No doubt because the King of All Media is a peasant compared to Carson.
Carson’s privacy was well known even when he was still on. He didn’t socialize much, he didn’t go to parties. Lots of people in the business have totally different onstage and off-stage personas. Not news, covered in all the recent stories, and no big deal.
This is a bad thing? Letterman was his protege, so no surprise that he was unhappy at NBCs decision.
I haven’t seen one article calling him a warm human being. Howard lasted on TV, what, 30 seconds? Just jealous, no doubt.
As reported in the book The Late Shift, the source of those reports was none other than Jay Leno’s manager, Helen Kuschnick. The exact sequence was:
With Leno’s contract about to expire, CBS approaches him to host a new late-night talk show.
Kuschnick uses that bargaining chip to negotiate a deal with NBC for Leno to take over when Carson retires.
With the deal in place, Kuschnick plants a story in the New York Post that NBC is unhappy with Carson.
Shortly thereafter, for whatever reason, Carson chooses to announce his retirement.
In fact, while Carson’s ratings were slipping among younger viewers (Letterman was actually getting higher ratings in that demographic in spite of being on at a later time) his overall ratings remained strong.
And Leno didn’t mention him on his first show. That one goes both ways.
There was an interview with Tommy Newsom in the paper here today. (Newsom retired to the area a few years ago.) Said that even though he worked with him/for him for 30 years (Newsom was on The Tonight Show before Carson), he didn’t really know him. The man, as others have said here and in other threads, was very private. But that he (Carson) did Newsom a favor by writing a very positive recommendation to put on a CD Newsom produced of band. Sounds like a nice enough guy to me.
I have heard the racism charge before. One of my professors said that his standup material was racisit, at least before the Tonight Show. The only direct words of Carson that I have of race were anything but racist. I have a book with an interview where Johnny Carson speaks against racism and calls racial slurs worse than other obscenities. He also put blacks on his show in the 60s when some others apparently would not. I don’t recall him making any jokes that could be seen as racist. BET is lauding him. Does anyone have anything specific and reliable?
I am especially interested because I don’t remember anything on the Tonight Show being racist. If he was racist in his private dealings, I think it is an interesting choice to be less racist in his public actions. If he were racist in his public actions, I’d like to see refernce to it.
I can’t remember which of the many obits it was in, but Carl Sagan, who was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show in the 1970s, said that not only would Carson chat him up during commercial breaks, but that he would also ask him about astronomical things far too complicated to be discussed on a mass-marketed talk show. Carson, of course, was quite the amateur astronomer.
So I guess the point is that he’d talk to you if he felt you actually had something interesting to say. I don’t know if there was ever a time that applied to Joan Rivers.
The biracial granddaughter was a tabloid story; I have no idea whether or not it was true, but if it was the true villain in the story was Carson’s son (who was accused of being a deadbeat dad). The child was on public assistance and of course the article juxtaposed pictures of Carson’s mansion with pics of the public housing the child lived in. This raises a point of even if it was his grandchild, was Johnny obligated to provide a comfortable life for its mother just because she had sex with a famous millionaire’s son? And if he tried to take custody of the child, that would have been a scandal- “Millionaire talkshow host tries to steal grandchild from indigent mother”.
I didn’t know Johnny Carson as a person- never met him and only spent a day or two in the same city with him (assuming he was there when I was). I only know him as a talk-show host. At that he was one of a kind, exuding an aura of intelligence and class and integrity that is noticeably lacking among most of his replacements (Jon Stewart coming closest to the mark). Whether he ate his young or tap-danced on kittens in his spare time I don’t know or care to as I’m content to remember him as a fixture of the memes of my youth.
Well, on the plus side (sorry for the brief hijack), he’s donated $100,000 to the James Randi foundation, according to the brief article in the Sun-Times, so I forgive any character flaws he may have.
Allow me to just weigh in with some personal experience of the man.
I’m nobody. I’m neither important nor famous, and I live in the UK. About two years ago I got an order on my website for a book I’d written, and the order was from Johnny Carson. He didn’t ask for a freebie - he actually put his credit card money down. I emailed him back, and he replied in a very genial, good-natured way. Depsite his protests, I refunded his credit card and sent him the book free of charge because I wanted to.
We exchanged a small number of brief emails over the past two years. He always replied to me promptly, with warmth and wit.
A while ago, I came back from a trip and there was a parcel waiting for me. Inside was a boxed DVD package, ‘The Ultimate Carson Collection’, special edition, culled from 30 years of the Tonight Show. This was a personal gift from JC himself. He sent it with a short note, just saying he hoped I enjoyed it.
I’d say that sounds like a fairly nice guy, who deserves to be remembered with respect and kindness.
As for all the carping and sniping from showbiz sources, first we wait to see how many of them enjoy success in the popular media for over 30 years, and then they can have their say.
All of the DVD material was new to me, by the way, because I’m in the UK and only get regular TV channels, which have never shown The Tonight Show. I don’t much care for talk shows, but it seemed to me that JC did his job about as well as anyone could be expected to.
To be fair, a lot of people probably stole from each other. I think his renown as a standup comic or comic actor was more for his timing and delivery.
You bet you could say more. Could you fill us in on the Youngbloods incident?
Here’s a story I read in a backstage history of Saturday Night Live. When they were getting ready to put the first episode of SNL on the air, it turned out that Carson didn’t want them to hire George Carlin as the first guest host, since Carlin was a sort of Tonight Show institution and had appeared frequently on the show over the years. Of course, the SNL folks went right ahead and put Carlin on the very first show, and Carson was naturally miffed. When he confronted Lorne Michaels about it, and asked why he had hired Carlin, the reply was “Because he fills out forms well and is punctual.”
No one I’ve seen remembering Johnny in the guise of a close friend says anything about him “closing his gates” 10 years ago. They do acknowledge that he did stop seeing people in the last 4-6 months. Both Don Rickles and Merv Griffin said that they last saw him at the end of the summer/beginning of the fall. Tom Drisen said something similar.
That, however, makes perfect sense. Johnny was clearly on steroid therapy the last time he was photographed in public; his lungs were failing. He was dying, and he wanted that process to be private and didn’t want his friends to remember him enfeebled and debilitated. Dying of emphysema is ugly, scary and sad, if you had the ability to protect the people you liked from bearing witness to the process, you likely would, too.
I posted this in another thread. I’m old enough to have actually seen the show, and remember it well:
A rather infamous moment: Back in 1969, the Youngbloods were scheduled to perform. (Buffalo Springfield had been originnally scheduled, but cancelled.) At the end of the show, Johnny said, “We were supposed to have a group called The Youngbloods perform tonight. But today during rehearsal, they didn’t like their spot on the show, they didn’t like the time allotted, they didn’t like the set - so we told them to blow their noses and go home!”
Later, Jesse Colin Young reported that it was he who had walked out on Carson when he learned that Carson wouldn’t let the band perform two songs.
In any event, the incident left such a bitter taste in Carson’s mouth that it was many years before another rock band was scheduled for The Tonight Show.
It’s my understanding that each guest was told that Johnny didn’t talk during commercials and not to expect it. Then if Carson wanted to, he would.
It sounds like a sensible standard operating procedure to me. I can’t imagine how much asskissing might have been attempted without it. "Hey, Johnny I’ve this script… this idea… this party I’m having… " several times a week for 30 years. Ugh.
Perhaps it was a generational thing, too. Carson was simply from a pre-rock generation and was far more apt to book the likes of John Davidson, Englebert Humperdinck, or Petula Clark. Steve Allen, too, for all his talent, was unbelievably scathing in his attitude towards rock ‘n’ roll, which he lambasted in one or more sarcasm-laden send-ups.
I heard a D.J. on the radio say that Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson had a major falling out after Joan had “screwed him over”, or possibly the other way around. Does anyone know what that was all about?
And it’s typical for even the most despicable celebrity to get lauded upon their death – when Nixon died, everyone treated him like he was a national hero. Heck, even Jeffrey Dahmer got sympathy when he died!!
