8 A long-awaited biography from journalist Bill Zehme pulls the curtain back on the life of late-night titan Johnny Carson. The God of U.S. Late-Night TV: A New Book Chronicles the Life and Times of Johnny Carson By Luis Polanco Late-night television is a bit of a misnomer — by today’s standards, that is. Sure, in the past, you had to stay up past primetime programming in the U.S. in order to watch Jack Paar or Merv Griffin or Johnny Carson, but in the age of streaming and Social Media and online video sharing, latenight programming is within reach anytime of the day — in the morning, at noon, in the evening, and even in the middle of the night. Clips of current late-night programs are repackaged for socials because some audiences are more likely to watch the repackaged clips than watch the shows live. The change of viewing patterns hasn’t helped late-night TV, and neither have the fluctuating levels of talent among the shows’ hosts. This reviewer, for one, is not going to stay up past midnight for Jimmy Fallon or Seth Meyers. There’s also the issue of budget shrinkage. The Tonight Show, the jewel in the late-night crown that has broadcast on NBC since 1954, is now a four nights per week program instead of five. Meanwhile, Late Night With Seth Meyers cut its live band. Late-night programming does have a magic to it, though. Johnny Carson once talked about what that magic might be in conversation with actor Tony Randall on a show that aired on Tuesday, September 18, 1973. “You see, Tony, at this time of night, people who watch the show are ready to go to bed, lie down, and sleep. A lot of them would like to think that they will wake up in the morning,” Carson said. “My job is to give them that feeling — that there will be a tomorrow.” Carson is the subject of the long-awaited biography, Carson the Magnificent (336 pgs., Simon & Schuster, 2024, $30), written by Bill Zehme and Mike Thomas. While there is much to glean from the life of a comedic titan whose name is synonymous with late-night TV, the story behind the book is equally as touching. Bill Zehme — a journalist, resident of Chicago, Illinois, co-author of memoirs of celebrity comedians like Jay Leno and Regis Philbin, and author of The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra, and Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman — was a lifetime fan of Carson and chased the opportunity to interview him. In 2002, he finally secured the assignment a decade after Carson’s retirement from late-night. In 2005, after Carson passed from emphysema, Zehme went to work on a biography — a decade’s worth of researching, writing, and conducting interviews with those close to Carson — that would get published and completed with the help of Zehme’s former research assistant Mike Thomas, after Zehme’s own death from cancer in 2023. The time and effort clearly shows in the elegantly written biography, which covers Carson’s life before, during, and after celebrity. A quick biographical rundown: Carson was born on October 23, 1925 in Corning Iowa. At the age of eight, his father, Homer, who worked as a power company manager, moved the family to Norfolk, Nebraska. After high school, Carson hitchhiked to Hollywood — a story with mythical significance in Carson lore. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1943, then attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he majored in journalism. (His college thesis, titled “How to Write Comedy for Radio,” bode well for his future.) In 1950, Carson began a career in broadcast radio that turned into a career in television, where he hosted the variety show The Johnny Carson Show from 1955 to 1956, and then Who Do You Trust? from 1957 to 1962. That last year also led to his long-running job as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and the rest, as they say, is history. Once he left TV, he sort of disappeared from his role as a public figure. Who was Carson behind the veil of his role as a comedic TV host? Zehme was interested in unthreading the mystery behind Carson’s public and private selves. “[Carson] would be meticulously aware of what pieces of himself he projected forth and what separate salient truths he would keep tucked away,” wrote Zehme. “Only he could know for sure how much of his authentic self would step before an audience, but whoever he seemed to be when so stationed was always a happy comfort.” For Zehme, the difference in comportment and temperament could even be noticed in youth: “[H]e could always be this one way (charismatic, commanding, engaged) — and he could also always be that other way (removed, intractable, missing in action) — but never simultaneously, since that would be difficult for even him to pull off.” That difficulty between those two states of being (charismatic/removed) could be one way to understand Carson’s notoriously secluded life after The Tonight Show. Throughout Carson the Magnificent, Zehme gave Carson a god-like importance in the realm of entertainment. Describing when Carson put in his resignation to NBC corporate executives at Carnegie Hall in New York, Zehme wrote, “And this was received as hurled Olympian thunder, and there was reeling and rolling and, by the following spring, as his vacancy encroached, strange portents of transition came to bear.” Zehme, not one for understatement, painted Carson’s departure with the gravitas of a blind bard singing of the power of the gods. Other people put Carson on that pedestal as well. Zehme noticed. “I have heard one sentence spoken several times in the years he left television, much less the planet: ‘Johnny Carson saved my life.’” And yet, maybe to give audiences the feeling “that there will be a tomorrow” is the gift of a god. Who was Carson behind the veil of his role as a comedic TV host? VIDEOAGE February 2025 Book Review
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