Johnny Carson was at once the most-watched and most-elusive star in television history—a familiar and even intimate presence inside American homes for three decades, yet enduringly impossible to truly know.
Bill Zehme, the author and celebrated magazine profiler, chased Carson beyond doggedly during the last years of his own life, seeking to craft a biography that would dive deeply into the opaque waters that made up Carson’s ever-roiling personality.
For a long time, the book world, the late-night TV world, and the wide world of fans of the mega-star that Carson was, wondered if Zehme’s exhaustive effort to capture the man would ever see publication.
When the author passed away in 2023, 18 years after his Moby-Dick-like subject, it seemed the answer would be no.
But thanks to a devoted editor and the work of a long-time Zehme colleague and friend, Mike Thomas, the book, Carson the Magnificent, has finally arrived. (It hits bookstores today.)
It is not, Thomas said in a telephone interview, meant to be a definitive, formal biography of the King of Late Night, despite Zehme’s massive to mind-boggling accumulation of what Thomas called “Carsonia.” It is, instead, very much Bill Zehme’s personal take on the comedian, a tribute more than a standard bio, but not a hagiography. “It’s a warts and all tribute,” Thomas said.
Zehme, who had already interviewed Carson for an article in Esquire after the star’s retirement from The Tonight Show, signed his contract for the book in 2005. From there, he doggedly assembled what Thomas describes as “a giant storage locker” containing audio tapes, DVDs, photographs, binders of transcripts of recorded interviews with everybody from Carson’s writers and poker buddies, to two of his ex-wives, as well as memorabilia from a comedy album he made in the 1960’s with Ed McMahon, to a tie from the Johnny Carson fashion line, to a huge pink check made out to bandleader Doc Severinsen, for some reason.
It also contained, astoundingly, verbatim transcripts of every edition of The Tonight Show that Carson hosted from 1972 on, along with assorted other shows from the 1960’s. (Most Carson shows from the 1960’s were infamously and shockingly erased by NBC.)
Thomas was given Zehme’s unfinished manuscript, 75,000 words worth. Not surprisingly, when he was approached a little over a year ago by the CEO of Simon and Shuster, Jon Karp, who had originally commissioned the book from Zehme, to try to complete the work, Thomas was “totally daunted.”
“I had Bill who loomed large in the magazine world and Johnny who loomed large in the TV world,” Thomas said. After he gained access to all the materials Zehme had gathered, he said, “I was totally overwhelmed.”
Besides the pressure of doing justice to capturing the enigma that was Carson, Thomas faced the challenge of collaborating with an author he admired so much, and one who wrote in style so distinctive it would have been folly to try to emulate.
“Repeating Bill’s style would have been a parody,” Thomas said. All he could do was “just write it the way I write, which is more of a straightforward style and hope it would blend in with Bill’s style. My part is linear. I don’t write as fancy as Bill Zehme, let me put it that way.”
Thomas had much ground to cover. Zehme’s manuscript, which flashed forward and back idiosyncratically, basically ended when Carson moved The Tonight Show to LA in 1972. That meant Thomas had two-thirds of Carson’s career to deal with—based predominantly on Zehme’s impressive research, though Thomas conducted a number of interviews on his own.
The book does speak distinctively in Zehme’s voice for that first half; the author brings himself in frequently through the first person. That was characteristic of Zehme. “There is no royal third person with Bill,” Thomas said with an affectionate laugh.
It is evident in Zehme’s portion of the book that the author was looking to duplicate in some way the success he had in capturing the essence of another iconic star, Frank Sinatra, in his earlier book, The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin.’
Thomas said: “Originally Bill thought his take could be much breezier than it turned out, because he had done that with Sinatra. But Johnny was not lending himself to the Sinatra treatment. He was internal where Sinatra lived his life out loud. So that was part of Bill’s frustration.”
The book does delve into some aspects of Carson’s darker side. “It’s not all tribute,” Thomas said. “There’s Johnny’s drinking; Johnny’s womanizing; Johnny’s bad behavior.”
That darker side made up the essence of an earlier Carson chronicle, written by his one-time personal attorney and close friend, Henry Bushkin. The salacious tales Buskin described are not included here. Bushkin, despite the ugly break-up of the association (Carson accused him of business betrayals), is mentioned only in passing. As is Joan Rivers, who had the famous falling out with Johnny.
“It was a choice,” Thomas said. “There were certain sides of Johnny’s life I had to give short shrift too.”
The deeper stuff, the more meaningful stuff, Thomas said, is what makes up the bulk of the book: the talent, the dynamism, the social awkwardness, the personal foibles, the vulnerability that made Carson who he was.
It may not be a book marked by a long list of definitive revelations, because those may be mostly out of reach in such an ultimately elusive figure, but “There are little revelations about him all the way through,” Thomas said.
He expressed pride in his own contributions to the book, but said it remains Bill Zehme’s take on Johnny Carson, expressed in his personal, non-linear, non-literal style. “Johnny is best described in metaphor,” Thomas said.
Dive Deeper:
Read an excerpt from Carson the Magnificent
