Today it might seem absurd to consider a late-night show without some form of a monologue, 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 recalled that it was Steve 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 [was] 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.”
It’s a shame so much of 1950s and 1960s TV is lost forever. I understand why they didn’t preserve the tapes back then, but I’d love to see more of Steve Allen’s Tonight Show than the little bit of footage available on YouTube.
yep, agreed….and a lot of Carson’s stuff from the 60’s, as you indicated, is gone too
All because some snooty building manager at NBC Burbank got into a huff about twelve rooms being taken up to store the tapes. It is a terrific, yet very sad story about what happened. So much of “Tonight’s” Legacy is gone forever.
These old tapes were very flammable, so, unfortunately it would be very difficult for NBC to keep large numbers of them. There is an alternate reality where they lost those types to fire.
Note that early in the Steve Allen era, old TV Guides show that many local 11pm newscasts ran just 15 minutes, and in many if not most markets, The Tonight Show started at 11:15PM. From the very few 1951 shows that survive – you have to go to the Museum of Broadcasting in NY or Beverly Hills to see them – the show starts with little fanfare. You can see Steve and the band vamp and fill time and then the show restarts at 1130pm.
That 1st 15 minutes is *really* loose… no guests per se, studio cameras in the shots sloppily moving around, lots of poorly-mixed in-jokes with the band during improv jazz jamming. It’s been 20 years since I’ve watched these clips but I seem to recall that at the 1130 mark they replayed the opening theme and Steve, with more focus and energy, began his monologue. Steve was gifted, thats for sure.
Even a decade later, I believe the 11:15pm start was in place as the Carson era began, and he negotiated an end to that… as he still had to host till 1AM, live.