These days, it might seem absurd to consider a late-night show without some sort of monologue (even After Midnight tweaked its format to add one), but the traditional leadoff segment began as a fluke.
The origin of the opening monologue was recounted by The Tonight Show orchestra conductor Skitch Henderson in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, originally recorded in 2002. (Henderson passed away in 2005, at age 87.)
From 1951 to 1957, Henderson worked at NBC, where he led the orchestra on Steve Allen’s Tonight show (as well as the Today show). Five years after his original departure, he returned to The Tonight Show for the beginning of Johnny Carson’s tenure between 1962 and 1966.
While Carson is widely viewed as “The King of Late Night,” Henderson said it was Allen who set many of the standards.
“Everything was in place, organized” by Allen by the time that Carson took over, Henderson explained. “The takes, the camera shots. I don’t give a damn what anybody says. That was all inherited from Steve Allen and Dwight [Hemion, Allen’s director].”
Another one of those early game-changers, Henderson revealed, was the monologue. “The monologue is an accident,” he said. “Steve didn’t know how to get the show started, so we opened with music. That’s vaudeville… Or Steve would play, at that time, very bad piano for five minutes.”
Until one night, when Allen came out, and he had been some place and done something. “He came out and opened the show with kind of what became a monologue.”
That monologue worked well enough that they stuck with it.
“[Tonight producer] Billy Harbach was very smart,” Henderson said. “He said, ‘That’s the way to go. Maybe we should always open that way.’”
The rest, as they say, is history. The monologue became a staple of the late-night show format for generations to come. Still, eventual Tonight Show successor Johnny Carson (who followed Jack Paar) continues to be seen as the man who fine-tuned all those elements—and it sounds as if Henderson agreed.
“If Steve Allen was the Model A,” he posited, “Carson was probably the Cadillac.”
