TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031692/0316992.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.2 KB | 261 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 62

COVER STORIES

And What a Reign It Was


In his 30 years, Carson was the best, providing a bedtime blanket
of amusing rituals and quirks, and a barometer of the national
mood

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los
Angeles and William Tynan/New York


    Darrell Vickers and Andrew Nicholls, head writers for The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, are sitting in a cluttered
room at the end of a long, nondescript suite of offices at
NBC's Burbank headquarters, getting ready to tackle El Moldo.
It is noon on Wednesday, and they have already had their morning
phone conversation with Carson about tonight's show (he has
asked for a few more jokes about Ed McMahon's recent wedding and
some on the Michelangelo computer virus), and they have
finished a draft of the opening monologue. Theirs is one of six
full-length monologues prepared by the show's eight staff
writers (including two writing pairs) that Carson will get when
he arrives at the office between 2 and 3 p.m. From this bounty,
Carson will pick the best 15 or 20 gags, put them in order and
deliver them later that day to a studio audience of 500 people
and a TV audience of nearly 12 million.

    But El Moldo awaits. A few days earlier, Carson had asked
his writers to come up with a new bit for the hoary character,
a fake psychic, who dubs himself the "master of mentalism."
It's just one of several classic Carson routines that are being
trotted out for a final appearance as his departure nears.
Carnac the Magnificent, the turbaned answer-and-question man,
showed up a few weeks ago for the last time. (Carson himself
wrote more than half the gags.) Art Fern will introduce his
final Tea Time movie in a bit scheduled for this week. There may
even be a comeback for lovable old -- old -- Aunt Blabby. But
Vickers and Nicholls, a pair of laid-back Canadians in their
mid-30s who joined the Carson staff in 1986, barely remember El
Moldo. Except for a one-night reprise in 1989, Carson hasn't
done him since 1983. But there's one thing Nicholls does
remember: "It's Ed's favorite spot."

    Of such stuff is the end of TV eras made. It has been nine
months since Johnny Carson became America's most famous lame
duck by announcing that he would retire from the Tonight show
this year, at the end of his 30th season. Now, as the
long-awaited finale draws near, a show that has always depended
for its appeal on the offhand, the spontaneous and the ephemeral
is acquiring an air of great moment. Hollywood stars are
clamoring to be on with Johnny for one last time. Elizabeth
Taylor appeared last month for the first time ever, thanking
Johnny for "30 years of brilliant entertainment." Regular
Tonight visitors too seem less interested in plugging their new
movie than in paying homage to the departing king. Tom Hanks
settled himself next to Johnny a few nights back and observed,
"It is still the most exciting moment in show business to walk
out from that curtain and sit in this chair."

    It will all end on Friday night, May 22, when Johnny will
appear without guests and reminisce with a selection of clips
from past shows -- "a collage," says executive producer Fred de
Cordova, "of what the years have meant to Johnny."

    Around the Tonight offices, the sentiment is starting to
get thick. "Everyone in the country has been tied together by
Johnny Carson," says co-executive producer Peter Lassally, who,
along with De Cordova, will depart from the show when Carson
does. "A part of Americana is leaving." Says bandleader Doc
Severinsen, who started out in the trumpet section of the
Tonight show orchestra in 1962: "In a way, it's agonizing. The
ending is going on and on. The pain is being extended -- and
there is pain."

    Carson's competitors are getting nostalgic as well. "The
best guy who ever did it is stepping down," says Dennis Miller,
host of a new late-night show that hopes to pick up some of the
viewers that Carson leaves behind. "I've been doing this for 30
shows, and he did it for 30 years. It's a tough gig, and he
still looks like he enjoys it." Dick Cavett, who once wrote for
Carson and later squared off against him as a rival host,
praises Carson's skills both onstage and off. "He has the
ability to pick good material, to budget his energy, to fire the
right people," says Cavett. "But finally it comes down to
personality. He's easy to take, and he's got that wonderful
naughty-fraternity-boy quality that he never outgrows."

    In a business where success is fleeting and burnout comes
fast, Carson's durability is not only unprecedented, it is
almost unimaginable. An Iowa-born, Nebraska-raised standup comic
and host of a popular game show, Who Do You Trust?, Carson
replaced Jack Paar as host of NBC's Tonight show on Oct. 1,
1962. His tenure on the program has lasted for two-thirds of the
time that national TV has existed. He has hosted the show long
enough to have had Judy Garland, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford and
Hubert Humphrey as guests. If Jay Leno lasts as long, he won't
be leaving until the year 2022.

    Carson's nightly rituals and idiosyncrasies have become as
comforting to millions of viewers as warm wool pajamas:
McMahon's booming, endlessly imitated introduction ("Heeeeeere's
Johnny"); the natty golf swing that signals the end of the
opening monologue; Carson's nervous tics (fiddling with his tie,
drumming a pencil on the desk), which have provided grist for
impressionists from Rich Little to Dana Carvey. The program has
had moments of great theater, from Tiny Tim's wedding to Miss
Vicki to Michael Landon's poignant last appearance to discuss
his terminal cancer. But mostly the show has succeeded because
of its cozy familiarity. Critic Kenneth Tynan once suggested
that during the turbulent 1960s, Carson may have become "the
nation's chosen joker because, in Madison Avenue terms, he was
guaranteed to relieve nervous strain and anxiety more swiftly
and safely (ask your doctor) than any competing brand of wag."
A bit overstated, perhaps, but it is true that TV never devised
a better bedtime companion.

    The history of Carson's years at the Tonight show is, to
a large degree, the history of television. In 1972, after 10
years in New York City, he moved the program to Burbank,
reflecting an industry-wide migration from the East to the West
Coast. In 1980 the show was cut from 90 minutes to an hour,
creating a tighter entertainment package out of the more
free-flowing gabfest that had become, in some ways, a relic of
an earlier TV era. (One element that was lost: book authors, who
had often been slotted in the final 15 minutes but who
disappeared from the show almost entirely.) One by one,
competing talk-show hosts -- Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop, Cavett,
Alan Thicke, Joan Rivers, Pat Sajak -- fell away. Even Arsenio
Hall, whose show has captured a new and younger audience, has
failed to dislodge Carson from atop the late-night ratings
mountain.

    For standup comics, a Tonight gig has always been TV's
most important, door-opening break. Says comedian Robert Klein,
who got his TV start with Carson: "He'll help a young comedian
by saying `Funny stuff' or `Boy, that's funny' or by laughing
a lot. The audience practically takes its signal from him." For
Hollywood celebrities, the show is a friendly, high-visibility
place to plug a new movie or TV program. As an interviewer,
Carson has never been particularly tough or adventurous, and
even after 30 years he can still sound clumsy trying to make
prepared questions sound like real conversation. But unlike many
of his competitors, Carson listens well and puts the primary
focus on the guest, not the host. Even when he ventures into
potentially troubling waters ("So what about those rumors . .
. ?"), his question usually comes equipped with a ready-made
canoe that the guest can paddle to shore (" . . . or did the
tabloids get it wrong again?"). Carson has succeeded by being
the ideal cocktail-party host; his job is to keep the
conversation flowing, embarrass nobody and send the guests home
happy.

    What made Carson's show a nightly must-view, however, was
not his weightless interviews but his opening monologue. For
years, Carson's comedic take on the events of the day has been
the most reliable barometer of the public's mood -- and
sometimes a shaper of it as well. When he began making jokes
about Nixon's duplicity during Watergate, it has been suggested,
the President's fate was sealed. At least one former U.S.
Senator, the late S.I. Hayakawa of California, gave as one
reason for his retirement the pain of finding himself the butt
of too many Carson jokes. Even now, the drop in President Bush's
approval ratings is reflected in the rising tide of ridicule
being directed at him by Carson. (Last Wednesday, after noting
Bush's apology for breaking his no-new-taxes pledge, Carson
commented, ``Today he made a new pledge -- `Read my lips: No new
promises.' ") "If you've made the Carson show three or four
nights in a row, you better start to worry," says Doug Bailey,
co-publisher of the Hotline, an influential Washington
newsletter. "Nothing undoes a candidate more certainly than if
he or she is the object of unremitting ridicule in the
monologues."

    Carson has always steered a careful middle course in his
political barbs, aiming them equally at the left and right. "Who
am I to foist my opinions on the public?" he asked back in
1967, and his sentiment hasn't changed. Says De Cordova: "If I
were to be asked today, `Is Johnny Carson a Republican or a
Democrat?,' I honestly still would not know." In truth, few of
Carson's political gags are motivated by political views of any
kind; most are simply stock put-downs pegged to the latest
unfortunate fall guy. Is it too farfetched to suggest that the
nondenominational cynicism popularized by Carson's monologues
-- all politicians are created equal in the sight of the
comedian -- is one source of the voter disaffection that has
gripped American politics?

    If Carson created a nation of political cynics, he has
also fostered a nation of show-business insiders. Not simply
because of the parade of Hollywood celebrities who troop onto
his show each week, but because of the intimate, conspiratorial
style of his TV persona. What Carson discovered that set him
apart from talk-show predecessors like Steve Allen (who created
some of the bits that Carson later adapted) was that the very
act of hosting a talk show could be the subject of comedy.
Carson enlisted the audience as collaborators, with everything
from the chorus of straight lines that arose from the studio
audience whenever he complained about the weather ("How hot was
it?") to his ubiquitous savers -- the ad libs meant to salvage
jokes that have bombed. The subtext of Carson's comedy is always
his own plight: How foolish, he says to the audience, to be a
grown man earning a living trying to make people laugh.

    Oddly, Carson, one of the most intimate of comedians, has
always been one of the most remote of public personalities. More
than most celebrities, he is wary of the press and aloof from
the Hollywood social scene. Indeed, that may be another reason
for his uncanny longevity. The few glimpses the audience has
had of Carson's private life -- notably his three divorces,
which he frequently uses as comedy material -- make it eager for
more. Though he was on TV almost every night, Carson was one of
the rare celebrities who never got overexposed.

    In the end, the Johnny Carson phenomenon will probably
never be fully explainable. "The idea that one man, basically
unscripted, could last on TV for 30 years -- it's a freak of
television," marvels Jeff Sagansky, a former NBC program
executive and now president of CBS Entertainment. And like most
freak accidents, it probably will never happen again. Carson's
retirement is another milestone in the slow withering of the
network mass audience. Even if Leno manages to succeed, much of
Carson's audience will undoubtedly disperse to other hosts and
other shows. TV's late-night living room will never be quite so
inviting again.