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.