One morning at the office, I received a call from a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. “Would you like to comment on today’s announcement that Fox is going to run a late-night talk show opposite Carson, hosted by Joan Rivers?”
Lawyers are trained to repress involuntary reactions to unexpected news, but this one made me feel like a cartoon cat. “Whaaaat?” I answered. “Let me get back to you.”
I immediately called Carson. “Can you believe this?” He was genuinely shocked, but not that The Tonight Show was going to be facing a new competitor. Networks had been running talk shows at Carson for years; even Fred Silverman, once NBC had its fill of his failures, ran Alan Thicke at Johnny on a group of independent stations. Johnny shrugged him off like a fly. If the infant Fox network wanted to stand on its tippy toes and take a swipe at the king, well, bring it on.
No, the shocking news was that it was Joan who was taking this shot and that she had never breathed a word to Johnny. This seemed like a huge betrayal and one quite out of the ordinary. What was ordinary was for Barry Diller to sit with a shit-eating grin on his face and profess how much he loooooved Johnny and would do anything for him and then turn around and launch a show as a direct challenge to Carson’s dominion. That was just business.
With Joan, it was personal. Not only did Johnny admire Joan as one of the very best comedians of her generation, he had a soft spot of affection for her. She was among a small, special group that included Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor who got their first big break from Carson. Moreover, Johnny and Joan’s husband, Edgar, were friends, and Edgar and Joan had acted as intermediaries during the secret negotiations with ABC in 1980. Over the years, Joan had hosted The Tonight Show ninety-one times (second only among guest hosts to Joey Bishop, who logged a lot of time in the host’s seat in the early sixties, between the Paar and Carson administrations). Johnny thought highly enough of the way she handled the throne that he named her his official stand-in, something that enhanced her value and gave her real cachet when she had to negotiate with the many bookers and agents and promoters she had to deal with.
And the feelings of respect and affection were completely reciprocated. “Johnny is one of the great straight men of the century,” she once wrote. “He never cut off a punch line, and when it came, he broke up.” Rivers has compared the sparkling comic rapport she and Carson displayed during her Tonight Show appearances to that of Burns and Allen.
And yet somehow she was able to turn around and blindside us. It was inexplicable. And despicable. Just days before, she had been a guest on The Tonight Show and presented Johnny with a copy of her book, Enter Talking, which she had dedicated to him, all the while knowing this announcement was about to come down. And just weeks before, Johnny had been sitting with Barry Diller at Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party, with Barry being all sweet to his poker buddy, even as he was sharpening his shiv.
The moment Johnny and I hung up, I called the lawyer who had negotiated her deal. “What the fuck was she thinking?” I asked. “Johnny gave her every break in the book. Just tell her this: Johnny feels like he’s been stabbed in the back. She will never appear on his show again.”
“I think Joan would love to talk to Johnny and explain . . .”
“Forget it. Tell her not to bother to explain. Her actions have said everything there is to say.” Then I slammed down the phone.
Looking back, I wish I had listened to her explanations, although I wonder if I would have been calm enough to hear them with an open mind. Later, in Still Talking, her memoir of this period, Joan offered a credible explanation of why she felt she had to act the way she did.
First, as Joan points out, being one of Johnny Carson’s nearest and dearest show business friends didn’t entitle you to much. For example, it didn’t mean that he ever spoke to you, at least not off the set. Johnny almost never greeted guests in their dressing rooms before the show; he wanted to save all the energy and spontaneity for the audience. Beyond that, the list of people with whom he liked to socialize was short, and Joan’s name wasn’t on it. Instead, she spoke to intermediaries, and those conversations often made her feel insecure. Peter Lassally, one of the producers of The Tonight Show, told her that if her ratings as guest host dropped below a certain point, she’d be replaced, which was a cold thing to do and not the sort of discussion he ought to have been having with the talent.
Second, she was feeling insecure because of something I had done, namely, when it was time for her to sign a contract to become the permanent guest host of The Tonight Show, I offered her a one-year deal. But because Johnny had just signed a two-year deal, she felt endangered, although I do not remember attaching any long-term significance to the number, nor do I remember Edgar coming back and asking for another year.
Most serious, Joan was also feeling insulted, having been told that Brandon Tartikoff at NBC had worked up a list of ten comedians who could succeed Carson should he retire from The Tonight Show. Despite the strong ratings she generated as Johnny’s replacement, the list did not include her name. Frankly, I would have been surprised if it had. Whenever Carson left the show, the only sensible thing NBC could do was to make a generational change. They wouldn’t want one of Carson’s peers; they would want someone like he was in 1962, someone who could endure.
Then Fox, the clever fox, addressed all those fears and insecurities, and offered her a talk show that would begin at eleven p.m. on the East Coast. It was a very tempting offer—good money, the prestige of having her own show, and being the first woman to do so in the late-night time slot; and with that half-hour’s head start on The Tonight Show, a very real chance to put a dent in Johnny’s numbers. The other attractive part of the offer was that Edgar would serve as the executive producer. This would certainly elevate the stature of a man who for a number of years had been best known as Joan Rivers’s husband.
It isn’t hard to spot evidence of Edgar’s love of secrecy and subterfuge in what happened next. Joan says that she wanted to talk to Johnny, to discuss his feelings about the offer. She asked Edgar to set up the call, and Edgar later told her that he called me on two separate occasions, and a key NBC executive on a third occasion, to discuss her future. Edgar reported that he never received a return phone call.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I didn’t get a call. My office keeps meticulous phone logs, and besides, talking on the phone is what I do. Joan was a friend and former client and someone with whom Carson Productions had a contractual relationship, all good reasons for me to pick up the phone. And even if human error caused us to drop a call, I seriously doubt we would have done it twice. The chance that we would have missed or ignored both calls and that NBC would have overlooked a third call from Joan on top of that was infinitesimal.
But is it possible that Edgar would have tried to deceive Joan and tell her that he called but that I never called back? Yes, I think it’s possible. Edgar and Joan were certainly right to worry that she did not have a long-term future at The Tonight Show once Carson departed. She got good ratings, but in Johnny’s opinion, she couldn’t maintain an audience night after night; she was, he said, “too hard.” Going to Fox might well have been her best opportunity to prove Johnny wrong, to show that she could carry a nightly program.
But Joan admits that she was deeply ambivalent about leaving Johnny and the security of The Tonight Show in favor of an unproven outfit like Fox. To me, it’s entirely plausible Edgar feared that if Johnny talked to Joan and offered her any inducement to stay—a free oil change at Jiffy Lube, say—she would have rejected Fox and stayed with The Tonight Show. And in two months or two years or whenever Johnny retired, Joan would have nothing, and neither would Edgar, his dreams of validating his career by becoming an executive producer of a network talk show gone a-glimmering.
But here’s one thing Edgar would have been wrong about: Johnny wouldn’t have stood in Joan’s way. Johnny told me later that had Joan called him before the decision was announced, he would have given her his blessing.
He knew it was a good deal for her and, frankly, he really didn’t fear her.
The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers debuted in October of 1986. It got reasonably good ratings at first, but then they sagged. In the spring, Fox decided to replace Edgar as executive producer. Joan declared that if Fox fired Edgar, they would have to fire her, so Fox got rid of them both. Three months later, Edgar committed suicide.
I remember talking to Johnny about this terrible news involving people who had once been friends. “I guess he kept pushing Joan,” he said. “The poor son of a bitch—married to that woman. Do you think it was Joan or Edgar that fucked me?” Of course I believed it was Edgar who hatched the scheme. At the very least, he knew the details of ABC’s offer to Johnny in 1980—details to use in his negotiation with Fox.
Johnny then tried to change the mood. “Did you hear this one? When a woman’s husband passed away, she put the usual death notice in the newspaper, but she added that he had died of gonorrhea. Once the newspapers were delivered, a good friend of the family phoned and complained bitterly, ‘You know very well that he died of diarrhea, not gonorrhea.’ The widow replied, ‘Yes, I know that he died of diarrhea, but I thought it would be better for posterity to remember him as a great lover rather than the big shit that he really was.’”
In 1989 Joan got another shot at a talk show. It was a daytime syndicated program that ran for four years and earned her an Emmy. The award seems to prove that Johnny had underestimated Joan’s appeal, although the relatively short tenure of four years seems to confirm his view that she was too hard to succeed on a daily basis. But the strength of her ongoing career certainly proves that no one is more resilient than Joan.
Johnny’s mother died later that year. “The wicked witch is dead,” he said when he called with the news. It was a bittersweet remark, jokey without being funny; in other words, it was true. He loved his mother as a son must. But he did not like her. He left the arrangements to his sister, Catherine, and did not attend the funeral. This did not entirely surprise me; a couple of years earlier, he had absented himself from his father’s services as well, telling me, “The only time I want to go to a funeral is when I want to make sure the son of a bitch is really dead.” According to his own criteria, I thought these circumstances might fit.
In my opinion, many of the difficulties Johnny had with relationships can be traced back to his relationship with Ruth. She was a difficult parent, the kind who inflicts consistent emotional pain on her offspring, pain that endures throughout their lives and grows. As Susan Forward says in her insightful book, Toxic Parents, “All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents. If those relationships are, for the most part, emotionally nourishing, respectful of our rights and feelings, we’ll grow up expecting others to treat us in much the same way. . . . But if childhood is a time of unrelenting anxiety, tension, and pain, then we develop negative expectations and rigid defenses.”
From all that Johnny told me, his mother ignored his needs and burdened him with guilt. She was indifferent and lacked emotion. She really did damage Johnny—damage that manifested itself in adulthood in his difficulties with bonding, decision making, and depression. According to Truman Capote, who saw Johnny frequently when Capote and the Carsons were cotenants in the UN Plaza, Johnny once told him that his mother would throw herself on the floor and scream, “I bore you from these loins, and you do this to me! All that pain and this is what I get in return!”
“I met his mother once,” Capote continued. “She was an absolute bitch. Despite everything he’s done, she’s never really accepted him, and he constantly wants her approval. That’s what keeps him going.”
In my opinion, Ruth Carson soured her son to the point where it was damn near impossible for him to be happy with any woman for any extended period of time—or with people in general, for that matter. The one thing he couldn’t deal with was his heart. Perhaps Jody or Joanne or Joanna had it for a moment in time, but it didn’t last. Surely he never really opened himself up to his children. It still impresses me how many times I saw him exhibit enormous heartfelt generosity. He bought a brand-new car for an old pal from his radio days. He sent Danny Stradella $100,000 when he was down on his luck. After Freddy de Cordova died, Johnny sent Janet de Cordova $100,000 with a sweet note that read: “I will always remember the great moments we shared. . . . I know Fred was not a great money manager, and you are no doubt encountering unexpected financial demands. Please look on the enclosed as a bonus for almost twenty-five years as The Tonight Show producer. Right now I have this strange feeling that Fred is telling Saint Peter how to do his job better.” And this was after he and Johnny had a serious skirmish. He was enormously generous with me on numerous occasions, and no one was ever a better tipper. But if somebody close to him put pressure on him, like Joanna committing him to emcee the SHARE banquet, he was grudging, angry, and sullen.
And just as he had trouble giving love, he had as much difficulty receiving it. I’m certain all his wives made great efforts to keep him happy and centered, but he never really trusted happiness, and even when things were going well, he would find a way to stir things up and get all those around him upset. More than anything, and certainly more than his infidelities, I believe Joanna grew tired of seeing her very best efforts to build a home for him being met with indifference, if not hostility. He couldn’t lead a normal life, nourishing people and being nourished in return. When I saw him with his sons, there was never warmth or affection.
I have been told that Johnny idealized his mother and believed that everything bad in his childhood was somehow his fault. I know that as long as his mother lived, he strove to win her love, and he never received it. He was the child of an emotionally abusive mother—no matter how strong and successful he became, he was a child whose trust had been betrayed. “She was selfish and cold,” Johnny’s second wife, Joanne, once told an interviewer. “No wonder he had trouble dealing with women. Mrs. Carson was cold, closed off, a zero when it came to showing affection.”
Johnny’s most successful relationships had a transactional foundation, one where his money compensated for a lot of bad behavior. I enjoyed Johnny’s friendship, but I overlooked a lot, in no small measure because he put a lot of money in my pocket. His wives and his sons put up with many insults and disappointments, but the women always got their payments, and the boys received their stipends. Freddy de Cordova and Bobby Quinn and Ed McMahon and the others at The Tonight Show swallowed a fair amount of shit from Carson, but he was the man who signed their generous paychecks.
Ruth, however, was immune to his gifts: to his minks and his trips and so on. More to the point, Ruth was immune to all of his charms, all of his talents. Nothing this extraordinary man could do impressed her, and she let him know that from his childhood onward. Johnny Carson enjoyed the adulation of millions, but his mother could not love him. He carried that pain, and spread it, all his life.
14
1987: Darkness Falls
TOM SHALES, IN the Washington Post, wrote, “Johnny just gets better and better; everyone else gets worse and worse. He has probably been funnier longer and more consistently than any other comedian who ever lived.”
And it was true. On The Tonight Show, Johnny just kept rolling on and on, never deviating, seldom surprising, seldom surpassing, but nearly always delivering. “You have to understand,” Ed McMahon once explained. “Every day, no matter what else is going on in his life, he has to come out there and be Johnny Carson.” Well, for the part of the day he had to host The Tonight Show, he mastered that challenge. But for the rest of the time when he had to be Johnny Carson, he accomplished that by making his world smaller, or simpler, or harder to reach.
Johnny began dating Alexis “Alex” Maas in 1985. She was a tall, lissome blonde in her early thirties, very pretty, who had once worked for Governor Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts. It’s said that they met when she came wandering across his property in Mal
ibu holding an empty wine glass, and he went out with a bottle of Montrachet and said, “Can I fill you up?” How she came to be on his property and where she was heading were details never explained, and it’s just as well—all that would do was ruin a good story. The reality was that they met at a party on Carbon Beach, a few doors away from Johnny’s home. It was at Irwin Yablans’s leased beach home where Johnny dropped by to check things out.
Johnny was dating other women at the time—since the divorce, he’d been linked with Sally Field, Morgan Fairchild, Angie Dickinson, and many others—but after a few months, it became clear that none of the others mattered, and that the relationship between Johnny and Alexis was becoming more than casual. At that point, Johnny had me order a background check from our PI, Joe Mullen. The report was unremarkable, the information familiar to the point of cliché. In the series of positions she had held, one could read the signature of an attractive girl moving from job to job in the hopes of landing the right one. And Johnny was finally the right one. I suppose Johnny could be considered a job by all those who knew him. Every other wife and girlfriend he had had found him to be a handful.
It was not a surprise when Johnny announced that he wanted to marry again; Johnny was the marrying kind. No commitment phobia there, perhaps because commitment wasn’t really part of the marriage package. It was, however, somewhat surprising that he chose to marry Alex, who was bright, amiable, and refined but nothing special. Had he, on that special day when they met, been doing something other than looking through his window, I don’t think that his life would have been much diminished. In my estimation, he could have met someone very much like Alex an hour later seating guests at a restaurant, or two hours later managing a spa, or three hours later in a shop on Rodeo Drive. Johnny’s previous wives were closer to being matches for him in temperament and interests and experience. Jody and he were two unformed college students from the Midwest, similar in age, upbringing, and expectations. Joanne was a television personality, younger and hardly a star of his magnitude, but from the same milieu; they were the same kind of fish swimming in the same waters. When he married Joanna, he was an established star and a grown man, but she was a complex and challenging woman who shrewdly built up her own stature to be worthy of his, maybe not entirely his equal, but more than his match.
Johnny Carson Page 25
