Not Tonight, Dear

Last week I read back-to-back-to-back biographies: a memoir by Johnny Carson’s former business lawyer Henry “Bombastic” Bushkin about the nearly two decades he spent gallivanting with the King of Late Night Television; Peter Ackroyd’s brief life of Charlie Chaplin (300 pages may seem not incredibly brief, but this was a very full life), and Robert M. Dowling’s excellent new Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts.
All three subjects were at the top of their professions, dominating their chosen fields for much of the 20th century. Yet it’s clear, even from Henry Bushkin’s self-serving hagiography, who is the odd man out here. Johnny Carson’s rise to fame and fortune, compared to a Chaplin or an O’Neill, was more about commerce than art. He was a reasonably priced newcomer who was given a shot at a type of television (late-night talk show) that was willfully underbudgeted and underestimated: a cheap promotional opportunity for actors and authors in an out-of-the-way time slot with little real competition.

Chaplin was a perfectionist who filmed take after take until the desired moment seemed both natural and iconic. O’Neill took inspiration from the disorders and calamities which defined his dysfunctional family. Carson, by contrast chose to create for himself the not entirely credible role of Midwestern everyman. He did not challenge himself artistically. He resorted to cheap vaudeville gags and magic tricks that would be embarrasing if any of today’s late-night hosts tried them today. How hot was it?

Carson suppressed his real personality on the air, unless the issues were so well-known (his many marital failures) that he had to turn them into self-deprecating comedy routines. Carson’s ability to jumpstart careers should not be underrated (though Bushkin underrates it himself, making repeated references to a select few comedians whose careers were made after a Carson appearance, limiting that list to a select few such as Bill Cosby and Joan Rivers and ignoring the legions of others who benefited from a Carson assist). Anyhow, that power came by dint of a national platform the likes of which has seldom existed, and which Carson simply inherited from Jack Paar and Steve Allen, who knew how to use it just as well as Carson did.
Carson became one of the highest paid entertainers of his time, but the remuneration was based more on a business model (The Tonight Show was insanely profitable for its network) than on a talent model.

Best thing about Bushkin’s Johnny Carson is hearing it on audiobook, where narrator Dick Hill basically delivers a six-hour vocal impersonation of Carson. He’s not pretending to be him, but the rhythms and cadences and pitches and twangs are there. It’s actually a better job than Carson himself could have done reading a book aloud. The host was notoriously impatient, ever in-the-moment. A sustained mood was not his style.