Book Review: Carson the Magnificent, by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas (2024)

The cover of Carson the Magnificent, by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas, 2024. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Johnny Carson last hosted The Tonight Show in May of 1992, 32 years ago. Yet the late-night talk show format that he innovated, and many would say perfected, lives on in the shows currently hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers.  

From the time that Carson first hosted The Tonight Show on October 1, 1962, there have been no shortage of attempts made to understand the personality of Johnny Carson. Bill Zehme toiled on his Carson biography, titled Carson the Magnificent, on and off, for twenty years, until his death in 2023. Mike Thomas, an author and one-time assistant to Zehme, finished the book, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2024.  

For all of the ballyhooed research that Zehme did, and the decades he spent toiling in the fields of Carsonia, there is an inevitable letdown when one reads Carson the Magnificent. The book clocks in at a relatively trim 295 pages of text, and many events are either glossed over or not mentioned at all. Do you know want to know about the time Johnny quit The Tonight Show in 1967 for three weeks? You won’t find anything in Carson the Magnificent about it. You’ll have to track down Nora Ephron’s excellent 1968 book And Now...Here’s Johnny for the full story. 

Zehme doesn’t make much of an attempt to summarize what it was that made Johnny Carson such a great entertainer. When analyzing art of any kind, one might argue that words are superfluous, that to understand the brilliance of Salvador Dali, Bob Dylan, Edith Wharton, or Johnny Carson, you need to experience the art itself. I agree with that somewhat, but I’d argue that part of the job of the biographer or cultural critic is to try to convey to the reader why this person was so noteworthy.  

In my own modest attempt to summarize the gifts of Johnny Carson, I would say that he was an amazing combination of the skills required to be a great talk-show host: he was an excellent stand-up comic who could deliver a great opening monologue—Carson could get laughs even when the joke itself bombed—he was a talented enough actor that he could convincingly portray characters in comic sketches, and he was a terrific interviewer, possessed of a curious mind, a quicksilver intelligence, and the ability to make it seem as though the person he was talking to was the only person in the world that mattered at that moment.  

I didn’t grow up watching Johnny Carson—I was 11 years old when he stepped down in 1992, and I remember all of the media coverage of his final shows. At that time, I wasn’t staying up late enough to watch any late-night shows. My knowledge of The Tonight Show has come later in life. I remember having a conversation when I was 20 years old with a co-worker who was a little older than me. We were talking about late-night hosts, and I said that I was a big fan of Conan O’Brien. She was a fan of Carson, and she said “Conan always turns the spotlight back on himself when he’s interviewing guests. Johnny never did that.” I don’t remember exactly what I said in response, but in my head a light bulb went off, and I knew that she was right. It’s a generalization and an oversimplification, but the fundamental point rang true. Carson made a similar statement in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1979, saying “You should try to help the guests be as good as they can be, because the better the guest is, the better I'll be.” 

Zehme’s writing style is a throwback, as it is full scale, breathless, old-school, New Journalism 1970’s magazine stream of consciousness. Zehme is not as fond of exclamation points as, say, Tom Wolfe was, but man, Zehme loves the parenthetical aside, and you’ll find yourself sometimes barely hanging on to sentences as they careen along. As an example, here’s just one sentence, after Zehme has informed us of the title of the game show that Carson hosted for five years, Who Do You Trust? “And, here, further irony requires noting that—far more than a quiz show moniker—this was already, and would remain, the single most salient, gnawing, often debilitating existential question to reside within the winsome host’s shielded soul.” (p.136) Are you still with me?  

The contradiction of Johnny Carson was that while he appeared in millions of homes across America nightly for 30 years, there was some part of him that he seemed to hold in reserve. Virtually every magazine article and book written about Carson has operated on this assumption. Carson bluntly summed up the contradiction between his public and private persona by saying in a 1979 Rolling Stone interview “I'm an extrovert when I work. I'm an introvert when I don't.” That might be the best distillation of any of the attempts made by writers to analyze Carson’s personality. 

Zehme makes the odd choice of not mentioning any of the characters Carson portrayed on The Tonight Show until the part where he mentions the last time Carson played those characters before his retirement. It’s strange to have Zehme write about the last time Carson played Carnac the Magnificent, and then he has to explain the character because he’s never mentioned Carnac before. 

The fundamental problem with Carson the Magnificent is that it does not differentiate itself from the other biographies of Johnny Carson. Carson the Magnificent doesn’t have much new to say about Johnny Carson, and thus it simply isn’t as good as the definitive Carson biography King of the Night, written by Laurence Leamer and published in 1989.  

Part of the problem with writing a biography of Johnny Carson in 2024, or the decade leading up to 2024, is that most people who knew Johnny Carson well are probably getting up there in age. Because Zehme worked on Carson the Magnificent for such an extended period of time, reading the interviews is like going back in time, as we hear from many people who have since passed on, like Dick Carson (Johnny’s brother and the longtime director of The Tonight Show), Johnny’s second wife Joanne Carson, Hugh Downs, Skitch Henderson, Ed McMahon, Bob Newhart, Suzanne Pleshette, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, and Betty White.  

Carson the Magnificent is actually strongest on Carson’s retirement years—which are covered at the beginning of the book. Carson had no desire to simply keep being on TV just for the sake of being on TV, and I admire how Carson’s sense of self was not dependent on fame and adulation. Johnny Carson was a fascinating person and a fantastic entertainer and reading Carson the Magnificent will inevitably send you back to Carson’s time hosting The Tonight Show.  

Book Review: Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin (2013)

The cover of Johnny Carson, by Henry Bushkin, 2013.

Henry Bushkin, Joyce DeWitt, and Johnny Carson, 1980's.

Henry Bushkin worked for Johnny Carson for eighteen years, from 1970 until 1988. Bushkin was Carson’s lawyer and one of Carson’s closest friends during this period of his life. In a 1978 New Yorker profile of Carson, author Kenneth Tynan asked Carson who he entertained at home, and Carson responded, “My lawyer, Henry Bushkin, who’s probably my best friend.” It would seem that Bushkin would be as well-equipped as anyone who knew Carson to solve the enigma that was Johnny Carson. 

Bushkin didn’t talk about Carson on the record very much until he released Johnny Carson in 2013. Bushkin’s memoir of his time spent working for Carson became a best-seller, and it’s the only book of any note about Carson that’s been published since his death in 2005. Johnny Carson is certainly a juicy, dishy piece of gossip, as Bushkin relates numerous stories and anecdotes showing Johnny Carson in a less than flattering light. 

One of the first times that Bushkin met Carson, the talk show host was organizing friends to break into an apartment that his second wife Joanne was renting that Carson suspected she was using to cheat on him. After the break in provided conclusive evidence of Joanne’s unfaithfulness, Bushkin was summoned by a drunken Carson to meet him at Jilly’s Saloon, where Carson proceeded to bare his soul to Bushkin, a man he barely knew. Bushkin quotes Carson as saying, “I can’t quit smoking and I get drunk every night and I chase all the pussy I can get. I’m shitty in the marriage department. Make sure you understand this.” (Bushkin, p.38) It’s a great scene, but as I read it I had to wonder, did it really happen? It just seems a little too perfect, as Carson also reveals in the conversation that his mother, Ruth Carson, “deprived us all of any real goddamn warmth.” (Bushkin, p.38) For Johnny Carson to thus unburden himself emotionally was highly unusual. But maybe this odd conversation helped to strengthen the bond between Carson and Bushkin.

After these first emotionally charged encounters, Carson made Bushkin his attorney, and Bushkin helped in Carson’s divorce from his second wife, Joanne. Bushkin also moved with Carson when The Tonight Show relocated to beautiful downtown Burbank in 1972. Carson and Bushkin played tennis regularly together, and Bushkin and his wife Judy often socialized with Carson and his third wife Joanna. Working for Johnny Carson was never easy, as Carson expected that he would always be Bushkin’s first priority. 

Johnny Carson is filled with stories about Carson’s incessant womanizing, and his frequently icy moods. Johnny Carson shows us Carson at his very best and very worst, and while that’s entertaining to read about, it's hard to get a picture of what Carson was like day to day. 

Bushkin negotiated Carson’s contract with NBC in 1980, which paid Carson a whopping $25 million a year. Carson’s new contract called for him to film three episodes of The Tonight Show a week, for 37 weeks out of the year, which meant that Johnny was making $225,000 for every episode of The Tonight Show. That’s a pretty good chunk of change. It’s a measure of the incredible power Johnny Carson had in 1980 that he was able to cut back his working week to three days. 

A provision of Carson’s 1980 contract was that his production company would sell NBC five television series. This was an opportunity for Carson to become an even wealthier and more powerful man than he already was. Bushkin played an active role in the business side of Carson Productions, and he pushed Carson to become a TV and movie mogul, but Carson simply wasn’t interested in creating an entertainment empire.

The last part of Johnny Carson gets a little dull, as it deals less and less with Johnny Carson and more with Bushkin’s involvement in Carson Productions. Bushkin was eventually fired in 1988, and his relationship with Johnny Carson came to an end. 

Bushkin makes it clear throughout the book that Carson was an extremely difficult man to deal with. Carson could be blunt in assessing himself, once saying to Bushkin, “You know I don’t have much of a talent for happiness. I never have. My mother saw to that.” (Bushkin, p.254) 

While Bushkin claimed that he was surprised when he read in 1978 that Johnny Carson considered Bushkin his closest friend, Judy Bushkin, Henry’s ex-wife, said, “I don’t know if Henry can think of anyone as a friend, except for Johnny. I’ve never known Henry to be really close to anybody except Johnny. I think that was true of Johnny as well. They had each other, and that was that.” (King of the Night, by Laurence Leamer, p.267) 

Maybe it was just the 1970’s setting, but as I read Johnny Carson, I couldn’t help but think that Henry Bushkin would make an excellent character in a Philip Roth novel. Bushkin starts out as an earnest Jewish attorney who eventually becomes the selfish double of his emotionally distant WASP boss. Johnny cheats on his wife, so Bushkin too cheats on his. The novel would practically write itself. What would the title be? Bushkin’s Kvetching? 

Johnny Carson is an entertaining read about one of the most interesting American entertainers of the last half-century, a man whose work still looms large over the late night television landscape that he helped to create.

Book Review: And Now...Here's Johnny! by Nora Ephron (1968)

My well-worn paperback copy of And Now...Here's Johnny!, by Nora Ephron, 1968. This is my "Hollywood" bookshelf. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor.)

Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson during the early years of The Tonight Show.

A dapper Johnny Carson, circa late 1960's.

Nora Ephron, probably circa 1975.

Johnny Carson was one of the most famous American entertainers of his era, hosting The Tonight Show from 1962 until 1992, and yet despite Carson’s constant presence in America’s living rooms, he has remained something of an enigma. Nora Ephron wrote the first book about Johnny Carson, And Now…Here’s Johnny!, published in October of 1968. At the time Ephron was a reporter for The New York Post. She would later go on to great acclaim as the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally…, and the screenwriter and director of Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Ephron wrote several articles for the Post about Carson that were published in 1967, and those articles formed the basis for And Now…Here’s Johnny! 

Ephron interviewed Carson for the book, and she found him to be a somewhat difficult subject. She writes of Carson, “He worries that his interviewer will go away thinking he is hostile or conceited. ‘That’s the way it’s been ever since I was in high school,’ he said. ‘It’s so easy to confuse shyness and conceit.’” (p.22) Carson deflected most of Ephron’s questions about his personal life. “He will not discuss his ideas or his habits. Or his thinking. Or his opinions. He would prefer it if you did not print the brand name of the cigarette he smokes.” (p.23) The irony of Johnny Carson was that even though he served as America’s favorite party host for nearly thirty years, he was not an avid party goer in his private life.

Despite Carson’s reticence, Ephron was still able to paint a vivid portrait of Carson in all of his contradictions and complexity. Ephron traces Carson’s life and career, from his childhood in Nebraska to his early years on television. When Carson took over The Tonight Show from the volatile and emotional Jack Paar, he also decided to distance himself from Paar’s style. As Ephron writes, “There was to be no controversy; there were to be no emotional outbursts; there was to be no universal involvement with the Carson family; there were to be as few opinions from Carson as possible.” (p.39) Carson’s coolness on screen kept viewers coming back for more, and he didn’t burn himself out the way Paar did. (Paar hosted The Tonight Show for less than five years.) Carson also greatly expanded the audience of The Tonight Show. According to the figures in And Now…Here’s Johnny, by 1968 Carson was averaging around 7 million viewers a night, and he was consistently getting higher ratings than Paar ever had, except for some of the shows around the time of Paar’s famous on screen resignation in 1960. In 1971, Carson averaged 11 million viewers a night, and by 1978 the number had increased to 17 million. By comparison, Jimmy Fallon, the current host of The Tonight Show, averaged 4 million viewers during the fourth quarter of 2015. 

Ephron clearly did her homework for And Now…Here’s Johnny!, and the book is full of fun tidbits like this: “His memory is so prodigious, {cue Ed McMahon: ‘How prodigious is it?’} partly as a result of a self-taught memory course, that he once memorized the names of all ninety-eight contestants in a Miss Universe contest he once emceed.” (p.57) Ephron also got some good quotations from her interviews with Carson, as when he said of people who criticized the show, “When people tell me they don’t like something on the show or the commercials, I say, ‘Go read a book,’ or ‘learn to play chess.’” (p.188) 

And Now…Here’s Johnny also reveals some of the battles that took place between Carson and NBC during the early years of The Tonight Show. In February of 1965, very few television stations carried Carson’s monologue, instead they started broadcasting The Tonight Show at 11:30, 15 minutes into the show. Incredibly enough, not even New York City carried the first 15 minutes of the show. So Carson stopped showing up for the first 15 minutes of the show, letting Ed McMahon fill the time instead. After about a week of this, NBC saw things Carson’s way, and let him begin his monologue at 11:30. A bigger battle between Carson and NBC occurred in April of 1967, as production on The Tonight Show was shut down by an American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strike. Carson, as a member of AFTRA, walked out, and when NBC ran reruns of The Tonight Show, he announced that NBC was in breach of his contract by showing reruns, and promptly quit The Tonight Show. After much negotiating with NBC, which raised his salary to $20,000 a week, Carson returned to The Tonight Show three weeks later. Carson also fired Art Stark, who had been his producer for eleven years, dating back to when Carson hosted Who Do You Trust? 

Ephron presented a portrait of Carson’s home life as well, as she interviewed Carson’s second wife, Joanne, for the book. Presciently, the photo section of the book identifies Joanne Carson as Johnny’s “present wife.” (Carson would marry two more times after his divorce from Joanne in 1972.) The interview with Joanne Carson is more than a little odd. Here’s how she describes Johnny: “He is a unique individual. He is so unique that you have nothing to relate him to. If I put an object on this table and you had no idea what it was, you would have nothing else to compare it to. You can’t compare him to anyone in the world. He is unique in his own likeness.” (p.205) Okay, well, whatever that means. She’s obviously nuts about Johnny. We also learn that Joanne Carson doesn’t know how many days are in a month: “In thirty-two days of the month, we eat at home maybe thirty.” (p.207-8) Huh? Maybe that was a simple verbal gaffe that wasn’t corrected by an editor, but it makes her sound out of touch. Another fun fact is that Joanne Carson makes snowball candles to give out as Christmas gifts: “At Christmas anyone can give money but I like them to think that I care and Johnny cares. Each of these candles takes one hour to make. So that’s what I give at Christmas. My time. Just to let people know we care.” (p.215) Excuse me, but I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. 

One of the reasons why And Now…Here’s Johnny! is a valuable book is because it paints a picture of The Tonight Show during an era that we can’t recapture, as most of the episodes of The Tonight Show before 1972 were taped over by NBC. And Now...Here’s Johnny! is a fascinating look at a television icon at a time when he was still a relative newcomer. For that reason alone, it’s worth reading if you’re a fan of Johnny Carson.