Johnny Carson Dies At Age 79
By Sid Smith Chicago Tribune arts critic
Published January 23, 2005, 4:33 PM CST
His generation produced edgier, more outlandish and more innovative comedians. But for nearly three decades, none of them got the nightly welcome bestowed on Johnny Carson, the amiable, boyish funnyman whose hosting of NBC's "The Tonight Show" came to be synonymous with bedtime for countless Americans. An icon, a living institution and familiar friend to so many he never met, Mr. Carson, who died early Sunday at age 79 at his home in Malibu, was that rare figure in show business, an industry so given to hyperbole: He was one star for whom just about every conceivable superlative fails.
"My reaction is with the rest of the country, in that I'm stunned," said Oprah Winfrey, who was told of Carson's death moments before addressing a gathering of television critics in Los Angeles on Sunday. "He has been one of the greats of our time." Carson's longtime sidekick, Ed McMahon, said Sunday that Carson was "like a brother to me." "Our 34 years of working together, plus the 12 years since then, created a friendship which was professional, family-like and one of respect and great admiration," McMahon said in a statement. "When we ended our run on 'The Tonight Show' and my professional life continued, whenever a big career decision needed to be made, I always got the OK from 'the boss.' " "All of us who came after are pretenders. We will not see the likes of him again," said David Letterman, host of "The Late Show with David Letterman." "Thank God for videotapes and DVDs. In this regard, he will always be around."
The comedian died peacefully, according to family members, who declined to give other details, except to add there will be no memorial service. NBC revealed that Mr. Carson, a longtime smoker, died from emphysema. Earlier this week, Mr. Carson's former producer Peter Lassally, now an executive at Letterman's production company, told reporters that Mr. Carson was still at it, occasionally writing monologue jokes for Letterman, in direct competition to Jay Leno, Mr. Carson's "Tonight Show" successor. "He's still interested in all of television," Lassally said of Mr. Carson on Tuesday. "When he reads the paper in the morning, he can think of five jokes right off the bat that he wishes he had an outlet for. He does once in a while send the jokes to Letterman. And Letterman has used Johnny's jokes in the monologue, and Johnny gets a big kick out of that."
"Clearly his voice had gotten quite thin," recalled Chicago writer Bill Zehme, whose 2002 Esquire story on Mr. Carson was one of the comedian's last interviews. "It was almost alarming. He didn't sound like Johnny, he sounded like Johnny's old uncle. That voice put so many billions of us to sleep. He was our great nocturnal comfort quilt. "There was something that only Johnny and Sinatra seemed to have - this inner power," Zehme added. "But, unlike Sinatra, Johnny immediately put you at ease. A gentleness and a kindness just radiated from him."
The man so often introduced by announcer Ed McMahon's bravura "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny" first took over the reins of the latenight NBC talkfest in October of 1962 and delivered his tearful fairwell May 22, 1992, a record in the annals of latenight network TV unlikely to be broken. Along the way, as his final guest, Bette Midler, sang, "We watched your hair turn slowly from gray to white."
We also followed the ups and downs of four marriages, some of them ending in costly breakups; grieved after the death of his son, Richard, in a 1991 car crash; and gaped at the endless procession of wanna-bes (Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin and Mr. Carson's prodégé-turned-rival Joan Rivers among them) who failed to unseat him. In his span, Mr. Carson slowly evolved from spunky arriviste, emceeing a 105-minute, often gutsy New York City live broadcast, into an avuncular fixture confidently helming a packaged, pared down, one-hour taping from Hollywood, where the show re-located in 1972. But for all the vicissitudes naturally occurring in his long reign, a reassuring constancy, not change, became Mr. Carson's most noteworthy trait, his graceful, imaginary golf swing at the end of each monologue just one of the comforting emblems of his unflappable steadiness. Through '60s assassinations and street revolution, '70s Watergate and gas lines and '80s recession and recovery, Mr. Carson endured as reliable, resilient and safe, as wholesome as the Midwestern background he alluded to so often.
Born John William Carson on Oct. 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, he was raised in Norfolk, Neb., where, at age 14, he performed his first professional act, a magic show at the Rotary Club, billing himself as "The Great Carsoni." (Magicians and their lore would often come up later on the broadcasts.) He appeared in plays in high school and wrote a humor column for the newspaper. He ushered at a movie theater before joining the Navy to serve in World War II. He started out in broadcasting as an announcer in radio in Lincoln, Neb., in 1948 and moved to television, writing for Red Skelton's show in the early '50s and then performing on camera as an impishly funny panelist on such daytime games shows as "To Tell the Truth." In 1958, he began hosting his own daytime entry, a half-hour called "Who Do You Trust?" But abiding viewer trust came only after Mr. Carson took over a job held previously by Steve Allen and Jack Paar, whose personal on-air melodramas Carson eschewed. Introduced on his first show by an earlier legend, Groucho Marx, Carson met with instant success, his reserved manner in sharp contrast to predecessor Paar's emotionalism, a restraint that encouraged hitherto hesitant political guests, including John F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, to visit.
In 1967, Time magazine proclaimed, "Carson is a master of the cozy pace and mood that he believes are appropriate for the muzzy midnight hours." The famed critic Kenneth Tynan put it, "He prevents us from being bored by making his own boredom funny - a daring feat of comic one-upmanship." He was canonized early on by the media as "The Prince of Latenight," a youthful sobriquet that faded only as he eased into midlife. But by then, the 1970s, Mr. Carson was established as a given, routinely thrashing all competition in the ratings and amusing Americans nightly with a remarkably unchanging catalogue of schtick, zookeeper stunts and buffoonish characters including "Carnac the Magnificent," a slapstick prognosticator.
Entertainment went through revolutions all around Carson, including on prime-time television - he lived through and outlasted such shifting tastes as "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," "The Gong Show," "All in the Family," and "The Bill Cosby Show." But the basics of his own show remained the same, from his often self-deprecating monologue - "Is this on?" he'd ask as he tapped the mike after a joke bombed - to perennial sidekick McMahon (who first teamed with Mr. Carson in 1958) and the short list of bandleaders: Skitch Henderson, Milton Delugg and, most of the time, Doc Severinsen. Mr. Carson's success helped them become famous, too, just as he used the variety and talk formats of the show to support the work of an entire generation of new comedians, including Leno and Letterman. Tom Dreesen, 62, a veteran comedian and Harvey native, got his first "Tonight Show" appearance seven years after he first took the stage in 1969. "In the eyes of America," he said, "if you weren't on 'The Tonight Show,' you weren't a stand-up comedian."
Other staples of "The Tonight Show" included "Stump the Band," a mock quiz bit; the Mighty Carson Art Players, who spoofed movies and TV; and a send-up of afternoon movies, complete with sexy Carol Wayne as "the matinee lady." Mr. Carson seemed to have a genius for how to keep his wide audience happy by staying in the middle. His comedy invariably avoided the mean. In 1987, hosting a guest from Fort Wayne, Ind., who brought her prized collection of oddly shaped potato chips, Mr. Carson, out of camera while she is distracted by McMahon, can be heard munching on a chip. She turns in horror, afraid he has downed one of her objet d'arts, only to see him reveal a bowl of ordinary chips he had hidden under his desk before airtime for the stunt. Johnny Carson par excellence: Momentarily biting and then, for a finish, cuddly and benign.
Year after year, Mr. Carson offered up laughs that, even when they walked the line, slyly never crossed it, maintaining an unshakeable love affair with the public as a likable, all-American innocent adept at harmless practical jokes. Mr. Carson also never waivered in his direct, uncomplicated approach, a master of the one-liner in a style he credited to vaudville and such idols as Jack Benny. Of his own latenight TV profession, he observed, "We're more effective than birth control pills." Or, "I was so naïve as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing."
The mighty and the mediocre came courting on his well-known couch, while he looked on from a desk that hid a carpet dotted with cigarette burns from his unfiltered Pall Malls. His vices - jokes about his and McMahon's drinking and his and their divorces were ongoing routines - now recall a rat pack era when men were men and boys simultaneously. Comic and onetime competitor Dick Cavett recalled Sunday, "I often called him for advice when awful things happened, like when Bobby Kennedy was shot, asking, 'How do you go on with a show?' He just said, people are there to be entertained. He often had really good advice, like jumping up and down right before you go on to make you appear more energetic."
For all its jollity (Mr. Carson mostly avoided political heat), "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," as it was officially called, made the occasional headline, most notably in 1969, when, in an early, eerie preview of reality TV, the program aired the actual wedding of falsetto-voiced singer, Tiny Tim, and his bride, "Miss Vickie." Truman Capote's on-air dissing of novelist Jacqueline Susann brought threats of lawsuits eventually avoided.
Mr. Carson's own marriages sometimes made headlines, too. Capote, a frequent guest on the show, died while visiting Mr. Carson's ex-wife, Joanne, and Mr. Carson's break-up from his third wife, Joanna Holland, made news because of the fortune involved. (She settled for $20 million in 1985.) There were other stories, including Mr. Carson's 1979 announcement he planned to leave NBC before the 1981 termination of his contract. (Instead, he stayed and re-signed.) His well-publicized, multi-million-dollar contracts came as a result of the fact that Mr. Carson made "Tonight" one of NBC's top moneymakers throughout his tenure. He also won four Emmy Awards, hosted the Academy Awards telecast from 1979-81 and, in 1992, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1993, he was a recipient of one of the Kennedy Center's lifetime achievement honors. By the '90s, the program itself was finally showing its age, victim of the canned interviews prepared by backstage writers, the substitute hosts thanks to Mr. Carson's increasing vacations and the promotional use of the show by stars touting their latest projects. Though still in first place, the ratings began to slip. Even so, his announcement that he planned to retire, uttered at NBC's affiliates convention in New York City in May of 1991, shocked network executives and the nation at large and set off a frenzied competition for the succession. The following spring, the show soared again, his final programs an ongoing swan song, jammed with great guests in as elegant an exit as any in TV history. As the clocked ticked toward the finish, Dianne Schuur summed up the nation's sentiments when she sang, "Every time we say goodbye, I die a little."
Though he promised in the final show to return, he didn't, except for a cameo here and there, declining invitations for prime time appearances while increasingly plagued by emphysema and other health woes. When he began as talk show host, in a television landscape made up of only three networks, few others were engaged in the practice. Now, thanks to cable and an explosion in the art itself, talk show hosts, even the comic variety alone, are innumerable. But Mr. Carson's achievement, his gentle intrusion into routine American life and consciousness, is unlikely to be duplicated. As Paar once graciously said to him, as a latter-day guest on the show, "No one will ever do what you've done again." Or, as Mr. Carson himself once joked of another celebrity who spawned a sea of imitators: "If life was fair, Elvis would be alive, and all the impersonators would be dead."
I had the chance to see a tonight show taping on one of my trips to California. You had to get to the studio early in the morning, wait in line for standy tickets and then come back about 4:00 - 4:30 p.m. and get in line again with no guarantee of getting in. The studio was so small in real life compared to what it looked like on T.V. It was a great experience. I remember one of the guests was a bubblegum chewing champion with the last name 'Montgomery' and she quipped she had "gum" in her name. It was also probably one of the first national appearances of Dwight Yoakam. At that time I had never heard of him. I distinctly remember the potato chip incident and Tiny Tim's Wedding. I hope they show reruns on his shows.
Published January 23, 2005, 4:33 PM CST
His generation produced edgier, more outlandish and more innovative comedians. But for nearly three decades, none of them got the nightly welcome bestowed on Johnny Carson, the amiable, boyish funnyman whose hosting of NBC's "The Tonight Show" came to be synonymous with bedtime for countless Americans. An icon, a living institution and familiar friend to so many he never met, Mr. Carson, who died early Sunday at age 79 at his home in Malibu, was that rare figure in show business, an industry so given to hyperbole: He was one star for whom just about every conceivable superlative fails.
"My reaction is with the rest of the country, in that I'm stunned," said Oprah Winfrey, who was told of Carson's death moments before addressing a gathering of television critics in Los Angeles on Sunday. "He has been one of the greats of our time." Carson's longtime sidekick, Ed McMahon, said Sunday that Carson was "like a brother to me." "Our 34 years of working together, plus the 12 years since then, created a friendship which was professional, family-like and one of respect and great admiration," McMahon said in a statement. "When we ended our run on 'The Tonight Show' and my professional life continued, whenever a big career decision needed to be made, I always got the OK from 'the boss.' " "All of us who came after are pretenders. We will not see the likes of him again," said David Letterman, host of "The Late Show with David Letterman." "Thank God for videotapes and DVDs. In this regard, he will always be around."
The comedian died peacefully, according to family members, who declined to give other details, except to add there will be no memorial service. NBC revealed that Mr. Carson, a longtime smoker, died from emphysema. Earlier this week, Mr. Carson's former producer Peter Lassally, now an executive at Letterman's production company, told reporters that Mr. Carson was still at it, occasionally writing monologue jokes for Letterman, in direct competition to Jay Leno, Mr. Carson's "Tonight Show" successor. "He's still interested in all of television," Lassally said of Mr. Carson on Tuesday. "When he reads the paper in the morning, he can think of five jokes right off the bat that he wishes he had an outlet for. He does once in a while send the jokes to Letterman. And Letterman has used Johnny's jokes in the monologue, and Johnny gets a big kick out of that."
"Clearly his voice had gotten quite thin," recalled Chicago writer Bill Zehme, whose 2002 Esquire story on Mr. Carson was one of the comedian's last interviews. "It was almost alarming. He didn't sound like Johnny, he sounded like Johnny's old uncle. That voice put so many billions of us to sleep. He was our great nocturnal comfort quilt. "There was something that only Johnny and Sinatra seemed to have - this inner power," Zehme added. "But, unlike Sinatra, Johnny immediately put you at ease. A gentleness and a kindness just radiated from him."
The man so often introduced by announcer Ed McMahon's bravura "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny" first took over the reins of the latenight NBC talkfest in October of 1962 and delivered his tearful fairwell May 22, 1992, a record in the annals of latenight network TV unlikely to be broken. Along the way, as his final guest, Bette Midler, sang, "We watched your hair turn slowly from gray to white."
We also followed the ups and downs of four marriages, some of them ending in costly breakups; grieved after the death of his son, Richard, in a 1991 car crash; and gaped at the endless procession of wanna-bes (Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin and Mr. Carson's prodégé-turned-rival Joan Rivers among them) who failed to unseat him. In his span, Mr. Carson slowly evolved from spunky arriviste, emceeing a 105-minute, often gutsy New York City live broadcast, into an avuncular fixture confidently helming a packaged, pared down, one-hour taping from Hollywood, where the show re-located in 1972. But for all the vicissitudes naturally occurring in his long reign, a reassuring constancy, not change, became Mr. Carson's most noteworthy trait, his graceful, imaginary golf swing at the end of each monologue just one of the comforting emblems of his unflappable steadiness. Through '60s assassinations and street revolution, '70s Watergate and gas lines and '80s recession and recovery, Mr. Carson endured as reliable, resilient and safe, as wholesome as the Midwestern background he alluded to so often.
Born John William Carson on Oct. 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, he was raised in Norfolk, Neb., where, at age 14, he performed his first professional act, a magic show at the Rotary Club, billing himself as "The Great Carsoni." (Magicians and their lore would often come up later on the broadcasts.) He appeared in plays in high school and wrote a humor column for the newspaper. He ushered at a movie theater before joining the Navy to serve in World War II. He started out in broadcasting as an announcer in radio in Lincoln, Neb., in 1948 and moved to television, writing for Red Skelton's show in the early '50s and then performing on camera as an impishly funny panelist on such daytime games shows as "To Tell the Truth." In 1958, he began hosting his own daytime entry, a half-hour called "Who Do You Trust?" But abiding viewer trust came only after Mr. Carson took over a job held previously by Steve Allen and Jack Paar, whose personal on-air melodramas Carson eschewed. Introduced on his first show by an earlier legend, Groucho Marx, Carson met with instant success, his reserved manner in sharp contrast to predecessor Paar's emotionalism, a restraint that encouraged hitherto hesitant political guests, including John F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, to visit.
In 1967, Time magazine proclaimed, "Carson is a master of the cozy pace and mood that he believes are appropriate for the muzzy midnight hours." The famed critic Kenneth Tynan put it, "He prevents us from being bored by making his own boredom funny - a daring feat of comic one-upmanship." He was canonized early on by the media as "The Prince of Latenight," a youthful sobriquet that faded only as he eased into midlife. But by then, the 1970s, Mr. Carson was established as a given, routinely thrashing all competition in the ratings and amusing Americans nightly with a remarkably unchanging catalogue of schtick, zookeeper stunts and buffoonish characters including "Carnac the Magnificent," a slapstick prognosticator.
Entertainment went through revolutions all around Carson, including on prime-time television - he lived through and outlasted such shifting tastes as "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," "The Gong Show," "All in the Family," and "The Bill Cosby Show." But the basics of his own show remained the same, from his often self-deprecating monologue - "Is this on?" he'd ask as he tapped the mike after a joke bombed - to perennial sidekick McMahon (who first teamed with Mr. Carson in 1958) and the short list of bandleaders: Skitch Henderson, Milton Delugg and, most of the time, Doc Severinsen. Mr. Carson's success helped them become famous, too, just as he used the variety and talk formats of the show to support the work of an entire generation of new comedians, including Leno and Letterman. Tom Dreesen, 62, a veteran comedian and Harvey native, got his first "Tonight Show" appearance seven years after he first took the stage in 1969. "In the eyes of America," he said, "if you weren't on 'The Tonight Show,' you weren't a stand-up comedian."
Other staples of "The Tonight Show" included "Stump the Band," a mock quiz bit; the Mighty Carson Art Players, who spoofed movies and TV; and a send-up of afternoon movies, complete with sexy Carol Wayne as "the matinee lady." Mr. Carson seemed to have a genius for how to keep his wide audience happy by staying in the middle. His comedy invariably avoided the mean. In 1987, hosting a guest from Fort Wayne, Ind., who brought her prized collection of oddly shaped potato chips, Mr. Carson, out of camera while she is distracted by McMahon, can be heard munching on a chip. She turns in horror, afraid he has downed one of her objet d'arts, only to see him reveal a bowl of ordinary chips he had hidden under his desk before airtime for the stunt. Johnny Carson par excellence: Momentarily biting and then, for a finish, cuddly and benign.
Year after year, Mr. Carson offered up laughs that, even when they walked the line, slyly never crossed it, maintaining an unshakeable love affair with the public as a likable, all-American innocent adept at harmless practical jokes. Mr. Carson also never waivered in his direct, uncomplicated approach, a master of the one-liner in a style he credited to vaudville and such idols as Jack Benny. Of his own latenight TV profession, he observed, "We're more effective than birth control pills." Or, "I was so naïve as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing."
The mighty and the mediocre came courting on his well-known couch, while he looked on from a desk that hid a carpet dotted with cigarette burns from his unfiltered Pall Malls. His vices - jokes about his and McMahon's drinking and his and their divorces were ongoing routines - now recall a rat pack era when men were men and boys simultaneously. Comic and onetime competitor Dick Cavett recalled Sunday, "I often called him for advice when awful things happened, like when Bobby Kennedy was shot, asking, 'How do you go on with a show?' He just said, people are there to be entertained. He often had really good advice, like jumping up and down right before you go on to make you appear more energetic."
For all its jollity (Mr. Carson mostly avoided political heat), "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," as it was officially called, made the occasional headline, most notably in 1969, when, in an early, eerie preview of reality TV, the program aired the actual wedding of falsetto-voiced singer, Tiny Tim, and his bride, "Miss Vickie." Truman Capote's on-air dissing of novelist Jacqueline Susann brought threats of lawsuits eventually avoided.
Mr. Carson's own marriages sometimes made headlines, too. Capote, a frequent guest on the show, died while visiting Mr. Carson's ex-wife, Joanne, and Mr. Carson's break-up from his third wife, Joanna Holland, made news because of the fortune involved. (She settled for $20 million in 1985.) There were other stories, including Mr. Carson's 1979 announcement he planned to leave NBC before the 1981 termination of his contract. (Instead, he stayed and re-signed.) His well-publicized, multi-million-dollar contracts came as a result of the fact that Mr. Carson made "Tonight" one of NBC's top moneymakers throughout his tenure. He also won four Emmy Awards, hosted the Academy Awards telecast from 1979-81 and, in 1992, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1993, he was a recipient of one of the Kennedy Center's lifetime achievement honors. By the '90s, the program itself was finally showing its age, victim of the canned interviews prepared by backstage writers, the substitute hosts thanks to Mr. Carson's increasing vacations and the promotional use of the show by stars touting their latest projects. Though still in first place, the ratings began to slip. Even so, his announcement that he planned to retire, uttered at NBC's affiliates convention in New York City in May of 1991, shocked network executives and the nation at large and set off a frenzied competition for the succession. The following spring, the show soared again, his final programs an ongoing swan song, jammed with great guests in as elegant an exit as any in TV history. As the clocked ticked toward the finish, Dianne Schuur summed up the nation's sentiments when she sang, "Every time we say goodbye, I die a little."
Though he promised in the final show to return, he didn't, except for a cameo here and there, declining invitations for prime time appearances while increasingly plagued by emphysema and other health woes. When he began as talk show host, in a television landscape made up of only three networks, few others were engaged in the practice. Now, thanks to cable and an explosion in the art itself, talk show hosts, even the comic variety alone, are innumerable. But Mr. Carson's achievement, his gentle intrusion into routine American life and consciousness, is unlikely to be duplicated. As Paar once graciously said to him, as a latter-day guest on the show, "No one will ever do what you've done again." Or, as Mr. Carson himself once joked of another celebrity who spawned a sea of imitators: "If life was fair, Elvis would be alive, and all the impersonators would be dead."
I had the chance to see a tonight show taping on one of my trips to California. You had to get to the studio early in the morning, wait in line for standy tickets and then come back about 4:00 - 4:30 p.m. and get in line again with no guarantee of getting in. The studio was so small in real life compared to what it looked like on T.V. It was a great experience. I remember one of the guests was a bubblegum chewing champion with the last name 'Montgomery' and she quipped she had "gum" in her name. It was also probably one of the first national appearances of Dwight Yoakam. At that time I had never heard of him. I distinctly remember the potato chip incident and Tiny Tim's Wedding. I hope they show reruns on his shows.
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