ohnny Carson, the droll, puckish, near-effortless comedian who dominated late-night television for 30 years, tucking millions of Americans into bed as the host of the "Tonight" show, died yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 79.
The cause was the effects of emphysema, family members said.
Mr. Carson took over the "Tonight" show from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily surrendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, he became the biggest, most popular star American television has known. Virtually every American with a television set saw and heard a Carson monologue at some point in those years. At his height, between 10 million and 15 million Americans slept better weeknights because of him.
Mr. Carson was often called "the king of late night," and he wielded an almost regal power. Beyond his enormous impact on popular culture, Mr. Carson more than any other individual shifted the nexus of power in television from New York to Los Angeles, with his decision in 1972 to move his show from its base in Rockefeller Center in New York to NBC's West Coast studios in Burbank, Calif. That same move was critical in the changeover of much of television from live to taped performances.
In his monologue and in his time, Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easily and celebrities who talked too much.
All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Mr. Carson's Nixon-Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedys. Members of the public couldn't say whether they were on Johnny Carson's side or he was on theirs. All they knew was that they liked him and felt they knew him - a claim most of those who were close to him in his life, including his wives, family and "Tonight" staff members, would not make with much confidence. They knew Mr. Carson was intensely private, a self-described loner who shunned the spotlight when off camera.
Still, Mr. Carson's scrubbed Midwestern presence was so appealing that he succeeded in unifying a fractious nation.
"Anyone looking at the show 100 years from now," said Tom Shales, the Washington Post television critic, at the time of Mr. Carson's retirement from "Tonight" in 1992, "will probably have no trouble understanding what made Carson so widely popular and permitted him such longevity. He was affable, accessible, charming and amusing, not just a very funny comedian but the kind of guy you would gladly welcome into your home."
During his reign, Mr. Carson was the most powerful single performer on television. He discovered or promoted new talent like Barbra Streisand and David Letterman; provided a consistent spotlight for show business warhorses like Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett; advanced the careers of emerging stars like Woody Allen, Steve Martin and, of course, his successor, Jay Leno; and helped keep older performers like Jimmy Stewart and William Demarest in the public eye.
All the while he earned millions of dollars for himself and for his network, the National Broadcasting Company. In his heyday he generated approximately 17 percent of the network's total profit and was, by any reasonable assessment, its most lustrous star since Toscanini. He held an overwhelming majority of late-night viewers in the palm of his hand, and his show was the biggest single money-maker in television history.
For a generation every performer of any consequence eventually made a visit to Mr. Carson's famous couch. An appearance there often signaled a performer's official acceptance as a star. Generally these performers paid homage to Mr. Carson's position of influence in show business. He was a generous host, as long as he did not feel crossed. Those on the outs with Mr. Carson frequently saw their careers damaged - most memorably the comedian Joan Rivers, who went from being his most regular guest host to a pariah for daring to mount a late-night show to challenge his without first informing him.
In a celebrated New Yorker profile, Kenneth Tynan said of Mr. Carson that he practiced "the art of the expected." Americans were reassured when Doc Severinsen, the show's bandleader, would start up the show's bouncy theme song (written by Paul Anka and Mr. Carson himself), Ed McMahon, the jovial announcer, would intone "Heeeeere's Johnny" and prepare to guffaw at every joke Mr. Carson told, and the dapper host - he also set a fashion standard for men of the World War II generation - would appear to deliver his nightly monologue, a tour de force that the critic Les Brown called "America's bedtime story."
Mr. Carson often turned his agile wit on himself: on his numerous unsuccessful marriages and pricey divorces; on his powerlessness at the hands of Con Edison workers who made noise under his apartment window on Manhattan's East Side when he tried to sleep (he claimed they were carting New York away, piece by piece, to New Jersey); and on his vulnerability to the people who employed him.
Monologues With Muscle
Mr. Carson guarded his political views as carefully as he did his private life, insisting that the only message of his show was entertainment. But his credibility with the American public was such that his monologues were carefully monitored by politicians mindful that no one who became a frequent target of Johnny Carson could long survive in public life. It didn't help Richard Nixon when Mr. Carson's monologue produced some of the funniest Watergate jokes around. Nor did it help when Mr. Carson trained his sights on former Senator Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado who found allure both in the presidency and in women he didn't happen to be married to. Mr. Carson's jokes about Mr. Hart's extramarital activities were surely not the only reason his political fortunes evaporated in 1988, but they were repeated often enough to have played some part.
"You get the feeling that Dan Quayle's golf bag doesn't have a full set of irons," Mr. Carson said of another favorite target. He also joked that Jerry Brown, the Democratic former governor of California who ran for president in 1992, admitted that he had smoked marijuana in the 60's "but didn't exhale." When President Bush's father was in the White House (and Mr. Quayle was his vice president), Mr. Carson told as many anti-Bush jokes as time would allow, among them "Read my lips: no new promises."
Each monologue contained between 16 and 22 jokes, the work of a talented stable of writers and Mr. Carson himself.
As well turned as the jokes were, it was Mr. Carson's style and timing that put them over, seemingly without effort. He was also a master at milking laughs out of bad jokes and bad audiences, using either a facial reaction or a prepared line about how badly he was bombing that night.
When he finished his monologue he would pantomime a golf swing and go to his desk, where he would usually perform a second comedy bit. His nervous habits and tics became familiar to the late-night nation: a heavy smoker, he would drum his cigarette (he later substituted a pencil) while his guests performed.
His biggest single audience tuned in on Dec. 17, 1969, to watch Tiny Tim, the falsetto singer, marry Vicki Budinger, a 17-year-old fan the singer called Miss Vicki. (The couple later divorced.) An estimated 58 million viewers watched the event, an enormous audience by any standard and, in terms of percentage of the overall population, the equivalent of about 80 million today.
Another memorable moment occurred in 1963, when one of Mr. Carson's guests was Ed Ames, an actor-singer who played an Indian on the television series "Daniel Boone." Mr. Ames was there to teach Mr. Carson how to throw a tomahawk, and he brought along a cardboard image of a sheriff as a target. In his demonstration, Mr. Ames threw the tomahawk across the stage, and it imbedded itself deeply in the sheriff's crotch. The audience was in an uproar; people were literally falling out of their seats with laughter.
When Mr. Ames went to remove the tomahawk, Mr. Carson held his arm and the uncontrolled laughter commenced anew. As the laughter subsided, Mr. Carson looked at Mr. Ames and said, "I didn't know you were Jewish."
A One-Man Cast of Characters
Mr. Carson also portrayed a variety of characters, among them Art Fern, an untrustworthy salesman; Floyd R. Turbo, an opinionated bumpkin; Carnac the Magnificent, an all-knowing seer; and Aunt Blabby, a gossipy old woman. The foils to which Mr. Carson returned time and time again included his doctor, Al Bendova; his accountants, H&R Goniff; and his lawyer, Bombastic Bushkin. (For a while he actually had a lawyer named Henry Bushkin, with whom he later fell out bitterly.)
Many of Mr. Carson's best moments from his early years in the show will never be seen again because of a colossal error by an unknown NBC technician who, looking for space to record new material, taped over hundreds of hours of old "Tonight" shows. The loss of so much of his work appalled Mr. Carson, who made moves later in his career to ensure that he and he alone would control his work.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Carson also played host to a string of marsupials, spiders, serpents, felines (some rather large, playful and unpredictable), creative canines, canny birds and at least one elephant. He also wrestled Antonino Rocca, played baseball with Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, became a human canvas for the painter Walter Gaudnek and, on one occasion, parachuted from an airplane, doing a 10,000-foot free fall before he pulled the ripcord - all to get a laugh and thrill his viewers. He did not tell NBC beforehand.
Throughout his career, Mr. Carson was instrumental in changing some of the bedrock ways television operated. His move to Burbank meant a realignment of American pop culture from East Coast to West Coast, from Broadway to Hollywood. And once the "Tonight" show ceased to be televised live from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. and began being taped in the early evening, it lost some of the spontaneity and sense of danger that live performance brings (and also, eventually, a half-four of its running time). The practice of taping is now the norm, and virtually all live entertainment programming on national television has become a thing of the past.
Mr. Carson was secure enough in his power that he never appeared to curry favor with sponsors, television executives or politicians, and audiences seemed to appreciate him for asserting such independence. But NBC occasionally tried, to its regret, to rein him in.
In 1979 the network's president, Fred Silverman, under the gun as ratings and profits were in free fall, began to complain publicly that Mr. Carson took too much time off and that he should rely less on repeats of past shows.
Just as publicly, Mr. Carson announced his intention to quit the show as soon as his contract expired. A frightened network then capitulated abjectly, conceding more to Mr. Carson than any star before had ever dreamed of attaining. He not only won the biggest salary in television, $5 million a year, but also wrung from the network a series of commitments for other shows for his production company. The total deal was worth more than $50 million, an unheard-of amount in that era of television.
Perhaps more important, Mr. Carson gained full ownership of his show from the network. He would realize all future profits on resale of his "Tonight" material, a deal that generated many more millions as videocassettes of his classic performances were sold to the public. In addition, and perhaps most significant, he forced NBC to cut his show from 90 minutes a night to one hour.
That decision ushered in a new late-night time period, which was occupied first by David Letterman and then Conan O'Brien. This second late-night front eventually generated hundreds of millions of dollars for NBC.
At the time, however, NBC had been humbled by its signature star. Asked if his new deal suggested that NBC was in trouble, Mr. Carson replied, "That's like saying the Titanic had a small leak."
Enter the Great Carsoni
John William Carson was born Oct. 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, one of three children of Homer L. Carson (known as Kit but no relation to the western hero), a manager for Iowa and Nebraska Light and Power, and Ruth Hook Carson, an extroverted homemaker who had a flair for theatrics, although she never worked in show business professionally. Johnny had a younger brother, Richard, who became a television director and directed the "Tonight" show for a time, and an older sister, Catherine.
In 1933, the family moved to Norfolk, Neb., where Johnny grew up unremarkably. A somewhat better-than-average student, he noticed, when he was in the fifth grade, that he could call attention to himself by telling amusing stories.
When he was 12 years old, he read "Hoffmann's Book of Magic" and liked it so much that he sent away for a mail-order magic kit. All his energies immediately went to mastering card tricks and other feats of prestidigitation. Intrigued by the stories he had read about the great magician Harry Houdini, he decided he would be known as "the Great Carsoni," and his mother embroidered that name on a black cloth that he draped on a magician's work table she gave him when he turned 13. He used it when he made his professional debut, at 14, before the Norfolk Rotary Club, a performance for which he earned $3.
Magic was not his only interest. On Sunday evenings he would lie on the floor in front of the family radio and listen to Jack Benny. Mr. Carson's original style and timing were derived from Benny, which he always acknowledged. As a boy, he would commit Benny's best gags to memory and recite them the next day in the schoolyard.
He also wrote a humor column for his high school newspaper and, as his interest in things theatrical grew, he became a part-time usher in the local Granada movie house. When he graduated in 1943, his friend Larry Sanford signed his yearbook, "John, if you don't get killed in the war you'll be a hell of an entertainer some day."
Soon after graduation he joined the Navy, was sent to midshipmen's school at Columbia University, and spent what remained of World War II as an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, serving in the Pacific.
After the war he entered the University of Nebraska, where he was active in student theatrical productions. He played Cleopatra in a college farce entitled "She Was Only a Pharaoh's Daughter but She Never Became a Mummy." He also appeared on an early experimental television broadcast, which was seen by almost no one.
He persuaded the university to let him write his senior thesis on comedy writing. It consisted of a tape containing material used by the leading comics of the day with Mr. Carson's explanation of why what they said was funny.
While still in college, Mr. Carson worked part time for the radio station KFAB in Lincoln, Neb., for which he created a comic western. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1949 (after three years) he got another radio job, at WOW in Omaha, for which he was supposed to do interviews.
In those days, national celebrities made tapes available to local radio stations in which the celebrity's writers would prepare questions for local interviewers, with the prerecorded answers given by the celebrities. But when Mr. Carson was assigned to "interview" the singer Patti Page, he changed the questions considerably. He was supposed to ask her when she started singing but instead asked, "I understand you're hitting the bottle pretty good, Patti - when did you start?" To which Miss Page's prerecorded voice replied, "When I was 6, I used to get up at church socials and do it."
Up From 'Carson's Cellar'
In 1951 he moved to Los Angeles, where he got a job as a staff announcer at KNXT-TV. Most of the work was routine, but he persuaded the station to give him a Sunday afternoon comedy show, "Carson's Cellar." In those days, few people bothered to watch television in the afternoon. During one telecast, a furtive figure ran by in the background. Mr. Carson advised his viewers to pay it no mind; it was only Red Skelton, and there just wasn't time that day to have Mr. Skelton perform.
As it happened, Mr. Skelton was home that day, watching Mr. Carson in action and thoroughly enjoying what he saw. The next week he showed up unannounced and demanded to be seen and heard. Soon, Groucho Marx and Jack Benny turned up to participate in a show they thought was funny even though it did not have the budget to pay them a fee. "Carson's Cellar" was not kept by KNXT, but Mr. Skelton thought so highly of Mr. Carson's work that he hired him as a writer of his own CBS television show.
One day in 1954, Mr. Skelton injured himself doing one of the strenuous stunts for which he was noted two hours before air time. Producers were hard pressed to find a substitute and gave Mr. Carson a chance, and he did so well that CBS offered him his own show. Mr. Carson's talent was apparent, but "The Johnny Carson Show" had trouble exploiting it. The show went through seven writers and eight directors before it folded, replaced by a dance show, "The Arthur Murray Party."
Mr. Carson then moved to New York and spent months making guest performances on various shows. One of the shows was "Tonight," then starring Jack Paar. In 1957 he was hired as the host of "Who Do You Trust?," an ABC game show that featured interaction between host and guests. It also featured Ed McMahon as its announcer.
In March 1962, the emotional, excitable Jack Paar decided to leave the "Tonight" show, which he had inherited from the comedian Steve Allen, after five years. Mr. Carson was offered the job and accepted, but he could not start work for six months because ABC would not release him from his contract.
By 1969, Mr. Carson was making about $20,000 a week. But he did not get to keep all that money. His divorces were expensive. Joanna Holland, a former model who was Mrs. Johnny Carson from 1972 to 1982, got more than $20 million in cash and some property. Joanne Copeland, Ms. Holland's immediate predecessor, got $200,000 cash and a yearly "salary" of $100,000. His first wife was Jody Wolcott, his college sweetheart, who complained that she did not get enough. He is survived by his fourth wife, Alexis Maas; two sons, Curt and Corey; his brother, Richard; and his sister, Catherine. Another son, Ricky, died in a car accident in 1991.
Asked how he became a star, Mr. Carson once replied, "I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled." Pressed further to analyze his own success, he said he worked hard on his own timing. "I have an affinity for editing and pacing," he said.
There were times over the 30 years of Mr. Carson's stewardship when the "Tonight" show seemed to lose ground and risk appearing passé. But he would keep working the material, and the ratings would always rise again. Many talented performers tried to best him in the same time slot, including, at one time or another, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers and Arsenio Hall. He beat them all.
NBC was purchased by General Electric toward the end of Mr. Carson's tenure, and he showed his new bosses no more mercy than he had the old ones.
At Christmas time in 1991, he announced in his monologue that General Electric had sent him a holiday card which announced that "in lieu of a gift, a G.E. employee has been laid off in your name."
Familiar but Mysterious
Although Mr. Carson was called the last man America saw before it went to sleep, he zealously guarded his private life, remaining something of a mystery man. Betty Rollin once wrote that off camera he was "testy, defensive, preoccupied, withdrawn and wonderfully inept and uncomfortable with people." Kenneth Tynan concluded that talking to him privately was like "addressing an elaborately wired security system."
Mr. Carson rarely talked to his guests after his show. He hated parties. Although he was impeccably polite, he tried to confine his off-camera sightings to the tennis courts at Wimbledon. "My bugging point is low," he once said. "I'm not gregarious. I'm a loner. I've always been that way."
Except for periodic appearances in Las Vegas, and some memorable assignments as host of the Oscars, Mr. Carson made few appearances outside his own show.
He consistently refused to appear in situation comedies, which he called "death."
His retirement in 1992 was another national event, though the show that preceded his finale on the air, which featured Bette Midler and Robin Williams as guests, was the one most of his fans remembered more than the finale itself. Ms. Midler's version of "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" left the audience, and the host, in tears.
After his retirement from "Tonight," Mr. Carson was expected to appear occasionally on NBC programs. He never did. (He made one brief appearance on CBS with his old protégé Mr. Letterman.) He preferred to leave his legacy as it stood, 30 years of last-minute laughs before bedtime.
Someone once asked Mr. Carson what he would like his epitaph to be.
He thought for a moment and reached for the traditional line of a talk-show host:
"I'll be right back."
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