Book review
carson the great
Written by Bill Zehme, Mike Thomas
Simon and Schuster: 336 pages, $30.
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Johnny Carson, who made “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” America’s favorite show, has been off the airwaves longer than he has been on the late-night show.
For people of a certain age, this can be calculated, but it is quite shocking. When Carson left “The Tonight Show” in 1992, it was a devastating cultural event. He was an Uber TV host for nearly 30 years. Cooler than warmer, more mischievous than passionate, he had just invented the opening monologue and went on to a myriad comedy career (along with Carson’s successor David Letterman and Carson’s substantial (including the career of his successor Jay Leno), bringing together millions of Americans on weeknights for a collective bedtime story. 50 million people watched his last appearance on “The Tonight Show.”
Of course, at least two generations now know him primarily as a reference point back in the day, when his late-night shows averaged 10 million viewers (the current king of the time slot Stephen Colbert averaged less than 10 million viewers (3 million). Some young people now associate the iconic “Heeeeeerrrreeee’s Johnny” more with Jack Nicholson in The Shining than with Ed McMahon’s introduction of the night.
So perhaps the publication of Mike Thomas’s long-awaited biography of Bill Zehme, Carson: The Magnificent, is happening at exactly the right time. Television continues to produce stars worthy of celebration and analysis, but it’s hard to imagine any star leaving as deep a mark on fans as Carson.
If you’re or have been a fan of Johnny Carson, you know what I’m talking about: the incredible list of attributes that set him apart — the suits, the relaxed posture, the endlessly swinging pencils; Sangfroid, who raised his eyebrows at the word “deadly weapon,” might melt into helpless laughter. Carson’s fans like to be reminded that despite his sophisticated sophistication, he was a Nebraska boy at heart. That he was a skilled magician and musician. He rarely attended “Tonight Show” gigs, but after he did, everyone ended up sitting on the couch next to his desk, no matter who they were.
By his own admission, he was also an often violent and deranged alcoholic who had torn up three marriages (his death was on his fourth), a mostly absent father, and a man of betrayal. It is said that he was also the man who immediately punished those who were deemed to be completely expelled. They are often just footnotes in the story.
And so it is with Carson the Great, which is at once the definitive testimony of a Carson fan, the definitive biography, and the product of a decades-long love affair. Not just about Carson’s Seeme, but also about co-author Thomas for Seeme, who passed away in 2023 after a battle with cancer.
A prolific and respected celebrity biographer, Zeme regularly writes celebrity profiles for Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He wrote books about Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman, and co-authored memoirs of Leno and Regis Philbin. He threw himself long and hard into Carson’s legendary bastion of privacy for years, giving his first interview after Carson’s shocking retirement in 2002.
Three years later, after Carson’s death, Seeme began researching his biography.
He soon realized that this icon’s reputation as a sphinx was well-deserved. In the prologue to “Carson the Magnificent,” Thomas quotes an email Zeme sent to former “Tonight Show” writer Michael Burry.[Carson] It was…the ultimate interior man, big and active only in front of the camera. He was an enigmatic national monument, always in full view. ”
Moreover, as Seeme writes in Chapter 1, Carson’s “ghostly rage” “seems to be now and forever eerie, especially when it comes to his very human flaws,” which left those who remained silent. The old vows still stand.”
But Zeme kept working hard, completing the first three-quarters of “Carson the Great” before being diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2013. After Zeme’s death, Thomas, a Chicago arts and entertainment writer and author, took over the task of completing the work. The New York Times called it “one of the great unfinished biographies.”
In many ways, the story of this book’s writing reveals as much about Carson as its contents. Even to experienced biographers, Johnny Carson remains the Everest of celebrity, both fascinating and dangerous.
Mr. Seeme’s research was extensive, but the headline-grabbing revelations and the sordid staging of 2013’s “Johnny Carson,” written by Henry Bushkin, Mr. Carson’s longtime lawyer until he was fired, Those looking for behind-the-scenes details will be disappointed.
For fans of Carson, the biographical details will be familiar. Much of it can be found in the 2012 “American Masters” documentary “Johnny Carson: King of Midnight,” in which Seeme was featured. The book delves into Carson’s early interviews, drawing on them, an in-depth reading of “The Tonight Show,” interviews with his ex-wife Joanna Carson, and many other friends, family members, and colleagues to help explain Carson’s early life. He insists on an interview from around the time. And his devoted love of magic, sleight of hand and misdirection, remained the dominant force in his life.
Jumping through time and space, Seeme’s eagerness to claim the book’s title (often with breathless parentheses) propels and sometimes slows down the story. The unavoidable combination of Seeme’s boldness and Thomas’ straightforward writing style provides an additional whiplash effect. Still, it’s a day in the field for anyone who remembers the likes of Kenneth Tynan and Tom Shales writing about late-night hosts in a way usually characteristic of poets and presidents.
Even more disturbing is Zeme’s willingness to downplay Carson’s lifelong infidelity and destructive relationship with alcohol. Carson’s emotionally repressive mother is inevitably blamed for Carson’s self-destructive marital habits. The drinking synopsis exists mostly in subtext.
A drunken Carson is briefly depicted cheating on his friends and terrorizing his wives. “Sometimes I would wake up the next day to discover that such catastrophes had disfigured the bodies of my sons’ mothers,” Zehme wrote of Carson’s first marriage, and later his third wife Joanna. – Carson details his “60 Minutes” profile with Mike Wallace. I was scared when I blacked out and passed out. ”
But the possibility that it was alcoholism rather than a love of witchcraft that shaped Carson’s personal life itself was less important than Carson’s inevitable repentance and public admission that he was “not very good at drinking.” Emphasis is placed on what has been acknowledged. Public figure.
Even the tragic death of his son Rick, who died in a car accident in 1991, is relatively downplayed. Carson’s longtime friend and bandleader Doc Severinsen later said, “Johnny was never the same after that,” but we only have Severinsen’s word. (Carson did not attend his son’s funeral; one of Rick’s friends said Carson did not want the inevitable publicity to turn the funeral into a “circus”).
Seeme is too good of a journalist to ignore the more troubling sides of his subjects, who were often described as cold and aloof off stage, but perhaps too big of a fan to explore them fully. is not enough.
Early in the book, Seeme compares Carson and Sinatra, two men who deeply touched audiences, often in difficult moments. “While Sinatra masterfully provided shocks of emotional solidarity in his performances, Carson specialized in distracting emotions… inducing impossible laughs just when you thought you would never laugh again.”
The difference is that while Sinatra’s voice remains ubiquitous in modern life, “Johnny Carson’s fleeting magic, which loomed just as large and swayed just as powerfully, no longer hums or flickers in the nightscape.” It means “I won’t.”
“Carson the Magnificent”, like many others, is the author of Carson’s “dreams for generations that Hollywood’s golden dream merchants would never have been able to imagine, even figuratively.” It was dedicated by an acolyte who discovered “The Man Who Founded Him.” He was never a movie star, but he might have been bigger and brighter anyway. ”
With the help of Thomas, Mr. Seeme is determined that the world must not forget.
Mary McNamara is a Pulitzer Prize-winning culture columnist and commentator for The Times.
