He-e-e-e-re’s Johnny!

Bill Zehme, the longtime star writer at Esquire, veteran of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, and the author of terrific biographies of Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman, was a unique chronicler of stars who dedicated much of his dogged career to pursuing a biography of Johnny Carson. 

Charm and wiles were crucial to Zehme’s success. (Cancer took his life in 2023 at 64.) With his leonine mane, round glasses, endearing countenance, and inexhaustible determination, he had a way of ingratiating himself to the famous. “It’s hard to explain how one can miss a journalist so much,” Sharon Stone said after Zehme’s premature death. “Bill was a wonderful person, a delicate, delicious, open, deep, robust feast of a human.” 

As a student at Loyola University Chicago in the 1970s, Zehme wrote a lengthy profile of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner for the student newspaper and jimmied his way into the company’s offices off the Loop to plant copies in the elevator lobbies. As he hoped, executives alerted “Hef,” who loved the piece. The stunt earned the savvy young reporter an invitation to the Playmate of the Year bash, reward enough for many a male college student. But Zehme parlayed it into an invite to Hef’s famed bacchanalian Los Angeles mansion. 

While in California, the rangy student scribe sought a coveted ticket to a taping of The Tonight Show, then hosted by Carson and the biggest thing in late-night television. Zehme’s parents devoured the show nightly and he had loved it as a kid, listening when he should have been asleep. NBC security turned Zehme away, despite his forged press pass. Still, he pursued America’s elusive late-night host for decades, eventually winning backstage access to Carson’s final shows in 1992 that held America in sad enthrall, ending the entertainer’s 30-year run of putting the nation to bed with his top-of-the-ratings 11:30 p.m. show.

For decades, Zehme sought time with Carson, all the while dashing off books,
biographical and ghostwritten, and incisive magazine profiles of Robin Williams,
Madonna, Tom Hanks, and other giants of popular culture. Like Ahab, he didn’t live to get his white whale. But if he didn’t complete the book before its posthumous publication, he won over Carson and won his blessing to talk to everyone in the entertainer’s life. The result? Carson the Magnificent is not only his richly reported look of America’s enigmatic host, but also a glorious romp through a lost era in entertainment and American life before the nation’s media and social fabric frayed. Zehme’s friend and colleague Mike Thomas, the Chicago Tribune feature writer and author of books about Second City Comedy Theatre and Phil Hartman, finished the reporting and writing on his behalf. Their triumph is a great read.

As you read about what an elusive paradox Carson was, you can see why it took so long, even accounting for Zehme’s decade-long illness. The Nebraska-raised Carson was among America’s best-known persons between October 1962, when he took over The Tonight Show just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and 1992, as Bill Clinton wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president. Carson didn’t consent to many in-depth interviews during his decades in the limelight, let alone the sustained conversations required for a book that’s better than the ones that preceded it, including a collection of New York Post stories by the then journalist, later filmmaker and auteur Nora Ephron. After Carson’s Tonight Show run had ended and he was working out of the small Santa Monica offices of his production company down the road from his Malibu mansion, Zehme pressed and charmed him. Their conversations made the book possible because Carson opened up about family, fears, and fame.

The paradox about Carson was that he was so little known at the very same time he was so well known. He was much more universally recognized than standoffish but iconic figures in the arts such as Marlene Dietrich or the hermit-like J. D. Salinger. Carson so dominated the after-your-late-local-news time slot that he kept the late-night comedy genre to himself for decades. None of the other networks would try to race against NBC’s thoroughbred. And yet, at times Carson revealed himself on air—joking about his four marriages; choking up over the loss of his second of three sons, who died when his vehicle hit a barrier on the Pacific Coast Highway; and alluding to the nine-figure wealth he had achieved. (Carson joked about being just a regular guy who relaxed at home in a hammock—until he asked the butlers holding it to let him down.) He did hardly any press, just a couple of in-depth serious interviews, including with Rolling Stone in 1979 but not with Zehme. Even to those around him, he was famously elusive. 

Carson was distant from his sons and his wives; three spouses sued for divorce. He smoked too much, which eventually killed him with emphysema. And he drank; easily soused on a little liquor—vodka tonics were a favorite—he could be mean. He overcame the booze for periods. But even sober, he was a loner, more comfortable coming home after an afternoon taping at NBC Studios in Burbank, shutting the doors, donning headphones, and playing his beloved drum set to jazz than seeing his kids or wife or even going out. (With the singer-songwriter Paul Anka, he had a writing credit for the brass-heavy, famed, and instantly recognizable Tonight Show theme song.) He was happier gazing at the Pacific from his palatial home atop Point Dume and playing tennis—singles—or tooling in his series of progressively larger yachts, the last one a 130-footer named the Serengeti. Speaking of which … His animal acts, a corny staple in the hands of bad entertainers, were wildly popular, like his pregnant pause before jumping into the arms of his on-air burly sidekick, Ed McMahon, when a baby lion roared at him. An autodidact, Carson read everything and even taught himself Swahili. There’s film of him entertaining locals on the African plains doing comic bits in their tongue. Even with tribespeople, he was more comfortable performing. Otherwise, to quote the sociologist giant of the era, he was David Riesman’s “inner-directed” man. 

Why does Carson still matter? First, he dominated an era when America, always a diverse and roiling continent-wide nation, had something resembling a unified national culture: three TV networks and maybe a half-dozen mass magazines like Life, Time, and Reader’s Digest. The showman so dominated late-night TV that what was on “Carson”—everyone called it that rather than The Tonight Show—was the buzz around the office coffeepot the next day, just as Walter Cronkite dominated evening news. This made Carson the biggest star in a way stars can no longer shine, with rare exceptions like Taylor Swift.

I’m aware as a New Jersey suburban kid—growing up in the 1970s and listening to Carson through my parents’ bedroom wall, turning the TV set off as they invariably conked out before the show ended at 12:30—that such nostalgia must seem like something from the Pleistocene Era to twentysomethings today. Indeed, I was about as far in time from Charlie Chaplin and silent films as they are from peak Carson. 

Carson’s gifts were his brand of comedy—reserved, cool, and self-effacing. He was never funnier than when he came back from a joke that bombed, with a stare that made the audience empathize with and laugh at his predicament. His other great ability was to spot a generation of talent, from David Letterman to Jerry Seinfeld. His reserved, understated style suited Marshall McLuhan’s much-discussed “cool” medium of television the way John F. Kennedy did. He forged topical comedy on television, unlike escapist fare from then-contemporary network giants such as Ed Sullivan, who dominated Sunday nights the way Carson owned Monday through Friday. From his late 30s to his late 60s, Carson was impossibly likable. America felt it knew him. 

Carson made comedy not just funny but hip. He was a suave host, handsome, known as a lady’s man not just because of his myriad nuptials but also because of his charming, flirtatious ways on camera and, more self-destructively, his constant affairs. Carson wasn’t the first comedian to do politics, but he gave America its craving for the political and topical, cranking out bipartisan jabs about Spiro Agnew or Ted Kennedy or on-the-news issues like “smog,” the ecological threat of its day. 

His cool comedy was never sectional, always universal. His first night on the air in 1962 was telling. The premiere was broadcast live—this is before it was taped in the afternoon as in Zehme’s day and how late-night comedy is still “recorded live” today. It was the night a riotous white mob met James Meredith, the first “Negro” student at the University of Mississippi. In a sly joke that tacitly expressed empathy for the civil rights pioneer and didn’t blatantly offend the still large segregationist section of his spanking-new audience, Carson wondered how the lily-white Ole Miss campus would treat the Jolly Green Giant if the canned vegetable mascot tried to enroll. It was funnier than it reads but emblematic of a comedy that walked the line.

That said, Carson was risqué within the bounds of network TV, still regulated by the Federal Communications Commission before standards loosened and largely unregulated cable TV proliferated. In one bit, the actor Ed Ames, who played the Cherokee buddy “Mingo” on television’s Daniel Boone, was tossing an ax to demonstrate how he didn’t use a stuntman and actually knew how to throw a tomahawk. (This was 1965, and Ames was not Native American; such were the times.) The baritone-turned-actor hit his target—a silhouette sketch of the human body on a big piece of wood—directly in the crotch. It took a few seconds for laughter to build as the studio audience, some sitting at a distance without the TV viewer’s up-close and direct shot, appreciated the hilarity of the blade’s entry. Carson, known for being unafraid of silences, waited a few seconds to let the laughter build and, still more, to subside before delivering the perfect riposte to the ax-meets-penis toss: “I didn’t even know you were Jewish.” The allusion to circumcision became one of his best-known spontaneous sidesplitters. 

Carson’s famous reserve has been attributed to his midwestern roots—like the old joke about the man, happily married for decades, who almost told his wife he loved her—but his demons have been attributed to his mother, including by Zehme. Born in Corning, Iowa, in 1925 and raised in Norfolk, Nebraska, Carson didn’t have a miserable boyhood. It was largely happy, in a small town where his father worked for the power company, but his mother’s withholding did scar him. Ruth Hook Carson could be outgoing, but she was also brutal about not wanting to have had two boys, because male children were dirty and feral. When Carson graced the cover of Time in 1967, the article’s author shrewdly recorded a Carson monologue and played it for Ruth to gauge her reaction. She declared it was not funny. Yet years later, Zehme reports, Carson discovered that his often condescending mother had proudly kept many newspaper clips about her boy.

If Carson’s mother was his Rosebud—the inscrutable force behind his fame, success, and turmoil—magic was his salvation. He sent away for a magician’s manual as a boy, and thus was born an obsession. As a kid in Norfolk, the skinny boy went by the name of “The Great Carsoni,” and did shows at the Rotary Club for $3. He performed in college, and the prestidigitation obsession never ended. In the film of his 1991 onstage meeting with network affiliates, where he surprised the brass at 30 Rock with his announcement that he’d leave the following year, he can be seen practicing card tricks. 

Carson had the self-awareness to know that performing gave his shy self the confidence he needed. He could control his world onstage. Meeting new people, dealing with his wives and kids—the man with everything could be at sea. Even as he came to the end of his life, dying in 2005 at 79, Carson was distant from his much younger wife—a stunning blonde whom he had met when she had strolled past his beachside home. (The star had one up high in Malibu and one at sea level.) He invited her in for a glass of wine. It was his most placid marriage because she accepted that he was a fully formed loner, unable to change. 

That Carson faced no threats in the 11:30 time slot until the 1980s—when Fox’s Arsenio Hall Show picked up younger viewers and ABC News’s Nightline won some affluent ones—would have seemed unlikely when Carson started in showbiz. His first break came in Omaha radio, where he hosted a talk show, followed by a moderately successful run as a game show host. Then came a stint writing for the very popular comedian Red Skelton’s television show, including a surprise appearance after the old vaudevillian injured himself in rehearsal that drew more of Hollywood’s attention. But he almost didn’t make it. A short-lived Johnny Carson Show on CBS was canceled after 39 weeks before he got the nod to replace Jack Paar as host of NBC’s Tonight Show. 

But Carson was a hit from the beginning, thanks to the magical sleight of hand that made it all look easy. He brought along McMahon, his sidekick at ABC, and their chemistry worked. They modified the guest format, interviewing one at a time on a swivel seat next to Johnny’s desk, the better to turn toward the host. As new guests arrived, everyone slid down the couch, giving the oft-stilted talk show format more of a party atmosphere. Carson’s trademark golf club swing was improvised on the first show but proved a brilliant nightly tee-off. 

It would be easy to wax nostalgic about the Carson Era in American life, when there was something closer to a national conversation than our current riven shoutfest. The existence of today’s much-lamented atomized, siloed media eco-systems—isolating and self-reinforcing—means that conservatives find comic relief in Fox News’s version of a late-night talk show, Gutfeld! And liberals can talk about Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert’s Trump bashing the next day. 

The Carson approach is better not because it’s bipartisan but because it’s funnier, especially in our day. Even if one is sympathetic to anti-MAGA humor, it’s a monotonous diet after a while. Those who avoided a firm political stance, like Carson’s progeny—Jay Leno (who is out of fashion with the cool kids) and David Letterman (forever considered edgy)—kept their own politics largely offstage. The taciturn midwesterner Carson had the loud plaid jacket of a Governor Reagan–era Corvette or Lincoln driver, which he was, but no one knew how he voted. The hyper-discretion was suited to a time when talking about politics in private life or in public was considered impolite. In that sense, Carson’s reticence to share his politics—even Zehme doesn’t crack this code—made his comedy better. The same is true for Chris Rock, who is a Democrat but takes enough whacks at “wokeness” to keep the audience guessing. The dad-friendly comedy of Jerry Seinfeld or my friend Jim Gaffigan (who, with his mix of midwestern bonhomie, makes him the perfect Tim Walz on Saturday Night Live) avoids politics, making their comedy an escape from a bruised body politic. The monotony of the one-note political comedian means that Colbert, no matter how genial and smart, can be monotonous.

Carson offered lessons for politicians, too. When he did his last show in 1992, sitting not at his iconic desk but on a stool in front of his trademark technicolor stage curtains, he thanked the audience, saying that he might reappear in their living rooms and bedrooms if he found something else he’d like to do and was worthy of them. But he never did, despite setting up that production company in Santa Monica. A 1994 appearance on David Letterman’s show reading a Top Ten list was his last television appearance. Letterman was clearly his favorite over Leno, although Carson stayed out of the succession, not offering counsel to NBC. (The executives did not seek his advice, either, which he considered an affront.) Carson, the loner, didn’t need showbiz or anything else public-facing to fill the gap for the next nine years until he died—tell-all memoirs, lucrative endorsements, corporate speeches, or Vegas residencies. He knew he was going out as number one late at night, and he didn’t need to stay past his prime or do anything else public; sailing the yacht and lunch with Zehme and others was enough. 

Joe Biden, at 81, needed to be nudged and prodded off the stage. As for the 78-year-old Republican nominee, he is all rage, private and public. In late September, he mocked the liberal comics of late night, Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel. “Those three guys—they’re being blown away by Gutfeld,” Trump said, adding that “they’re all dying.” Then the former president looked back fondly on an earlier time, which is very on brand for him. “Where is Johnny Carson? Bring back Johnny … these three guys are so bad.” 

But Carson himself took shots at Trump, as a womanizer, self-promoter, and petty child of privilege. He once deadpanned that a game show Trump came up with, Trump Card, would include an “eviction of the week.” It was an apolitical joke about a pre-political Trump that landed. Unlike the Donald, Johnny welcomed guests and elevated them, whether they were lefty and prickly like Gore Vidal, or tricky and conservative like Richard Nixon, or an insult comic like his friend Don Rickles. He teased them, laughed with them. Trump doesn’t elevate anyone for long. All too often, his most fawning acolytes end up on his enemies list, which is miles longer than the one Nixon penned. Johnny Carson didn’t have enemies. There was the family he disappointed, the flashes of anger owing to drink. But cruelty was never part of his act.

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