Goldie Hawn‘s very first late-night TV appearances crystalize a wonderfully different Hollywood era.
By now, it’s a familiar refrain: between social media and ubiquitous celebrity-driven podcasts, it’s almost a challenge not to know everything about an actor’s life. Few surprises are to be had, almost no curiosities to be uncovered.
The late 1960s/early 1970s were the veritable Wild West, however, especially when it came to the yarns spun by late-night TV guests.
Ahead of Hawn’s Wednesday-night visit to ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! (she’s promoting her first children’s book, The After-School Kindness Crew: Pooch on the Loose #1), LateNighter revisits one of her very early late-night hits.
Hawn’s initial breakout came on Roman & Martin’s Laugh-In, where her fizzy presence made her the comedy series’ groovy poster girl. During the series’ early heyday, Hawn made a few extracurricular appearances, including on The Dean Martin Hour (where she dazzled with an elaborate dance sequence).
Hawn’s first invitation to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson came in late 1969, smack dab in the middle of her Laugh-In run and ahead of the release of the screwball comedy Cactus Flower, for which she would earn an Academy Award for supporting actress. That night’s other guests included Charlton Heston (promoting the football drama Number One), Fernando Lamas, George Chakiris, and singer Jane Powell.
Hawn returned to talk with Johnny a year later, and again in March 1972 (to discuss her and Warren Beatty’s heist comedy $). Her first Tonight Show appearance available in full on YouTube (above) was her fourth one, airing March 25, 1975. Shampoo, which re-teamed her with Beatty and also starred Julie Christie, Lee Grant and Jack Warden, had been in theaters for a little over a month and was about to pass a whopping $40 million in box office.
That 1975 visit, and her dynamic with Carson, is very much “of the time.” The “slinky” black dress Hawn wore for the occasion does not go unmentioned; Johnny at one point quips she couldn’t be wearing much less. She freely talks of how her Shampoo character doesn’t “get as much” (sex) from Beatty’s promiscuous hairdresser as the other women in the picture do. (Can we bring back the term “picture,” please?) Carson coaxes her into sharing some of her “wonderful,” sensual “fantasies.” And there is some rumination about “the most important sexual organ.” (Your brain, naughty child.)
The sit-down actually opens with Hawn sharing tales of her time as a go-go dancer at the Peppermint Box in New Jersey. She made a whole $25-a-night, minus the 10% that went to her “go-go agent.” Oh, and she’d at times be left to catch a Greyhound bus home. “There’s more, there’s more” stories from that time, she teases while looking away with a big grin. “I can’t tell it all!”
Hawn was nearly divorced from her first husband at the time, and when Johnny delicately asks if she sees another marriage in her future, she answers no, that she “doesn’t understand it.” Turns out, she would marry again (actor Bill Hudson), if only for a few years—but long enough to bring both Oliver and Kate Hudson into the world/SAG-AFTRA.
For more than 40 years now, Hawn has called actor Kurt Russell her partner, and together they have yet another actor offspring, son Wyatt.
Notably, Hawn’s 1975 Tonight Show visit also makes clear that this is an entertainer with a long career ahead of her. The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, Foul Play, Private Benjamin (and her second Oscar nod), Seems Like Old Times, Swing Shift, Overboard, Death Becomes Her and The First Wives Club are but a few of the films she’d headline.Talking with Johnny, she offers keen insight into her Shampoo character and if she’s ever been a “Jill.” She is quite candid about a time in her life when she “didn’t have the courage, or the will, to express myself,” but then locked into a mindset focused on being “happy.”
“You sound like you’ve got everything figured out now, Goldie,” Carson warmly notes.
“Yeah, maybe I do,” Hawn allows. “For now!”
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