Bill Zehme, the premier magazine-profile writer of the 1990s, once told me that it was like he had two fathers. “Johnny,” he explained, “was the cool dad with the television show.”
At a time when U.S. presidential candidates are fielding questions from a mulletted YouTuber named Theo Von and appearing on Call Her Daddy, it’s impossible to overstate the role Johnny Carson filled during his 30 years on television. In an era when we were a collective culture, with a common experience, he was much more than a talk-show host. Like Walter Cronkite, Carson was America.
Each night, Carson’s presence “conferred intrinsic order and reassurance upon his country,” Zehme writes in Carson the Magnificent. Glamorous, sophisticated, and cool beyond words, Carson was a middle-American smart-ass, with impeccable timing, whose impact on the national psyche is unfathomable in a digital-media landscape that micro-targets each individual.
When Carson died, in 2005, Zehme was the obvious choice to chronicle his life. Writing for Esquire and Rolling Stone, Zehme pierced the artifice of the biggest stars (Madonna, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Woody Allen, to name a few) and made them as familiar as the parents at your kid’s school. A late-night specialist who interviewed David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel, he wrote Carson’s only post-retirement profile.
As his hero’s anointed biographer, Zehme began a quest to track down anyone who’d ever had coffee with the king of late night, while digging up all the Carsoniana he could find. Two years in, however, the writer who could penetrate anyone realized he was dealing with an impenetrable subject, telling one Tonight Show writer that he was “vexed” by Carson. “Large and lively only when on camera, he was the inscrutable national monument,” Zehme writes, “on constant full view, ever occluded nonetheless.”
“Carson started off as a lake and became [an ocean] … complete with dark and unfathomable depths,” writes Mike Thomas, the author of The Second City Unscripted, who completed Carson the Magnificent after Zehme died of cancer, in 2023.
Despite Zehme’s years of doubt and apprehension, however, the pair ultimately did a masterful job of revealing the unseen side of a man of whom one colleague said, “Johnny Carson on TV is the visible eighth of an iceberg called Johnny Carson.”
The Permanent Host of The Tonight Show
Born in 1925, Carson grew up in small-town Nebraska, the middle of three children. He had a disapproving mother (Johnny didn’t attend her funeral), and a traditional Midwestern upbringing. “Nobody in our family says what they really think or feel,” his brother once said. That reserve was the essence of Carson’s on-air persona. Though awkward and shy at cocktail parties, he was cool, calm, and collected while being watched by millions.
Carson discovered the allure of an audience while performing magic—a lifelong obsession—at birthday parties under the name “the Great Carsoni.” Graduating to campus radio, and then local TV, he moved to Los Angeles, where he hosted morning shows. These were short segments—“Carson’s Coffee Break” was 5 minutes long, “Carson’s Cellar” was 15 minutes—but he made a big impression, gaining such early fans as Jack Benny and Red Skelton, who hired him to write monologues for his popular television show.
In 1954, Skelton suffered a concussion during rehearsal. With only 90 minutes’ notice, Carson was tapped to stand in. Having had no time to read Skelton’s script, he was forced to improvise, scribbling notes on slips of paper so that his fellow performers would know what to do next. Incredibly, he was a hit.
Midwestern reserve was the essence of Carson’s on-air persona. Though awkward and shy at cocktail parties, he was cool, calm, and collected while being watched by millions.
After a few weeks guest-hosting The Morning Show on CBS, Carson was offered his own variety show on the network, which in turn led to several years presiding over the ABC game show Who Do You Trust?, where he met his longtime sidekick, Ed McMahon.
Then, on October 1, 1962, Groucho Marx walked onstage and introduced “the permanent host of The Tonight Show—Johnny Carson!” Although Carson wasn’t the first to host the program—Steve Allen and Jack Paar had each manned the desk for a few years before him—he did become as close to a permanent fixture of late-night television as it’s possible to be.
Carson’s rise seems preordained in retrospect, but the truth is, it just happened. “From youth onward,” Zehme writes, “he was just an instinctual fellow, swept forth, at best, by a calculated current.”
Preternaturally comfortable in his own skin, Carson didn’t try to make a big first impression that night—or on any of the thousands of nights that followed. A great comedic counterpuncher, he was utterly relaxed and never sought attention as Paar, his more emotional predecessor, had. Like a great athlete, Carson let the show come to him—and then he reacted.
“Johnny was simply willing to play,” Conan O’Brien said. “He was willing to have the animal shit on his head … to put on a ridiculous costume. Yet there was nobody cooler.” The key, O’Brien recalled Carson telling him, was to “just be yourself on the show. It’s the only way it can work.”
But which self? Carson “would be meticulously aware of what pieces of himself he projected forth and what separate, salient truths he would keep tucked away,” Zehme writes. “Only he could know for sure how much of his authentic self would step before an audience.”
The authentic Carson wasn’t without a dark side. Married four times, he was a serial philanderer whose drinking often revealed a nasty streak and once nearly got him killed for hitting on a mobster’s girlfriend. (He was saved thanks to the intervention of Frank Sinatra.)
Untrusting by nature, his small circle of friends included his longtime attorney, Henry “Bombastic” Bushkin, whom Johnny frequently joked about on-air. But even that relationship ended badly, when Carson sued him for malpractice.
Carson discovered the allure of an audience while performing magic—a lifelong obsession—at birthday parties under the name “the Great Carsoni.”
A man of strong personal convictions (particularly regarding civil rights), Carson kept his political opinions, and his private self, strictly cordoned off from the public. A chain-smoker (he died of emphysema) who eventually refused to be photographed with a cigarette, he was a master of eluding anyone that tried to probe too deeply.
“If the conversation edges towards areas in which he feels ill at ease or unwilling to commit himself, burglar alarms are triggered,” Kenneth Tynan wrote of Carson in 1978. “His smile as he steers you away from forbidden territory is genial and unfading.”
But the troubles beneath never seeped into his reassuring nightly presence, which was a responsibility he understood better than anyone. “A lot of [the audience] would like to think that they will wake up in the morning,” Carson once told a guest on The Tonight Show. “My job is to give them that feeling—that there will be a tomorrow.”
When Carson abdicated the throne, after 30 years on top, he became that rare performer who never looked back—the Cincinnatus of late night. He disappeared into civilian life with elegance and dignity, knowing that he was the only one that ever had, or ever would, do what he’d done.
After plumbing the depths of the man he describes as “our Garbo of Comedy, our J.D. Salinger of Television,” Zehme seems to have discovered that being “Johnny Carson” was ultimately the Great Carsoni’s most magnificent trick of all.
Josh Karp is the author of A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind
