Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  Under the property settlement, Joanna received the house on St. Cloud Road in Bel Air; the apartment in the Pierre; a Rolls-Royce and other cars; some significant art and half of their stocks and bank accounts. Overall, her portion was worth $35 million. It was less than Crowley had demanded, but much more than the average on-again, off-again fashion model/single mother could expect to be awarded after a twelve-year marriage. It was also far, far more, tens of millions more, than Johnny would have paid had he not, in a grand romantic gesture, dispensed with a prenuptial agreement. Regardless of the amount, she did well for putting up with a difficult man during a difficult time. According to Joanna, when they signed the divorce decree, Johnny turned to her and said, “What I’ll miss the most is being able to talk to you.” As far as I know, they never spoke again.

  Carson retained all the stock in Carson Productions and Carson Tonight Inc., their Malibu house, the Trump Tower condominium, assorted properties and automobiles, and his membership in the Beverly Hills Tennis Club.

  When Johnny started dating Alexis “Alex” Maas in earnest in 1985, he called me aside and said, “Look, I’m not going through this bullshit again. If I ever get married again, put a .38 to my head, and if we don’t have a prenup, pull the damn trigger.”

  13

  1982–1985: Days of Weinberger and Neuroses

  IN THE EARLY sixties, Ed Weinberger was a newly minted graduate of Columbia University when he left Morningside Heights and went down to 30 Rock to write jokes for Carson’s monologue. He went on to create material for Bob Hope, Dick Gregory, and Dean Martin before teaming up with the writer Stan Daniels. This duo then joined James L. Brooks, David Davis, and Allan Burns to form the legendary comic brain trust of MTM Enterprises, the hit factory that produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Phyllis, and The Betty White Show. Later the quintet moved to Paramount where they created the hit series Taxi, among other hits.

  After all that success, Ed might have been content to rest on his laurels (and royalties), but he went back to working by himself. When we first began talking to him, he had just finished writing the pilot for a new family-based sitcom for Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show, which would win Ed his seventh Emmy, and which would become one of the funniest and most beloved series in the history of TV. In other words, we were interested in Ed because he was exactly the kind of heavy hitter who would make people notice Carson Productions again. He was a creative force who knew what audiences liked, knew how to invent compelling characters, knew how to identify talent, and knew how to make people laugh. And he could develop his own material.

  All that was to the good. On the other hand, given that he was already a heavy hitter and a creative force, he wouldn’t be acquiring any new radiance by standing near Carson’s glow. That might not be to the good. Johnny was accustomed to being a Star Among Stars, nowhere more so than in his own domain. Ed was nobody’s second banana. Stocky and droll, he always spoke slowly and thoughtfully in a deep voice about whatever topic was at hand; listening to Ed was sometimes like watching a wave roll in and suddenly break with a funny line or a sharp rejoinder. He was famously passionate about his work, which is the way fans of a person describe an attitude that the critics of that person describe as stubborn, hardheaded, or uncompromising. Either way, he was unafraid to butt heads with anyone whose vision did not support his own. How would the dynamic of the relationship work when Carson was the guy who owned the company that was adrift, and Weinberger was the savior who was being summoned to set things right?

  Ed’s attorney, Joe Horacek, suggested him to us, and Joe and I had very positive discussions about the advantages of bringing Ed aboard. Horacek was up-front about Ed’s personality. “I know he can be difficult and demanding,” Horacek said, “but he’s a creative genius, there aren’t many of them, and you need one. His attitude is not his problem, Henry—it’s yours. This is how you’re going to earn your money. Pacify him, mollify him, kiss his ass, or kick it—you figure it out.”

  I explained all this to Johnny, and he was not put off. “It’s been a long time since I talked to Ed,” said Johnny. “I’ll have lunch with him, just me and him, and I’ll let you know.” I don’t know exactly what happened, but after the two of them met at Roy’s Restaurant in West Hollywood, Johnny was very positive, and we hired Weinberger for $750,000 a year for three years, plus all of the normal profit participations and perks that an executive of his stature commands.

  One of the first decisions of the Weinberger regime was to move the company out of that lovely little building on Riverside Drive (wholly owned by Johnny) and onto the Paramount lot in Hollywood. He felt isolated in that building and wanted to be part of a creative community that got his juices flowing. That was fine with us, expensive, but fine. But soon other clouds appeared on the horizon, clouds that bore watching. Maybe Ed knew of his reputation as an iconoclast and was trying to be a good team player, but he called Johnny a lot and felt frustrated by Carson’s inaccessibility. This happened often because Johnny didn’t want him to call, he wanted him to make decisions. You could see the disconnect, like a severed power line crackling on the ground: Ed, who had never had this much responsibility and authority before, was seeking some reassurance for some of the moves he was making; Johnny, who had all the authority but who wanted none of the responsibility, was content to leave the issues to Ed. With Johnny uninterested in being CEO, Ed and I were forced into a working relationship, and generally, we did fine.

  The first show that Weinberger developed for Carson Productions was called Mr. President. It was a sitcom about the family life of a president of the United States, Samuel Arthur Tresch—who was played by George C. Scott—and it aired on the brand-new Fox network. The program got middling reviews—the New York Times said that watching Scott in the show was “like watching an elephant trample a marshmallow”—but the adequate ratings made it the best-performing show on Fox. We were glad when it was renewed for a second season . . . sort of.

  There were problems. George C. Scott was a drinker; more to the point, he was a distinguished Academy Award–winning drinker with a lot of opinions about the show. He thought it was too much of a kitchen-sink comedy and that it ought to bring issues like racism and the environment in through the side door, the way a Norman Lear comedy might. Weinberger wearied of dealing with him and shuffled responsibility for the show to colleagues.

  A bigger problem than Scott, however, was the cost of the show. Television financing is difficult to explain because it is so illogical. In the 1980s virtually every network paid less than the cost of production to license a show. If a show ran for five years, however, it could be put into syndication, and the producers could expect to reap huge profits. Until that occurs, each show that is produced loses money. In our case, because we were paying George C. Scott $100,000 an episode, the highest sitcom salary in the business, and because Ed Weinberger had a fastidious, damn-the-costs attention to detail, we were losing piles of money. Our distributor, who was absorbing the deficits, was losing patience. Scott was in the bag half the time, and when he had a heart attack, production shut down. Johnny had been a big supporter of Scott’s and had personally lobbied Weinberger to hire him, saying, “He’s the only one who can pull this off.” But when we concluded that this would give us a good opportunity to get out from under this pain-in-the-ass obligation, Johnny urged us to talk to Barry Diller, the bald, lantern-jawed broadcasting executive who was the head of Fox, and ask him to cancel the best-performing show on his network.

  I had some concerns about seeing Diller. More than a decade before, there was a financial disagreement between Carson and Diller that turned into a lawsuit before it was resolved. It stemmed from a deal I had negotiated in the early seventies with Frank Yablans, then head of Paramount, to form a company called Carson/Paramount Productions. We set up shop on the Paramount lot in the vacated offices of Bob Evans, which were as good as you get and which Joanna did a marvelous job redecorating to suit Johnny’s taste. A couple of made-for-tele
vision movies were produced by the company (the never-to-be-forgotten Locusts being one, starring Ben Johnson, Ron Howard, and Katherine Helmond). Despite this, I don’t think Johnny was there more than two times throughout the entire history of the company.

  The period when Yablans ran the studio is now usually referred to as the Golden Age of Paramount, the time when its movie division released The Godfather, Chinatown, Paper Moon, Serpico, Death Wish, Lady Sings the Blues, Murder on the Orient Express, and The Longest Yard, and the television branch had successes with Star Trek; The Odd Couple; Mission: Impossible; Love, American Style; and the pilot of Happy Days. The successes no doubt pleased Yablans’s egomaniacal boss, Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Gulf+Western, parent of Paramount. Bluhdorn was known as the “Mad Austrian of Wall Street,” but once the media began calling Yablans a genius too often, Bludhorn replaced him with Barry Diller, who had created a big success running ABC’s TV movie-of-the-week franchise.

  New bosses often clean house; it’s nothing personal, just business. You make some kind of settlement and move on. Diller, trying to avoid costs, was surprisingly calculating. He called Carson first, ostensibly to cancel the Carson/Paramount deal because it was too expensive. Diller then called me to say Carson agreed to the closure. I then called Johnny, who told me that Diller didn’t cancel anything; he was just griping about the high costs he inherited from Yablans. “I didn’t agree to anything!” insisted Johnny. Diller then proceeded to cancel the deal. We ended up having to file suit and begin taking depositions before Paramount settled the case with a million-dollar-plus payout.

  That was years earlier, and although Carson and Diller now sometimes played poker together, I was still worried that this earlier episode would color our discussion. However, not a word of it came up. Diller was gracious and completely accommodating. “I love Johnny,” he said. “We’re poker pals. I’m happy to help.” As time would soon tell, his love of Johnny was more specifically a love of Johnny’s viewers, and what he was happy to do was dump an expensive and not very popular George C. Scott, who wasn’t all that valuable to him. Later, when Diller decided he wanted to go after the King of Late Night, none of that poker-playing love stood in the way.

  Around this time, Johnny began suffering heart problems. No surprise: the man smoked four packs a day or more. Everyone around him knew that he was a prime candidate for heart and lung disease. Yet, at the same time, he was so fit, so energetic, so lively, that disease seemed like a remote event, something to be reckoned with in the distant future. But little by little, those of us around him noticed signs of change: an ominous cough that would not go away or his sucking wind on the tennis court long before our usual match was finished. At one point he seemed so pale to me that I bought him a tanning machine. It was a big contraption shaped like a coffin that you had to climb in and out of, but it restored his color.

  Johnny was too much the stoic Midwesterner to complain, but he must have felt tightness in his chest if not outright pain because he took himself in for a checkup. Very soon he was in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, among the premier cardiac facilities in Los Angeles, undergoing an angioplasty to remove a buildup of plaque blocking one or more arteries to his heart. Everything was hush-hush—he used an assumed name at the hospital, but since the name he chose was Art Fern, the name of the “Tea Time Movie” announcer on The Tonight Show, I’m not sure he achieved much of a disguise. I assumed his recovery process would prevent him from his annual pilgrimage to Wimbledon, a notion that was confirmed by his physician, Dr. Robert “Bud” Foran, who told me Carson should stay home and watch this year’s tournament on TV.

  “Bullshit,” responded Johnny. “Besides, Foran’s partner was the one who actually did the procedure, and he said I was good to go.” As it happened, we went and had our usual good time.

  Not long after this, my father’s chronic coronary condition worsened. Carson recommended that I take my dad to see his doctors at Cedars-Sinai. Dr. Foran examined my father and concluded that he needed the type of sophisticated vascular operation that was best done at Cedars because of its staff expertise. My dad thought about it but decided to have the operation done where he lived, in Florida. Taking the company plane, Scott and I flew to Miami to be with Dad during the surgery. We stayed three days, leaving only when it seemed Dad had weathered the operation and was on the mend.

  Two weeks later, during spring break 1985, Joyce and my two children and I were vacationing at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel on the big island of Hawaii when I got a phone call telling me that Dad had died. I called Johnny to tell him that I would be heading to Miami immediately and that naturally I was going to be preoccupied and largely unavailable for the immediate future.

  Usually Johnny was not very good at moments like this, and I was surprised and touched at how consoling he tried to be. He reminded me that I was with him when his dad died and that he appreciated it, and several times he asked what he could do for me. When I told him that I was planning to get the morning flight out of Honolulu to LA and then catch a flight to Miami, he said, “Look, I’m going to arrange to have Bob Elliott meet you with the plane at LAX. It’ll be faster, and you’ll be more comfortable.”

  Even in my grief I was conscious of how uncommonly considerate he was being, but then he blew my mind. He asked for my mother’s phone number. Normally when something unfortunate happened to someone he knew, he would have me call and express his condolences. To call my mother personally was a big deal for him, and it was a big deal for me.

  And that wasn’t all. When I arrived at my parents’ apartment, I found that Johnny had sent a beautiful flower arrangement, as well as platters of food from the famous Sage Deli in Hallandale Beach. He knew it was traditional in Jewish homes to have this kind of food on hand to offer mourners, and he had his secretary track down the best place to order from. When I called to express my appreciation, my mother got on the phone and broke into tears as she thanked him.

  Weinberger’s second show for Carson Productions was Amen, a series set in a black neighborhood church in Philadelphia. It starred Sherman Hemsley as a deacon whose wacky and wily schemes often got him into hot water. Anna Maria Horsford played his daughter, an unmarried lady in her mid-thirties, and Clifton Davis played the new young pastor who developed an attraction for the daughter. Despite NBC’s decision to bury the show in the nine-thirty time slot on Saturday night, Amen was a hit and finished the season in a very respectable fourteenth place, with a 19.4 rating and a 33 share. (To show you how things have changed, the top-rated show in the 2010–2011 television season was American Idol. It had a 14.4 rating and a 23 share.)

  Unfortunately, Carson didn’t like the show and never worked up any enthusiasm for it. He loved the concept but felt the writing and acting were subpar. His trouble began at the outset, during the making of the pilot. Johnny and I went to Paramount to observe the filming. He was not pleased with the dialogue and was determined to let Weinberger know of his displeasure. Little Richard was doing a guest spot in the pilot, and Carson did not think him funny. He wanted him cut or the lines changed. “Make Ed change this,” he said, reading me his notes. “And change this line. And this one.” His mood was not good, and what was worse, everyone could hear what he was saying.

  “Johnny—Henry—I’m sorry, but we really need everyone to be quiet while we’re rehearsing.”

  “I understand that, Ed, but you’re rehearsing things that need to be changed. I don’t see much point in perfecting dialogue that has to be changed.”

  Weinberger’s face went through several shades of red, but to his credit, he stayed calm. “Why don’t we all take ten?” he said, closing the set, and he came and sat down with us. He got right to the point. “What’s the problem, Johnny?”

  “The dialogue is awful, Ed,” said Johnny.

  “I don’t agree, but there is nothing that can’t be improved on. What should they be saying here?”

  “I’m not going to write your show for you, Ed,” Johnny replied.
“I’m just here to say that what you’ve got here is a piece of shit. I don’t know what you have Little Richard doing there, but somebody should tell him to stick to his rock-and-roll schtick and stay out of acting. The guy can’t deliver a line, and he couldn’t ad-lib a fart after a baked bean dinner.”

  This was going nowhere good, and it was getting there in a hurry. If Johnny left the stage without feeling that Ed had listened to him, Weinberger’s days would be numbered and our problems magnified.

  I managed to interrupt the discussion and separate the two men. “Look, he was in the middle of producing the show,” I said to Johnny. “You know how you are when you’re working. It’s not the best time to give you suggestions, is it? Let me go talk to him. Please don’t leave.”

  I then went to Weinberger, who didn’t wait for me to begin. “He just doesn’t get it,” Ed said. “All he knows is live television and immediate audience reaction. I know episodic television and what makes a sitcom work and what doesn’t. I know what the fuck I’m doing, and he doesn’t have a clue. So what should we do?”

  “Give him something,” I said. “He has some suggestions; reshoot the scene the way Johnny wants it. Make him feel that he made a contribution. And then go and do whatever the fuck you want to. Agreed?”

  “Whatever I want?”

  “You’re the producer, right?”

  “All right,” said Ed. He and Johnny went into the green room, and Ed dutifully wrote down all of Johnny’s notes and reshot the scenes the way Johnny recommended. Feelings were soothed and the pilot was completed, with none of the changes included.

  Amen went on to become a success, but Carson never warmed to the show. It was Weinberger’s baby, not his. And after the confrontation at the pilot, Ed always thought of Johnny as a lurking threat, capable of exploding at any moment. Thereafter, any time Ed and Johnny had to deal with each other, I had to act as the go-between.