The Amazing, Disappearing Johnny Carson

For thirty years, from October 1, 1962, to May 22, 1992, Johnny Carson presided over American popular culture from the 11:30 P.M. throne of “The Tonight Show.” At its peak, the show was regularly watched by seventeen million people. (The current late-night ratings winner, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” averages about 2.5 million viewers.) Together with his producers, Carson developed the format that network late-night talk shows would employ from then on: a monologue of topical jokes followed by a desk piece, and then a mix of guests and the occasional skit to round out the night. His monologue, which moved like a newspaper from major stories to sports, the arts, and human interest, and which never contained more than a few jokes on any one subject, became the template for all late-night opening monologues that followed.

Original ideas were not Carson’s forte: “The Johnny Carson Show,” the only major TV program he tried to launch from scratch, quickly failed, and after leaving “Tonight” he was unwilling, or perhaps, unable, to come up with a follow-up. But, as a host, he was an innovator. His style—both sartorial and, at least on camera, interpersonal—represented a new kind of cool: relaxed but quick-witted, generous but judgmental, controlled but possessed of an anarchic streak that he could deploy whenever bored or presented with second-rate material, or whenever anything on “Tonight” went wrong. His easygoing exterior belied a deft improvisatory mind that could take the temperature of the room, the guest, and the viewer all at once, course-correcting with breathtaking speed. As Kenneth Tynan noted when profiling Carson for this magazine, he learned early on that his real scene partner was not his sidekick, Ed McMahon, or his guests, or even the studio audience, but, rather, the cameras broadcasting him into America’s homes. He was so successful because his asides to the camera, his quick looks and devastating one-liners and wry smiles, enlisted viewers into a kind of conspiracy. Guests appeared on the show to promote their work, but Carson used them, sometimes quite coldly, as a vehicle to get to the millions watching at home. Fail to impress, and you’d find your allotted six minutes whittled down to two as Carson cut you off to go to commercials. One guest compared the experience to “facing death.”

Another major Carson legacy, besides the above, is the deliberate dumbing down of American television. As the comedian Mort Sahl told Tynan, “Carson’s assumption is that the audience is dumb, so you mustn’t do difficult things. . . . He never takes serious risks. His staff will only book people who will make him look artistically potent.” Carson, who was initially thought of as not intellectual enough for the job of hosting “Tonight,” was forthcoming about wanting no “controversy” on the show. The avoidance of controversy extended to politics; under Carson, who was liberal in his views, the monologues would be bipartisan in their targets, the content of the interviews studiously apolitical. This was a marked contrast from his sometime rival Dick Cavett, who often hosted in-depth conversations about ideas with guests, and was so open in his opposition to the Vietnam War that Nixon mentioned him in the White House tapes. By the time Tynan wrote about Carson, “The Tonight Show” was unlikely to convey a single idea that the audience did not already hold, and Carson had destroyed Cavett in the ratings.

Carson was influential in a third way, and that is with his choices of guests. To get a booking on “Tonight” was a career-making experience for a young comic, particularly if the host gestured to you to sit down on his couch after your set and kibbitz for a bit. The actor and comedian Drew Carey was so moved when describing the experience of his first appearance on “Tonight,” for PBS’s “American Masters,” that he teared up on camera.

And yet, for all this, Carson’s presence in American culture has been strangely ephemeral. Tynan noted that few outside the United States knew who he was in 1978, at the peak of his influence. Today, thirty-two years after his retirement, the number of people in this country who are aware of him is dwindling. As an experiment, I recently asked two friends—both writing teachers—to inquire of their twentysomething students what they knew about Carson. One friend happened to be workshopping a student’s short story in which the Carson-era “Tonight Show” figured prominently, but no one in his class apart from the story’s author had any idea who Carson was prior to reading it. The other friend struck out completely. Not one of her charges had ever heard Carson’s name.

When Carson retired, it was unthinkable that he would vanish into the mists of history within a generation. He had been crowning new stars, charming exotic animals, and soothing Americans to sleep night after night for three decades. So essential was he to the culture that when he moved “Tonight” from New York to Los Angeles, in 1972, it was like Peter the Great’s shifting of Russia’s capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. Just as Peter’s moving of his court transformed Moscow into a backwater for out-of-favor nobles, Carson’s helped to usher out the era when the Big Apple could claim to have cultural parity with Hollywood. Carson’s demand, during contract negotiations with NBC, in 1980, that “Tonight” ’s running time be cut to an hour led to the creation of a new time slot, with Carson getting a major say in its programming. Two years later, his protégé David Letterman was appointed to fill it. When Carson stepped down, he refused to nominate a successor; the resulting crisis led to the network late-night landscape we have today, with three duelling shows, all of which look an awful lot like “Tonight.”

Carson might have lasted longer in the public imagination had he not so deliberately retreated into the shadows. After he left “Tonight,” he shot a few cameos on shows such as “The Simpsons” and “Cheers,” called in the occasional monologue joke for Letterman to use, and contributed a couple of short humor pieces to this magazine, but never attempted any kind of second act. Unlike other elder statesmen who spend their late careers managing their legacies, Carson apparently didn’t care much about the history books, preferring instead to sail his yacht and learn Swahili. So happy was he to be out of the public eye that he granted only a single post-retirement interview, to the journalist Bill Zehme. Zehme, a writer for Esquire, had written about Carson many times and had taken to dropping by his office simply to see if he could catch a glimpse of the abdicated king. Those visits turned into a lunch, and that lunch turned into “Johnny Carson: The Man Who Retired,” which appeared in Esquire in June of 2002. For a profile of a man who does very little all day, it is remarkably fun reading, filled with the sentence-level panache for which Zehme, a self-styled heir to Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism, was known. The piece’s central drama is not any dilemma in Carson’s life—it’s unclear whether Carson at this point had any—but, rather, what it feels like to eat lunch with your aging idol. In one of the piece’s most powerful passages, Zehme documents the changes in Carson’s speaking voice since his retirement. “Carson’s voice is different now,” he writes.

It has climbed in register, sounds a little cottony, and it throws you for a second or two. It is, after all, an underplayed instrument, a reed long out of practice. Through seven presidential administrations, his edgy rasp essayed the perfect pitch of national incredulity, always with subtle phrasing and precise shading. Like Sinatra, he knew just how to swing slightly ahead of the beat, seemingly without effort, and make the music of his monologues feel definitive. (The Carson version of events was the version you danced to first.) Once his chords ceased flexing over public air, they began to husk up, catching friends by surprise.

The passage is made all the more poignant when one recalls that Carson died, less than three years later, from emphysema.

After Carson’s death, Zehme began working on a biography of him, but the book progressed slowly. Zehme, like the historian narrator of Don DeLillo’s “Libra,” became so diligent in his Carson obsession that, rather than finishing his book, he collected binders and binders of material ranging from the important (interview transcripts) to the meaningless (an ugly necktie from Carson’s clothing line). In 2013, with three-fourths of the manuscript finished, Zehme was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer. From then on, until his death, in 2023, he set the book aside in order to focus on survival, both physical and financial. When Zehme died, it seemed that his Carson bio, the work to which he had dedicated so much of himself, would never be published. Instead, Zehme’s friend and former assistant Mike Thomas came in to finish the job.

Thomas, the author of quite a good biography of the comedian Phil Hartman, is a gifted writer in his own right, and he was the natural choice to take over the project—he first contacted Zehme, whose work he had read since high school, via a fan letter, and served as a kind of amanuensis to him for many years, helping to organize transcripts and do research, and working on biographies of Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman. But, perhaps because Zehme’s style cannot be imitated, or because Thomas had to work fast, or because he loved and idolized Zehme just as Zehme loved and idolized Johnny Carson, he appears to have left Zehme’s work completely untouched, and focussed solely on writing the final chapters of the story.

The resulting book, “Carson the Magnificent,” is an exquisite corpse. The first three-quarters is chronologically scrambled and written in Zehme’s fevered post-Tom Wolfe style, filled with parentheticals, italics, digressions, and sentences that rival Victor Hugo’s in length. Then, at the beginning of the sixth chapter, the book becomes a competently told, straightforward biography of the end of Carson’s life. What emerges from all this is less a portrait of Carson than a portrait of Zehme’s obsession with Carson. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Writers’ obsessions can illuminate their subjects in ways that more dispassionate approaches can’t. But, in this instance, Zehme’s compulsive overwriting and anti-dramatic priorities settle over Carson like a fog.

The biography’s theme is that Carson is essentially unknowable. As Zehme wrote in an e-mail to Michael Barrie, a writer for “Tonight” during the Carson years, his quarry “vexes me in countless ways . . . he was—like I need to tell you—the ultimate Interior Man, large and lively only when on camera. He was the inscrutable national monument on constant full view, ever occluded nonetheless.” In medieval England, the King had, as the historian Ernst Kantorowicz once explained, two bodies. There was his body natural—the one that loved, and ate, and suffered, and died—and then there was the body politic, the eternal guardian and embodiment of the English people. As many writers, beginning with Tynan, have noted, Carson the King of Late Night appears to have been similarly divided. There was the body natural, which was often neglectful, arrogant, shy, and, when drunk, impossible to deal with, and then there was the body television, which was charming, graceful, comforting, beloved.

The shark fin of Carson’s dark side regularly breaches the surface of “Carson the Magnificent,” which reveals its subject to have been a strict and absent father and a rage-prone alcoholic. Carson physically abused at least one wife, lacked fidelity both marital and interpersonal, and carried grudges with such fervor that he complained to Barbara Walters, in an interview in 1983, about things his classmates had scrawled in his high-school yearbook forty years earlier. It is clear in reading the biography that Carson, regardless of the size of a slight, did not like to be crossed. He once tried to fire Ed McMahon for stepping on one of his punch lines, and never forgave his substitute host Joan Rivers after she decided to launch her own late-night talk show on a rival network. But Zehme remains too besotted by Carson to reconcile these disparate pieces of the man in any meaningful way.

One problem complicating Zehme’s bid to solve the Carson mystery is that he often dwells on odd irrelevancies. “Carson the Magnificent” is fewer than three hundred pages long, and Zehme spends nine of them on the lunch that forms the centerpiece of “Johnny Carson: The Man Who Retired,” and four on the pantomimed golf swing with which Carson ended his nightly monologue. There’s also surprisingly little of the court intrigue that one would expect from the story of Carson’s life and career. What Kremlinology can be found in “Carson the Magnificent” is perfunctory. Zehme emphasizes for the reader the importance of Carson’s early producer Art Stark, a mentor who first worked with Johnny on “Who Do You Trust?” Carson’s cue-card man Michael Zannella testifies that Stark “was The Tonight Show . . . he was the last producer who was a peer with Carson. He created that show as it would come to be known, and laid the foundation.” In 1967, Carson fired Stark from “Tonight.” Zehme never says why, and never delves into this moment rich with Oedipal significance beyond a brief quote from Stark’s widow about how sad it all was.

Zehme tries to nudge readers toward charitable interpretations of Carson’s misbehavior whenever he can. Carson, he reveals, took half of Paul Anka’s royalties for the “Tonight Show” theme, because Carson wrote lyrics for it that were never used. But Zehme lets him off the hook, writing that after Anka agreed to the arrangement—a choice he doesn’t seem particularly broken up about—Carson felt it “ethically essential . . . and also a little bit ego enhancing” to make sure he contributed to the track by recording the very brief drum solo that kicks the theme off. Worse, Zehme narrates Carson’s abuse of his first wife, Jody Morrill Wolcott, entirely from the point of view of his subject, whom he portrays as forlorn and confused: “Occasionally he would wake the next day to discover that some such havoc had bruised the flesh of his sons’ mother. And, in those moments of grim reckoning, nobody could presume to fathom the depths of mortification and self-disgust that metastasized inside of him.”

Zehme’s goal is to locate some key that would unlock Carson’s mystique. For biographers, these tend to lie in childhood, but Carson’s was boring. He grew up in the interwar years in Iowa and Nebraska, a middle child; his father was a manager at a power company and his mother stayed at home. There’s not even a narratively rich youthful trauma, although his mother was so withholding with praise that she downplayed his gifts in interviews after he became famous. The closest Zehme gets to solving Carson is in explicating his love of sleight of hand and stage magic, which began in his discovery at age twelve of Professor Hoffman’s “Modern Magic,” and continued through a lifelong membership to Hollywood’s Magic Castle and the frequent booking of magicians on his show. Zehme convincingly uses Hoffman’s guidelines for aspiring magicians (“Don’t make a parade of dexterity. . . . Don’t force yourself to be funny”) as a guide to Carson’s personality both on and off camera. But what drew Carson to this kind of misdirection and prestidigitation to begin with? This is the question that Zehme cannot answer; instead, he flings a dictionary at Carson in the hope that something profound will emerge.

The way he was, was not unlike a flawlessly designed winking performance hologram—from the start of public life especially wherever stages or microphones or cameras were near. Which is to say, to some degree, he was the man who wasn’t there, except that he was always there, night after night, making nationally televised mirth—and that excluded appearances in actual person, as he regularly navigated his popular nightclub act to various physical corners of the land. Despite his shrugging claims to the contrary, he would be meticulously aware of what pieces of himself he projected forth and what separate salient truths he would keep tucked away.

Setting aside the meaninglessness of the opening image—what is a “winking performance hologram”?—the sentences struggle under the burden of dependent clauses and extra words, all trying to get at the simple point that Carson carefully selected what parts of himself he allowed to be seen. Zehme is so dedicated to the idea of Carson being a Great Mystery that he cannot entertain the possibility that he may not have been all that complicated. Carson’s desire for control and solitude will be very familiar to readers who know dry drunks. His inability to see women as fully human, and his regular mistreatment of them, is hardly unique among men of his era, either.

Thomas is far more comfortable with the biographer’s traditional role. Instead of long passages interpreting Carson’s hypervisible invisibility, Thomas tells us how he lived, the choices that he made, the people he talked to, and what he said. The last quarter of the book moves swiftly through the end of Carson’s second marriage, the two that followed it, an infamous D.U.I. arrest, the death of one of his children, his elevation to elder statesman of comedy, and his decision to retire. Unburdened of any need to solve the mystery of Carson’s persona—and burdened by the very real ticking clock of an impatient publishing industry—Thomas is so fleet-footed and clear that it made me wish that he had betrayed his mentor a little bit and cleaned up the rest of the book.

“Carson the Magnificent” is thus a hall of mirrors of devotion—Zehme’s to Carson, and Thomas’s to Zehme. By the end, I felt lost in the fun house with the authors, staring at curvilinear glass, trying to make out the face of their subject. The essential drama of the book is not the drama of Carson’s life but, rather, the drama of the authors trying to rescue Carson and his legacy from the host’s essentially closed-off nature. In the end, they, and we, are defeated. Carson, whose first love was stage magic, has made himself disappear again. ♦