First one was when I was really young and Paul Lindh was being interviewed on somebody’s daytime show. Might have been Donahue. What I remember was some woman in the audience standing up to ask him if he’d had a “liquid breakfast” (“Mommy? What’s a ‘liquid breakfast’”) and him indicating an affirmative. It was pretty clear everyone was angry and disappointed in him.
The other one is I swear we were watching the night Carson decided to hang it up. Bill Cosby was the guest, with Morrissey performing. The audience was full of teenyboppers who kept shouting “Morrissey!” at every opportunity. It was pretty clear they didn’t want to see Cosby, which was a shame b/c he doesn’t make many appearances and Carson was clearly delighted to have him there and royally pissed at the audience for misbehaving. Cosby was a trooper, he gave up and went with it and tried to get Carson to calm down. It wasn’t long after that when Carson announced his retirement.
That sounds so incredibly staged. Funny, but staged, because,
Johnny wouldn’t have put Chevy on the spot like that.
Everybody in show biz already knew that Ebert regular trashed (deservedly) Chevy’s movies (most of them spectacular flops).
There are monitors everwhere in a studio taping of a talk show, Ebert could have easily seen Chevy mugging.
This whole thing was a set up for Chevy to do the only funny thing that was his trademark.
Ebert has a sense of humor and has played along with other injoke jokes in other venues. He does feel sorry for trashing people he knows are good people or have some capability of doing well given the right situation; and so, this was a bone he threw Chevy’s way.
I personally loved Jon Stewart’s interview of a couple of Spice Girls. They absolutely didn’t get his humor, and said so. He kept needling them, and they got more and more annoyed. Beautiful.
Letterman seems to be the king of attracting stoned or drunk guests. In addition to the Courtney Love and Farrah Fawcett ones mentioned I remember, a few disasters from the 80s.
Nastassja Kinski, who came on with her hair piled on top of her head like a rat’s nest, and quite zonked out of her mind.
Billy Idol, who by all acounts wasn't that bright when he was sober, also showed up in an altered state. Watching him struggle to finish sentences, and then break into his tradmark sneer when he would loose his train of thought (often), was better than a dozen "just say no to drugs" ads.
He wouldn’t do that now. The last few times I’ve seen him interviewed he’s been grumpier than George Carlin but nowhere near as funny. Perhaps it’s the death of his son or perhaps frustration with today’s youth, but he’s become almost as uncomfortable a guest to have as Jerry Lewis.
(Hijack, but- does anybody know why he has taken to wearing sunglasses all the time? Does he have an eye problem?)
Speaking of Ebert, one uncomfortable moment with him that was definitely not staged was when he became furious with Gene Siskel. I believe this was on ARSENIO; they were discussing movies then at the box office, one of which was the Douglas/Turner movie War of the Roses. Siskel revealed the twist ending
that Turner and Douglas both die in a chandelier accident while trying to kill each other
and Ebert was livid. (He had previously become furious and tried to have the video edited or pulled when Siskel gave away the twist to The Crying Game , the twist being that Jaye Davidson’s character
is actually black and English. And something about a penis.
He really sent Dave for a loop when he talked about an incident that took place after a conccert. Seems fans found out which hotle Idol was staying. They were shouting for him to come out on the balcony. He did so. Naked. He revealed to Dave that he hung his dick out over the edge of the balcony.
I can’t believe this thread has gone so far without anyone ever mentioning Bette Davis’ legendary moment on “the Tonight Show.” It was the day after Joan Crawford died. Of course, Davis & Crawford had been bitter enemies since at least “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, so Carson couldn’t resist asking what she thought of the passing.
Bette Davis: “My mama told me to say nothing but good about the dead. Well, now she’s dead. GOOD!”
The book “Gotta Revolution” (about the history of Jefferson Airplane/Starship/etc.) recounts the time the band appeared on Carson’s show to perform their bit hig of the day “White Rabbit.” Some fool set designer figured Grace Slick should be riding a stuffed rocking horse while lipsyncing the song. (Yes, Ashlee Simpson was no where NEAR the first to do this!) And Carson apparently made the mistake of snidely putting down the band’s music before they were set to go on. Anyway, just as they were about to appear (on live tv!), Grace turns the horse around, so that it’s rear end was facing the audience. Halfway during the lipsync, she abruptly stopped ‘singing’ and started thrusting her mic into the horse’s ‘bottom’ over & over again. (The tape for that night was, unsurprisingly, not saved. I don’t believe they ever came back to the show either.)
I saw that show in 1983, and although she was indeed wearing that odd hair-don’t, nothing in her speech or demeanor suggested she was “zonked out of her mind”. She was no doubt put off by Dave’s ridicule of her appearance, followed by his inappropriate laughter at a film clip from her latest movie, Exposed (a romantic scene, not comic).
Your inference is wrong. Any videotapes of The Tonight Show from the 1960s (and White Rabbit was a 1967 hit) are rare, as NBC routinely erased and reused the expensive 2-inch tapes back then. Not until 1971 and the advent of the U-matic VCR were tapes of the show routinely saved.
But you may be right that the band did not appear again on The Tonight Show during Carson’s tenure, at least according to the official guest database, which is complete from 1971 onward.
Just to clarify, I did know that the Tonight Show did not routinely preserve tapes from this time period, but they DID hold onto occasional tapes that they considered memorable and possibly worth rescreening at a future date. There is, for example, footage of Jack Paar’s famous moment when he quit his hosting gig midshow and stalked off the set midshow (ASIDE: Was this mentioned already? If not, it REALLY should have been!) What I meant was that Carson & the producers didn’t want to keep it taped, and hence it can’t be seen again (like Bette Davis’ catty remark!), only read about. I didn’t mean to imply that Carson erased this specific episode out of spite for the band.
From what I remember, it wasn’t so much that Kinski’s speech or demeanor seemed “zonked” but rather she was completely oblivious to how her hair looked. It wasn’t until halfway through the interview, when she glanced at the monitor and saw that she looked like she just spent 24 hours in a wind tunnel, that she noticed anything was wrong.
BTW, Letterman’s next guest on that show was John Candy who came out with his hair piled up on his head the same way as Kinski.
