Johnny Carson

by Henry Bushkin

  At that moment I realized the guillotine had fallen. No need to offer an explanation, no point in engaging in a discussion, and certainly no call for sentiment or nostalgia. “One year’s compensation paid over the next twelve months,” I said plainly, “and my share of the proceeds when the company is sold.”

  “It’s a deal,” he said. We shook hands, and I left. And just that fast, my eighteen-year association with Johnny Carson came to an end.

  Years before, when I was officially hired as Carson’s full-time lawyer, he told me what he wanted. “I don’t expect to be somebody’s only client,” he said, “but I need to know that I’m number one.” Over the years, a lot of people failed to satisfy that stipulation: Bruno and Shields, the William Morris Agency, Sonny Werblin, Arnold Grant, three executive producers of The Tonight Show, three wives, and Joan Rivers. Now add to that list the name of Henry Bushkin.

  Had I been disloyal? Hardly. I did nothing that harmed his interests. But it is true that at some point his goals and my goals, which had always been united, diverged. I negotiated a contract that got him ownership of The Tonight Show, which enabled the popular, successful, well-paid Carson to become an astronomically well-compensated entertainer. The contract also could have allowed him to be a rich, powerful, and influential producer of films and television programs, the likes of which Hollywood had yet to see, if only that was what he wanted. I helped him walk through that door, but after seeing what life was like on the other side, he decided that it wasn’t for him. He didn’t want the aggravation, and he certainly didn’t need the dough.

  But having walked through that door with him, I discovered that I didn’t want to help him throw it all away, and I didn’t want to just be his adjunct, his enforcer, his “quicker picker-upper.” I had discovered that I liked running the company, doing deals, working with creative people. Running Carson Productions suited me. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything to hurt Carson’s interests, but I hoped he wouldn’t act in a way that would hurt mine. He had done so too often already.

  So our interests were in conflict.

  As I thought about it, talking to the Tribune people didn’t seem like that big a crime. I told Klein about it; it wasn’t like I had tried to keep it a secret, which would have been a worse offense. Perhaps he had been looking for an excuse for some time. Maybe I should have kept playing tennis with him; maybe I should have been warmer to Alex, who had moved Fred Kayne, Bob Trapenberg, and Michael Hattem out of Johnny’s life like so much old furniture, and who perhaps had come to see me as a worn and soiled settee. Maybe there were so many maybes that when Carson caught a whiff of a betrayal, he dropped the hammer first and felt badly about it later.

  Once I was gone, Johnny had Ed Hookstratten, his new attorney, fire Ed Weinberger and shut down production. One hundred people lost their livelihoods. Weinberger later sued the company for the money due him under his contract and lost profits. He won.

  Over the next year, I spent considerable time working with Hookstratten, bringing him up to date on two decades’ worth of Carson’s affairs. Despite a fraught atmosphere, Ed and I worked well together, and we remained friends. The issue that promised the greatest potential for anger and bitterness, the amount due to me for my percentage of Carson Productions, was handled with professionalism. I got more money than I would have under the proposed terms of the company’s sale to the Coca-Cola Company, but I lost the friendship of the most interesting man I had ever known. I was not a winner in the deal.

  In 1988 Ed Weinberger and I made one more attempt to salvage Carson Productions. We targeted Taft and Westinghouse, the big station groups, but never got a deal off the ground. As my distance from Carson grew, I began to see that I didn’t have an interest in staying in show business per se. What I enjoyed was the law and business. I liked setting up deals, negotiating terms, and knowing the law to create advantages and benefits for my clients and myself. When eventually I took a job again, it was “of counsel” in a law firm, where I found that working for savings and loans and banks to be as rewarding and fruitful as working for Carson. It’s true that I did take a flyer at becoming a movie producer with 1990’s Spontaneous Combustion, written and directed by Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Alas, Spontaneous Combustion did not catch fire, and that ended my movie career.

  Johnny terminated our relationship in a mere three-minute conversation. A swift unceremonious end to a long and profitable run. There was no final act; it felt as if someone unplugged the projector in the middle of the movie.

  But there was a twisted epilogue, much of which played out in court. My ouster rumbled through Hollywood like a storm amid accusations of backstabbing and other forms of character assassination. I was angry. I lost the one client I had devoted my life to for nearly two decades. And Johnny had insisted that I work for him alone—any time spent on others was considered an insult. My partners at the firm handled other clients that I brought in, like Neil Simon. If Neil invited me to New York to view a rehearsal, I knew I’d better fit in a reason for the trip that would benefit Johnny. I would tell him that I was going to visit with NBC, and that usually was enough to satisfy him. But by 1988 our ties were frayed to the point of dysfunction, and our friendship was shredded by others with their own agendas in mind.

  Johnny and I never had a written contract, so at the end he agreed to one year’s salary as my severance plan. But the unpleasantness didn’t end with an awkward handshake . . .

  About six weeks after my final meeting with Johnny, I got a call from Norman Marcus, my accountant as well as Johnny’s. Johnny had decided to sell his apartment in Trump Tower and was livid that he was losing money on the sale. Johnny claimed I should cover his loss, since I had suggested that he buy a place there. I was more shocked at Norman’s gall than at Johnny’s grievance. Norman also informed me I would no longer be a client of Ernst & Young.

  “Obviously we can’t continue to represent you” were his parting words to me. They wanted me to be a guarantor on Johnny’s investment—that is, they wanted me to make him whole should he sell the condo at a loss.

  “Obviously you can go fuck yourself,” I said. A week later he called to let me know that the severance pay Johnny and I agreed upon would be stopped. He would keep it in order to recoup his loss on the apartment sale.

  Meanwhile, Ed Hookstratten demanded that two decades’ worth of files be handed over immediately. My firm foolishly agreed to send them our original files and Ed agreed to have a copy service duplicate them. But six months later we were missing a page, a crucial page. It was a one-page letter allowing my firm to represent Johnny Carson in the Willowbrook investment partnership. The project had twenty investors. Each investor signed such a letter. Of the twenty signed letters, nineteen were found. Only Johnny’s was missing.

  We were fucked. Carson’s side brought in hired guns—a Los Angeles law firm that accused us of malpractice. They claimed because we could not produce that letter, it left our firm on the hook for Johnny’s entire investment.

  My frustration and anxiety were mounting. That somber, numbing meeting with Johnny in his Malibu home seemed like it had happened decades ago. What I thought was a simple, albeit sad, end took a nightmarish turn. When that letter went “missing,” it signaled the beginning of a lengthy legal battle that would gnaw at me continually for four years.

  The story of the end of the Carson–Bushkin relationship proved irresistible for the media because I was accused of everything except sodomy with a duck (an expression Johnny often used when facing accusations from one wife or another).

  The journalists reporting on the split printed whatever the Carson lawyers’ publicity machine meted out. Those reporters showed no skepticism whatsoever; none of them ever called me to comment on anything Carson’s people had told them. His story was the one they wanted to believe. According to the reportage, he was the good guy and I was the one who betrayed him.

  We notified our insurance carrier of the claim made by Johnny’s
camp. They hired Irell & Manella to investigate the claim. Eventually, Irell agreed that without the letter, there was a technical but real act of malpractice. We were technically negligent for not being able to produce that letter. It was obvious to my partners and me that someone on the other side, we didn’t know who, had trashed the letter during the six months our files were in their possession. Ed (and his firm) denied that anyone had trashed the letter, but since we had sent them the original, there was no proof that the letter had ever existed.

  Our insurance carrier then claimed that the missing letter indicated collusion between Johnny and me—that we were setting them up to cover the Willowbrook investment. That ninety-three-acre parcel of land in Houston was suffering from a recent downturn in the economy—as were all such investments at the time. My firm and Irell & Manella urged the carrier to pay the $15 million claim from the Carson camp. They refused, and once Hookstratten got wind of the refusal, he filed a “massive malpractice” lawsuit against the partners in my firm.

  In the lawsuit they alleged that I was negligent to advise Carson to buy a place in Trump Tower. They also claimed that I used company funds to pay for the vacations that Johnny and I took at Hôtel du Cap for the past eleven years. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Those unbelievable summers on the French coastline that had produced such fond memories for me—now soured by these ridiculous accusations. In fact, NBC had paid the costs for those trips, specific terms that I’d negotiated with Dave Tebet.

  My stomach churned as I listened to these claims. I rubbed my hand around my neck, feeling for bolts. Surely I was some kind of monster to have the townspeople turn on me like this.

  I phoned Bob Shapiro, a friend—and one of the best lawyers I know. He was also a good friend to Hookstratten and I thought he could mediate a successful conclusion and put an end to this ugly affair.

  “They want your stock in the Carson companies,” he told me. “If they get that, the insurer will know there’s no collusion and they believe Johnny will get paid,” he said.

  I flatly refused. Judy had gotten everything else in our divorce a few years earlier, and I wasn’t about to hand over my last asset. But, anxious about the effects this suit could have on the firm, my partners put the pressure on me.

  “Give them that and this will all go away.” I was stuck. Hold on to my last piece of financial security and dig my heels in for a lengthy battle with the Carson camp. Or acquiesce and leave my financial future to the fates. I held out just long enough that the Carson side agreed to assign to me their “bad faith” claim against the insurance company. (Once the claim was assigned to me, who now bore the brunt of the insurer’s refusal to pay up, I could go after them in court.) I gave Carson’s camp my stock, and they dropped their lawsuit.

  After the settlement, my good pals at Ernst & Young informed me I was receiving a 1099 with more than $2 million in phantom income. Which means I now had a tax liability in excess of $1 million courtesy of Carson. I had escaped the lawsuit, but now I had no clients, no real income, and I owed more than $1 million in taxes.

  I then filed a bad faith action against the insurance company. The case came to trial in 1992. Their defense against my claim was simple: Henry Bushkin is a bad guy. They went through the complaint Carson’s camp had filed against my firm. They subpoenaed a primary lawyer from his camp to testify about all the allegations that the earlier lawsuit had made against me.

  The lawyer said the complaint was filed because they had suspected wrongdoing. But they could not prove I’d done anything wrong because I hadn’t done anything wrong. And after nine weeks of deliberation, the twelve-person jury came to the same conclusion. The debate among the jurors focused on how much I was entitled to for my stock and the emotional distress I had been put through. They awarded me $11 million. Plus, they said that the insurer was also subject to punitive damages. They wished to settle immediately and offered an additional $6 million. I agreed because the total sum would offset the amount I’d lost when I turned over my stock to Carson.

  Whatever justice I ultimately got in court, I was still considered guilty in the court of public opinion because I could not tell the full story of that case. My nondisclosure agreement with the insurer prevented me from saying anything on the subject when I made the deal with them. Even if I had been able to reveal the truth, the media wasn’t really interested by this time. There’s been a lot of research recently on how hard it is to dislodge an impression once it’s been implanted in someone’s mind. (This is why political attack ads don’t have to be true to be effective. The other side can point out their inaccuracies, but the voter’s mind privileges the memory of the original accusation, which was juicier than any counterargument ever could be.) Perhaps no amount of good press after the trial could have unseated the impression of me that had by this point become ingrained in the public’s mind.

  In the ensuing years, I have had many adventures. I practiced law; built 150 single-family homes; moved to London; took on a business in Kyrgyzstan; then came back to California, where I ran a large computer distribution business; practiced more law; and got involved with an international trading company based in Hong Kong. So much has happened to me since Johnny and I split, so far am I removed from that world, that as I’ve been working on this book, I have at times felt as if I were an interloper in my own past. But I do know for sure that in the years since I left Carson I have been happier than I was during the years I spent with him. There are fewer things I regret, and there are no feelings from that time that compare with the sadness I feel over the pain I caused some of my friends and loved ones during the Carson years, especially Judy Bushkin and Arnold Kopelson.

  I never saw Johnny after we broke up, but one day in 1988, while he was in the midst of selling his apartment in Trump Tower, he called me to complain because the buyers were taking too much time to finalize the sale. For a moment, it was as if nothing had changed. He called me to bitch, yet he was not going to call the lawyer actually working on the matter. I was surprised by the call and was mostly amused by his predicament, but I was glad that I had no responsibility in the matter. He was funny and charming, and for a while I hoped that this call might signal a reopening in our relationship, a period when he might call from time to time and we could talk as the real friends we almost but never quite were. However, he did not call back, and in time I concluded that he had dialed my number by reflex that day, not by choice. It was simply a mistake. And I was disappointed. The truth is that I was excited he had called. The truth is that I had missed him and I hoped he was missing me too.

  All the time I worked for him I knew that nobody in Johnny’s life was really necessary to him. There were a lot of guys who had worked for him who had great relationships with him and who one day found themselves gone. We had a relationship that lasted a long time, but I always knew it could and would end. But until it happens, you don’t really believe it will, and even after it happens, part of you keeps thinking he’ll change his mind. Once I realized that there was no going back, I became angry—angry that I’d been fired, angry that he didn’t miss me, angry at myself for having sacrificed so much for a man who had so little appreciation for what I’d given up.

  After I left, Johnny’s world continued to shrink. Rick Carson died in 1991. I never watched The Tonight Show after Johnny fired me, except for the night that Johnny returned from his hiatus and offered his tribute to Rick. I thought Johnny did a good job. I sent him a note of condolence, but he never acknowledged it. I was told that at some point following Rick’s death, Johnny apologized to Chris and Cory, his surviving sons, for not being there when they needed him.

  The following year, Johnny retired from The Tonight Show with a spectacular sendoff, full of tributes and emotion. It was entirely deserved. That program drew more than twenty million viewers, but I was not among them.

  At some point, Johnny and Alex separated, although they never divorced. Their eighteen years of marriage put her in first place among the C
arson wives. He spent a great deal of time in his last years on his boat, alone with his crew, who took care of him.

  On January 24, 2005, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Johnny died of respiratory failure due to emphysema. He was alone. According to published reports, he left an estate worth in excess of $450 million, money that came primarily from his ownership of The Tonight Show. He never did sell Carson Productions, and perhaps that was the best choice after all. In 2012, his still-considerable estate was able to transfer $156 million to the Carson Foundation for distribution to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Free Clinic, Planned Parenthood, and other charities.

  When Carson died, just like the character Diana in A Chorus Line, I thought I ought to be feeling something, but nothing emerged. The news media deluged me with calls, no doubt thinking that I would be a Vesuvius of memories, insights, and emotions, but I refused them all. I couldn’t work up any noble sentiments about the man, and I did not want to look like I was taking a cheap shot.

  My feelings began to emerge sometime after his death, and mostly what I felt was sadness. I thought it was terrible that he died alone, without the company of anyone who really cared—separated from his wife; his two surviving sons incapable of providing any sort of comfort; so many of his friends dismissed, alienated, or turned away. Long before emphysema took Johnny’s life, the disease he caught from his mother killed his spirit. In the end, it’s true, we each must die alone, but the love and friendship we share with one another show that we do not live alone. And of all men, Johnny did not live alone. He lived with millions, among whom were a small, very fortunate group who really did care about him. I began to think that had he and I remained as we once were, there would have been a celebration of his life, and he would have left this world far happier than he did.