More than any other, the night that I will never forget was May 22, 1992. Our final show. I had been just as surprised as everyone else when Johnny announced almost a year earlier that he was leaving. I had no warning. I don't think he told anyone except his wife, Alex, that he had decided to quit. There had been so many times in the past when it looked as though he might leave that long ago I had stopped thinking about it. In 1979, when after considerable deliberation Johnny decided to continue doing the show, NBC President Fred Silverman took the news calmly. "I got down from the chair," he explained, "and put the rope back in the closet." I don't know why Johnny finally decided that this was the right time, but it was. Johnny Carson has always been a master of timing.
NBC asked me to continue with the show for six months after Johnny left, but there had never been any question in my mind that I would leave with him. It was time for me too. Years earlier I had given him a statue of Don Quixote with his faithful Sancho Panza, on which I'd had inscribed, "I follow ever in your footsteps, O Master. But you told me it would only be for ten years."
That last show was incredibly emotional, incredibly. In addition to the show ending, Johnny and I were ending a thirty-four-year professional relationship. We'd been together more than half our lives. "Ed has been a rock for thirty years," he said on that show, "sitting over here next to me . . . We have been friends for thirty-four years. A lot of people who work together on television don't necessarily like each other. This hasn't been true. We've known each other thirty-four years, we have dinner together, we're good friends, you cannot fake that on television. Some of the best things we've done on the show have just been, you start something, I'll start something . . . I got a letter from a guy. It said, 'Now you're gonna find out if Ed McMahon really thinks you're funny.' "
I responded to those kind words with the nicest gesture I could think of at that moment. I invited him to appear on Star Search. I mean, the guy needed a job. And with his experience he had a real shot at the one-hundred-thousand-dollar first prize.
It took me a long time to get used to the fact that the show had ended. At one point my assistant had made an appointment for me on a Thursday afternoon. A Thursday afternoon? "I can't do that Thursday," I started to explain. "I have to . . ." And then I realized I didn't have to do anything at all. I called Johnny and asked him if the same thing was happening to him.
"Every morning when I'm reading the newspaper," he said, "I start writing jokes for the monologue in the margin. And then I realize, who's gonna hear these jokes? The fish?"
On that final show, Johnny said that when he found something he wanted to do, he would be back. As it has turned out, that was his last professional appearance. He's spent the years since then enjoying his life. I've seen him or spoken to him infrequently; occasionally we've had lunch. But I'm not really surprised by his retirement. Nothing Johnny did surprised me. In a 1967 interview, I told Time, "Johnny is not overly outgoing or affectionate. He doesn't give friendship easily or need it. He packs a tight suitcase."
About ten years later, after we had been through so much together, Johnny asked me one day, "What did you mean, I pack a tight suitcase?" Ten years later. It had been on his mind for ten years. What I meant by that, I told him, is that he was not a man of great excesses. He takes with him only those things he needs. And that applied to every part of his life. Johnny always traveled light, he carried his own bag, he never had an entourage, no makeup man, no hairdresser. He lived life with a minimum of fuss.
Johnny Carson was a paradox. He was far more comfortable in front of millions of people than he ever was with a small group. Even he admitted he didn't particularly enjoy small social gatherings. If he had to be at a party, I'd look over and see him standing in the corner entertaining a small group of people with sleight of hand, card tricks, or coin tricks. He knew that people thought he was cold and aloof but he really didn't care very much what others thought about him. After spending time with Johnny, my daughter Claudia decided, "It was an amazing thing to see. Everybody wanted a little piece of him, they wanted to show him something or ask him something. The only way he could have possibly handled that was to shut down. No one has the time or energy to deal with that pressure and still put on a live TV show every day, the only way to do that is to withdraw. Other people might think he was detached, but I thought that was necessary for survival."
I understood what Claudia was saying. I couldn't even guess how many times I was with him when a woman told him, "I undress in front of you every night, and my husband doesn't mind," or a man said to him, "You're ruining my sex life." By nature Johnny is very shy, he's a loner; I've always been very gregarious, but I will tell you Johnny always tried to be polite. He used to suggest to those men, "Why don't you put on a better show than I do?" but I know how wearing it was on him. He could be tough, particularly with people who did not do their jobs. There was tremendous pressure on him. When you're responsible for getting a show on the air every night, as he was, you depend on a lot of other people to do their jobs. If the show failed, no one blamed the lighting technician. So Johnny had a short fuse for ineffectual, inefficient people. But the fact is that most members of our technical staff stayed with the show for many years, even when their seniority qualified them for more lucrative jobs, because they were the best people in their fields and The Tonight Show was a wonderful place to work.
As far as being aloof, when Johnny met someone whose work he respected, he was completely open, and he'd end up telling the most engaging stories. And he is an incredibly loyal friend. After Burt Reynolds's career went into a steep decline, Reynolds became seriously ill. There were all kinds of rumors about his illness and many people with whom he was once close disappeared. As he said, "I found I could save a lot of money on Christmas cards. But not Johnny. Johnny called me every week."
I have been asked so often what Johnny Carson is really like. There is no easy answer to that question. The best answer is that he is like no one else I've ever known. He's as funny and charming in private life as he was on the air. He didn't turn that wit on and off for the camera. We were sitting at Jilly's bar late one night, well past midnight, when Frank Sinatra walked in. This was still pretty early in The Tonight Show's run, so although Johnny was hot, he certainly wasn't the star he would become. And Frank Sinatra . . . well, he was the biggest and most powerful person in show business, and Jilly's was his hangout. People went there just because they might see him. So when he walked in, the entire restaurant quieted. Everybody was watching him. The king was in his palace. Believe me, if God had walked in at that moment, the only way He would have gotten any attention was if He had said He was with Mr. Sinatra. No one dared say hello to him until he said something to them first. Until he walked past the bar. As he did, Johnny said loudly, in a voice dripping with irritation, "Frank, I told you 11:30!"
Once, I remember, we were in California and we wanted Ethel Merman to come on the show. She'd recently ended her very brief marriage to actor Ernest Borgnine and I think she was a little embarrassed about it. So she was reluctant to do the show. Talent coordinator Shelly Schultz set up a dinner for us, hoping Johnny could make her comfortable. When she sat down at the table Johnny looked at her, smiled, and said, "You know, I had a headache that lasted longer than your last marriage."
"I'll have something to drink," she said, laughing. Fortunately. She made a great guest.
One of Johnny's few passions is astronomy. It wasn't just a little hobby; he had a powerful telescope and was extremely knowledgeable about outer space. Sometimes during commercial breaks he'd tell me about the things he'd been able to find in the previous night's sky. In fact, when the show ended I thought he might do humorous PBS specials about space. Johnny and I went with Bill Rosenthal of D'Arcy McManus, Budweiser's advertising agency, to the Kennedy Space Center, as it was then known, to watch the launch of Neil Armstrong's flight to the moon. We were seated only a row behind former president Lyndon Johnson and dignitaries from around the world. When the rocket was launched, a shock wave just rolled over us. It was awesome, more than any of us expected, and Carson said softly, "Jesus Christ."
With that, the representative of the Vatican, who was sitting directly in front of him, turned and said, "Namedropper."
Afterward astronaut Gene Cernan took us on a private tour. We had to walk across one building on a metal cat-walk about ten stories high. I took one step, stopped, and froze. With my fear of heights, there was absolutely no way I could cross that walkway. Johnny, of course, was very sympathetic. In fact, I was worried about him. He was laughing so hard I thought he might fall off. I guess I was one of the few people who could get him to loosen up. On occasion, when both of us were single, we'd go to Ft. Lauderdale for what we called our "Raise Hell" weekends. It was our way of escaping the pressure of the show. Many nights in Florida and later at the great restaurant Sneaky Pete's in California we'd end the evening up on the bandstand. I'd be singing my ad-lib blues, making up lyrics about everybody in the place, and Johnny would be backing me up on the drums. For a while, when The Tonight Show was not yet the phenomenon it was to become, we were as tight as brothers.
Johnny even spent several weekends with my family in Gulph Mills. Only later did Claudia tell me that she had a big crush on him, or as she admits, he was the first older man she didn't look at and think "Ugh." It was at that house that I threw a big surprise birthday party for him. I think I was more surprised by the fact that I was able to successfully surprise him than he was by the actual surprise. How do you surprise Johnny Carson? Very carefully.
The offices of TV Guide were not far from this house. We convinced Johnny that TV Guide wanted to put us on the cover but that they wanted to shoot the cover photo at their headquarters. He didn't want to do it—being on the cover of TV Guide was not particularly important to him—but his manager convinced him to do it. We agreed that he would pick me up on his way. When he got to the house, one of the kids told him I was out back by the pool. He walked outside to find seventy friends, relatives, and business associates waiting for him. He was shocked, and touched.
On the last Tonight Show Johnny introduced the members of his family who were in the audience that night, telling them, "I realize that being the offspring of somebody who is constantly in the public eye is not easy . . . I want you to know that I love you and I hope your old man hasn't caused you too much discomfort . . ."
Those words struck my home. They were the same words I might have used. For thirty years The Tonight Show dominated my life. My personal life was lived around the demands of my career. If someone invited me to an event or a dinner a year in advance, I would have to look in my book to see if we were doing a live show or a repeat that night before I could accept it.
I missed my daughter Linda's birth because I was in Korea, but I missed my son Jeff 's birth because I was between shows. Jeff was born while I was doing Who Do You Trust? We did two shows on Friday, between shows Johnny and I went to Sardi's. While I was there someone came over to me and said, "Congratulations, you've just had a son."
I can't even begin to estimate the impact of the show on my family. Certainly it dominated all of our lives. An actor creates a character on the stage or screen that has nothing to do with real life, but on a free-flowing television program like The Tonight Show real life is the central theme. People who'd never met me thought they knew me. I remember I had an audition with Goodson and Todman for a game show very early one morning. I was standing on the traffic island in the middle of Park Avenue when a cab driver leaned out the window. "Hey Ed," he shouted, "it's eight o'clock in the morning. You sober?"
"Yes," I said.
"Good boy," he said, then drove off. I understood that. That was his frame of reference, that's what he knew about me. I accepted this kind of kidding in the manner in which it was intended. When Alyce and I returned from our honeymoon, I had seventy-five cents in my pocket. The Tonight Show made possible the kind of financial success we had never even dreamed about. It enabled me to provide my family with a very comfortable lifestyle, even though I often couldn't be there to enjoy it.
The Tonight Show certainly contributed to the end of my first marriage. Alyce raised our children while I was out building my career. She did all the things that a mother and father were supposed to do. For years I commuted to New York every day because Alyce and the kids were comfortable in Philadelphia. And some nights I'd end up staying in New York for meetings. There was no such thing in our home as a family dinner. When it became obvious after the first few years that The Tonight Show was going to be on the air for a long time, Alyce finally agreed to move to the lovely community of Bronxville, about a half hour outside New York.
We rented a gigantic house in Bronxville; I think it had twelve bedrooms. After we left, it became the Icelandic Embassy. But by the time I got home at night the kids were in bed and Alyce was upstairs. I'd end up making myself a greasy cheeseburger, opening a bottle of wine, and listening to the radio. That's when our marriage really started falling apart.
Eventually we bought our own home in Bronxville and tried to become part of the community. The kids went to school there, we joined the clubs, but that didn't make things any better. Usually the taping of the show ended about eight o'clock and a lot of nights I had business meetings after that. The truth is, I was leading a very exciting life and I was enjoying it. I felt very guilty that I wasn't doing more to save my marriage but I didn't know what to do. Eventually I asked Alyce for a separation. I never planned to get divorced because I never planned to get married again.
When the show went to Hollywood in 1972, Alyce stayed in Bronxville. Being forced to move to Los Angeles was the breaking point for our marriage. I was going—there was never any doubt in my mind about that. Finally, she moved to Los Angeles with the family and we made an attempt to reconcile, but it was much too late. When we were married in 1945 neither one of us could have anticipated the opportunities that would be available to me, and I took advantage of them. My career didn't break up my marriage, but it made it easier to end it.
At times my career was rough on my kids. Being the child of any celebrity is difficult, but the fact that I was on television all the time and so much was publicly known about my private life made it much harder on them. My daughter Linda once admitted to me that she secretly wished I'd been a plumber, like my grandfather and my uncles had been, because her life would have been more normal.
The kids were constantly being reminded that Ed McMahon was their father. It must have seemed to them that every time they turned around, there I was. My presence was inescapable. Except at home. Once, when Linda was in elementary school, they allowed her class to watch the broadcast of a space flight. But when they cut to a commercial, there I was, Linda's father. When Claudia was at Syracuse University, Budweiser distributed life-size cardboard displays in which I was holding a six-pack to retailers all over the country. Many students knew that Claudia was my daughter, and she couldn't stroll across the campus without strangers telling her, "Pick a pair of Bud" or "This Bud's for you."
My kids were embarrassed about all the attention they received for things over which they had no control. My celebrity made it difficult for them to establish their own identities. Apparently, for example, it was considered extremely important at Bronxville High School to appear in candid photos in the yearbook. Only a very few people from each class made it. When Linda was a freshman they ran two pictures of her; the caption under one of them read, "Heeeeere's Linda," and under the second picture, in which she was holding a soft drink, "Bud Makes Me Wiser." She was horrified. Crushed. Maybe it seems like a small thing, but Linda knew it had nothing to do with anything that she herself had accomplished except being my daughter. "Where am I in all this?" she wondered. She was so upset that she insisted on transferring to another school.
After spending years doing social work with children, Claudia decided to go into show business. I was doing Star Search and I was able to get her a job with the production company. Obviously she got the job because she was my daughter, but what parent wouldn't help his child? Particularly a person like Claudia who had spent so many years working with underprivileged kids or in poverty programs. And the trade-off for getting the job was that she had to deal with a lot of animosity from a few people who resented her being there. To compensate for that, she made sure she was the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave at night. As "the child of," she knew, she had to work harder than most people to prove she was capable of doing the job.
And my son Michael . . . my oldest son, Michael, was never able to find his own place in life. He struggled with my celebrity his entire life, resenting it, fighting it, sometimes using it, but never successfully dealing with it. Of all my children, Michael was the one who suffered the most because of my work.
Jeff, my youngest son, just accepted it. When Jeff was a child he didn't quite understand exactly what it was that his father did, except that every time he turned on the TV his father seemed to be talking to him. Eventually he figured it out, but it didn't make any difference. Very early one Sunday morning he was in Dallas driving to a golf course with a friend, he turned on the car radio—and there I was, promoting one of my projects. "It's eight o'clock Sunday morning and I'm in Dallas, Texas," he told his golfing partner, "and there he is."
One of the consequences of my fame was that all of the kids were more sensitive to their mother's feelings. Often when Alyce and I were out together people would approach me and ignore her. I'd always introduce her, but I know that was unpleasant for her. That wasn't the kind of life she wanted. The kids saw that happening and they didn't like it. They had to put up with it too. We'd be out somewhere and people would ask me for an autograph; I tried to be nice, but the kids wanted to get wherever it was we were going. And as they got older, people would tell them, "Please say hello to your Dad," to which they would often respond, "I have a mother too."
Only Claudia was old enough to really remember what life was like before I started doing The Tonight Show. Claudia remembers the day she had to wait with her mother until I earned enough cash by pitching a holiday toy for us to celebrate Christmas. My other children grew up with The Tonight Show. To them it was nothing special; it was their father's job, part of their life, something they just had to put up with. I used to have a summer home in Avalon, on the New Jersey shore. It was a wonderful community, and Johnny would often make jokes about it. Everybody knew where our house was, and too often late at night teenagers would pull into our driveway, honking the horn and screaming, "Where's Johnny?" "Heeeeere's Ed." This was the kind of stuff, and much of it was well meaning, that the kids had to put up with their whole lives. That was tough for them. When someone was nice to them, they never knew if it was because of who they were, or because they were Ed McMahon's children. As a result they became very close. They knew they could trust each other. Throughout their childhood they were each other's best friends.
They didn't often watch the show on television, but they enjoyed coming to the studio, especially if someone they wanted to meet was going to be on that night. They knew everybody on the crew—Linda even took guitar lessons from band member Bucky Pizzeralli. They were allowed to watch the show from backstage and even go into the green room where some guests were waiting. Most of the time it was exciting for them. Most of the time. Jennifer O'Neill was on the show one night, I remember, and during a commercial break Claudia came out and told me, "She's so beautiful, I wish I could ask if I could borrow her face for one night." Well, I made the mistake of telling that to Johnny, and when we went back on the air, Johnny said, "We're always hearing how jealous women are of each other and how quick they are to criticize each other, but Ed's daughter Claudia just said the nicest thing . . ." And then he proceeded to repeat it to ten million viewers. Claudia was so embarrassed as only a high school girl can be. I thought she might never speak to me again. Or at least until the next time we had Cher or the Jackson Five on the show.
My children and Johnny's kids and Doc's kids all got to know each other. Our families never socialized very much— maybe that was because of all the divorces—but the kids certainly had an unusual bond. In some way, all of their lives revolved around The Tonight Show. They knew that the show was responsible for so many of the wonderful things in their lives, as well as the difficult ones.
I tried to include the kids in as many things as I possibly could. It was one way of spending more time with them. In Philadelphia, for example, Claudia and Michael appeared in commercials with me. For several years Jeff pushed the red button to light the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and he even got to play a junior astronaut on a record album I did titled What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? And Linda would go with me when I hosted America's Junior Miss pageant.
They also got to meet a lot of tremendously interesting people because of The Tonight Show. I mean, how many kids get to have Jonathan Winters spend a weekend at their home? For two days the kids just followed him around the house in Gulph Mills. All I heard that weekend was the sound of laughter, interrupted only occasionally by someone saying things like, "I don't think we're supposed to walk on that table," "Boy, Dad never lets us touch that," and "What do you think'll happen if we open this one up?" If you can imagine what it would be like to have Robin Williams on fast-forward in your house, that's a hint of what it was like to have Jonathan Winters as a houseguest. Let me put it this way, by the end of the weekend it was the kids who were exhausted.
One Thanksgiving I took Jeff to dinner with me and my second wife, Victoria, at Frank Sinatra's house in Beverly Hills. Jeff was in college at this time. As we walked in, Frank was playing with his dogs, and Sammy Davis Jr. was standing at the bar. I loved and respected Sammy Davis. Jeff had met him several years earlier, but hadn't seen him in a long time, and went over to him to say hello. He said politely, "Hi, Mr. Davis, I'm Jeff McMahon, I'm sure you don't remember . . ."
Sammy stopped him. "Babe," he said, "you kidding? I remember you when you were only as tall as I am."
David Steinberg was a frequent guest on the show and he and Linda became good friends. When he was dating Carly Simon he'd take Linda to her concerts, and they would often have dinner together. But he completely shocked Linda one day when he told her, "I love your Dad. He's cool."
That was perhaps the last thing she ever expected to hear from him. "You think my father is cool?" She couldn't believe it. "My father? You think my father is cool?" Of all the things I had ever been in her life, cool was not one of them. As anyone who has played the role knows, "cool" is the antonym of "father."
My children were in the audience when we taped the final Tonight Show . And when Johnny told his kids that he hoped the discomfort they had suffered because of the show had been worth it, my children looked at each other . . . and shrugged. That's an equation to which none of them knew the answer.
One thing my kids really disliked about the show was the fact that I was portrayed as a big drinker. That was an important aspect of the character Johnny created for me. Let me admit at this point that this was not a difficult role for me to play. I didn't even have to draw on my acting lessons; in this case I was more of a method actor. And my method was, sure, I'll have another one.
Until recently, until society began to look at alcoholism as a serious problem, there was a tradition of happy, friendly drunks, good-time guys, heavy-drinking characters in show business. It has been used as a comic device throughout the entire history of show business. I was one of a long line of people—admittedly it was a long wavy line—that started in vaudeville and minstrel shows. On Jack Benny's radio show, for example, Phil Harris was the resident carouser. Dean Martin claimed he was once stopped by the Los Angeles highway patrol; when they told him to stand on one leg he stood on one leg, and when they told him to close his eyes and touch his nose with his forefinger he closed his eyes and touched his nose with his forefinger, but when they told him to walk a straight line he objected. He looked right at them and said, "Not without a goddamn net I won't!"
In my nightclub act I quoted the great W. C. Fields, certainly the most famous inebriate in show business history, who said, "A man must believe in something, and I believe I'll have another drink." George Gobel once claimed, "I have never in my life been drunk. Frequently, however, I have been overserved." Jackie Gleason played a wonderful drunken character, Crazy Guggenheim, and Foster Brooks did a hysterical drunk act even though privately he didn't drink.
It's a character who has served as the basis for endless jokes. Actually, maybe "served" isn't really the proper word here. But the guy who likes to have a good time, who enjoys a good drink, or even a bad drink, has always been a good target for a joke. It was a role that fit me well. I mean, I'm a big tall Irish guy, I'm gregarious, and for a long time I enjoyed it. For example, when Jay Leno was hosting the show, he said to me, "Now you seem like the kind of guy, perhaps one night . . . ," and with that he pretended to lift a glass to his lips.
Naturally, I objected to that. "What does this mean?" I asked, repeating his gesture. "One night?" I continued, perhaps even a bit insulted. "How about every night? I mean, why only one night? Is there a drought?"
I got the joke. Fortunately, I usually got the drink too. Johnny created my character on Who Do You Trust? After doing the show Johnny and I would often go to Sardi's or Danny's Hideaway and end up at Jilly's and we'd have a wonderful time. Johnny would actually have a more wonderful time than I did, but on the show the next day Johnny would tell stories about my behavior. "Ed and I were out last night, and I asked him why he drank so much," was the kind of thing Johnny would have said, "and he said he drank to forget. So I asked him, 'To forget what?' and he said, 'What was that question again?' "
Now the truth is, as Johnny has often admitted, he was the one who did not hold his liquor very well. Three drinks and he was broadcasting from a distant network. But by the time we got The Tonight Show my character was well established. It worked very well for us. And it was based on fact. I drank. Sometimes I drank a lot. I'm a big man and I could hold a lot of alcohol. And I did. I was never an alcoholic—I never needed alcohol to get through the day—and I never drank when there was work to be done, but when it was time to play, I played. I don't know when or why I started drinking. No one in my family was a serious drinker. My father usually had a couple of beers when he came home from work, occasionally he had a glass of scotch or maybe he'd have sherry with dinner, but I don't think I ever saw him have a martini. Nor did any of my uncles drink excessively. I don't remember ever seeing a McMahon get drunk.
I guess I started drinking when I was working in the carnivals. I was young and I was one of the few people with the show going to college and for me that was a way of proving I belonged. There's a lot of alcohol around a carnival. A lot of people walked around with a half-pint of whiskey in their back pocket. I didn't get into that so much as having a few beers at the end of the day. For me, drinking has always been a reward, payment for a good day's work. You finish your work, you're entitled to a couple of drinks.
I started taking my drinking seriously in the marines. At the end of the day the pilots would get together for happy hour, perhaps the longest hour in history, and talk flying. When I was in Korea not only were we working very hard under difficult conditions, people were trying to kill us. About the only place to go to relax was the officers' club that I'd built. One night, I remember, we'd been drinking and we were walking to the mess hall in a downpour, the whole camp was one big mud bowl, and this buddy of mine whose nickname was Herkimer kept slipping into foxholes. After he did that a couple of times I stood on the edge of the foxhole, looked down at him lying in the mud, I mean he looked as miserable as we all felt, and said, "Herkimer, I told you the last time you did that it wasn't funny. It wasn't funny then and it isn't funny now. So the next time you fall in a foxhole, no one's gonna laugh. But this time, Herkimer, we will laugh."
When I got back to the States I started commuting to New York to try to get voice-over work in commercials. I'd get there early in the morning and try to schedule interviews and auditions, but most of the time was spent waiting, waiting for a return phone call, waiting for a meeting, waiting for an audition. I'd have an interview at 10 A.M. and my next appointment wouldn't be until 2 P.M. If waiting had been a profession, I would have been a star. Michael's Pub on East Forty-eighth Street became my office. Michael's Pub was the hangout for people in this line of wait . . . work. Everybody would gather there between appointments. It was at Michael's Pub that I met the best voice-over people in the business, people like Pat Hernon, who later became a weatherman, the great Bill Wendell, Bob Delaney, who broadcast the Boston Red Sox games, the great Fred Collins, known for his cigarette tag line, "and . . . they are mild," as well as the line "More people watch ABC than any other news organization." Believe me, when Fred Collins told you they were mild, you believed they were mild. And when Pat Hernon told you it was raining outside, you could look outside and tell how much he'd had to drink.
During the hours we spent waiting at Michael's Pub many of us became close friends. Now, most of us would drink only coffee during the day, we wouldn't even have a beer before going to an audition for a beer commercial, but after that last audition or when the phone didn't ring again, well, we did a little drinking. A little drinking? Let me be a little more precise about this: this group was to drinking what Charles Eiffel was to erector sets.
Both the best and the worst thing about drinking excessively is that you really can't remember exactly what you did when you were drinking. I can state unequivocally, however, that there is absolutely no truth to the story about Pat Hernon and me climbing the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Now, there may well have been a discussion about the possibility of climbing that tree, there might even have been some wagers placed on our ability to climb that tree, but we did not climb the tree. Oh sure, maybe we did attempt to climb that tree, but as my close friend Charlie Cullen will attest, the guards never let us close enough.
On another occasion, I remember, Bobby Quinn, the director of The Tonight Show, Mort Rosen, who owned Sneaky Pete's, our hangout in Los Angeles, and I flew to Las Vegas to surprise Johnny when he did his nightclub act. We stayed the whole weekend, the whole, long weekend, and we drank to the New Year. I think by the time we finished, the New Year we were drinking to was 2146. Our flight back to New York was not direct, and apparently when we stopped in Los Angeles Mort Rosen got off the plane. Now, he didn't tell me he was getting off, so I still believe it was his fault that I thought he was sitting next to me the entire flight. I don't know who it was that I was speaking to during that trip, but he must have thought he was Mort Rosen because he never corrected me.
The most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me while I was drinking took place years later, when I was the spokesperson for Budweiser. The wonderful people at Anheuser-Busch had a party at a club in St. Louis. This combined two of my favorite activities, business and drinking. As the evening was coming to an end, a terrific man named Jimmy Orthwein, the chairman of the board of D'Arcy McManus, the brewery's advertising agency, invited several people back to his house to continue the party. Hey, more party? That sounded like a good idea to me. He gave me directions to his home and I told my driver how to get there. We drove down this long, very private road, past several beautiful homes, until I told the driver where to turn. I was the first one to arrive, but fortunately the front door was open. So I went in and decided to get everything ready for the others.
It was a beautiful home. I puttered around, I set up the glasses on the bar, I went into the kitchen and filled two ice buckets, I put some soft music on the stereo and turned on just enough lighting to create the proper atmosphere, I poured myself a drink, and just as I was about to light the fire, I turned around and saw a woman in her nightgown standing on the stairway with two children. "What are you doing in my house?" she asked.
What was I doing in her house? That seemed like a good question. "Isn't this the Orthwein home?" I asked, feeling quite certain I knew the answer.
"No," she said, "this is the Griesedieck home."
I knew that name. The Griesedieck family owned Falstaff brewery, one of Anheuser-Busch's competitors. So not only did I walk into someone's home early in the morning, turn on the stereo, and pour myself a drink, probably scaring them to death, but I'd invaded the home of a big rival of the company for whom I was the spokesperson. Now, had I really been thinking clearly at that moment, I might have said, "I guess you've never seen my program, Bloopers and Practical Jokes?" or, "Remember that notice you got from American Family Publishers that said you may have already won ten million dollars?" Instead, I said, "I'm really sorry." I started cleaning up the house. "Let me just turn off the stereo and put these glasses away. I'll just be a minute, let me turn off the lights, and I'll go out the same door I came in."
Now, for just one minute, put yourself in this woman's place. There she was, asleep, happy, when suddenly she was awakened by the sound of music coming from downstairs. The lights were on, someone was in the kitchen. She walked slowly downstairs, and there, in her living room, Ed McMahon was standing by himself having a drink. Now, I really don't know what was going on in her mind at that moment, my guess is that she didn't think Ed McMahon had broken into her house just to have a drink, but whatever it was, I've always hoped she thought she was dreaming rather than having a nightmare.
"Ed isn't drinking anymore," Johnny announced one night, ". . . of course, he isn't drinking any less either." Or, "The first time Ed saw Niagara Falls he asked, 'Does that come with scotch?' " The truth is, I drank, sometimes I drank a lot, but I didn't drink as much or as often as people believed. If I had, I wouldn't have been able to function as well as I did. I considered myself a drinking man, but physically I'm a big man and my system could absorb a great deal of alcohol. I could drink a lot. Besides, I used little tricks when I was drinking. For example, I always had a sip of water between sips of drinks. A sip of wine, a sip of water. A sip of a martini, a sip of ice water. Maybe that diluted the alcohol; whatever it did, it enabled me to drink a little more than most teams.
One night I think I remember I spent in the St. Louis home of the great Gussie Busch, who could party with the best of me. Gussie used to have a little test. At the end of a meal I went with him into the smoking room in which he served his famous Pick Me Up Charlies. This was a drink served in a glass with a narrow top; it looked like a cordial glass. A Pick Me Up Charlie consisted of Courvoisier, a cognac, topped by a slice of lemon and a single sugar cube. You drank it by chewing the lemon slice and sugar cube until they became a sweet and sour pulp, and then drank the Courvoisier through this filter. It was a very potent drink. Most people had two or three, and all of a sudden it was Wednesday.
Please don't tell anyone, but I set the all-time record. Seventeen. At least that's what I was told later. Much later. But please, keep that to yourself.
I never objected to Johnny's jokes about my drinking or the creation of this image. Object to it? I encouraged it. And I used it. People believed that I was their kind of man, the kind of regular guy who lived next door or with whom they could sit down and have a friendly drink. My reputation as a drinking man helped put me on a first-name basis with America. Everybody knew me as Ed, Big Ed. This image was certainly part of the reason I was hired by Anheuser-Busch as the spokesperson for Budweiser. I even wrote a slim book, Ed McMahon's Barside Companion, which was filled with bar games, jokes, bets, and tricks, such as how to make a needle float on a glass of water, how to make up your own "Tom Swifties," like " 'I had trouble with my power saw,' he said offhandedly," and how to answer questions like "Can a man marry his widow's sister in the United States?" The answer to that question is no; in order to marry his widow's sister he would have to be dead.
Because of my reputation, whenever I was in a restaurant or a club people would send drinks to my table. Naturally I didn't want to hurt their feelings. Once, though, that created a little problem. I spent the evening with my good friend Jimmy Breslin, who was making the rounds of New York taverns in search of his column for the next day. We wound up at the bar of a well-known midtown restaurant, sitting next to a ruddy-faced man wearing a hat. This man turned to me and said, "I know you. I'm gonna buy you a drink."
When someone I don't know speaks to me, I try to relate to them as an individual, I try to kid with them, make them feel I'm paying attention to them, not just giving them some sort of celebrity response. "That's very kind of you, sir," I said to this man, but then I jokingly added, "However, I never drink with a man who wears a hat at a bar." Breslin was just staring at me. I could tell from the lack of expression on his face I'd done something wrong. The whole place quieted. What I did not know was that this man was the head of a mob family running Newark or Trenton.
"You know what?" the man said, hitting me in the shoulder. "You're absolutely right." He removed his hat and we had several drinks together. Later Breslin told me, "That's the kind of guy who would have shot off your kneecap just for laughs." Well, I thought, there's an unusual sense of humor.
I went through several different periods in my drinking days and nights. There was my martini period, a scotch and soda period, scotch and water and vodka and water, scotch without vodka and water, and red and white wines. I did love those martinis before dinner. The question I have been asked most often about my drinking was what I did for a hangover. Now this was the most amazing thing of all: I've never had a hangover in my life. Never. There were many days when I'd wake up on what I assumed to be the next morning and I wasn't very sharp. It took me a while to focus. But I never experienced the traditional hangover, complete with headache, nausea, and spinning room. I know how bad they can be, though. One man who knew how to drink was my friend John Wayne. Duke was one of the great men of this world and a good friend. When Budweiser was repeating a television show we'd done together, they asked us to do several radio spots to promote it. Duke volunteered to do these commercials on the Tonight Showset. They set up a little recording area for us. I expected him hours after we'd finished taping the show, but to my surprise, when I walked backstage after the show he was standing there, waiting for me. "McMahon," he yelled in his booming voice, "I quit drinking!"
I was surprised. "Really, Duke?" I asked.
"Absolutely," he said firmly, and then added, "well, except tequila."
And later that night, after we'd finished taping the spots, we went to Chasen's and drank tequila. And then we drank a little more tequila. And then a . . .
In my barside companion I quoted a college study that stated that it takes from twelve to thirty-six hours for the body to return to normal following a night of drinking, and suggested that the best thing to do is just sleep it off. Well, if that's true, my body will get back to normal just after my 181st birthday. For me, the key to preventing a hangover is to always have something to eat before going to bed. That way the alcohol works on the food. But the best hangover remedy I know about is the hair of the dog, a Bloody Mary with tomato juice. Apparently whiskey depletes the vitamin B in your body and a Bloody Mary replenishes it. A good cold Budweiser with a few drops of Worcestershire sauce will do pretty much the same thing, because there are a lot of B-complex vitamins in the yeast.
Among the lessons I learned from drinking was that I had to watch out for parked cars. As I stepped out of a cab after an evening of celebration with Charlie Cullen, I slipped and fell heavily into a parked car, spraining my ankle. They had to put it in a cast. On the show the next day, when Johnny asked, "Well, what happened to you?" I had to tell him the truth. With a sigh I admitted, "You probably won't believe this, but I got hit by a parked car."
Anheuser-Busch once commissioned an eighteen-month study by the Wharton School of management research to find out why people drink. The study identified four types of drinkers. Indulgents, an incredibly small percentage of people, use alcohol to escape reality. Social drinkers use alcohol to sublimate their inhibitions; a drink helps them feel more comfortable at a party. A third group of people use alcohol to control others; at parties they'll tell the bartender to pour doubles to get everybody loose. But the largest group were the reparatives, those people who work hard and like to relax at the end of the day with a drink. I was in that last group; I was a reparative. No matter how much I drank the night before, I was never late for an appointment, I never missed a day of work, and I never showed up unprepared to do my job. In the thirty years I did The Tonight Show I probably missed six shows, five of them because of illness and the sixth was the night I took off because Claudia was leaving for Europe on her college graduation trip and I wanted to see her off. Listen, some days it was tough, I'd come home very late, Alyce would be asleep, and I'd write on the bathroom mirror in toothpaste, "Please wake me at 8." And at eight o'clock the next morning I'd be up and getting ready for work.
Only once did I ever appear on The Tonight Show slightly . . . considerably . . . less than sober. That afternoon, while I was having lunch with some friends, among them the great songwriter Paul Williams, I got word that two lawsuits in which I was involved had both been settled in my favor. Normally I wouldn't drink during lunch if I were doing the show that day. But this news was so good I had to celebrate. I wasn't really drunk, although I certainly had a nice buzz on. Maybe I shouldn't have done the show that night, but my strong sense of responsibility—and several martinis—outweighed my good judgment. I guess the problem started when Johnny introduced Joan Embry, the wonderful representative of the San Diego Zoo. "We've had this lady on the show very often in the past, I guess, seven or eight years," he began.
I tried to help him out. "Nine years," I said firmly.
"Nine years, yeah," he agreed. "Several plus several'd be about nine." He was just beginning to sense that something might be wrong.
"You said seven or eight, then . . ."
"I didn't say seven or eight," he insisted. "I said several . . ."
There are few people more insistent than someone who has been drinking and is convinced he's correct. "Then you said, 'seven or eight,' and I said, 'It's nine.' The animals you had as babies are now . . . ," I had to pause to figure this out, "ten years old."
"That'd be about right," he agreed. He still wasn't sure how to handle me. I suspect he felt if he left me alone no one would notice.
The worst thing you can do when you have too much to drink is pretend that you're sober. And that is what I tried to do. "Remember those animals that . . . did something funny on your tie? Those little baby lions were one year old. Now they're treacherous and ferocious ten-year-old animals."
Johnny patted me on the arm. "Okay." Then he tried to save me. "Joan Embry's here tonight . . ."
That was not going to be possible. "She's now thirty-two," I interrupted.
"That's right. Joan is an animal handler and a trainer and . . ." Johnny couldn't resist any longer. He started laughing as he looked at me and said, "You really think you're fooling everybody, don't you?"
"No, no, no, no. I'm just doing my best to help."
"I know that," Johnny continued, but not easily, ". . . and she does her three horse shows a day, did you know that? At the animal park?"
What I didn't know was how to be quiet. "Boy, is that an exciting idea."
Now Johnny was getting into it. "Would you like an army cot or something maybe? Time to catch up on a little nappypoo or something, maybe?"
See, my feelings were hurt. I was trying to make a point, even if I had no idea what it was, and my friend Johnny Carson was making fun of me. "I love Joan. I'm the only one who went to see her," I said defensively. "Doc has never seen her, you've never seen her. I went to the wild animal farm . . ."
"It's all right, it's all right . . ."
"But you're upsetting me."
"No, no, I don't want to upset you."
Now I was insistent, "I went down, Joan and I . . ."
Johnny was trying to calm me down, saying solicitously, "I know you did. It's all right."
"Don't say . . . I know Joan. I went down there." Then I added proudly, "I held a baby gorilla."
Johnny finally realized he had to save me. "I couldn't go with you that week. You held a baby gorilla. And let's get her out here real quick . . ." And Joan came out to end that conversation.
Did I mention that I went down to the San Diego Zoo?
Although I never had a problem with my reputation, my kids did. They didn't think it was funny at all; they never laughed at Johnny's jokes about it. There's a good reason for that; not only did they have to put up with all types of remarks from both friends and strangers, they also had to live with the reality of my drinking at home. And at home it wasn't very funny. It's accurate to say that alcohol played an important part in the failure of my first two marriages. It didn't cause them to break up, but it exacerbated the problems that already existed.
Alcohol led to a lot of arguments. Things that otherwise would have had little meaning suddenly became important, and words that wouldn't have been said and probably weren't even meant were said. The more unpleasant it got, the easier it became for me to stay out at Michael's Pub or Jilly's drinking with Hernon and Jonathan Winters and sometimes Carson. The kids knew the part that alcohol played in the end of my marriage to their mother, and they didn't like the jokes.
It was because of the impact on my children that I sued one of the tabloid newspapers. Look, I understand that the trade-off for success in the entertainment industry is the loss of much of my private life. I accept that. During my career there have been many things printed about my private life that I didn't like, things that were very embarrassing to me, but I knew these papers had the right to print them. But when one of these publications printed made-up stories that were hurtful to my children, I had to take legal action.
Now, my taking action against a publication for writing that I had too much to drink may seem a bit like our first spokesmodel on Star Search, Sharon Stone, complaining that someone wrote she was too beautiful. I'd been telling my own jokes about my drinking for years. But in this case they went too far. They reported that I had consumed an entire bottle of scotch during a flight to London and had gotten so drunk and obnoxious that I caused a disturbance and then barely managed to stagger down the gangway at Heathrow. Every part of that story was fabricated. I wasn't on that airplane, I hadn't been to London in five years, I did not cause a disturbance, and I no longer drink scotch. Even then I might have just ignored the story had my daughter Katherine not come home from school crying. I don't know if her classmates teased her about it or she heard it on the news, but it affected her. People were saying that her daddy had done some bad things. I don't have much of a temper. Just about the only time I get angry is when someone is bothering my family. And then I get very angry. One night, for example, I was with my daughter Linda in P. J. Clarke's in New York. A man standing next to her started bothering her, repeatedly trying to put his arm around her.
I poked him in the chest so hard I knocked him to the floor. I remember exactly what I said to him, "It will not be necessary for you to touch me or any member of my family for the rest of your life. Do I make myself clear?"
I think I was probably just as angry about this tabloid story. In a sense, this paper was touching my daughter. I couldn't poke it in the masthead, so I sued for libel.
It was very easy to prove that the story was wrong. I simply produced my passport. That was evidence that I had not been to England. The source of the story, we discovered, was a friend of the writer, who had overheard a conversation in which someone said a person who looked like Ed McMahon had been drunk and disorderly on that flight. They assumed that if it looked like me, and he was drinking, it had to be me. They had no defense.
Winning damages was much more difficult. Libel means that a story damaged your reputation. Even though the story was a complete fabrication, how could I prove I had been damaged by being identified as a drinker when so much of my reputation was based on the fact that I liked to drink? In fact, the paper's lawyers actually claimed that this story improved my image.
In their defense presentation they showed the tape of that night I was a bit tipsy on the show. But the fact is that this story could have damaged my reputation. No matter how much I've had to drink, I've never bothered anyone and I've always been conscientious about my work. Only a lawyer for one of these publications would think that being drunk and unruly could improve someone's reputation. Just prior to the publication of this story I was discussing a show with a major studio. After the story was printed they lost interest in the show. Was that because of the story? Impossible to prove, but certainly the possibility existed. And as my lawyers, Neil Papiano and Barbara Derkowitz, wondered, how many nameless people were considering inviting me to a function or hiring me to host a show and didn't when they read that I was so drunk I practically fell down the gangway? Eventually we settled, and let me say I was happy with the settlement, but more important, I was able to show my daughter that the story was wrong.
My reputation made me an easy target for the tabloids. As part of the resolution of a lawsuit I had filed, one of the major tabloids had to inform me before they ran any story about me. That didn't mean I could stop it, but they had to at least attempt to check the facts with me. One evening I was at dinner with Charlie Cullen and the lawyer Paul Tobin. A Los Angeles sportscaster I knew came in with his date and we greeted each other. That was the extent of my interaction with the sports reporter. As I drove home that night, less than two hours later, the phone in my car rang. A reporter from the tabloid was calling to check out a story that I had been at this restaurant with two beautiful women, had been drunk, and had gotten into a brawl with this sportscaster over his date. I've known Charlie Cullen for more than forty years, and not only isn't he a woman, he certainly isn't beautiful. Oh, maybe in the right light he's nice-looking . . . The only way someone could have believed that I was with two beautiful women was if they had been drinking very seriously. And even with all the drinking I've done, I still don't know of any alcoholic beverage strong enough to turn Charlie Cullen into a beautiful woman.
I now have a new ending for Johnny's old joke "Ed isn't drinking anymore . . ." It's "Good." See, it's not a joke anymore. I gave up drinking for a beautiful woman—no, not Charlie Cullen—my wife, Pam McMahon. Before we married she told me, "I'd like to have you around for a long time, and that isn't going to happen if you keep drinking." Since I'd like to be around her for a long time, that made a great deal of sense to me, so I've cut down to a few glasses of red wine at the end of the day. And even that wine is for medicinal purposes—I'd feel awful if I couldn't have it.
I don't miss my drinking days. No matter how much I'd had to drink, I always believed I was perfectly in control. But I wasn't. The only regret I have is that when I was drinking I wasn't quite as sharp as I could have been. I think my edges were dulled. I may have accepted a little less from myself than I otherwise would have. And sometimes I wonder how much more I might have accomplished had I been completely in control for the last thirty years.
Years ago, I might have celebrated the fact that I had stopped drinking by lifting my glass and declaring, "I'll drink to that." But with all the problems caused by drinking excessively, I don't use that line anymore. My Christmas tree–climbing days are over.
Although the memory does linger on. My great friend Tony Amendola, the former president of D'Arcy McManus Advertising in St. Louis, has had two heart transplants. After the first one, I sent him a telegram reading, "Glad you're well. If I had known your heart was in such sad shape, I would have given you mine." To which Tony responded, "Your heart yes, your liver no."