Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  In those days, Carson always picked up the check when we went out (later in our relationship, we alternated paying the tab, with total disregard for whether the previous check had been for two burgers or dinner for eight). This was true everywhere but Danny’s, where we ate at least once a week, and where Danny always picked up the tab, something he did for his favorite customers. Of course, Johnny would in turn always leave a few hundred dollars on the table as a “tip.” It was a game they both enjoyed. The first time I accompanied Johnny to the restaurant, Danny told me, “As long as Johnny comes to my joint, he will always be my guest. He did me a real good turn two years ago and now the same goes for you.” I was stunned and Johnny said, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” The next time I went to Danny’s, I was with Judy for our anniversary. I was quite prepared to pay the check when, true to his word, Danny picked up my tab. I often wondered how many of the celebrities in the photos on his walls were in his free-meal program.

  Some years later, after we had moved to California, I had heard that Danny was having some tax or financial problems. I mentioned this to Johnny, who then instructed his accountant to send Danny a check for $100,000. “Just tell Danny that it’s a small repayment for all the meals that he bought for me over the years.”

  That gesture showed Johnny in all his complexity: he was often generous, frequently on a grand scale, but he often had trouble responding when the people around him needed him for something, particularly emotional support. And in the same way that he often had trouble accepting compliments and praise from people, he sometimes had trouble expressing himself, and he would delegate even his great acts of kindness to intermediaries. In this case, Danny got to thank Johnny personally, and he broke down in tears as he did so.

  And in between tennis and dinner? Yes, almost all of that time was absorbed with Johnny’s many issues as well. His divorce, his business dealings, and many matters associated with his Tonight Show contract took up most of my office hours. Along with the apparel deal, Werblin had placed Carson in a number of other arrangements that were far more rewarding to Werblin than to Carson, and they had to be undone. There was Raritan to button up, and contracts to execute that covered the many personal appearances Johnny made for badly needed cash. My practice and my life were subsumed by all things Johnny. We talked about everything—women, children, wives, parents. After The Godfather debuted in 1972, Johnny would refer to me with that great new old word we learned from that movie—consigliere. It wasn’t a perfect term for me: the disparity in our ages and stature in the world made me chary of fully asserting a lawyer’s customary authority and bluntness. And yet we both realized that in order to meet my responsibility, I would have to advise him candidly. We agreed that we should always speak as equals on all matters of lawyer and client. This wasn’t easy for me at first, but I got better at it.

  And so we embarked on a complicated relationship. We were friends, but it wasn’t a friendship of equals. We were business associates, and although we were very friendly ones, in any business arrangement the question “What have you done for me lately?” is never long out of the room. But we were close, and what bonded us was trust. Carson had been looking for, and had really needed to find, someone he could trust—trust to be competent, trust to protect his interests, trust to be on his side. And the more he trusted me, the more trustworthy he found me to be.

  One day early on, I learned that Rick Carson, the second of the three sons Johnny had with his first wife, Jody, had been locked up in the military psychiatric ward of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. Rick had joined the navy in hopes of impressing his father, who had served in that branch, but whatever payoff he earned was soon overwhelmed by reality. Stationed in a desolate Alaskan outpost, the twenty-year-old soon became bored, lonely, and isolated. He began drinking heavily and exhibiting suicidal tendencies. The navy shipped him to New York to determine if he was fit to serve. He was at risk of being dishonorably discharged. Or killing himself.

  Johnny was, of course, very concerned about Rick, but he didn’t want to go see him. “Think of the media attention!” he said. “It would be a circus, and it would just piss the navy off. And it would mortify Rick. I can’t see how this wouldn’t end up doing him more harm than good.” This seemed like a colossal rationalization to me, but whatever the real reason was, I could see that Johnny didn’t want to see his son in Bellevue Hospital, and so when Johnny asked me to handle the matter, I agreed. But this is not the sort of thing they teach you how to handle in law school.

  Every day for most of the next two weeks, I passed through the wrought-iron gates and the ominous brown brick walls of Bellevue to visit Rick. On the first few occasions, he was confined to his bed, restrained and sedated. It wasn’t until the third or fourth visit that I could speak to Rick without him being medicated. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were the conditions afflicting the young Carson, along with an awful case of the hiccups, and Thorazine was the treatment of choice. The young man (although he was not much younger than I) was scared and overwhelmed by his surroundings. Bellevue was actually part of the New York University Medical School, but every New Yorker knew it as an intake facility for the mentally disturbed. Rick was being held in a lockdown facility, and a more depressing place one could not imagine. Each day I would bring magazines and food, and gradually he began to trust me. He admitted that he had failed to follow orders and had then begun to drink heavily. Unfortunately, both of his parents were drinkers. He denied the navy’s contention that he had attempted suicide, maintaining that he had only faked the attempts. He had no explanation for the bandages on his left wrist.

  “Can I see my dad?” he asked.

  “Your dad thinks if he came, there would be a million cameras, and it would turn into a big publicity spectacle that would just impede your recovery.” I was speaking the truth—that is what Johnny thought—but I don’t know if I was mustering much conviction.

  Rick nodded and said he understood, but I could see by the way his shoulders slumped that he was terribly disappointed. He wasn’t getting any other visitors, even though his mother lived in Westchester, only an hour away. I don’t know if she knew he was there or if she didn’t care to visit. I was willing to call her, but Johnny declined to give me her phone number. “Rick and his mom are not getting along,” he told me. I argued that under the circumstances she should be advised and should visit, but I was too new on the job to press the point. This part of the problem was being delegated to me.

  After a couple of weeks, I did manage to get through to the navy commander in charge of Rick’s fate. We reached an acceptable solution. Rick would be given a general discharge and would enter a rehab program, and the navy commander would receive four tickets to The Tonight Show for himself and his boss and their wives. I went to the show that the officers attended. I thanked them effusively and then brought everyone backstage to meet Johnny. He also thanked the officers and posed for pictures.

  Whether or not Johnny was right to avoid seeing Rick under such circumstances, it’s true that by any standard Johnny was not a very good father. He was concerned about his sons—we had innumerable discussions in which he expressed real worry about their well-being—but he was not a significant presence in their lives, and he knew it. Johnny was very much a member of a generation of men that saw their principal paternal obligation as providing for their family’s material well-being. That notion was used not only to excuse long hours and demanding schedules but, let’s face it, also to excuse a lot of selfish behavior. Once his first marriage started to fall apart, there were a lot of nights when Johnny used work as an excuse to get away while Jody lived in Harrison and raised the boys alone. But that pattern dated almost from the day they were married in 1949; by 1959 they had separated, and in 1963 she had obtained a Mexican divorce, under the terms of which Carson agreed to pay $15,000 a year in alimony and $7,500 in child support. It was a reasonable settlement at the time but not very much in light of the huge income he would
eventually earn. Jody never succumbed to the temptation to air her grievances in public; asked by one interviewer to describe what went wrong, she said, “We had three children right away and there was no money. It happens all the time to a lot of people.” For his part, Johnny spoke of that marriage more than once as his “greatest personal failure.”

  To Johnny’s credit, he sent Jody money many times over the years when she had a particular need. It would be wrong to say that he possessed a lingering affection for his college sweetheart, but he didn’t want to see the mother of his children in want. Eventually, Jody had me on her speed dial to call me for some sort of help, either finan cial or legal. I always refused the legal assistance, but Johnny rarely refused her money.

  Obviously, not all men availed themselves of the “work comes first” excuse, but it was perfect for Carson. Johnny had many virtues: he was generous and charming, and he could be warm, but he didn’t like to be needed. He liked his relationships to be on his terms, and over the years, wives, children, friends, and associates found that Johnny was prepared to give a great deal to those he was close to, but that if you needed something more or something different than he was offering, you were almost always denied, and you risked being rather harshly rebuffed.

  The hostility between Joanne and Johnny intensified. The longer their divorce dragged on, the more I learned the Carson’s marriage had long been a troubled union filled with booze, fireworks, and sexual infidelity. I suppose these were the ordinary problems of many couples, happy and unhappy, but few had the wherewithal to underwrite their indulgences that Mr. and Mrs. Carson did.

  Johnny wasn’t any good at marriage. He made that very clear to me at the beginning of our relationship, when the second of his marriages was disintegrating, and his aptitude didn’t improve very much with subsequent unions. Nonetheless, he firmly believed he should be married. That was just something you did when you became a man: you got married, had a wife, raised a family. Look at Homer and Ruth: they had been married more than sixty years. Being married was what a man did, and Johnny always married. There were things he liked about it. He liked having a home, and a home wasn’t a home without a wife. He liked the stability. When he had a wife, he never had to bother to find a date for the many events that he attended each year, and in what struck me as a weird piece of celebrity logic but which Johnny truly believed, having a wife meant being less bothered by the media. As he put it to me one day, “If I’m single and I show up at a restaurant or some obligatory red-carpet or black-tie event, anybody I take with me will be fodder for tabloid speculation for months. It’s really a big pain in the ass for both of us. If you show up with your wife, there’s nothing to write about.” Oddly, this rationale is similar to the one he gave for not visiting Rick in Bellevue.

  But having a wife did not limit his behavior. There may have been times during his marriages when he was faithful, but fidelity was not the defining characteristic of husband Carson.

  Certainly this caused him trouble. Years after Johnny left New York, Jilly Rizzo told my girlfriend at the time, the actress Joyce DeWitt, that there were many nights in the late 1960s when he had to put Johnny in a cab to get him back to his apartment. One night before Jilly got his chance to play dispatcher, an attractive brunette at the bar caught Carson’s eye, and soon Johnny was doing his considerable best to convince her to leave with him. Unfortunately, the lady was not unattached, and when her boyfriend—a major figure in the underworld—arrived, he was not grateful to Johnny for entertaining his “goomar” during his absence. He and several large associates lifted Johnny off his bar stool and threw him down a flight of stairs, an apparent overture to a rather more serious beating. Only Jilly’s intercession prevented the kind of punishment that would have kept Carson off the air for weeks, but as Jilly told the story, he had won only a temporary reprieve: the mobster took out a contract on Carson.

  What prevented Johnny from a gruesome exit? As it happened, an infamous rally was about to take place, and that saved his life. Taking the threat seriously, Carson holed up in his UN Plaza palace for three days, missing three shows. Not good for the network. Soon David Tebet, an indispensable NBC executive, went to speak with George Wood, an important agent at the William Morris Agency. Wood was well known for having the “right” mob connections, and Tebet wanted to know if something could be done to patch things up. Just possibly, said Wood. He had heard that Joseph Colombo, widely reputed to be the head of one of the Five Families of New York and New Jersey, had formed the Italian-American Civil Rights League and was planning to hold a big Italian-American unity rally on Columbus Day in 1970. He was deeply, deeply disappointed that so far all of the networks had refused to cover the rally.

  “Oh, I don’t think NBC has completely made up its mind yet,” said Tebet.

  Soon an accommodation was reached. NBC News covered the event, and Johnny could leave his apartment.

  The second Italian-American unity rally was held the following year. Colombo was shot three times at the rally and left in a coma from which he never recovered. That was the last of the rallies.

  This, by the way, was not the only occasion when Carson’s antics earned him a beating. For some reason, Johnny had started making jokes about Keefe Brasselle, an actor of modest talent and a would-be producer of several failed television shows. Around this time, before The Tonight Show moved to Hollywood, the show would travel to Los Angeles two or three times a year. During these sojourns, Johnny had taken a liking to a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called Sneaky Pete’s, where he often sat in with the jazz trio after hours, playing the drums and sometimes singing. One night a rather burly man named Walter Stevens came in. He found Johnny and Ed McMahon having a late dinner in a banquette. Stevens politely asked to have a moment alone with Johnny, and after Ed removed himself to the bar, Stevens told Johnny that he had been hired by some friends of Keefe Brasselle’s to tell Johnny to lay off the Keefe Brasselle jokes. Apparently Johnny was unconvincing in his reassurances because Stevens then launched a flurry of punches to Johnny’s stomach and liver. He was still pounding away when he was hauled off. “What the fuck, I’ll drop it,” said Johnny later. “No one gives a shit about Keefe Brasselle.”

  Johnny was always a player, but now that he was separated from Joanne, he did not have even the notion of a wife to limit his escapades. With Joe Mullen’s arrangements freeing him from the scrutiny of Joanne’s divorce investigators, Johnny was free to enjoy—discreetly—his de facto bachelorhood.

  Discreetly, however, wasn’t a word that described Johnny’s adventures during this separation period (nor any other period, I suppose). Early in 1972 there was a Friars Club roast of Buddy Hackett. Johnny was the emcee at this stag affair that featured George Burns, Jack Benny, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Red Buttons, George Raft, Flip Wilson, Jonathan Winters, and seemingly half of Hollywood was on the dais (it had three tiers). He started the evening off in great form with one of the few jokes from the event that I can repeat. “Most of you know I’m an astronomy buff. In fact, I had an observation deck and telescope installed at my home. I use it almost every night, sometimes even to look at the stars. We’re very fortunate to live so close to the Palomar Observatory. They have an amazing telescope there. The glass that formed the lens took seven years to cure, and then the Steuben Company spent another three years polishing it. But it was worth it. You can look through that thing and see back billions of years into space. And I actually visited the Palomar Observatory to look through that famous telescope. And as I looked back into billions of years of history from that device, I could not find a single reason why this goddamn club is giving a dinner for a son of a bitch like Buddy Hackett.”

  It was surely one of the funniest nights of my life. The next comedian was more hilarious than the last. The incident that topped everything, though, came during a momentary lull in the proceedings, when Flip Wilson (seated behind Johnny on the third tier of the dais) suddenly burst out laughing in his inimitable high-pitche
d cackle. It seemed that Johnny, who was quite drunk (and in the middle of the second tier with ten guys on either side), had taken a wine bucket and was peeing into it. Of course the audience couldn’t see this; they could only hear the growing mirth. But when Jonathan Winters joined Carson, the whole room collapsed with laughter.

  The next day Johnny was to have a life-insurance physical for a ten-million-dollar policy. A doctor from New York had flown out to conduct the exam. One problem: Johnny was nowhere to be found. He never made it home that night. We were concerned enough to call the police. After a few hours, his car was spotted outside a massage parlor on Sunset Boulevard. It turns out that he had been there all night. I drove over and got him.

  “You have a physical!” I reminded him.

  “Oh, call the fucking thing off. If they examine me today, the only thing the tests will show is that I died last night.”

  So we postponed the physical, but I drove him to Burbank, and he taped that evening’s show.

  Despite striking out in two marriages, Johnny was still prime husband material, and with his divorce inevitable, his marriageable status was high. Handsome, debonair, intelligent, witty, and famous, he was rich and fast becoming richer, thanks to a new deal with NBC (which I negotiated) that was paying him $5 million a year, terms that made him one of the highest-paid entertainers in the world. And unlike so many other stars at the pinnacle whose insecurities were painfully transparent, Johnny Carson lived comfortably in his own skin. He may have been troubled in certain areas, but he was never tormented by insecurity.