After the show, Joyce and I went to the Palace Court restaurant at Caesars for dinner. When Johnny came in to join us, it was as if the president had arrived. He was always slightly uncomfortable with that sort of reaction, but he handled it graciously. Johnny ordered the wine, and we soon were all having a lovely time.
“When are you going back to Los Angeles?” Johnny asked Joyce at the end of the meal. It was one of those questions that could sound innocent or invitational, depending on the interest of the recipient, but I certainly took it to mean that Johnny was expressing an interest in seeing her, or more likely, in not saying good night.
“Well,” I said, “Joyce and I were thinking of going back to the casino to play some blackjack.” I was certain that would shake him; Johnny would prefer a root canal over exposing himself to all the humanity in the casino. “Great idea!” Johnny said. “Mind if I come along and play?”
No, we said, the more the merrier. Three’s Company ain’t just a TV show, even if I was hoping to go to bed with the star. But actually I was angry. I knew what he was up to.
Johnny signed a “marker” in the casino for $25,000 and immediately fifty $500 chips were placed in front of him. Joyce and I both played blackjack for $25 a hand, while Johnny bet $500 each hand. With Johnny in the casino, Wingy Grober was standing by, and after a while, Johnny called him over.
“Wingy, it’s getting awfully late,” said Johnny, the perfect gentleman. “Could you please arrange a room for Miss DeWitt here at the hotel?” Johnny knew, as I knew, that Wingy, being an old hand at facilitating assignations, would not only arrange a room, but would make sure it was stocked with toiletries and nightclothes in Joyce’s approximate size. Anything was possible in those days, and I’m sure for some people it still is. Joyce was, of course, flattered and a little dazzled. Johnny then bid us good night.
Finally I was alone with Joyce, and things began evolving as I had hoped. “Why don’t we check out my new room?” she suggested, which seemed like a very fine idea. Upon entering, we saw that the message light on her phone was flashing. Joyce wasn’t expecting a message—she hadn’t even expected a room—and she called the operator for the message. “It was from Mr. Carson,” she reported when she hung up. “He would like me to call him.”
It was now clear that Joyce had become the focus of his interest. We had a problem. And I knew what was coming.
Joyce phoned the operator and requested that if Mr. Carson asked to please say that the message had not been picked up. “We’ll just pretend that it never happened,” I said. But as we stood there pondering our next move, the phone rang again. Of course, Joyce didn’t answer. It was now almost three a.m. Only one possible person could be calling.
“Let’s go to your room,” said Joyce. “At least the phone calls will stop.” Wrong again. As soon as we entered my room, my phone rang. It was Johnny, and he was obviously drunk. “Hey, Henry,” he said, “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I told him. “I just put Joyce in a car to take her back to the Sahara. And now I’m beat. G’night.”
Joyce and I had our first night together, even though we were under the constant threat of “phonus interruptus.” The damn thing kept ringing all night, and each time it was Carson calling to report that Joyce wasn’t in her room. It might have been aggravating, but the predicament was so ludicrous that she and I started to laugh, and we would laugh together whenever we recalled the absurd situation. Soon afterward, Johnny realized that Joyce and I were an item, and the silly evening when the seigneur failed to enjoy his droit was never spoken of again.
One day, all of these high jinks came to an end. Johnny grew tired of performing anywhere other than on The Tonight Show. Anywhere else, the money just wasn’t attractive anymore, and after 1980, he never performed in a nightclub again.
11
1980–1984: Hobson’s Choices
THE CARSONS AND the Bushkins returned from the inauguration in very different moods. Johnny and Joanna came back on an uptick. The blows to their egos, singularly and jointly, had brought them together and unified them. Johnny emceed the SHARE Boomtown event again in the spring without any recalcitrance, and the first part of the year passed with no known eruptions. But the attempt by Judy and me to launch a reconciliation went nowhere. I was too attentive to Johnny when we were in Washington, even before the slights and snubs, real and imagined, ever began to be felt. Once they started, Judy may as well have been a minor figure in the Carter administration for all the attention she was receiving. When we returned, I was back in my apartment.
Still, from where I stood in 1981, I had much to be happy about. In little more than a decade, I had gone from being a green associate in a small entertainment firm to one of the founding partners of a large practice that employed more than sixty lawyers in offices in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York. My principal client was not only one of the most popular entertainers in the country, but now, thanks to the deal I had negotiated, easily one of the richest, positioned to become one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. It’s true that my personal life was a mess, that my marriage was on the rocks, and that the ordeal of a divorce loomed. It’s also true that my willingness to devote more attention to Johnny’s needs than to Judy’s was the prime reason. But through my work I had reaped financial rewards, gained influence and respect, and met powerful men and beautiful women. I had attained a life beyond all imagining, and I suppose I thought the trade-offs, though regrettable, were worth it.
But if I could have looked forward in time with the same ease as I could look back, I would have seen that my tenure as Johnny Carson’s lawyer was more than halfway done.
Joanna was now spending a lot of time in New York, having persuaded Johnny to acquire for her a one-third interest in the business of the dashingly handsome clothing designer Michaele Vollbracht. She was living in a splendid apartment in the Pierre that Johnny had purchased for her after one or another of his transgressions. It might have been bought after Joanna discovered a film of Johnny en flagrante with a comely young lady, after which she furiously shattered every vase, every picture frame, every single thing made of glass in her living room, creating such a dangerous mess that a hazmat team had to be hired to clean up. Or it may have been bought after she saw Johnny’s white Corvette and Ann-Margret’s Rolls convertible canoodling in a parking lot outside one of Johnny’s friends’ houses in the midafternoon. And if it wasn’t the apartment in the Pierre that was purchased after such an event, then maybe it was her Rolls Corniche or her diamond brooch and matching pair of diamond earrings from Hammerman Brothers. After the divorce, Joanna seized the high road, telling interviewers, “When you are married to a man like Johnny . . . well, that goes with the territory. There were certainly times when you just look away.” Perhaps there were, but often enough, Joanna then fixed her eyes on something with a big price tag.
Joanna became a habitué of the fine-art auctions in Manhattan. In May she learned that Sotheby’s was going to offer an oil of Picasso’s, Homme et Femme. Johnny and Joanna discussed bidding on it. Johnny loved the painting and was excited by the prospect of owning it. He authorized her to bid up to $2 million. The Los Angeles head of Sotheby’s was recruited to accompany Joanna to New York and orchestrate the bidding. We happened to have dinner right before the auction, and he and Joanna kept rethinking the strategy. It was fascinating.
At the auction, Joanna successfully outbid her rivals and secured the Picasso. Johnny was delighted with her performance. Unbeknownst to him, however, she had purchased a second painting, a Kees van Dongen oil for an additional $750,000. Joanna bought the piece as a surprise gift for Johnny’s birthday, which was still months away on October 25.
Her secret didn’t last long. The auction house needed to be paid, and Johnny got the bill. Perhaps no man was ever so excited to receive an invoice: he was thrilled that she had bought the painting for him.
Weeks passed, and no painti
ngs arrived. Johnny was surprised at how long it took to ship a couple of paintings from New York. “They could have walked here by now,” he griped. Eventually they arrived at the St. Cloud residence. The valuable art was kept in the crates in a secure part of the garage.
By spring, work at Carson Productions was well under way. We began forming the company early in 1980, even before Johnny had decided which network he would go to work for. We knew after our cruise with ABC that we would have a production company, and we didn’t need to know where the underwriting was coming from in order to outline in broad strokes what the lines of authority would be. Johnny would be the boss, as if that was ever in doubt. In practical terms, that meant that he would have the ultimate say-so on things. Usually that meant ratifying the decisions made by his executives. Occasionally it meant that if he didn’t like something, it would stop. Otherwise, he wasn’t going to give orders or preside over meetings or, heaven forbid, read scripts, which is something that most people who produce television shows spend hours a day doing. “What the hell do I know about sitcoms?” Carson would say, aghast at the thought. “I don’t have the foggiest fucking idea what would work.” He would, however, control The Tonight Show, just as he had always done.
My role was to be Johnny’s chief operating officer, his designee to oversee the running of the business. It would be up to me to negotiate the employment agreements with the key management personnel. After that was done, I would then deal with the president of the company whose job was to run the real business. Dealing with NBC was also my responsibility, but all the terms that I negotiated then had to be ratified by Johnny. One part of the arrangement took me by complete surprise. “I’m going to give you a 10 percent ownership stake in the company,” Carson said to me one day. “I’m happy to do it. What the hell, that’s how much I would have had to pay an agent. You earned it.”
Naturally I was touched by Johnny’s gesture and thrilled by its potential value as well. But the windfall complicated my life enormously. At a time when I was supposed to be focusing on negotiating contracts with our new hires, I had to think of what this meant for me. When Johnny made his offer, I had not fully decided that my marriage was over. Johnny’s announcement forced me to make a decision.
According to California’s community property law, Judy would be entitled to half of anything I made while we were living together, which meant that as soon as Carson Productions was formed, she would be entitled to half of my share. I had no problem with the idea of Judy getting her half of our estate and some alimony going forward. But if we were going to split, I saw no point in surrendering half my equity in a newborn company. Very soon my last hopes for our marriage disappeared.
Johnny was in the same position that I was, or at least it seemed that way to me. More than a year had passed since Joanna had decided that she and Johnny would have a very public reconciliation at the Mancinis’ party, a method and an occasion that had very little to do with actually bringing the relationship closer and everything to do with cementing her status in SHARE. Since then, the relationship had more ups and downs than a castle jumper full of five-year-olds. From the inauguration and throughout the spring, things had been going well in the Carsons’ marriage. So well, in fact, that in March, when the National Enquirer reported that there was trouble in the Carsons’ marriage, Johnny was furious and wanted to sue for slander.
“You cannot be serious,” I said, trying my best to capture John McEnroe’s incredulous tone.
“Well, it’s not true,” he said. “We’re getting along great right now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If you sue, they’ll subpoena everyone who you were ever rumored to have gone out with. They’ll subpoena the desk registers at the Beverly Hills Hotel; they’ll call all the clerks and bellhops. You may as well hand them a proctoscope and invite their investigators to crawl up your ass.”
But Johnny kept at it, and gradually it occurred to me that there was something more there than was meeting my eye. Maybe he was feeling gallant and wanted to prove something to Joanna; maybe she was feeling needy and wanted him to make a reassuring gesture. Eventually, we decided that he would make a statement on The Tonight Show, refuting the article.
“This is absolutely, completely one hundred percent falsehood,” he said from his desk. “They said some very nasty things, attributed to her close friends and pals. But when they attacked my wife, well, I get a little bit angry.
“Now, I could sue the National Enquirer,” he said, but he explained that the length and stress of litigation made that an unsatisfactory choice and that he didn’t want to put “my wife” through it. But because “our friends, our relatives, our family, our children, and our parents” are troubled by the allegations, he felt obliged to respond.
“I’m going to call the National Enquirer and the people who write for it liars. Now [if that’s false] that’s slander. They can sue me for slander. You know where I am, gentlemen. Please accept my invitation [to sue me] for calling you liars. I’ve done it publicly now in front of fifteen or twenty million people, and I will be very happy to defend that charge against you.”
The audience applauded vigorously, and Johnny’s strong response won him a lot of attention and support. But I knew that their marriage wasn’t the California redwood he purported it to be, and that even during the periods when things were going well, he had his moments of restlessness and doubt. In most relationships, a friend and counselor shuts his mouth and lets events take their course. But in this case, with Johnny about to begin his ownership of what we assumed would be the wildly remunerative Carson Productions, I wanted him to take a cold, hard look at the relationship and assess its prospects for longevity. If he was even thinking that the relationship might be over, then he owed it to himself to consider making a sharp cut.
“You have to face facts,” I told him one day after tennis. “Once the production company starts operating, it will have income—value—that she’ll be entitled to take half of forever. I’ve moved out—Judy won’t have a claim on that asset. But even if you moved out right this minute, I think it would be a toss-up whether she would get a cut of the new deal or not. It’s a Hobson’s choice: the more we get, the more she’s going to get.”
“What should I do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Try to be happy in your relationship? Try to make things work? Get out while the getting’s good?”
He shook his head. “I can’t stand the thought of a divorce.”
If nothing else, his reluctance meant that my job, which was principally about making sure that Johnny Carson was happy, would continue to include the obligation to make sure that Joanna was happy, lest her feelings infect his mood. In 1981 that meant making sure that none of the ugly violations of protocol that marred the inauguration for Joanna would take place at the 53rd Annual Academy Awards ceremonies, which Johnny was once again hosting, and which, in the world that the Carsons inhabited, was an infinitely more important event than any presidential swearing-in.
Carson, of course, is universally recognized as one of the great Oscar hosts, and he liked doing it, although I can only assume why. It wasn’t the money; he was paid only $15,000, and the expectation was that he would donate that to charity (he did). Or was it the show, which he always groused was a three-hour program spread over four hours? Mostly I think it just reinforced his sense of his own eminence. In presiding over this event, he was the ringmaster of the ultimate show business circus. Five times between 1978 and 1983, he emceed the Academy Awards ceremonies and never broke a sweat. In 1981, however, I did enough sweating for both of us.
That year, since I was without a wife or a date, I escorted Joanna. I arrived at their home in the limo at four-thirty p.m. to collect the wife of the host; Johnny was, of course, at the theater, going through rehearsals. The show began promptly at six p.m. That left us an hour and a half to get to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Los Angeles Music Center, which under normal conditions is no more than a h
alf hour away. Except Joanna wasn’t anywhere near ready. She was in her robe waiting for José Eber, the hairstylist to the stars. He had wall-to-wall appointments and was running late.
“Joanna,” I said, pointing at my watch and falling straight into sitcom-character panic, “we gotta go!” She refused to budge. I began doing time-and-traffic calculations in my head. Sunset to Palm, I was thinking, that’ll be crowded, but moving. But Palm to Beverly Boulevard could be tough, and where it changes into First Street . . . If we were not in our seats in the second row when Johnny started the show, he would undoubtedly notice and would be supremely pissed. Of course, if we were in our seats in the second row and Joanna didn’t think her hair looked right, she would be extremely pissed. The image of Scylla and Charybdis came back to me from high school English class. I sensed I was in for a long evening.
Eber arrived right around four-forty-five. It took another forty-five minutes for him to work his magic and for Joanna to get dressed and hustle herself into the limo. Given the way traffic always clogged up around the pavilion on Oscar night, I didn’t think we had a chance of arriving on time. “I’ll give you an extra $200 if you get us to the show before six,” I told the driver. We arrived just as the big hand was touching the twelve, and I tossed the driver his $200 as Joanna and I ran into the side entrance of the theater. We could hear the president of the Academy giving her remarks. We were going to make it!
Suddenly, there was a problem. There were people in our seats. Kids—Jane Fonda’s kids! She was an Oscar winner and was attending the event to see her father, Henry Fonda, receive an honorary Oscar. She had only two tickets, but she didn’t want her kids to miss this, and so she planted them in our seats.
“I’m sorry, but these are our seats!” I said, brandishing our tickets. “You have to move them!”
“I’m not moving anybody now!” she replied with all the tenacity of a Hollywood princess who had grown into an award-winning exercise-company millionaire and Hollywood-family diva. “The show’s starting! Go sit down before you embarrass yourself on national TV!”
Johnny Carson Page 21
