Johnny Carson

John William Carson was born on October 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, the second of three children of Homer Lloyd Carson, a power company lineman and manager, and Ruth Hook Carson ^[1]. The family moved several times around southwestern Iowa before settling in Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1933, when Johnny was eight. Norfolk was the town he always named as home, and it remained central to how he presented himself: a plainspoken boy from the Nebraska prairie who never quite believed his own fame ^[2].

At age twelve he sent away for a mail order magician's kit, and the hobby took hold of him completely. Billing himself as The Great Carsoni, the teenager performed card tricks and sleight of hand at local churches, Rotary luncheons, and county fairs, sometimes earning a few dollars a show ^[1]. The magic act taught him lessons he applied for the rest of his career: how to read an audience, how to recover from a failed bit, and how to make preparation look like spontaneity.

Carson graduated from Norfolk High School in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, and joined the United States Navy. Commissioned as an ensign, he served aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania in the Pacific and was assigned to decode encrypted messages ^[3]. He later recalled that the high point of his naval service was performing a card trick for Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. After the war he enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he studied radio and speech, wrote a senior thesis on comedy that analyzed the techniques of Jack Benny and other radio comedians, and graduated in 1949 ^[2].

Carson's broadcasting apprenticeship began at radio station WOW in Omaha, where he hosted a morning program and quickly showed a knack for ad-libbed comedy. In 1951 he moved to Los Angeles and took a job at KNXT, the CBS television station, where he was given a low budget Sunday afternoon show called Carson's Cellar ^[1]. The program's audience was small, but its admirers included established comedians such as Red Skelton, who hired Carson as a writer. When Skelton knocked himself out during a rehearsal in 1954, Carson stepped in front of the cameras on short notice and delivered the monologue himself, a substitution that brought him his first serious network attention ^[3].

CBS gave him a prime time program, The Johnny Carson Show, in 1955, but it was cancelled after a single season, a failure Carson later blamed on constant network tinkering with the format. He rebuilt his career in New York as the host of the ABC daytime quiz program Who Do You Trust?, which ran from 1957 to 1962 ^[1]. The game show format mattered less than what happened between questions: Carson's teasing interviews with ordinary contestants proved he could generate comedy from conversation itself. It was on this program in 1958 that he began working with announcer Ed McMahon, starting a professional partnership that lasted more than three decades ^[4].

When Jack Paar announced he was leaving NBC's Tonight Show, the network chose Carson as his successor. Because ABC held him to his contract, nearly six months of guest hosts filled the chair before Carson finally took over on October 1, 1962, with Groucho Marx handling the introduction ^[3]. He was thirty six years old.

Anyone asking who was Johnny Carson usually gets the same answer first: the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which he led for exactly thirty years, from 1962 until May 22, 1992 ^[1]. Under his stewardship the program became one of the most profitable franchises in the history of NBC, at times reported to account for a substantial share of the network's earnings ^[5]. His nightly opening monologue, built from the day's headlines, became a fixture of American life; politicians and press secretaries paid attention to which stories Carson joked about, treating his material as a rough measure of public opinion ^[2].

The show developed a repertory of recurring characters and bits that audiences knew by heart. Carson played Carnac the Magnificent, a turbaned seer who divined answers to questions sealed in envelopes, along with the huckster Art Fern of the Tea Time Movie sketches and the folksy Floyd R. Turbo ^[1]. Animal segments with zoo director Joan Embery and naturalist Jim Fowler produced some of the most replayed moments in the program's history, largely because of Carson's silent, wide-eyed reactions when a marmoset climbed onto his head or a big cat lunged near his desk. His golf swing at the end of each monologue and McMahon's drawn out introduction became rituals as familiar as the theme music composed with bandleader Doc Severinsen's NBC Orchestra in mind ^[4].

Carson also reshaped the program's geography and rhythm. In 1972 he moved The Tonight Show from New York to Burbank, California, confirming the entertainment industry's westward shift ^[3]. Over the years he trimmed the broadcast from ninety minutes to sixty and reduced his own schedule, decisions that his critics called semi-retirement and his admirers called quality control. During a 1980 contract negotiation NBC granted him terms that reportedly made him the highest paid performer in television at the time ^[5].

Among the most durable Johnny Carson facts is his role as a gatekeeper for American comedy. An invitation to perform stand-up on the show, and above all a wave to the couch afterward, could transform an unknown club comic into a national act overnight. Performers including Joan Rivers, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, and Drew Carey all pointed to Tonight Show appearances as decisive moments in their careers ^[6].

Carson's private life ran far less smoothly than his broadcasts, a contrast he acknowledged with self-mocking jokes about alimony. He married four times. His first marriage, to college sweetheart Jody Wolcott in 1949, produced his three sons, Christopher, Richard, and Cory, and ended in divorce in 1963 ^[2]. Marriages to Joanne Copeland (1963 to 1972) and Joanna Holland (1972 to 1985) also ended in divorce, each accompanied by heavily publicized settlements. In 1987 he married Alexis Maas, who remained his wife until his death ^[1].

He suffered a devastating loss in 1991 when his son Richard, a photographer, was killed in a car accident in California at age thirty nine. Carson closed a Tonight Show broadcast that summer with a quiet on-air tribute, showing his son's nature photographs, one of the rare occasions when he let personal grief onto the program ^[3].

Off camera, Carson was famously private, even shy, a fact that surprised people who knew only the relaxed figure behind the desk. He gave few interviews, avoided the Hollywood party circuit, and spent his free time playing tennis, flying, practicing drums, and sailing aboard his yacht, which he named Serengeti ^[2]. Friends and biographers have described a man who was warm in one-on-one settings but guarded in groups, and who preferred an evening of astronomy or reading to a public appearance ^[7].

Carson announced in 1991 that he would step down the following year, setting off a succession fight between Jay Leno and David Letterman that became one of the most chronicled rivalries in television business history ^[6]. His penultimate broadcast on May 21, 1992, featured Robin Williams and Bette Midler, whose serenade of Carson with a farewell song became an indelible television moment. The final episode the next night, with no guests, drew an audience estimated at roughly fifty million viewers ^[3]. After 4,531 episodes as host, he thanked the audience and said goodnight.

Unlike many entertainers, Carson meant his retirement. He declined nearly every offer to return to television, reasoning that he had left at the right time and had no wish to diminish the memory. His post-retirement public appearances were scarce: a brief cameo on Letterman's CBS Late Show in 1994, in which he walked on, sat at the desk, and left without speaking, was among the last ^[1]. It later emerged, after his death, that he had quietly sent monologue jokes to Letterman, who occasionally used them on the air ^[6].

Carson spent his final years in Malibu with his wife Alexis, traveling, sailing, and studying subjects that interested him, including astronomy and the Swahili language. A lifelong heavy smoker, he announced in 2002 that he had emphysema. He died of respiratory failure arising from the disease on January 23, 2005, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the Los Angeles area, at age seventy nine ^[3]. At his request there was no public memorial service.

Any honest accounting of Johnny Carson achievements begins with endurance: no one else has hosted an American network late night program for thirty years, and the format he refined, monologue, desk, sidekick, band, and celebrity couch, still defines the genre decades later ^[2]. He won six Emmy Awards for the program, received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1993, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush in 1992 ^[1]. The Television Academy Hall of Fame inducted him in 1987, and a Peabody Award in 1985 recognized The Tonight Show's place in American culture ^[5].

His wealth funded a substantial philanthropic afterlife. The John W. Carson Foundation has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to charities since his death, and his gifts during his lifetime included major support for the University of Nebraska, which houses the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film, and for institutions in Norfolk, Nebraska ^[7]. In 2010 the foundation gave 156 million dollars to charitable causes in a single distribution, one of the larger entertainment-derived bequests on record ^[7].

Every serious Johnny Carson biography, including Henry Bushkin's memoir by his longtime lawyer and the archival documentaries produced since his death, wrestles with the same paradox: the most watched man in America was also one of its most private ^[7]. Comedians still describe their craft in terms he established, and hosts from Letterman and Conan O'Brien to Jimmy Fallon have named him the standard they measure themselves against ^[6]. Carson liked to say that he was lucky in his timing, arriving when television was young and leaving before the audience tired of him. The record suggests the luck was mostly the audience's.