There was a ring-a-ding quality to those early shows. They always felt live, though they were taped hours earlier. It helped that Carson had a smart, sophisticated team of writers behind him—besides Cavett, Ed Weinberger (who later created such television series as Taxi and The Cosby Show), and a corpulent, irreverent genius named Pat McCormick, there was Marshall Brickman, who would later co-write Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery with Woody Allen. Brickman, who became head writer on the show at the tender age of 27, wrote many of the “Carnac the Magnificent” routines, in which a turbaned Carson divined the answers before being given the questions. As in, Answer: “N.A.A.C.P., F.B.I., I.R.S.” Question: “How do you spell ‘naacpfbiirs’?”
Carson was more than just an editor of other people’s jokes—he was a good comedy writer on his own. It was no accident that his thesis at the University of Nebraska had been “How to Write Comedy Jokes,” narrated on tape with examples from the famous comics of the day: Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, and others. “He was able to choose the jokes that really worked,” Simon says. “They weren’t dealing with family—he wanted to deal with what it was like to live in the city during the 60s.”
Often the opening monologue made fun of the downside of what New York’s Mayor John Lindsay had christened Fun City—the muggings, the garbage strike, the blackouts. Cavett recalls writing a number of jokes for Carson on urban decay. To an out-of-towner who bragged on an audience card, “My hometown of Cincinnati has much cleaner streets than New York, signed Miriam,” he answered, “Pompeii, after Vesuvius went off, had cleaner streets than New York.” He joked about the city’s high crime rate: “New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time—most, unsolved.” Not even New York’s weather was immune to ridicule—“It’s so cold here in New York that the flashers are just describing themselves.”
Unfortunately, Carson’s nightly poking fun at New York helped define the city for the American heartland. Even Mayor Lindsay got in on the act on one show, describing a computer-dating machine set up in Central Park where a bachelor deposits his quarter and tells the machine, “I’m sensitive, I’m single, I’m rich,” whereupon the machine mugs him. The jokes got so relentless that the builder Lew Rudin and the president of the New York City Council complained to NBC executives about the bad press Carson was giving New York.
He smoked throughout the show. “That was the sign of being an intellectual” in the 60s, recalls Simon. “Edward R. Murrow smoked, Leonard Bernstein smoked—two of Carson’s role models.” He wanted to be equal to the city that was hosting him.
Carson was always pushing boundaries, negotiating with NBC as to what he could say on the air. On one show he appeared in his undershorts, joking that NBC had taken everything away from him. He was very conscious of who owned the show, until the mid-1970s, when he wrested control from the network. Besides benefiting financially from the show’s distribution and syndication, making Carson a very wealthy man, he now had a major say as to who would follow him on the air at 12:30 A.M. In the 1980s, observes Simon, “no host of any other NBC property ever received such a privilege.”
Carson also showcased a lot of eccentrics. Both the zenith, and the nadir, was the on-air marriage of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki. The ukulele-plucking oddball known for his trilling, falsetto version of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” had been a fixture of bohemian nightclubs in Greenwich Village. It was the moment reality television was born. They were married on the air on December 17, 1969, and it was the most-watched event in the history of late-night television until Johnny’s final show, on May 22, 1992. “There was no tougher ticket in New York than a place in the audience for The Tonight Show that evening,” wrote Laurence Leamer in King of the Night, his 1989 biography of Carson. Carson’s stalwart sidekick, Ed McMahon, set the tone for the nuptials: “We cordially request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki right here on The Tonight Show. But right now, here are some words of wisdom from Pepto-Bismol tablets.”
Throughout it all, Carson lived high above the mean streets of New York. Dick Cavett remembers Carson’s first apartment, at 1161 York Avenue, as a “four-bedroom bachelor pad over the river with his telescope there, [which he] claimed he used for astronomy.” He had a car and driver available day and night. In the mornings he would play tennis alongside Mayor John Lindsay at the Vanderbilt Club, in the Grand Central Terminal Annex; later in the day he’d make the rounds—Patsy’s, Toots Shor’s, ‘21,’ Le Club, Danny’s Hideaway, even the Playboy Club. Like a true midwesterner, he was a meat-and-potatoes man his whole life and loved the row of steak houses between Lexington and Second Avenues in the East 40s—Colombo’s, the Palm, Pietro’s, Joe and Rose’s, the Pen and Pencil.
His favorite watering hole, though, was Danny’s Hideaway. He enjoyed the company of manly men such as writer George Plimpton, recalled Henry Bushkin, Carson’s legal consigliere for 18 years, who recently published Johnny Carson, a lively and revealing memoir of his time with the talk-show host. “I’ll say one thing for Carson,” Bushkin recently told V.F. while sipping a drink in Peaco*ck Alley, in the Waldorf-Astoria. “In those days he always picked up the check.” The exception was at Danny’s Hideaway—“Danny would never let Carson pay.”
In 1963, after less than a year as host of The Tonight Show, Carson married his second wife, Joanne Copeland, at Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church, on Fifth Avenue. Joanne was a former Pan Am stewardess, back when being a stewardess was considered a glamorous job. She had barely finished redecorating the York Avenue apartment when the Carsons had dinner with producer and television host David Susskind and his wife, Phyllis, at their co-op apartment at the U.N. Plaza. The two towers rose up 38 stories at First Avenue and 49th Street, with panoramic views of the city. “You have to move here,” Susskind told Carson. “How can you not wake up happy living here?”
Despite his success, Johnny Carson rarely woke up happy. He usually woke up hung over. But move they did, into a posh duplex apartment in the west wing of the U.N. Plaza with an even more breathtaking view than the Susskinds’. The nine-room apartment, with its dark, wood-paneled living room, cost $173,000. They moved in with eight color television sets and 16 phones. The World Wildlife Fund would not have approved of Joanne’s decorating scheme—wolf in the living room, cheetah in the foyer, and lamb in her dressing room.
Despite its luxurious décor and staggering views, the U.N. Plaza apartment was a home few people were allowed to visit. When Joanne threw a surprise birthday party for her husband one year, only eight people were invited. “Johnny packs a tight suitcase,” Ed McMahon confided to Nora Ephron. “You won’t get in.” In fact, Bushkin was astonished to hear himself described by Carson as his “best friend” in Kenneth Tynan’s February 1978 profile of the comedian in The New Yorker.
Carson and McMahon, who had taken his rolling *r’*s with him from Who Do You Trust? to The Tonight Show as Johnny’s announcer and second banana, would do their serious drinking at P. J. Clarke’s, Sardi’s, and Trader Vic’s, inside the Plaza hotel. Carson’s drinks of choice were vodka sours and J&B scotch and water. One night at Danny’s someone came over and apologized to Johnny for seating him in the wrong room. “ ‘Whatever room I’m in is the right room,’ he said.”
Another favorite watering hole was Jilly’s Saloon, on 52nd Street at Eighth Avenue, known to cater to celebrities and mobsters, and owned by Jilly Rizzo, Frank Sinatra’s boyhood friend. According to Bushkin it was at Jilly’s that Carson was thrown down a flight of stairs for chatting up a mobster’s girlfriend, resulting in injuries that put him out of commission and off the show for the next three nights.
