Shortly after Bill Zehme‘s death in 2023, The New York Times called the legendary author and journalist’s long-gestating book on Johnny Carson “one of the great unfinished biographies.” Now, after nearly twenty years in the making (and with the help of journalist and former Zehme editorial assistant Mike Thomas, who finished the book), Zehme’s dearest work is set to finally hit bookstores.
In this exclusive excerpt from Carson the Magnificent (to be published November 5th by Simon & Schuster), Zehme looks at the tragic chapter in Carson’s life that would leave him forever changed.
“I’d like to say hi to my mom. Unfortunately, she’s watching Ted Koppel. That’s her idea of a son!”
Johnny Carson, outset of The Tonight Show monologue, August 6, 1982
“One got the impression that Johnny’s relationship with his mother was complex. Once, when I came into his office, he told me that his mother had just angrily hung up on him. I asked why, and he said, ‘I called and asked her how things were going. She said, “Not so good. Yesterday, we put Walter Burbage in the ground.” I said, ‘Was he dead?’”
Emailed anecdote from Carson monologue writer Michael Barrie
The complexities of Ruth Elizabeth Hook Carson—woman of grand flair and mannered propriety, poker-game hellcat, preternaturally withholding, crisp, exacting, colorful, misunderstood—imbued her son Johnny, in particular, with even deeper complexities.
But without them, he would not have grown into what he needed to be. Which is how it has worked, vis-à-vis powerful men re: their mothers, since time and nimble psyches began ticking. Arguably, traces of this mother mixed throughout the bulk content of her middle child’s infamous tightly packed suitcase. The parts of her that he would directly adopt into his own makeup were also, in no small measure, the same parts of her to which he was forced to adapt—or steel himself against—from tender years onward.
So it followed that he had sired three sons who would also never quite believe they were unconditionally adored (or, at times, much cared for)—no matter that his own cloistered heart wanted far better for them than he had ever gotten. Demonstrating the difference, of course, was the big hitch, since no affirming example had been drummed into him. Instead, his protectiveness for the boys showed up as a brisk tough love (with sweet dashes of twinkle)—which mostly left them wanting, especially in a household that grew more and more unstable and where their father was mostly missing in action.
Thus, the circle stayed unbroken—a fact he would later grasp with sizable remorse. Except it was a frozen, paralytic remorse that all but stymied him from correcting matters. “It was very hard,” says Suzanne Pleshette, who saw the toll of these struggles across many years. “I know all of the children of all of the big stars. And all of these kids have a lot of legitimate complaints—and yet it’s these guys’ demons that made them who they are, and also who their children ended up becoming. Johnny’s relationship with his sons was difficult and bittersweet—especially knowing that he felt that he hadn’t given what they deserved to have. In some ways, he had probably replicated what was painful for him. And he didn’t quite have the ability to know how to fix it.”
At best, he did find a way to address that niggling impulse—by proxy, anyway. Long after the die was cast and the boys had become men, he would softly bolster younger fathers who found themselves in grim marital straits, almost wistfully forking over his two cents in a manner akin to don’t-do-as-I-do-just-do-as-I-say. (It was a singular exception to his tendency to stifle advice dispensation.)
The comedian and fail-safe guest Robert Klein, whose only child, a son, was born in 1983, had been one such beneficiary-absorbing repeated doses of concern during Tonight Show commercial breaks (which was when the host deigned to socialize, selectively but also genuinely, with preferred or privileged seat-fillers). “He was very, very kind to me when I was going through a terrible divorce [in 1988],” Klein told People. “He advised me to make sure to let my boy know that I love him very much, and he kept telling me this over and over.”
Like any comedy pro, Johnny Carson knew that misadventures in fatherhood were tantamount to gold, especially after intervening years, or decades, had diluted whatever traumas may have been part of the payoff. (See comedy theorem of tragedy-plus-time-equals- funny.) Like the night of December 10, 1981, when he was caught, post-commercial break, interacting with his Burbank studio constituency: “I was telling the audience the story about the guinea pigs,” he explained to viewers, a bit ominously. “I don’t want to repeat it—maybe later. But never buy your children little guinea pigs in New York and then put them outside at night. They were hard as a carp!”
This material, of course, was basically the benign stuff of typical suburban cocktail party patter—except his shaggy parenting tales were magnified via coast-to-coast broadcast, albeit in distant aftermath. “I know my dad enjoyed wearing the mantle of fatherhood with his friends and acquaintances,” Carson’s youngest son Cory mordantly notes. “Always been a part of the irony for me. And it’s okay.”
But The Tonight Show was always going to be where he shared himself most generously (eking out, via chatty dollops of personal history, the autobiography he refused to write) and, during those confessional or conversational asides, his sons’ names and pursuits would often trip eagerly—and proudly—from his tongue.
As these things went, his fame would certainly, if unintentionally, form their lives as much as he fought against it by leaning hard on them. Phil Donahue aimed in early 1970 to pry open that worm can, asking him: “When you first signed an autograph in front of your kids, how did they respond? Did it affect them in a way that undermines your ability to be their father?” To which he replied, after a confounded pause, “I don’t know. It’s hard to ask your own children.”
My feelings about my Dad are quite mixed. Professionally he was without a doubt most suited for the career he sought. The right man for the job and . . . at the right time in history. On the personal side of the coin, he left his kids and family as a consequence to [pursue] that professional end and, as a result, made life most difficult for those left to watch the “magic” unfold without the benefit of experiencing it with him.I think he was typical of most entertainers in that area though, so whaddaya gonna do? Work was easy for him, family was not.
Email from Cory Carson, August 2, 2005
I understand my dad’s foibles better than any, been a lifetime study. I am free of feeling unworthy though, that was a biggie many years ago. Imagine witnessing the little guests that would frequent the show and having my Dad absolutely enthralled with their every word. What did they have that we didn’t? Ten minutes of material! Hey!!! (snare – kick sound) Show bidness. Gotta love it.
Email from Cory Carson, August 3, 2005
***
While Carson’s love for his sons rarely manifested in hugs and attaboys, it was nonetheless tucked away in subterranean seams awaiting extraction.
On June 21, 1991, it exploded to the surface. Carson was only a month into his valedictory season when, toward the end of a two-week vacation, he learned that his son and middle child, Rick, had died in a car accident near Morro Bay, on the Southern California coast. Investigators determined that the thirty-nine-year-old amateur photographer had likely been taking or setting up for photos when his SUV plunged 125 feet down an embankment, fatally injuring him.
There was talk of Carson’s returning to The Tonight Show as scheduled, but he was too devastated and needed more time. Only a few weeks later, however, he was back on the job.
“The first time I spoke with him [on the phone], I didn’t know what to say,” says Helen Sanders, Carson’s longtime executive assistant. “The thing that came out of my mouth was ‘I just wish I could give you a big hug.’ Afterward, I thought, What a stupid thing to say! Why did I say that? I felt so dumb. The day he came [back] to do the show, the first thing I noticed is that he had no energy. He always had a sparkling energy; you could see the sparks come off him. But he was like a shell. It scared me. I said, ‘Hi.’ I didn’t really know what to say; I was trying to act normal. He just stood there and said, ‘Can I have that hug?’ I got up, and I just gave him a big hug. We hugged and cried together. I felt him just take my energy. I feel really good about the fact that I made a really safe, calm place for him to be that afternoon.”
When Carson’s writers gathered that day for their regular meeting, he told them, “Don’t ever go through this, guys.” Then it was business as usual, the show going on as it must.
Rick had been a second assistant director on the pilot for Amen, recalls Ed. Weinberger, a short-lived Carson Productions president and former Tonight Show writer. “But he wasn’t prepared to work, and I feel very bad about that. That’s a very serious regret that I was not more patient or understanding—but [we were] in the midst of doing the show and with actors saying, ‘He can’t do his job’ and ‘I didn’t come out of my dressing room because I didn’t know that I was due.’” There were all kinds of things, so I let him go. He called me one night when he had obviously been drinking, and he said, ‘I know why… I understand … You’re a lot like my father…’ He went on for thirty-five, forty minutes just rambling about who he was, what he was. He was lost.”
Rick’s pal Danny Robinson, son of Tonight Show talent manager Bud Robinson, knew him on a much different level. “He was hilarious—killer sense of humor,” Robinson says, adding that of Carson’s sons, Rick most closely reflected his father. “He had the same sort of energy, the same sense of humor.” Carson, too, saw the resemblance, telling second ex Joanne that “he was so like me in so many ways.”
But Carson could be cold and cruel. According to Tonight Show associate producer Tom Boles, “there was not a mean bone in [Rick’s] body. I think his own individuality was so eclipsed by Johnny’s mega-stardom that he was unable to exist as his own individual. It was impossible for him to be anything more than Johnny’s son.” Boles also notes, “I would see [Johnny’s youngest son] Cory in the halls of NBC. He’d be around The Tonight Show irregularly. You could tell he didn’t bear that same weight that Rick did. It’s hard to put your finger on Rick. There was something troubled about him. You kind of felt bad for the guy.”
After Rick died, Danny and Boles attended a memorial that Rick’s girlfriend and some of his friends held at the tiny and historic Little Brown Church, on Coldwater Canyon Avenue in Studio City. Attendees received laminated memorial cards that bore one of Rick’s lush landscape photos—a blue sky, brown mountains, and water. On its flip side were Rick’s birthdate and words typically attributed to Scottish poet Thomas Campbell: “To live in the hearts of those you leave behind is not to die.”
By Robinson’s account, former Tomorrow Show host (and Rick’s former boss when he worked on the program as a stage manager and associate director) Tom Snyder attended. So did various Tonight Show staffers, people from the Today show, and others who’d known Rick.
“Johnny didn’t come, and I get it,” Robinson says. “I buried my parents, and that was as hard as anything I ever want to do in my life. And I’ve buried, unfortunately, enough friends. I can’t imagine burying your child. But here’s what Johnny said: ‘Where I go, the press will go. I don’t want it to turn into a circus.’ Personally, I would have loved for Johnny to be there because he would have gotten to see a side of Ricky that maybe he never saw.”
During Rick’s stint at The Tomorrow Show, he’d become friends with producer and director Andy Friendly (son of CBS legend Fred Friendly). “His death, following a difficult time in his life, was devastating to me, and to all of his friends and Tomorrow Show colleagues,” Friendly wrote in an excerpt from his 2017 memoir Willing to Be Lucky: Adventures in Life and Television. “I wrote a long letter to his dad expressing my sympathy and describing the kind, fun-loving, great person and colleague Rick was.” Carson replied with a brief note of thanks.
During the first Tonight Show taping after Rick’s death, on July 17, 1991, Carson made no mention of the sensitive subject up top. (“We were all on tenterhooks, walking on eggshells,” Ed McMahon says. “Worrying about how he was gonna do the show.”) Instead, he delivered a joke-filled monologue and interviewed guests Bernadette Peters (who also sang) and Earvin “Magic” Johnson before delivering a eulogy for Rick from behind his desk near the show’s end.
For such an interior and private man it was no small feat, and at times he stifled tears. Two days after Rick died, he said, Carson’s good friend, the actor and director Michael Landon, had called to offer consolation. Landon was deeply unwell at the time and died of pancreatic cancer the following week. “So these have not been the most happy several weeks,” Carson said.
With a photo of his handsome boy displayed on monitors—not to be “mawkish,” he assured, but because it was a better representation than the driver’s license shot used in press reports—Carson described Rick as “an exuberant young man, fun to be around. When Rick was around you wanted to smile.”
Carson briefly glanced off to the wings, where he could hear Fred de Cordova on the phone with director Bobby Quinn, letting him know they were running long. De Cordova also flashed Carson a stunningly ill-timed sign to wrap things up. (The gaffe damaged their decades-long relationship, though they reportedly mended fences before de Cordova died in 2001.) Tamping down his anger like a musket ball, Carson went on as if nothing had happened: “He tried so darn hard to please. He had a laugh that was contagious as could be. Luckily he left some marvelous memories for the whole family, and that’s what you kind of hang on to.”
A montage of Rick’s photographs followed, accompanied by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble’s languid jazzy-bluesy tune “Riviera Paradise”—urban vistas and rural horizons; shores beneath mountains and crashing surf; a wildflower field and a poplar grove. (“This one goes out to anyone who’s suffering in any way,” Vaughn said before an October 10, 1989, performance of the song at Austin City Limits.)
The moving segment lasted five and a half minutes. Prolonged emotionalism, even in the wake of such a crushing personal loss, wasn’t Carson’s style. Offstage, though, his quiet grieving never ended. Recalling the impact of Rick’s death two decades after it happened, Doc Severinsen said, “Johnny was never the same, ever, after that.”
Excerpted from the forthcoming book “Carson the Magnificent” by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Bill Zehme. Reprinted by permission.
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