And What a Reign It Was

By Richard Zoglin

Darrell Vickers and Andrew Nicholls, head writers for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, are sitting in a cluttered room at the end of a long, nondescript suite of offices at NBC's Burbank headquarters, getting ready to tackle El Moldo. It is noon on Wednesday, and they have already had their morning phone conversation with Carson about tonight's show (he has asked for a few more jokes about Ed McMahon's recent wedding and some on the Michelangelo computer virus), and they have finished a draft of the opening monologue. Theirs is one of six full-length monologues prepared by the show's eight staff writers (including two writing pairs) that Carson will get when he arrives at the office between 2 and 3 p.m. From this bounty, Carson will pick the best 15 or 20 gags, put them in order and deliver them later that day to a studio audience of 500 people and a TV audience of nearly 12 million.

But El Moldo awaits. A few days earlier, Carson had asked his writers to come up with a new bit for the hoary character, a fake psychic, who dubs himself the "master of mentalism." It's just one of several classic Carson routines that are being trotted out for a final appearance as his departure nears. Carnac the Magnificent, the turbaned answer-and-question man, showed up a few weeks ago for the last time. (Carson himself wrote more than half the gags.) Art Fern will introduce his final Tea Time movie in a bit scheduled for this week. There may even be a comeback for lovable old -- old -- Aunt Blabby. But Vickers and Nicholls, a pair of laid-back Canadians in their mid-30s who joined the Carson staff in 1986, barely remember El Moldo. Except for a one- night reprise in 1989, Carson hasn't done him since 1983. But there's one thing Nicholls does remember: "It's Ed's favorite spot."

Of such stuff is the end of TV eras made. It has been nine months since Johnny Carson became America's most famous lame duck by announcing that he would retire from the Tonight show this year, at the end of his 30th season. Now, as the long-awaited finale draws near, a show that has always depended for its appeal on the offhand, the spontaneous and the ephemeral is acquiring an air of great moment. Hollywood stars are clamoring to be on with Johnny for one last time. Elizabeth Taylor appeared last month for the first time ever, thanking Johnny for "30 years of brilliant entertainment." Regular Tonight visitors too seem less interested in plugging their new movie than in paying homage to the departing king. Tom Hanks settled himself next to Johnny a few nights back and observed, "It is still the most exciting moment in show business to walk out from that curtain and sit in this chair."

It will all end on Friday night, May 22, when Johnny will appear without guests and reminisce with a selection of clips from past shows -- "a collage," says executive producer Fred de Cordova, "of what the years have meant to Johnny."

Around the Tonight offices, the sentiment is starting to get thick. "Everyone in the country has been tied together by Johnny Carson," says co-executive producer Peter Lassally, who, along with De Cordova, will depart from the show when Carson does. "A part of Americana is leaving." Says bandleader Doc Severinsen, who started out in the trumpet section of the Tonight show orchestra in 1962: "In a way, it's agonizing. The ending is going on and on. The pain is being extended -- and there is pain."

Carson's competitors are getting nostalgic as well. "The best guy who ever did it is stepping down," says Dennis Miller, host of a new late-night show that hopes to pick up some of the viewers that Carson leaves behind. "I've been doing this for 30 shows, and he did it for 30 years. It's a tough gig, and he still looks like he enjoys it." Dick Cavett, who once wrote for Carson and later squared off against him as a rival host, praises Carson's skills both onstage and off. "He has the ability to pick good material, to budget his energy, to fire the right people," says Cavett. "But finally it comes down to personality. He's easy to take, and he's got that wonderful naughty- fraternity-boy quality that he never outgrows."

In a business where success is fleeting and burnout comes fast, Carson's durability is not only unprecedented, it is almost unimaginable. An Iowa-born, Nebraska-raised standup comic and host of a popular game show, Who Do You Trust?, Carson replaced Jack Paar as host of NBC's Tonight show on Oct. 1, 1962. His tenure on the program has lasted for two-thirds of the time that national TV has existed. He has hosted the show long enough to have had Judy Garland, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford and Hubert Humphrey as guests. If Jay Leno lasts as long, he won't be leaving until the year 2022.

Carson's nightly rituals and idiosyncrasies have become as comforting to millions of viewers as warm wool pajamas: McMahon's booming, endlessly imitated introduction ("Heeeeeere's Johnny"); the natty golf swing that signals the end of the opening monologue; Carson's nervous tics (fiddling with his tie, drumming a pencil on the desk), which have provided grist for impressionists from Rich Little to Dana Carvey. The program has had moments of great theater, from Tiny Tim's wedding to Miss Vicki to Michael Landon's poignant last appearance to discuss his terminal cancer. But mostly the show has succeeded because of its cozy familiarity. Critic Kenneth Tynan once suggested that during the turbulent 1960s, Carson may have become "the nation's chosen joker because, in Madison Avenue terms, he was guaranteed to relieve nervous strain and anxiety more swiftly and safely (ask your doctor) than any competing brand of wag." A bit overstated, perhaps, but it is true that TV never devised a better bedtime companion.

The history of Carson's years at the Tonight show is, to a large degree, the history of television. In 1972, after 10 years in New York City, he moved the program to Burbank, reflecting an industry-wide migration from the East to the West Coast. In 1980 the show was cut from 90 minutes to an hour, creating a tighter entertainment package out of the more free-flowing gabfest that had become, in some ways, a relic of an earlier TV era. (One element that was lost: book authors, who had often been slotted in the final 15 minutes but who disappeared from the show almost entirely.) One by one, competing talk-show hosts -- Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop, Cavett, Alan Thicke, Joan Rivers, Pat Sajak -- fell away. Even Arsenio Hall, whose show has captured a new and younger audience, has failed to dislodge Carson from atop the late-night ratings mountain.

For standup comics, a Tonight gig has always been TV's most important, door- opening break. Says comedian Robert Klein, who got his TV start with Carson: "He'll help a young comedian by saying 'Funny stuff' or 'Boy, that's funny' or by laughing a lot. The audience practically takes its signal from him." For Hollywood celebrities, the show is a friendly, high-visibility place to plug a new movie or TV program. As an interviewer, Carson has never been particularly tough or adventurous, and even after 30 years he can still sound clumsy trying to make prepared questions sound like real conversation. But unlike many of his competitors, Carson listens well and puts the primary focus on the guest, not the host. Even when he ventures into potentially ! troubling waters ("So what about those rumors . . . ?"), his question usually comes equipped with a ready-made canoe that the guest can paddle to shore (" . . . or did the tabloids get it wrong again?"). Carson has succeeded by being the ideal cocktail-party host; his job is to keep the conversation flowing, embarrass nobody and send the guests home happy.

What made Carson's show a nightly must-view, however, was not his weightless interviews but his opening monologue. For years, Carson's comedic take on the events of the day has been the most reliable barometer of the public's mood -- and sometimes a shaper of it as well. When he began making jokes about Nixon's duplicity during Watergate, it has been suggested, the President's fate was sealed. At least one former U.S. Senator, the late S.I. Hayakawa of California, gave as one reason for his retirement the pain of finding himself the butt of too many Carson jokes. Even now, the drop in President Bush's approval ratings is reflected in the rising tide of ridicule being directed at him by Carson. (Last Wednesday, after noting Bush's apology for breaking his no-new-taxes pledge, Carson commented, "Today he made a new pledge -- 'Read my lips: No new promises.' ") "If you've made the Carson show three or four nights in a row, you better start to worry," says Doug Bailey, co-publisher of the Hotline, an influential Washington newsletter. "Nothing undoes a candidate more certainly than if he or she is the object of unremitting ridicule in the monologues."

Carson has always steered a careful middle course in his political barbs, aiming them equally at the left and right. "Who am I to foist my opinions on the public?" he asked back in 1967, and his sentiment hasn't changed. Says De Cordova: "If I were to be asked today, 'Is Johnny Carson a Republican or a Democrat?,' I honestly still would not know." In truth, few of Carson's political gags are motivated by political views of any kind; most are simply stock put-downs pegged to the latest unfortunate fall guy. Is it too farfetched to suggest that the nondenominational cynicism popularized by Carson's monologues -- all politicians are created equal in the sight of the comedian -- is one source of the voter disaffection that has gripped American politics?

If Carson created a nation of political cynics, he has also fostered a nation of show-business insiders. Not simply because of the parade of Hollywood celebrities who troop onto his show each week, but because of the , intimate, conspiratorial style of his TV persona. What Carson discovered that set him apart from talk-show predecessors like Steve Allen (who created some of the bits that Carson later adapted) was that the very act of hosting a talk show could be the subject of comedy. Carson enlisted the audience as collaborators, with everything from the chorus of straight lines that arose from the studio audience whenever he complained about the weather ("How hot was it?") to his ubiquitous savers -- the ad libs meant to salvage jokes that have bombed. The subtext of Carson's comedy is always his own plight: How foolish, he says to the audience, to be a grown man earning a living trying to make people laugh.

Oddly, Carson, one of the most intimate of comedians, has always been one of the most remote of public personalities. More than most celebrities, he is wary of the press and aloof from the Hollywood social scene. Indeed, that may be another reason for his uncanny longevity. The few glimpses the audience has had of Carson's private life -- notably his three divorces, which he frequently uses as comedy material -- make it eager for more. Though he was on TV almost every night, Carson was one of the rare celebrities who never got overexposed.

In the end, the Johnny Carson phenomenon will probably never be fully explainable. "The idea that one man, basically unscripted, could last on TV for 30 years -- it's a freak of television," marvels Jeff Sagansky, a former NBC program executive and now president of CBS Entertainment. And like most freak accidents, it probably will never happen again. Carson's retirement is another milestone in the slow withering of the network mass audience. Even if Leno manages to succeed, much of Carson's audience will undoubtedly disperse to other hosts and other shows. TV's late-night living room will never be quite so inviting again.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: Johnny's Legacy

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York