it this way: if it had been a bull, after this it no longer would have been. These were the kind of moments Johnny just lived for. The audience was hysterical; I looked at him and I could almost see his mind whirling. It was like a computer searching for the proper response. Ames immediately began moving forward to retrieve his hatchet, but Johnny grabbed him. Johnny was holding two hatchets, and he stood there sharpening those hatchets as he waited for the laughter to subside. His timing was impeccable. Finally, at just the right moment, he told Ames, "I didn't even know you were Jewish." That started the laughter all over again, and when that wave quieted down, he announced, "Welcome to Frontier Briss."
Eventually the audience calmed down, and an obviously embarrassed Ed Ames asked, "You want to try it?"
Johnny shook his head no, saying, "I couldn't hurt him any more than you did."
Not all of Carson's ad-libs were verbal. He did a lot of great physical humor on the show. I remember one evening when things got completely out of control. Believe me, none of this stuff could be planned. Johnny got into an egg fight with Dom DeLuise, which ended with Carson dropping an egg down the front of DeLuise's pants and then breaking it. Johnny then turned around and started throwing eggs at me. At me! Finally Burt Reynolds came out with a can of whipped cream. After spraying just about everything, Reynolds put the can down the front of Johnny's pants and squirted whipped cream straight down. Now here was Carson's genius. When he took the can from Reynolds, I'm sure everyone expected him to squirt it down Reynolds's pants. I know I did. But instead, he put it down his own pants and, with a big smile on his face, squirted it again.
I don't know how many people can say, as I can, that for thirty-four years I looked forward to going to work every day. When I started in television in Philadelphia, we were thrilled simply to be on the air. All the programming I did was live and anything was possible. Television really wasn't so much of a business in those days as a wonder. Of course, that changed very fast. By the time we started doing The Tonight Show, TV had become a very profitable, professional business and every minute of every show was carefully planned and rehearsed. What made The Tonight Show so much fun for me as well as for our audience was that we treated it like a live show. Even though we taped in advance, we rarely edited anything out of the tape. Most of the things that happened on the show weren't planned and weren't rehearsed. I think Johnny probably expressed it best one night when expert Jim Fowler brought a marmoset, a monkey, on the show. As this monkey climbed to the highest ground on the stage, in this case Johnny's head, Johnny said, "Name me one other place in this entire world of four and a half billion people where a man is sitting with a marmoset on his head . . ."
To which I added, being completely supportive, "If you turn sideways the tail is extended and it's very cute."
And after doing the show for all those years, when I look back on it, I really have only one thing I want to say to Mr. Carson: Nietzsche?