The beautiful starlets who appeared on The Tonight Show were rarely shy about showing off their charms. One night, when Eddie Murphy was a guest, a well-endowed young woman admitted that her figure had "opened a lot of doors for me."
"Uh yeah," Johnny agreed, "I would think so."
"I think that once you get in the door, though," she continued, "there are nine thousand other busty blonds who also got in the door."
At that point Eddie Murphy interrupted to ask, "Where's that door at?"
I'm very good at a lot of things, but being alone isn't one of them. I guess you might say that I'm only good at being alone when there are a lot of other people around. I had gotten married when I was twenty-two years old and had been married twenty-six years; I was almost fifty years old when Alyce and I separated and, for the first time in my adult life, I was single.
I didn't know anything about dating. Fortunately, I was a fast learner. Dating, I discovered, was like riding a bicycle: you just had to keep everything in balance. Look, it wasn't very difficult for me to get dates. Instead of taking a girl dancing to Frank Sinatra's records as I'd once done, now I could take my dates to dinner with Frank and Barbara Sinatra. I also discovered an amazing fact about women: although I had aged almost thirty years since I'd last dated, most of the women with whom I was going out were still in their twenties!
As with just about everything else in our lives, the fact that I was dating young girls became a topic of humor on the show. "Ed was a little late getting here tonight," Johnny would explain. "His date's baby-sitter didn't show up." Or, "You know, Ed was telling me just before the show about a new restaurant he'd taken his date to, and, uh, I have to admit, I was surprised. I didn't know Gerber's even had a restaurant."
Uh-ooooooo!
If there ever was a perfect time to be single, it was in Los Angeles in the 1970s. It was sort of the command post for the sexual revolution. People were always trying to fix me up with their friends or relatives, but I really preferred to meet people myself. I met a wide range of interesting women and encountered problems that in my wildest dreams I could never have anticipated. One lovely woman I was dating posed for Playboy, and during the shooting accidentally sat on an anthill. This was not a good thing. It was also not an area in which I had any expertise. Ask me about going down the embankment to retrieve toys, but don't ask me what to do when a naked woman sits on an anthill.
There was no prohibition against dating people who appeared on The Tonight Show, and at times members of the staff did date guests. I wasn't really comfortable about doing it myself—until the night we had a lovely woman who had been an equestrian in the circus on the show. She was working as an actress at that time and had just made her first movie. As she moved down the couch closer to me I became more and more attracted to her. Two guests later she was sitting next to me, and I invited her to see my nightclub act later that evening. That was my first romance after my divorce. Both of us loved the circus, and although she was the first bareback rider I'd ever gone out with, I'm sure I wasn't the first clown she'd ever dated. Our relationship lasted several months, and she was the only guest on the show I ever asked out.
I did not intend to remarry. I wasn't against it; I just never thought about it. Marriage seemed like something that was part of my past. I'd raised my family. In fact, Alyce and I were just legally separated, not divorced. And I kept thinking that way until I met Victoria Valentine in 1974, when I flew to Houston to host a party for Budweiser. She was a VIP hostess for National Airlines and met the plane when we landed. As we waited for my luggage we started talking. Looking back, if my luggage had been on time, my life would have been so different. Her name, Victoria Valentine, fascinated me; what a nice name. We discovered very quickly that her best friend was Scotty Sanders, then the wife of golfer Doug Sanders and one of the wonderful women of the world. I called Victoria the next day on the pretext that I needed help with travel arrangements and managed to get around to asking her out. Actually, "out" probably isn't accurate. I invited her to come to New Orleans, where I was doing my nightclub act at the Roosevelt Hotel.
Scotty Sanders convinced her to go. We had our first real date after my performance, just Victoria and me and two hundred other people, including Al Hirt and Pete Fountain. After that we were on the phone every day. Four weeks later, on Valentine's Day, I told her, "You are the valentine of my life." A year later I proposed. I gave her an engagement ring and a little note that read, "Will you marry me a year from the day in a city to be announced?" You know, with my schedule I never knew where I was going to be. The night I gave her the ring we had dinner with John Wayne. As women do, she was showing it to everyone. Duke took one look at it, looked at me, then shook his head, and said, "Conservative, aren't you?"
We were married in San Francisco by Father Ward on my fifty-third birthday, March 6, 1976. The party started that night and continued for several years. Like me, Victoria knew how to enjoy herself and we lived the Hollywood life. We went to all the parties, restaurants, and openings; wherever it was fashionable to be, that's where we would be, whether it was Swifty Lazar's Oscar night party, Chasen's, Ma Maison, or weekends at Frank and Barbara Sinatra's home in Palm Springs. It was easy to get caught up in that whirlwind and I did.
When we were first married we built our dream house in Beverly Hills. This house was designed by my friend the great architect Carson Wright. It had four bedrooms, six bars, in which the only beer served was Budweiser, living rooms and dens, a formal dining room, a recreation room and media room, a custom-built two-hundred-bottle wine cooler with a separate temperature control for each rack, a brook stocked with beautiful Japanese koi, which ran right under the patio decking and surrounded the outdoor Jacuzzi.
Now, I love planning surprises and I wanted to do something special for our anniversary—so I decided to have an intimate dinner with Victoria in the house. At that time the "house" had just been framed; it consisted of a foundation and a lot of two-by-fours nailed together. There were no walls, no doors, no windows, just a lot of two-by-fours. I had borrowed everything I needed from the great restaurant Ma Maison: a table with two chairs, dishes, silverware and crystal, the wine cooler, flowers—I'd even taken pictures off the walls of Ma Maison and hung them on the two-by-fours.
When Victoria and I arrived she was stunned. We dined by candlelight—we had to because there was no electricity in the frame. As a portable radio played classical music in the background, Pepe, the legendary bartender from Chasen's, the creator of the world-famous flaming martini favored by W. C. Fields, served martinis and wine. My friend Patrick Terrier, owner of Ma Maison, served caviar and veal prepared on a Coleman stove. It was an incredibly romantic evening.
The night was marred only by the occasional squeal of car brakes, as people driving by would glance over and see waiters in tuxedos serving dinner in the frame of this house, then stop and back up to get a better look.
It was a wonderful house, but when we adopted Katherine Mary we needed a lot more space, so I bought a house that had been built by David O. Selznick, the legendary producer of Gone with the Wind, among many other classic movies. The house was four levels, eleven thousand square feet, and some of the great parties of Hollywood history had taken place there. It was thrilling for me to sit at the bar and realize that I was sitting right where W. C. Fields, Ronald Colman, and Errol Flynn had sat. Charlie Chaplin's house was directly across the street. It was a lifetime away from an apartment near the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
For several years Victoria and I had a wonderful time together. We did everything possible to please each other. She dressed to please me, she made my life as comfortable as she knew how. And I did things that had never previously interested me. Victoria loved horseback riding, for example, so I bought her a horse. When she wanted me to learn how to ride I bought myself a beautiful black horse. Then I remembered—I didn't like riding horses. If God had wanted me to learn how to ride a horse He wouldn't have invented limousines. Maybe I got up on that horse once or twice, but I would always find some excuse not to ride. I was a lot better at making excuses for not riding than I ever was at riding.
Victoria loved to ski so I took skiing lessons. We used to go to Sun Valley and I just fell in love with that place. I wasn't a very good skier, my legs weren't strong enough—I should have used that excuse for not riding. To me the best thing about skiing was that it was followed quickly by après-skiing. Eventually I figured out that if I didn't go up the mountain in the first place I didn't have to ski down the mountain to get to where I already was. So I gave my skis away and concentrated on perfecting my après-skiing style.
It was a good marriage for a long time, but we always had some problems. When we first got together, I explained to her, "The most important thing in my life are my friends and friends need nurturing. All you have in life is an accumulation of friends. I mean, you can have eighteen cars, but you can drive only one. You can have fifty pairs of shoes, but you can wear only one. But friends, you can have as many of those as you can handle." And during that marriage I don't think we nurtured some of my oldest friendships as much as we might have. I found myself seeing people I'd known and loved for many years less and less. Listen, I accepted it. It was my responsibility as much as hers.
By far the most important thing to come out of our marriage was our little girl, Katherine Mary. For almost ten years we never even thought about having a child. It just wasn't part of our marriage. Victoria seemed very happy. And me? I already had four grown children and two grandchildren. To be honest, the prospect of starting all over again with a baby was not something that seemed appealing to me at all.
After being me all those years, I was amazed how wrong I could be about myself.
The whole thing started when my daughter Linda allowed Victoria and me to baby-sit for my eight-monthold granddaughter Alexandra for two weeks. Victoria and I picked up Alex in New York and brought her back to Beverly Hills. I'd long ago forgotten whatever I'd once known about taking care of a baby, but somehow we managed without any help. We did everything ourselves. We took her everywhere with us. I remember sitting on the floor in Aaron Spelling's wife's lovely gift shop changing Alex's diaper one night. We did such a good job that Linda let us do it a second time. That was all we needed; we fell so madly in love with Alex that whatever parental urges were stirring in both of us came right to the surface and we decided to try to adopt a child of our own.
I wanted a little Irish Catholic girl, that was my dream, but the truth is we would have settled happily for any kind of baby. We just got lucky. We found an attorney in another city who made all the arrangements for us and then we waited. And we waited a little longer. We waited about a year. That was actually a good thing, because it allowed us to experience all the anticipation of a pregnancy. I think so many of the feelings that come with a natural birth are caused by the waiting. We told no one that we were doing this, not even Victoria's mother, because if we couldn't find a child we didn't want people to feel disappointed. And maybe we didn't want to jinx it.
Katherine Mary was five days old when she arrived in our lives. The night before we picked her up I didn't sleep, I reread Dr. Spock from cover to cover. She was dressed all in white when I first saw her, with a little crocheted white hat covering her head. She was a beautiful baby. We named her after my grandmother, Katie, and Victoria's mother, Mary. And I got exactly what I wanted, an Irish lass, complete with the requisite Irish temper. When she wanted something, she bellowed. When she wanted her bottle, she let us know loudly.
Everyone was shocked when we told them. I think it was more disbelief than surprise. My children especially didn't know how to deal with the fact that after all these years they had a new sibling. Jeffrey sighed when we told him and said, "Thank God, I'm not the youngest anymore." Linda's children, who were older than Katherine, had a difficult time understanding their relationship to her. Linda tried to explain all about the divorce and that Katherine was her new sister, just like Claudia was her sister, and that made Katherine their aunt. So when Alex met her Aunt Katherine for the first time, I said to her, "This is your Aunt Katie."
She looked at me, sighed, and said, "Granddaddy, it's not normal to have a baby aunt."
I discovered immediately that one of the biggest differences between having a child naturally and adopting one is the paperwork. It makes no difference in the way you love that child. It never even occurred to me that I might love her in a different way than my other kids. I don't have a control valve on love. I took one look at my little girl and I think she smiled at me and that was it. One smile and we were bonded forever. Maybe the thing that surprised me most was how many people I had known for a long time, people I thought I knew well, told me that their child or children were adopted. We got hundreds of lovely letters and cards from people all over the country. During one of the first trips we made with Katherine, a woman came up to us and said, "I'm so happy for you. I was adopted and I've had a wonderful life, thanks to two loving parents."
A friend of ours sent us a lovely poem that begins, "Not flesh of my flesh or bone of my bone, but desired of my heart . . ." and closes with the beautiful lines, "And never forget, for one single minute, you didn't grow under my heart, but in it." We framed it and hung it on her wall.
I was able to spend more time with Katherine than I had with my other kids. I mean, I changed her diapers, I got up and fed her at all hours of the night, I took her everywhere with me. By the time she was six months old she'd been to lunch at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel several times, although she brought her own. When I served as grand marshal of a St. Patrick's Day parade, she rode on my lap in the car, and when I visited Ireland for the first time in my life, I took her with me. Sometimes during meetings I'd keep her on my lap and feed her. I went with Victoria for every visit to the doctor. It wasn't just that I was starting a second family, it was almost as if I were starting my own second childhood.
I wasn't used to getting up in the middle of the night, and it was tiring, but it was a pleasant sort of exhaustion. Satisfying.
Katherine was born just before Christmas and received more presents than we could count. She had more teddy bears than FAO Schwarz; she even had two stars in the heavens named after her, one a gift from our doctor, the other from a wonderful stranger. The first time Johnny Carson saw her he picked her up and she cooed and gurgled. Of course, as I reminded him, many women have done that with Johnny. One night we were talking about my baby on the show and he admitted, "I don't know what to buy a young girl."
I suggested, "Well, stocks and bonds are always nice."
Instead he sent her a gorgeous silver frame engraved with her name. He knew that was much more romantic than stocks and bonds.
By the time she was three years old she knew that Johnny was my boss. I remember one morning I was leaving for work and I gave her a big hug and a kiss and she asked, "Where are you going, Daddy?"
"I'm going to work," I told her. "I've got to make a living."
She considered that for a moment, then told me, "Well, have a nice day, and say hello to Mr. Carson." Three years old and she knew how to butter up the boss.
At first Victoria and I were worried about what this would do to our marriage. We'd had a great relationship for nine years, we knew it was going to change, we just didn't know how or how much. What happened is that we became closer—at least for a time.
If I hadn't expected to get divorced a first time, the prospect that my marriage to Victoria would not last seemed even more improbable. As far as I was concerned, we were married for life, and adopting Katherine seemed to make us even better together.
So I guess it's accurate to say I was stunned when I found out that Victoria was having an affair. Stunned? I don't think that even begins to describe how I felt. That was about the last thing I would have thought possible. Now, in retrospect, I've been extremely fortunate. As a result of the end of my marriage to Victoria, I had the great good fortune to meet Pam and fall in love and marry her and experience a kind of love so deep and true that my life has been turned in a new direction. But at the time of my divorce from Victoria I was deeply hurt.
It's hard for me to write about it. Some of the people who worked for me knew about it before I did and didn't know what to do. They were in a difficult situation. But after a while it was obvious even to me that something was going on. Our relationship had changed. At one point I confronted her and she denied it. But something was wrong and I had to find out for myself what it was, so I hired a private investigator. Imagine, me, hiring a private investigator to follow my wife. I wanted to be wrong.
I had no experience with this kind of situation, I didn't know what to do. Fortunately, I was surrounded by people who cared about me, and they were incredibly supportive and helpful. They were there when I needed people to be there. The whole thing seemed like a terrible dream to me; this was the kind of thing that happened to other people, certainly not to me.
My assistant, Madeline Kelly, was in contact with the investigator. He compiled irrefutable evidence that Victoria was having an extramarital affair with a Beverly Hills police officer. Madeline and the investigator sat down with me and showed me the evidence. The range of feelings I experienced was unbelievable: pain, betrayal, embarrassment, anger, and great sadness. I decided immediately that we would get a divorce, but my biggest concern was Katherine. Victoria and I had taken on the great responsibility of raising a child and my heart was committed to her in every way. I didn't want to do that casually, I didn't want to be a part-time father, not again, not at this time in my life. So when I filed for a divorce, I also filed for custody of our daughter.
For Katherine's sake we tried to make the end of our marriage as civil as possible; we even went to the opening of our friend Marvin Davis's new restaurant together the day I signed the divorce papers. I just went to work every day and did my job as best I could. But everyone was surprised when I filed for divorce. Even Tonight Show producer Freddy de Cordova, whom I saw every day of the week, admitted that he was shocked when he heard the news.
And it was news. For a time it seemed like I couldn't open a newspaper without reading about my life in one of the columns. These stories were most often exaggerated or inaccurate, but they were always hurtful. Reporters were calling all the time asking me to make a statement. My picture was on the cover of all of the tabloids. As someone who has spent my life talking, even I knew that sometimes the best possible thing to say is nothing. The most I said to anyone was, "Look, I'm a marine, and marines hang in there." It was one of those times when you wish some major news event would take place to occupy everybody's attention.
The only thing I could do was put on my game face and continue going about my life as best as possible. When you're going through a situation like that in public you think that every person on every corner knows all about it. Every time I noticed someone looking at me I just knew that they were thinking about this. I remember a story Doc Severinsen once told me. He was in a hotel room having an argument with his wife, and right in the middle of it he heard this fluttering sound. He looked and saw a piece of paper being slid under the door. It was a note from several people asking for his autograph. So Doc and Emily stopped the fight, opened the door, signed some autographs, and had a nice chat, then closed the door and started screaming and yelling all over again. That's how I felt, as if the world was watching my life. Doing The Tonight Show was not that difficult; Johnny Carson always knew just how far he could go on the show about all of our personal lives, his own included, and he knew this was not a topic for humor.
I hired a lawyer. Paul Tobin, a fellow marine, explained to me that in California, once the personal animosities are removed, a divorce is no more than a business deal. It's the breakup of a partnership. The only good thing about the entire divorce agreement was that I didn't have to ride that horse anymore.
To me, the money was secondary. It was important, obviously—I had worked very hard all my life—but still secondary. I knew I could always make more money. People are always going to need a good metric slicer. But Katherine . . . she mattered to me. Eventually we settled for joint custody and Katherine spends substantial time with both of us. And, I think, because we both cared so much about her, the divorce was about as amicable as possible given the circumstances.
My friends and my older children were very supportive. Claudia was living in San Francisco so I flew up there to be with her and Linda joined us. As a symbol that a period of my life was ending, they decided that we should throw away my one pair of white Gucci loafers. They just never thought that their father really belonged in white Gucci loafers. That was much too Hollywood for them. To them, I was a torn-socks kind of guy. But these loafers turned out to be the shoes that wouldn't go away. These were the loafers from The Twilight Zone. Three different times we tried to throw them away, but each time they returned. The first time we held a family ceremony around a wastebasket. "Okay," I announced, "I'm ready to let go of them," and dropped them in the basket. But when we came back from lunch, they were sitting neatly in my closet, cleaned and polished. That night we left them outside the room; the next day they were back in the closet. We tried the wastebasket again, again they returned.
Changing my life wasn't going to be as easy as it appeared.
This was so silly, but it was just what I needed. The three of us just laughed and had fun. Finally, Linda disposed of them. Being with Katherine, being reminded of the best part of that marriage, was also important to me. One afternoon when Katherine was about five years old we were on my boat and I was playing a lovely album on the stereo system, Natalie Cole I believe it was, and there was a line in one song, "Every day's a beautiful day . . ." When Katherine heard that, she put her arms around me and added her own line, "Especially if it's a day with Daddy."
"Honey," I responded once again, "what color do you want that Porsche?"
Once again, I was single. Being single is my second choice. For me, it isn't as enjoyable as being married to a woman I love, but there are a lot of very beautiful things about it. And I met several of them. This time, as soon as Victoria and I separated, I began getting hundreds of letters from women. After having suffered a terrible blow to my ego, this was very flattering. Some of these women were just offering advice: "What you need, Ed, is an older woman who can cook for you," "What you really need is a nice down-home type woman." Some of them made offers:
"You've had enough of these Hollywood types, I've got a trailer you can move right into," and "I'm the kind of woman who knows how to pamper a man," and some of them sent photographs.
I was better at being single this time than I had been in the past. Well, I had more practice. And this time, this time I was certain I wasn't going to get married again. I had my career, I had my two families, I had so many wonderful friends, and I had several attractive women in my life. Although some of the women I dated were beautiful, it was obvious they weren't right for me, and I knew that immediately after the first seven or eight dates.
Whee-yoooo!
There just was no need for me to marry again. But at Milton Berle's eighty-third birthday party, Lillian Crane, a former Ziegfeld showgirl married to the great comedy writer Harry Crane, whispered in my ear, "I have the perfect woman for you. She's beautiful on the outside and the inside."
Since Lillian is a woman of great style, taste, and good humor, I knew I wanted to meet this person. I called Pam Hurn and we made a blind date, lunch at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. For years I've had lunch in the same booth at the Polo Lounge; people knew they could often find me there sitting right behind a full plate.
When Pam walked in the door, I was instantly attracted to her. Pam is tall and elegant, but it was the warmth of her smile that lit up my heart. I took one look at her and thought, if Lillian is right, if this woman really is as beautiful on the inside as I see she is on the outside, then this could be something serious. From our first moment together she was so easy to be with. Three hours passed in minutes. It was obvious we were going to see each other again. I didn't tell her I'd decided never to marry again. In fact, I completely forgot that I'd decided that.
Pam later told me she'd decided that day that we should be together. Well, as they say, the groom is the last to know. We met on a Tuesday afternoon. That night I invited her to a small birthday party I was throwing for my housekeeper. On Thursday we went to see Frank Sinatra performing at the Greek Theatre, and during intermission we went backstage to have a drink with him. On Friday we had dinner on my boat, where I had been living since the divorce. On Saturday we went to Tony Bennett's concert, then went backstage to spend time with him. That was some first week, and by Sunday I was convinced that she was as special as Lillian Crane had promised.
The better I got to know her, the more attractive she became to me. Pam had a son, Lex, by an earlier marriage, whom she'd raised by herself. He was then serving in the Marine Corps. Maybe I had Sinatra and Bennett and a large boat to impress her, but on her side she had the United States Marine Corps. No contest. And the fact is that although she enjoyed all the things we did together, she was not the type of person who was impressed by celebrities or glitz. She was one of the most down-to-earth, sweetest people I'd ever met. As my daughter Linda would later say, it was as if the skies opened up and she dropped out of heaven just for me. Pam was working in advertising when we met, but by passion she was a dress designer. She'd had her own company, she'd designed and manufactured ready-to-wear hand-painted fashions. For a while it was a successful company; she had showrooms in New York, Dallas, Atlanta, and sales representatives all across the country. Major department stores and upscale boutiques carried her clothes. When the 1980s recession hit, these shops couldn't pay their bills. She had to abandon her dream. She was working as an advertising executive.
Everything I learned about her was impressive. She had been active in everything from the rock music industry to her church, a mostly black church in south central Los Angeles ministered by Dr. Frederick Price. Years ago Dr. Price had founded a day-care center for single mothers living in that area that had grown into a school. He had added a grade each successive year until in 1996 he graduated his first six high school students, each of whom was accepted by a major university. The school now occupies thirty acres no more than a well-placed nine-iron shot from the spot where the recent riots started and has 310 students. Pam donates 10 percent of all the profits from our company to this school, and after we were married I produced a concert for the Price School Scholarship Fund that raised almost one hundred thousand dollars. We had the brilliant songwriter David Foster, Kenny G, Shanice, Billy Porter, a two-hundred-voice choir, and a full orchestra.
Our relationship progressed with all the subtlety of two locomotives racing toward each other on the same track. From the day we'd met, everything seemed so right. It was as if we were destined to be together. Several weeks after we'd started dating, my son Jeffrey came to California for the weekend with his lovely girlfriend, Martha. The fact that Jeff had brought Martha out to spend time with me meant that he was serious about her. The three of us took my boat to Catalina. Pam was working and couldn't go with us. Jeff and Martha were so obviously in love that I pointed out, "As captain of this ship, once we're three miles off land-mass, I can marry you. That's one of the oldest traditions of the sea. It won't last a lifetime, but it will certainly tide you over for the weekend."
I missed Pam terribly. Since meeting we'd spent so much time together that I hadn't had the opportunity to feel what my life was like without her. Well, it didn't feel good at all. So I spent most of that weekend on beautiful Catalina island standing at the pay phone just outside the ladies' room in the Black Buffalo Nickel Cafe telling Pam how much I cared for her. "I'm in love with you," I told her, "and if you're feeling the same way I am, you know where it's going to lead."
"I was just waiting for you to catch up with me," she said.
Those are the moments about which love songs are written. Not particularly the fact that I was standing outside the ladies' room, but that instant when you realize and accept that this is the person with whom you'll be sharing a future. Seven months after we'd met, we eloped. I wanted to be married by Father Ward in the chapel at St. Jude's Ranch. Father Ward and the judge who would perform the legal service were the only people we told. Our plan was to fly to Las Vegas with Katherine and my assistant, Toni Holliday, after The Tonight Show and drive out to St. Jude's the following morning to be married.
At 5 A.M. Pam and I walked into the Las Vegas marriage license bureau. The woman typing our papers looked up and recognized me. "You!" she said. "Are you doing what I think you're doing?"
Now, since we were in the marriage license bureau at five o'clock in the morning getting a license, there was not a lot of room for denial.
Later that morning, as Pam drove us to Boulder City, I turned around and showed Katherine and Toni two small ring boxes, a blue one and a black one. "Okay," I said, "I'll tell you what's going on. Pam and I are getting married. Toni, you're going to be the maid of honor. Katherine, you're going to be the ring girl and the best man. The blue box is the prettiest, so that's for the lady, the black box is for the man. When the priest asks you for the rings to bless them, you'll hand them to him . . ."
Because this took place during Lent we couldn't be married in the chapel, so we were legally married in the Ed McMahon Child Care Center at St. Jude's. What do you do the night of your marriage when your best man is your fiveyear-old daughter? It's automatic; you go to Excalibur, the medieval jousting spectacle, where you eat your wedding dinner with your fingers. Our team was the White Knights and they won, which we agreed was a fine symbol. Back at the beautiful Golden Nugget Hotel we had our wedding cake, although in this case it was our wedding key lime pie.
On Monday I appeared on Live with Regis and Kathy Lee and announced that I'd gotten married over the weekend.
Since then Pam and I have done even better than live happily every after; we've lived healthily ever after. I believe Pam saved my life. When we got serious she told me, "I love you and I want us to be together for a long time, but the only way that's going to happen is if you change your habits. You're going to have to learn how to eat healthy."
All those years I hadn't been eating just for myself, I was eating for the starving kids all over the world my grandmother Katie had told me about. My weight had always been a big topic for Johnny's jokes, and over the years it had gotten bigger and bigger. To me it seemed as if I was either always on a diet or always about to go on a diet. I was always going to start the strictest diet known to man—next Monday morning. Through the years I'd tried probably fifty different diets, everything that came along, the Stillman diet, the grapefruit diet, the hard-boiled-egg diet, Dr. Atkins's diet, the Scarsdale diet. One I particularly loved was the martinis and whipped cream diet; now there was a diet that was right for me. It was based on the theory that if you kept your carbohydrate intake to less than sixty grams a day you would lose weight and could still eat steak, drink martinis— but you couldn't eat watermelon because it contained too many carbs. I tried fasting—that's when I learned that the slowest thing in the world is a fast. They all worked for a short time.
I wasn't just eating too much; I was also eating too much of the wrong things. My favorite breakfast, for example, consisted of a bagel with the bread scooped out, filled with tomato, and covered with melted American cheese and spices. By not eating all of the bagel, I figured, I was cutting down on starch. Pam changed all that. She taught me about nutrition. She figured out how to cook everything I love, but with low-fat ingredients. You can't taste the difference, but your body knows.
Now, I had cut down considerably on my drinking before I'd met Pam. But Pam insisted I drink. One glass of red wine a day, with my meal, which is very good for the heart. The truth is that sometimes I cheat a little: it's still one glass, but I fill it twice.
I married Pam for better and for worse, but I don't remember anyone saying anything about exercise. My response when I was asked to do some exercise on The Tonight Show —"I have a man who does that for me"—was true. Except for that part about there being a man. Earlier in my life I had been a good athlete and in Marine Corps condition, but later in life my exercise had been limited primarily to climbing in and out of limousines. As I'd gotten more successful, in fact, my shape actually began to resemble a dollar sign—I had a round bulge in the front and a round bulge in the back. Pam put both of us on an exercise program. We have dueling treadmills—two treadmills that face each other. And if we don't get outside for a fast walk in the morning, we use those treadmills. Now I can go nowhere faster than ever before. I also started lifting weights. I'd always wondered why the weights were called dumbbells when I was the one picking them up over and over and putting them right back. But as I've learned, moderate weight training is an excellent way of keeping muscles trim and flexible.
The result has been that I'm in the best condition of my adult life. The one place I resisted Pam's attempts was when it came to alternative medicine. The closest I'd ever gotten to alternative medicine was taking a multivitamin. But Pam asked me to go with her to see her doctor, Soram Singh Khalsa, M.D., who uses a combination of Western and Eastern medicines. I agreed to go with her, but I made it clear that I had no intention of getting involved myself. When I walked into the office, all the doctors were wearing turbans. I felt as if I were walking into a Tibetan monastery. The last person I had seen wearing a turban was Carnac.
I told Dr. Khalsa, "I hold in my hand the final . . ." Well, actually I told him I was there to be a supportive husband, that Pam was his patient. And I told him that as he examined me and showed me a simple diagnostic technique called applied kinesiology. And I told him that as he prescribed a program of herbs and nutritional supplements. And I continue to tell him that twice a month during our regularly scheduled appointments. And I'm firm about it too!
And that doesn't even include acupuncture. I try to be a positive person, and one thing about which I've always been positive is that I don't like needles. I could land an airplane on an aircraft carrier at night or fly over enemy lines while people were shooting at me, but the idea of getting a needle or having my blood taken frightened me. Needles hurt. So it was difficult for me to accept the concept that being stuck with needles took pain away. But when I started having back problems, Dr. Khalsa claimed that acupuncture might bring relief. Yeah, sure, I thought, I know how that works. The needles hurt so much they make you forget all about the pain in your back. But I agreed to try it. I really do dislike needles so this wasn't easy for me.
The biggest problem with acupuncture, I discovered, is that it gives medicine a bad name. Who wants to get a treatment called "puncture"? It sounds painful. It sounds like "root canal." But it worked for me, my back pains were greatly diminished. And to my surprise, it was about as painful as a mosquito bite. So what acupuncture really needs is a new name, something like "spot therapy," or "pleasure points." I just call it relief.
Before I met Pam the chances that I would completely change my lifestyle, that I'd limit my drinking to a glass or two of red wine, follow a diet of nutritious low-fat foods, take an array of vitamins and herbs, exercise every day, and let people wearing turbans stick needles in me were probably about the same as that of Aunt Blabby modeling in Sports Illustrated 's swimsuit edition. Maybe even a little worse. You know, with the right lighting, on a beach, Aunt Blabby wasn't so . . .
But I had no choice, I had to do all these things. Once again I need all the energy I can muster because I'm about to go into battle one more time: my daughter Katherine is now a teenager. If Doc were doing the music for this book, this would be the page for really terrifying music. Thus far I've learned one thing about raising a child in this rapidly changing world: the fact that I've already raised four children is absolutely no preparation for raising Katherine. I realized that when she was just a baby. Instead of the traditional Dr. Dentons and sailor suits, the baby stores sold everything from baby flapper outfits to astronaut suits. Everything in her life had to have a theme, she couldn't just be a pretty baby girl. Her bedroom, for example, was done in Miss Piggy; everything from lamps to drawers featured the divine Miss P.
Very few of the lessons I'd learned about child raising applied. Personal computers didn't exist when my older kids were growing up, so they never surfed the Internet; not only didn't they have their MTV, television consisted of only about six channels; there were no such things as Sega or Nintendo, serious sports for girls, body piercing, or even rap music; they had very little exposure to drugs; they didn't have to worry about AIDS; and they knew very little about sex.
Things are so different now. Katherine was as sophisticated at eleven years old as my older daughters were when they were sixteen. When she was five years old we took her to Spago, one of the most popular restaurants in Los Angeles, and she ordered an artichoke. An artichoke? I didn't even know what an artichoke was until I was thirty-eight. She asked for asparagus. It is a known fact that not a single child in the 1950s or 1960s ever asked for asparagus.
Children today have access to so much more information than children of any other era in history that the old methods of raising children no longer apply. They have a hundred TV channels and they're taught about drugs in school and they know about sex. Know about it? When Katherine was twelve we told her Aunt Martha was going to the hospital and that Maggie would be born that day, and Katherine replied, "Oh, you mean she's having a c-section?"
Kids have so much more knowledge about the world. It's impossible to restrict their access to it; the best thing to do is try to channel it in a positive direction. "Channel" really is the right word. I refer to television as "the sorcerer." It can be magical, it can be an extraordinarily effective teaching tool, but if parents aren't careful it can take control of their children's minds. Katherine does not have a TV set in her bedroom, and we try to monitor the shows she watches; but like kids of any time, the shows she wants most to watch are the shows we don't want her watching. And even if she doesn't see them, her friends at school do, and the next day they're talking about them.
Katherine does have her radio, her boom box, in her room. Long ago radio stopped being a medium limited to playing the top forty love songs. Now kids listen to Love Lines, where young people frankly discuss their sex problems, shock jocks who talk about anything, and instead of love, the songs are about suicide and self-mutilation. If I were trying to create my own radio show today in Katie's parlor, instead of introducing Enoch Light and his Light Brigade and reading cigarette ads from Time, in order to be realistic I'd be interviewing a topless dancer and reading condom ads from Spin.
Even if we wanted to, it's impossible to shield kids from these things. There are so many external influences. Drugs just weren't a part of my older kids' childhood. But Katherine started learning about them in second grade. Pam and I made a deal with her: we agreed that if she doesn't smoke, drink, or use drugs by her sixteenth birthday we will take her on a trip anywhere in the world. She decided the one place she wants to go, of any place in the entire world, is New England. Maybe she heard me talking about Lowell, but much more likely she saw something about it on TV that impressed her.
She learned about things like the dangers of smoking and AIDS in her Catholic elementary school. I hosted a benefit the school produced to raise money for pediatric AIDS. Kids know how AIDS is spread, they are much more sexually aware than any previous generation. I'm the one who has had to learn how to deal with a whole new set of problems. One day I drove home with Katherine and her friend, and as we got out of the car, she said, "Daddy, we forgot to stop at the department store. I have to get a training bra."
I can't imagine Claudia or Linda even saying the word "bra" to their father. When I'm faced with a situation I don't know how to handle, I try to be the thoroughly modern parent. "Oh," I said, not knowing what to say. "Let's go inside and let Pam handle that. That's for the Pammy department."
Faced with this barrage of information, kids grow up very fast. Katherine did get her training bra, and one Saturday afternoon several months later Pam and Martha were going shopping with her. Katherine wasn't ready and finally Pam gave her two minutes. Eleven-year-old Katherine came out to the car out of breath. "I couldn't find my bra," she explained, and added sadly, "and now I'm sagging." And after a pause she concluded, "Everyone'll know I'm not wearing a bra."
When I was raising my kids in the 1960s I was the authority figure. I set the rules and the kids lived by those rules. The magic words, after "please" and "thank you," of course, were "because I said so." Why can't I do that? Because I said so. How can you do that to me? Because I said so.
That would never work with Katherine. As I've had to learn, everything is negotiation. "What do you think about this plan?" "If you do this today, we'll do that tomorrow." And when you reach an agreement, you'd better follow through with your end of it.
One thing hasn't changed, though. The best form of punishment is depriving a child of something he or she wants to do. When Katherine misbehaves she is confined to her room—and we take the boom box out. As she gets older, of course, I'll have to start looking for a collapsible ladder. I remember the afternoon we were going to UCLA for a full day of activities with celebrities to raise money for multiple sclerosis. Pam's son, Lex, was bringing thirty members of his college fraternity to work as coaches, timers, and ushers, and Katherine was in heaven. She adores Lex, and the chance to spend time with him and his friends was important to her. But she was less than charming several times and finally, as we were driving to the campus, she said something very rude to me. Pam turned the car around and we confined Katherine to her room, where she had to write a one-hundred-word essay on the topic "Why I must have a good attitude."
When Pam and I came home that afternoon she had finished. After listing several reasons, she closed the essay by admitting "It's important to have a good attitude, otherwise your room will become your best friend."
I am trying to correct the worst mistake I made with my older kids by spending much more time with Katherine than I did with them. I go to her school functions and outside activities and whenever possible she travels with Pam and me. When we went to Detroit to host a benefit for an animal shelter she came with us. On the plane I explained to her that there would be many dogs at this event and under no circumstances could we bring home another dog. Between our dogs and Lex's dog we almost qualified to be a kennel. So this time, no way, no more pets. Under no circumstances. Katherine understood.
We named our new dog Lucky. I managed to hold out about five minutes. There are some things that just never change.
Katherine is turning out to be a lovely Irish lass, exactly what I'd hoped for. She's independent, opinionated, and smart, and she knows every route directly into my heart. When she was six years old we were at a luncheon and she came over and said to me, "Daddy, let's go up and do the Daddy and Katherine Show."
There's a request that is impossible to resist. See, ever since Katherine has been old enough to deliver a punch line I've been teaching her the great vaudeville jokes. What good is a straight man without someone to deliver the punch line? Although I guess it would be more accurate to say I was playing straight person to my daughter. So, in front of the audience, she told me, "Oh, Daddy, it was Lincoln's birthday and I didn't even send him a card."
"Why send him a card?" I asked. "Lincoln is dead."
"Dead?" she said with surprise. "I didn't even know he was sick!"
People often ask if it's hard raising a young child at my age. I suppose the best answer to that question would be, at exactly what age is raising a child easy? What makes raising Katherine a joy is that she is part of a large and very modern extended family. Pam and Katherine have formed their own wonderful relationship. One Halloween, for example, Pam turned the house into a fair. We took out all the furniture and put in carnival games and booths and served ice cream and cotton candy to more than one hundred kids. Pam and I and our friends Kenneth and Josie Castleberry dressed as clowns and entertained. We had a hot dog man and someone to paint the kids' faces. In the backyard we had a haunted house. We had glass eyeballs and frozen ice hands floating in the punch bowl. At Christmas we tented the backyard and had fresh-baked cookies for the kids to decorate, and then we donated the cakes and cookies to the needy.
Katherine also has her older brothers and sisters and their children—my grandchildren, her nieces and nephews. And she has her stepbrother, Lex. When it became obvious to Pam that our relationship was going to be serious, she called Lex, who was in marine boot camp, and told him she was going out with Ed McMahon.
Apparently Lex was very impressed. Not that I was a television personality, not that I was the spokesperson for the largest-selling beer in the country. "Ed McMahon," Lex said. "Mom, he's a colonel in the Marine Corps!" Now that impressed him. He always referred to me as "the Colonel": "Mom, tell the Colonel they had me doing this . . . ," or whatever. Often Pam didn't understand what he was talking about, so she'd ask him to explain it.
"Mom," he'd tell her, "don't sweat it. Just tell the Colonel, he'll understand. It's a marine thing." It's a marine thing. So how could Lex and I not get along?
The first day I met him I was working aboard my boat when I was suddenly blinded by the sun glaring off his shoes. I looked up and saw this handsome young man with a friend. "Good to see you, marine," I said.
"Good to see you, Colonel," he responded. "Permission to come aboard, sir?" Marines talk to each other like that, like police officers talking to suspects on badly written TV shows. Lex and I had the Marine Corps in common, which meant we spoke the same language, so we got along very well right from our first meeting. Growing up, Lex had no father—he doesn't even get a Christmas card from his natural father—so I've happily taken on that role. Although he'd never been much of a student, getting by mostly on charm and football, when he left the Marine Corps he went on to graduate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is presently in law school.
I often express my feelings through little poems. On our fifth anniversary, I wrote a poem for Pam. It reads, partially, "Oh, I've been lucky in my life, once or twice. But lucky in love, that's a roll of the dice. Well, luck turned to love, and a wonderful life, and brought me a lover, a friend, and a wife." Now, Coleridge it's not, and it only begins to explain the way I feel about Pam. There is one more way in which Pam has changed my life. She has gone back into the fashion business, creating a couture line creatively named "Pam McMahon." Her gorgeous dresses are carried by Neiman Marcus, Saks, many of the top boutiques. When we got together, we agreed that we would really be together. So when she is doing truck shows, meaning showing her new line, if I'm not working I go with her and our partner, Greg Mills. I carry the dresses and maybe sell a little. So Pam has turned me into something I've never been before: besides everything else, I am now a proud schmatta schlepper.
Life with Pam is full of surprises. I knew she was planning something for my sixty-ninth birthday, for example, because my best friend Charlie Cullen had explicit instructions to take me out of the house early in the morning and make sure I didn't return until evening. I guessed she was having a nice dinner for about twenty people. But as I returned home after taping The Tonight Show, I was surprised to be greeted by a Marine Corps honor guard standing on the front steps of the house. The first thing I noticed was that Lex was in the middle of the honor guard. On the side a photographer kept snapping pictures. It took me a moment to realize that the photographer was my son Michael. I walked into the house and it was filled with people from my life. Friends from different parts of my life from all over the country. Pam had turned the house into Ed's Jazz Joint. The backyard had been tented, the furniture had been replaced by round tables with dripping candles, there was a band in the corner.
"When Ed met Pam," I once wrote, "so the story goes; There wasn't much twinkle in those traveled toes. A life that was full had taken its toll; And the joie de vivre had left that merry old soul. But a blind lunch meeting had changed all that. And a beautiful brunette showed him where it was at. She was witty and honest, direct and wise; And you can see the sparkle in his weary eyes . . ."
I was so lucky to meet her.