Here's Johnny Carson as you've rarely seen him (2024)

More than two decades have passed since Americans heard Ed McMahon shout from their television speakers, “Heeeere’s Johnnnnny!” Yet, those old enough to remember that line remember Johnny Carson of “The Tonight Show” as a man of charm, wit and friendliness.

But in “Johnny Carson,” the smiling Carson comes across on many pages as an all-too-often sour wheeler-and-dealer and serial adulterer. Still, on other pages, Carson comes across as charming, witty and friendly.

In other words, like most of us, Carson was a contradictory and complicated human being.

For 18 years, starting in 1970, author Henry Bushkin got to see both Carsons close up — at first, as Carson’s lawyer in his divorce from the second of his four wives. Soon, Bushkin writes, he was also acting as Carson’s “agent, personal manager, business manager, public relations agent, messenger, enforcer, tennis partner, and drinking and dining companion. If Johnny needed something done, I was the one who did it.”

But by 1988, Carson had soured on Bushkin, as the comic had soured on so many close to him (including his first three wives). Carson and Bushkin parted ways. Carson died in 2005 of emphysema; Bushkin notes that Carson consumed four packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day. Three years later, Bushkin started writing “Johnny Carson.”

Much of the book focuses on Bushkin’s key area of responsibility — Carson’s dealing with his employer, NBC. Readers will learn a lot about the backstage maneuvering over contracts, and the TV bosses doing the maneuvering. “There was a time,” Bushkin writes, “when network executives were men in starched white collars and Brooks Brothers suits who were cool and professional and drank martinis and never seemed ill at ease. Today network executives are guys with tans and tennis sweaters who are cool and friendly and who drink green tea and do yoga and never seem ill at ease.”

Carson drew Bushkin in as a friend, giving Bushkin an opening into a personal life filled with infidelity. (Infidelity worked both ways. One night in New York, Carson enlisted Bushkin and a handful of others to break into a love nest rented by Carson’s second wife. That evening, Carson wore a .38 pistol in a holster on his hip — a pistol that turns up a few more times as the book rolls along.)

One continuing theme is Carson’s failure to win love — or even affection — from his mother. Bushkin writes, “In my opinion, Ruth Carson soured her son to the point where it was damn near impossible for him to be happy with any woman for any extended period of time — or with people in general, for that matter.”

But like “The Tonight Show,” the book has many a merry moment. One is the author’s recounting of Carson’s swapping off-color jokes one evening with Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra. (Readers should be warned that Carson dropped F-bombs almost as often as he lit fresh cigarettes.)

Although Bushkin makes a living as a lawyer, he writes simply, clearly and entertainingly. Very early in the book, he explains his motive for writing it: “The question that people most frequently ask me is what was Johnny really like. They are usually happy to hear the first part of my answer: he was endlessly witty and enormously fun to be around. Their interest flags when I add that he could also be the nastiest son of a bitch on earth. The truth is that he was an incredibly complex man: one moment gracious, funny, and generous; and curt, aloof and hard-hearted in the next.”

He was also one of a kind, and is missed. This book brings a bit of him back.

Harry Levins of Manchester retired in 2007 as senior writer of the Post-Dispatch.

{hr /} ‘Johnny Carson’

By Henry Bushkin

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pages, $28