In 1970, Johnny Carson was commanding a (huge-for-the-time) salary of $30,000 per week from NBC. But somewhere in the influence he wielded was a missed opportunity for another revenue stream.
Just over seven years into his run as host of The Tonight Show, audiences were captivated not just by Carson’s humor, but also his style. What Carson wore on air signaled what was “in” in American fashion.
When Carson appeared on air in a turtleneck in the mid-1960s, a surge of demand for the clothing item followed.
In March of 1968, he hosted The Tonight Show in a Nehru jacket designed by Oleg Cassini. Within a week, the designer had received 2,000 phone calls and letters from interested buyers. Another store reported 1,000 calls for the jacket the next day. Four thousand orders were placed in New York City alone. While the Nehru jacket lasted one night, its effect lasted decades.
“Probably no performer in the modern era has had as much impact on style trends as Johnny Carson,” The New York Times wrote in 1972. “Johnny Carson was making some menswear producers rich” in the late ’60s.
That’s what sparked an idea in someone on Carson’s team: Why should Carson wear Cassini threads when he could enter the fashion game himself? If Carson made his own clothing line—and wore it on national television—the windfall could be his.
And so Johnny Carson Apparel was born. The “dramatic new approach to the male fashion market,” as one paper put it, partnered Carson with clothing manufacturer M. Wile and Co. (a subsidiary of Hart Schaffner & Marx).
M. Wile would own 51 percent of the new brand. The rest of the company, it was said, would be split between Johnny and his agent, Sonny Werblin. (The Carson employee who initially suggested the idea wasn’t left empty-handed. He was reported to have received five percent of the company.)
Johnny Carson Apparel’s first line launched in the fall of 1970. The business model was simple enough: M. Wile and Co. would manufacture suits and sport coats under the Carson name. (Suits from the line sold for the premium price of about $100 to $125, with sport coats falling in the $75 to $85 range.) Other clothing manufacturers would be granted licenses to produce other items for the brand: hats, shoes, shirts, ties, knitwear, outerwear, rainwear, and more.
Carson would lend his thoughts to the design process, inspired by the stylish-but-conservative wardrobes of entertainers such as Myron Cohen, Cary Grant, and Nat King Cole. But the clothing line would mainly be the brainchild of designer Gary Thorpe, who Carson enlisted at just 27 years old to serve as the company’s stylist and vice president of merchandising.
Carson would then wear items from the line on The Tonight Show, as well as out in public, as a way to promote the clothing. In effect, Johnny Carson Apparel promised its namesake both a base salary and profit participation.
“It is the perfect wedding of a personality with a product,” Werblin told The New York Times in 1972. “Johnny was a brand name the minute we started.”
Carson didn’t directly market Johnny Carson Apparel on The Tonight Show. “I don’t like to use the show as a pitch,” he told GQ in a 1971 cover story. “People don’t want you huckstering your own clothing when you’re supposed to be entertaining them.”
But there was another reason Carson wasn’t outwardly shilling for the brand on his show. “Direct plugs for his company are not permitted by either the network or by federal regulations,” The New York Times explained. To appeal to viewers directly, Johnny Carson Apparel had to purchase commercial time during The Tonight Show’s time slot.
It also ran print ads to get the word out about Carson’s company. As long as the public knew that Carson was wearing his own clothing line on air, the indirect method of advertising he employed on the show could be effective enough. On air, the Times noted, Carson would draw focus to his largely traditional wardrobe by “contrasting it to the more flamboyant garb of his bandleader, Doc Severinsen.”
Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon didn’t participate in the on-air modeling. (“We don’t carry Goodyear sizes,” Carson joked.)
Two years after the launch of its first line, Johnny Carson Apparel was on track to sell more than 300,000 units of suits and sport coats alone. With the other products, they were on pace to make $35 million for the year. Forecasts for 1973 put those numbers at 400,000 and $50 million.
Thorpe proclaimed the clothes reached places as far as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Paris. The company also partnered with a Canadian manufacturer to bring the clothing line north of the border beginning in the fall of 1972. All of that success was even enabling M. Wile & Co. to expand its operations—creating 350 new jobs for the parent company.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing on Carson’s end of the deal. While the original announcement of Johnny Carson Apparel painted the picture that Carson would own as equal a share of the company as his agent, that proved to not quite be the case.
In Henry Bushkin’s 2013 biography Johnny Carson, the former Carson lawyer recalled that in the early 1970s, he discovered unsavory business tactics employed by Werblin for the agent’s benefit.
“As I studied Johnny’s contracts, I was shocked to realize that he owned no equity interest in the new company. Instead, half was owned by the manufacturer and half by Sonny Werblin,” Bushkin wrote. “Carson, in effect, was paid a salary to wear clothes from the company that bore his name, while the man he had entrusted with his affairs lined his own pockets.”
In light of that and other Werblin-led deals that Bushkin didn’t approve of, the lawyer eventually approached Carson about severing ties with Werblin. “The clothing deal was rewritten,” Bushkin recounted. First I flew to Chicago and met with the CEO of Hart Schaffner & Marx. I told them that Werblin was out and that unless Johnny replaced Werblin in the deal, Carson would no longer wear their clothes on television.”
In the end, Carson received Werblin’s stock in the company, as well as a $400,000 yearly “modeling fee” for wearing the suits in advertisements.
In 1975, the Carson line was still going strong.That year, Esquire presented Carson with its Fashion Man of the Year award—an honor typically reserved for retail executives in the industry.
By the end of the decade, Johnny Carson Apparel had expanded into suits and blazers for the boys’ market. It maintained a presence in the fashion world through much of the 1980s, although its popularity seemed to diminish over the decade. By 1989, Johnny Carson Apparel, Inc. was “merged out of existence” and declared inactive.
Three years later, Carson ended his run as host of The Tonight Show. Thirty-plus years later, he remains an icon in the world of television. In the world of fashion, he might best be remembered as a public figure savvy enough to know that the many hours he spent on America’s TV screens could pay dividends.
“No one has that kind of advertising budget,” designer Thorpe told The Windsor Star in 1973. “Not even Ford.”
