“Aw, thanks, Bob, that’s really sweet of you,” Carson politely said. “The material is all set, but thanks anyway.” As soon as Hope was out of earshot, Johnny started griping. “Can you imagine the nerve of the man to think that I need jokes from him?” he seethed, sotto voce.
He didn’t get to gripe long. A new crisis arose. Hope couldn’t find his cuff links. Distressed, he loudly searched his overnight suitcase and then made everyone in the green room stop and look around. “Here, Bob, take mine,” I said, to the old man’s visible relief. I was rewarded the next day when Hope returned my cuff links along with an autographed copy of his latest book.
At long last, Sinatra arrived. “Frank’s here!” said Martin, momentarily reviving. “Hey, can I have some chips for the casino?”
“We’re not at the casino, Dean,” said Frank, evenly. He then turned to Mort Viner. “Take him out. Have him sit next to Barbara. Every once in a while we’ll put him on camera.”
When Johnny agreed to first do the show, there was no mention of it being televised, which was one of the reasons he agreed to forego any payment for his performance. Late in the game, however—far too late for Johnny to back out—we learned that the Republican National Committee was putting the show on ABC and was making $6 million off the deal. Then came the news that really unnerved him: Marty Pasetta was directing the broadcast of the Inaugural Gala. He was a veteran of many broadcasts of special events, notably numerous Oscar telecasts, but Johnny hated him and thought he was a hack. When Pasetta directed the 1980 Academy Awards that Johnny had hosted just nine months before, he angered Carson with the way he edited Johnny’s monologue during the show. That was one area that you did not screw with when it came to Johnny. So now, besides being unhappy with the talent that had been booked, Carson was distinctly not thrilled with the director, either. He insisted that I speak with Pasetta and make him promise that he wouldn’t edit the monologue. Pasetta agreed, but Johnny was not mollified. “I still don’t trust the son of a bitch,” he barked, “but what choice do I have?”
The gala was just okay as far as Carson was concerned. His material was well received, his performance was sharp, and he had a number of memorable lines. “This is the first administration to have a premiere” was an opener that drew a big laugh. He went on, “Mr. President, if your movies drew crowds like this, you wouldn’t have had to get into politics.” He kidded the new VP: “George Bush gave up public life to become vice president.” He was critical of the rest of the program, unfairly so, in my estimation. From where I sat, the other performers gave characteristic performances—they were who they were—and Carson’s view was colored by his general regret for having become involved in the first place. Afterward, Don Santarelli arranged for an intimate dinner party where Johnny was the guest of honor. It was held at a fabulous Italian restaurant that Donald had taken over for the evening. The food was excellent, Santarelli had arranged for a bel canto singer to entertain, and the overall atmosphere was Washington-festive chic. President Ford and his wife, Betty, stopped by, as did the head of the CIA and several ambassadors, including Walter Annenberg. Fred de Cordova and his wife, Janet, came and they had invited Jack Benny’s widow, Mary Livingstone, and her escort to be their guests. At one point I turned and saw that Mrs. Benny had just lit up a joint of marijuana and was passing the fat doobie to Janet de Cordova. I was amazed that no one seemed the least bit put off. Johnny seemed happy, or at least as happy as he could when he was at a social occasion outside his element.
There was only one problem. Joanna Carson was visibly upset, scowling in anger and very near tears. At first I thought she might be unhappy because she didn’t go to some of the inaugural balls. The Carsons were invited to them all, but Johnny declined to visit the mad scenes. Joanna’s anger increased, and she was getting out of control. Something had to be done, so Johnny took her by the arm and led her into a private area where she began sobbing hysterically.
She said, “I’m outraged—and embarrassed—that Victoria McMahon—had better seats than me.”
If Ed McMahon’s wife had better seats than Joanna, it would indeed have been humiliating, and it would have nothing to do with Victoria and everything to do with the fact that Johnny was a bigger star than Ed.
“It wouldn’t have happened,” she explained through her sobs, “if you really cared about me.”
There you had it. Joanna was humiliated, and she blamed Johnny. Johnny was pissed about everything, and he blamed me. If I hadn’t been so busy boosting my friend Santarelli and had done my damn job, Joanna would have had the better seats.
So now it was my fault.
It was nine p.m., and the cherry was about to be placed atop the shit sundae. Waiters wheeled in television sets so that we could watch the tape delay of the broadcast. Within two minutes, it became clear that Marty Pasetta had edited Johnny’s monologue.
“Turn it off,” said a seething Carson. “That no-good son of a bitch. He swore to me he wouldn’t touch my monologue and he did. Fuck him. Turn it off.” The temperature in the room turned frosty, and Janet de Cordova and Mary Livingstone could have burned bales of marijuana without elevating the mood.
It was not a good night. We returned to the hotel barely speaking, where I found that Judy was angry with me. “You’re up to your same old tricks, Henry,” she said, not inaccurately. “We go somewhere, and all you can think about is Johnny, Johnny, Johnny.” Now I was faced with a major situation: a client who had had a bad show, a very unhappy wife, and a director that he wanted to strangle. It did, however, make me think of a very funny remark that Johnny’s brother, Dick, made a few years earlier. “Put it this way—we’re not Italian. Nobody in our family ever says what they really think or feel to anyone else.” I didn’t know whether to feel grateful for that now.
Judy and Joanna, both polite and cool, joined me at the inauguration the next day. Joanna’s mood gradually improved, and she apologized to Judy and me for her breakdown. Judy was sympathetic to her but less forgiving to me, and now she jumped back into her blame Henry fest, expressing her aggravation that the weekend was so stressful. The main cause of the aggravation, meanwhile, remained in the hotel room; Johnny didn’t want to deal with the crowds, but more to the point, he didn’t want to have anything to do with any more of the inauguration, particularly if it involved me. It was just as well; it was so cold that he would have frozen his ass off had he attended the ceremony. The women, on the other hand, had major furs that they didn’t get to display that frequently; it could have been twenty degrees colder with snow, and they would have paraded their pelts.
Happily, Judy and I flew home the next morning. We were too exhausted to do any more fighting. But all the warmth that had developed over the holidays was gone, and it was clear that nothing was going to bring it back. At the airport, I didn’t even offer to drive her home. I just hailed a taxi, and she looked relieved to be by herself in the back of the cab.
Meanwhile Johnny and Joanna stayed in Washington in order to visit with the president at the White House. Perhaps Reagan would salvage this disaster.
When I arrived back in my apartment, I was greeted by five messages to call Mr. Carson. When I finally reached him, he berated me. “How the hell could you let all this happen? Joanna’s seats were terrible. You should have made sure she would be happy.”
“Look,” I said, trying to defend myself, “I did everything possible to make sure your wife was comfortable. The Inaugural Committee provided the seats. Nobody consulted me. She had seats seven rows from the stage. She was sitting with ambassadors and senators. I thought they were great seats. Are you telling me that I was supposed to say, ‘Hey, good job, but tell me, where have you put Vicki McMahon?’”
“And what about this damn tour?”
“What tour?” His visit to the White House, it turned out, was just a guided tour with about ten other people. “We stayed in Washington thinking we were going to visit with the new president, and instead we got to walk around
the Reagans’ house. I could have had my real estate agent do that for me in Los Angeles!”
As he was talking, I was trying to imagine what had gone wrong. I had played no part in arranging the White House visit. My guess was that Johnny spoke to Frank about arranging something nice, which resulted in the fuckup.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry Joanna is upset, but I pointed out to you where Joanna would be sitting and you were fine with that. But now she’s angry and so it’s my fault. I didn’t know where Victoria fucking McMahon was sitting! What am I supposed to do, get the identity of everybody in the first six rows? And now somebody arranges a White House visit for you and you don’t like it, and I have nothing to do with it, but because you don’t like it, it’s my fault?” Somehow it was dawning on me in a way that it never had before that whenever something went wrong in this man’s life, I was going to take some form of crap for it. I had the sense that one or the other of us was very close to saying something that would be very hard to forget. I paused a moment and then told him I would speak to him the next day.
In a panic, I called Mickey Rudin and told him what had taken place. “You got me into this, Mickey, now you get me out. I helped you guys out and now my ass is in the wringer.”
Rudin had surely received more than a few irrational phone calls in his time, and he demonstrated appropriate concern for my situation. Still, I wasn’t so sure he or anybody else could fix it. Carson wanted a dog to kick, and every time he looked at me, he saw a Milk-Bone in my mouth.
I was in danger of losing the number one television client in the world. He was right: no good deed goes unpunished.
Almost immediately Charles Wick called me. He was apologetic. He was appalled. He was distressed that things had gotten so far out of control. “Henry, I promise, we will take care of this.” The following day he phoned me again. “Henry, I just wanted to let you know that the president of the United States has just phoned Mr. and Mrs. Carson and apologized for the mistakes. He also extended a personal invite to join the Reagans for dinner at their home in Los Angeles on their next return trip.”
And so all was forgiven. Both the Carsons were now happy, or at least seemed so. Most important, as far as I was concerned, I was still his lawyer. But I had learned a couple of lessons. One was that in this crisis, my only friends were Mickey Rudin and Charles Wick, men like me, men who were highly accomplished at what they did, but who took it as part of the job that every once in a while, deserved or not, they had to swallow shit from somebody farther up the ladder. The other lesson was that while I was hoping to boost Donald Santarelli and please Judy Bushkin, I had forgotten the lesson that had been learned by Sonny Werblin, Al Bruno, Tom Shields, Art Stark, Joanne Carson, and others: Johnny Carson was client number one, and there was no number two.
When the newly inaugurated president of the United States made the aforementioned call to soothe the wounded feelings of a talk-show host and his socialite wife, he already had much on his mind—Soviets in Afghanistan, Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the well-being of the American hostages who had just been released, a prime interest rate that stood at 20 percent. It was truly a testament to the power and prestige that Johnny had by now gained as a performer and as a person that the president called him over a minor issue of protocol. It was also a reminder that Carson’s ego had grown so large that only a call like this could pacify him.
A couple of days later, while we were playing tennis, Johnny brought up the weekend. “Look, Henry, I’m really sorry about the inauguration. Joanna pushes the right buttons and I go off. What the fuck do I do?”
I don’t know if he wanted me to respond as his friend or his lawyer, but I still wasn’t feeling that friendly. “It’s totally fucked up between the two of you,” I said, pointing out the obvious. “On again! Off again! A week at the hotel. A hunk of jewelry to apologize. Do you like the drama? You say you don’t, but here you are. I thought Washington might be a new start for Judy and me. It was awful. I paid her no attention. And now, on Joanna’s suggestion, she’s retained that warmonger Arthur Crowley to file against me. The weekend was a complete disaster.”
My words hung in the air without reply and eventually evaporated.
10
1972–1980: Vegas
THIS SEEMS LIKE an appropriate time to pause in the chronological telling of this tale, and the reason is simple: while Johnny and I enjoyed our usually friendly, sometimes stressful business relationship in Los Angeles and New York, we also lived in a parallel universe. Several times a year we left the real world and transported ourselves for days and sometimes weeks at a time to the fantasy world of Las Vegas.
Johnny Carson was the first person I ever met who lived in luxury. Even at first, when he was mired in bad deals and cut off from most of his income, he still lived in a splendid apartment, had a magnificent wardrobe, and dined out every night. Later, accessorized with the Rolls-Royce and the white Corvette and the luxurious Malibu mansion, he lived even more sumptuously. But never, and nowhere, was Johnny more pampered, more doted upon, more satisfied, and freer to explore and indulge the far boundaries of his Johnnyness than when he went to Las Vegas. It was his Shangri-la.
One of the things that surprised me when I first got to know Johnny was how often he went on the road. You might think that a television host who did five ninety-minute shows a week and earned a seven-figure salary would be content to enjoy some time off. But Johnny, like many entertainers, really preferred to work. He didn’t want to go home. Domestic life bored him. His children challenged him with responsibilities that he didn’t want. And for a while, until we undid the Werblin mess, he needed the cash flow. Besides, he didn’t like relaxing all that much. Indeed, one of the challenges of vacationing with him was keeping him occupied.
He liked performing. He liked being onstage, being the center of attention, and doing something he did with supreme excellence. Doing stand-up was a different experience than performing on TV: no cameras separating him and his audience, no commercials interrupting the pace. Plus, there were other attractions. He liked hanging with the guys. He liked the excitement of being with new women. Being on the road stimulated him. It relaxed him. It freed him.
After he moved to Los Angeles, club dates around the country became a smaller part of his itinerary, and Las Vegas filled his remaining time. Most years he spent as many as ten weeks of his Tonight Show “vacation” working Vegas. And I use the term “working” pretty loosely: apart from some new jokes containing contemporary references that were fitted in, the act never changed, but Carson made the audience believe everything he was saying was fresh. There was, of course, no incentive to change: in all my years with him, there was never an empty seat in any show room where he performed. Johnny was the King of the Counts; of all the performers at the Sahara, Carson was their number one star.
Most people go to Vegas to pursue a fantasy: an ideal of glamour, luxury, easy money, entertainment, and forbidden pleasures. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don’t. But if you’re a headliner in a premier Strip hotel, that fantasy is guaranteed to be fulfilled. For all intents and purposes, the indulgences are part of your compensation. When you headline Vegas, anything that is not explicitly in your contract is unmistakably written between the lines.
Once we redid Johnny’s contract with NBC in 1971, Carson didn’t need Las Vegas anymore, at least not financially. Most of the other entertainers who headlined the hotels and casinos did depend on Vegas as a primary source of income. The casinos could afford to be generous because entertainment was a loss leader, a cost that was carried as part of the business of separating gamblers from their money.
Johnny’s original Vegas home was the Sahara. He would work the main room there six to ten weeks a year, doing two shows per evening. In those days he was making roughly $3,000 per show or $40,000 per week. That was a lot of money by early-seventies standards, but in time his pay would increase dramatically. Johnny appreciated the money, of course, but he paid little atte
ntion to it. Jack Benny might have been the comedian who had most influenced Carson stylistically, but the notorious skinflint had no effect on Johnny’s attitude toward finances.
More than money, Vegas offered Johnny certain things you couldn’t get at home in quite the same form. Pampering, of course. And a surprisingly controlled social atmosphere. Most places Johnny would go in Las Vegas had security that would isolate him from the curious and intrusive, but there were also a lot of places where Johnny could be in public in Vegas and be let alone. If he felt social, there were always a lot of comedians and musicians and other people in whose company he felt comfortable, and if he wanted to be alone, he was Batman in the Batcave, with all the privacy he could desire.
The house the Sahara provided was a good-size residence with multiple bedrooms, but Johnny never liked sharing quarters, so I stayed at the hotel. He liked his solitude, plus his visitors could come and go in privacy. There was never a shortage of women who visited.
Unlike a lot of Las Vegas headliners, Carson usually didn’t mix in the social scene. Most of the entertainers lived in one of the sumptuous suites in the hotel where they were performing, and they could often be seen hanging with the high rollers and gambling at the tables. But Carson preferred to stay in a home owned by the hotel on the grounds of the Las Vegas Country Club. He lived something resembling a down-to-earth, regular domestic existence there. Although the Sahara staff always stocked the place, there was usually something unexpected Johnny had a taste for, and off we would go to Smith’s Food King supermarket on Tropicana and Paradise Roads, and stand in line with our groceries with the rest of the customers, who almost always were very cool.
Johnny Carson Page 18
