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CARSON THE MAGNIFICENT, by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas
Maybe late-night TV shouldn't be called "late-night TV" anymore, with so many viewers consuming it in clips the morning after, on their phones. Yet the genre's hallmarks -- the avuncular host, the sidekick, the band, the monologue, the desk, the guests -- linger. Most were stamped on America's consciousness by Johnny Carson.
A new biography about an old reliable, Bill Zehme's "Carson the Magnificent" harks back to an era when doom and scroll were biblical nouns and Carson's "Tonight Show" was a clear punctuation mark to every 24-hour chunk of the workweek -- less an exclamation point, maybe, than a drawn-out ellipsis. "They want to lie back and be amused and laugh and have a nice, pleasant and slightly ... I hate the word risqué ... let's say adult end to the day," is how a producer in 1971 described the millions tuning in from home, to Esquire.
Carson went off the air in 1992, after three decades on "Tonight," and left this Earth in 2005. Zehme, a journalist known for his chummy celebrity profiles, struck a book deal almost immediately but struggled to get purchase on his subject -- "the ultimate Interior Man," he despaired to a source, "large and lively only when on camera" -- and then was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. He died himself last year at 64, and a former "legman" and friend, Mike Thomas, has finished the project, giving it a doubly valedictory feel.
Short but florid, "Carson the Magnificent" is a memorial of the monoculture; a steady parade of mostly men chatting companionably to one another on a padded sectional.
Carson was a white whale for Zehme (he'd managed to harpoon Hugh Hefner, Frank Sinatra and the "Tonight" successor Jay Leno, though rather delicately, as if with cocktail toothpicks). After months of faxes and some time backstage inhaling the "cloud of spiced cologne that trails him like an entourage," Zehme formally met Carson in 2002 and the two men, both said to have unusual professional empathy, had a long lunch at Schatzi on Main, the Santa Monica restaurant owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Over the years Zehme amassed piles of Carsonia, like a paisley polyester necktie, and interviewed scores of his intimates, including two of his four wives. (The first was named Joan, though she went by Jody, and the next two Joanne and Joanna. "The man just won't go for new towels," Bob Newhart joked.)
There were plenty of earlier books to consult, like "King of the Night," by Laurence Leamer (who wrote about Joanne Carson in "Capote's Women"), "And Now ... Here's Johnny," by a young Nora Ephron, and the memoirs of Carson's eternal second banana, Ed McMahon. His lawyer's tell-all, published in 2013, is tellingly unmentioned. Zehme and Thomas have taken, if not the high road, the yellow brick one, with Carson's Midwestern background left in dusty black and white while the nitty-gritty of show business is buffed to a high Emerald City sheen.
Give the authors points for changing up the standard chronological format. We don't get to Carson's birth date of Oct. 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, until the 107th page; his rebirth on Oct. 1, 1962, in NBC's Studio 6B, midwifed by Groucho Marx, being the main event.
John William Carson was a middle child whose younger brother, Dick, would go on to direct some of his shows.. Their tight-lipped father, Homer, went from lineman to manager at public power companies. "But of course electricity shot through this gene pool," Zehme writes.
Carson seems never to have gotten along with his mother, Ruth, a "woman of grand flair and mannered propriety," a "poker-game hellcat" and yoga practitioner with "a taut affect of swellegance" whose evil deeds are not really specified, other than blabbing to reporters. Joanna, at least, thought her "a riot." Along with that spiced cologne, there's a faint whiff of male chauvinism in "Carson the Magnificent." Jody is a "vivacious pixie-minx brunette"; the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen is a "pinched gossipeuse"; the fourth wife, Alexis Maas, is hinted by unnamed "Carson insiders" to be "(among other things) a controlling social climber"; and when news of Ruth's expiration reaches him, Carson exclaims, "The wicked witch is dead!," according to Burt Reynolds.
The family moved to Nebraska when John was young, and he sublimated whatever childhood dissatisfactions there were into magic, admiring performers with a compact set of tricks. "Johnny packs a tight suitcase," McMahon once said. Carson: "I guess that means that you keep your emotions and personal feelings under check. And that's true."
School was "a staging ground" for pranks and a humor column, Carson's Corn. John worked as an usher in one of the grand local movie palaces and, while waiting to serve in the Navy, hitchhiked to Hollywood, later claiming to have been "sawed in half" at the performance of a fellow illusion enthusiast, Orson Welles. "He's the only invisible talk host," Welles told Kenneth Tynan for a 1978 New Yorker profile, and Zehme runs with this oracular characterization: "He was the man who wasn't there, except that he was always there, night after night."
Carson narrowly missed combat on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania but, in unpublished transcripts for a Time article, told of having to bring up the decomposing bodies of felled soldiers. The other great trauma of his life was the death of his own middle son, Rick, whose S.U.V. tumbled down an embankment during a nature photography session in 1991, when he was 39. Johnny, a lifelong avoider of funerals, didn't attend the memorial, fearing a press frenzy. "I don't want it to turn into a circus," he said.
There's a kind of mirroring going on here. Carson's work was to keep the show going, not to dwell on unpleasant topics (including politics), and Zehme follows suit. He runs through the curriculum vitae with a brisk ring-a-ding. Carson's college thesis was a reel-to-reel tape of how to tell a joke. Post-Navy, he rolls back into Los Angeles with a U-Haul trailer -- "I looked like something out of 'The Grapes of Wrath'" -- and starts broadcasting briefly in local markets ("Carson's Corner," "Carson's Cellar"), drawing the notice of the celebrated comedian Red Skelton. Soon he's running a quiz show called, with America's proud renunciation of grammar, "Who Do You Trust?," and then, "as calendar and intestines turned," he's replacing Jack Paar on "Tonight."
Zehme's suitcase is also tightly packed -- with Dad jokes. Carson is square but cool. He "put the hip in Hypnos," the god of sleep.He was "smoothitude incarnate" and a "lifetime majority shareholder, Evasive Twinkle Inc."
Giving away little, Carson gets distilled to body language, objects and oddities. He "taps syncopated pencil," wears lucky mismatched cuff links and anoints other comedic talent with an "OK" sign ("a gesture from God," as Richard Belzer put it). He has a forest-green Mercedes with the license plate "360 Guy," as in "all-around." His eyes were steely blue, McMahon would say, "to imply their power of chilly reproach." His production company once financed a show called "Wizzle Falls," about a news reporter who crashes on an island controlled by puppets. In retirement, he learned Swahili. As his wickedly good "Saturday Night Live" impersonator Dana Carvey would smirk: "weird, wild stuff."
On air, Carson would take on various goofy guises, including the turbaned Carnac the Magnificent. The book's title, and its light glide over his womanizing and sometimes violent alcoholism, suggest that in real life, too, he was a master of disguise and escape. After an unpleasant first date with Jody, he gives her a cactus in a bedpan with a note reading: "Sit on this. It will remind you." After they married, she would sometimes wake with bruises. "Did he hurt you, Mom?" Joanna's son asks after blowups. Zehme attributes such behavior to a booze-poisoned "doppelgänger"; he credits Carson with destigmatizing divorce without considering how swiftly, today, his whole operation would be canceled.
Visiting a proto-couples counselor, Carson "would taste shrinkage for the first time," but he was far more comfortable overseeing Carson's Couch. He might have been his own best analyst. "My job is to give them that feeling," he told the "Tonight Show" regular Tony Randall of his drowsing masses, "that there will be a tomorrow." How very yesterday.
CARSON THE MAGNIFICENT | By Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas | Simon & Schuster | 322 pp. | $30