Still Talking (21 page)

I’ll never have the opportunity to see him again. Such a brave, brave man.

Larry Hagman came on at his peak during all the brouhaha over “Who shot J.R.?” At showtime he had not arrived, but we announced him as a guest, and I kept getting the word, “He’s on his way, he’s on his way.” Well, he never arrived, so I had to stretch the other guests and vamp with Ed McMahon to fill the time. As I came off at the end, Hagman strolled in looking for his dressing room, saying he thought the show was ninety minutes, not sixty.

The rock star Elvis Costello sat there on camera sweating and nodding off to sleep. I mouthed to the audience, “He’s asleep. ” I thought it was hysterical and kept talking loudly to wake him up. I was so naive then. I could not figure out what his problem was. After all, the man had just sung a song.

Vanna White used to come over from Wheel of Fortune night after night and hang out behind the rear curtain with the makeup people and the sound technicians, hoping somebody would spot her and have her on as a guest.

Finally a slot did open up, and I put her on, a nice, bright girl, eager to play on camera.

I never did well with the old-time stars, Freddie’s contemporaries he would put on from time to time. Their brains had been studio-washed; they were always so careful. Everything in their lives had just been marvelous, everybody so lovely. Lana Turner came on and said, “I’m not here to promote my book. I’m just here to meet you.” I said, “Good,” and threw her book over my shoulder. Thank God she laughed.

But I tried never to go too far with guests because I was, in fact, a hostess, and my obligation was to make them feel they did well. I watched their hands to see if

STILL TALKING 147

they shook and looked for the sweats. I listened to what they said during the commercial break because I never wanted a guest to be truly uncomfortable.

Steered by Freddie De Cordova and Peter Lassally, The Tonight Show had become a stately ship gliding on an even keel through unrufed seas. The show was the embodiment of Johnny’s cool tone, his ease and charm, his familiarity. By 11:30 P.m. most TV audiences are lying down, and they want to watch-but not watch. You can do your nails to Johnny because you know he will bring the ship in smoothly, no surprises. Jay Leno is cut from the same cloth. You can be alone in a hotel room in Sioux City and know that if you turn on The Tonight Show, you will find family companionship.

Now into this placid sea steamed Joan Rivers, a hot, mouthy, pushy little tugboat painted pink. I was Johnny’s opposite. Compared to years of unrufed sameness from Johnny, I must have been like a dash of ginger. I tried not to do the usual plain-vanilla interviews. I wanted to ask the intimate things everyone really wanted to know. I confess I’m very interested in all that cheap fan-magazine gossip. And so is America. I became the National Enquirer of the TV screen.

Victoria Principal was my guest first in 1983 when she was on Dallas, and I wanted to know about her breakup with Andy Gibb of the Bee Gees. “Did you keep the ring?” I asked. Well, she denied they were engaged and denied there had been an engagement ring. At that moment the audience and the camera disappeared, and we were like two women at a kitchen table. “But you showed me one,” I reminded her. “You and Andy Gibb came to my dressing room in Las Vegas. You had the ring. You’d just gotten engaged.

“Why was it on your left hand?” I wanted to know. “It’s my best hand,” she said. “For what?” I asked.

After we went off the air, Victoria said sweetly, “I’ll get you next time.”

And she did come back, determined to win-came on all vulnerable and innocent, playing the victim. But she made a big mistake. Early in the show she

said this was her thirty-third birthday. Later she told me she was born in 1950, the first American baby in Japan after the war.

Well, I know when the war was over-1945. Let’s see, subtract that from 1983

and you get … I said, “Victoria, you’ve ruined yourself again.” I teased her, “Okay, I was born in 1950, too.” She wanted to know where I bought my birth certificate. “Same place you bought yours,” I said.

When the show finished, she stormed off the stage in a fury. But that same year Andy Gibb was my guest. Agreeing that Victoria had claimed it was an engagement ring, he said, “She played with the truth a little bit.” I asked him how old Victoria was when they broke up two years earlier. He said, “Same age she is now, I think.”

That was great television. That was what Johnny could not do. No wonder it was threatening to everybody.

Johnny pretended that he never watched my shows-but Freddie would say, “Of course Johnny never watches, but he wanted to know if that joke was from us or you.”

In Johnny’s shoes I would have felt just as competitive. I’ve yet to meet one person who got to the top with generosity. You have to be very, very strong and push your way through, or people will shove you under. It’s human nature. It’s survival of the fittest. We may be out of the jungle, but we’re still fighting over the one banana.

The whole staff was terrified of Johnny, and rightly so. When the press began writing that The Tonight Show was stale-as they periodically did-he would go on a rampage, saying, “We’re going to have to clean house around here,” and people played hide-and-seek, trying to avoid him in the halls.

We all lived at Johnny’s whim. Our oneyear contracts with NBC. Each year he milked the renewal drama for every watt of suspense, playing it right down to the wire-Is this the year that Johnny Carson quits? The producers were men with families. Peter Lassally had two children to put through college, a big mortgage on a big house, several cars, and a maid. And, of course, when Jay Leno finally does take over, who knows what will happen to Freddie and Peter.

STILL TALKING 149

Johnny was doubly frightening because as the years passed, he seemed incapable of true warmth and intimacy. When I first knew him, I think we were both terribly shy, both loners. I think show business wore my shell away to raw sensitivity and anger-while Johnny’s shell grew thicker and more impenetrable.

I remember while we were still in New York, Joanne Carson, wife number two, invited Edgar and me to Johnny’s fortieth birthday party at a steak house.

I looked around, and every person in the room was beholden to him-his lawyer, manager, producer, director, Ed McMahon, the head writer, me. I wondered, Where are his friends, the people who just like him for himself?

Maybe Freddie De Cordova is close to him, but I wonder if that would be true if Freddie did not work for Johnny. Certainly around town, Carson has the reputation of being a solitary man.

That party was the first time I saw what stardom can do, how easily you get entrapped within a little group of dependents, and I felt sorry for Johnny.

Eventually the same trap happened to me-and I escaped only when I moved back to New York, my career in shambles. Without realizing it, a star becomes surrounded by people who say, “You’re the best. You’re the brightest. You’re the funniest. You’re right and I’m wrong.” Such an atmosphere is so gratifying and safe, you are tempted to hide out in your little group and never grow, staying exactly as you are, becoming more and more closed with no need to reach out to anybody else.

Odd as it may seem, during the times I was permanent guest host, I had almost nothing to do with Johnny personally, because he was not at the studio. In fact, my New York relationship with Johnny had never ripened into a friendship. That was a myth created by our amazing comedy connection on camera. During commercial breaks, when the red light went off, we found we had nothing to say to each other beyond, “How’s Edgar?” and “Gee, the band sounds good. ” Even those banalities lapsed after thirty seconds when Johnny would fall silent, drumming his pencil on the desk.

In New York Joanne had invited us occasionally to large parties. It was heady being there with Mayor Lindsay and Truman Capote. But when wife number three, Joanna, took over in Los Angeles, those invitations stopped.

She was pursuing the “A” list. I stayed on the Christmas-card list and once a year received a phone call. “Joan, this is Joanna Carson. How are you?

Joan, I saw you the other night on the show. You were wonderful.” Right away I would be feeling guilty-Oh, hell, I should have invited them for dinner Thursday night.

I’d say, “Oh, Joanna, thanks. You know, I’ve been so busy with Melissa and … “-thinking maybe we could have them to our house for dinner on Wednesday. “Joan, the reason I called, I’m president of SHARE and would like you to perform at our annual fund-raiser. ” That happened for five years. After the third year I was always busy.

I believe my relationship with Johnny was permanently shaped by his feeling, on some level, that I was his creation and so could be taken completely for granted. Indeed, I played that role, catering and kissing and thanking-and staying loyal beyond reason.

After I became the permanent guest host, I was offered talk shows opposite Carson by two huge conglomerates, Orion and Viacom-but I had sworn never to go up against Johnny. ABC wanted to make me the queen of daytime TV, and in the days before 1985, when Oprah came on the scene, it might have happened.

I was wooed by the president of ABC, Tony Thomopoulos, in a secret meeting and offered obscene money. After stuffing myself on Danish pastry, I declined.

Johnny had been the one person who said, “Yes, she has talent. Yes, she is funny.” He was the first person who knew what I could become. He handed me my career. I could not make myself leave that man. There was still an umbilical cord. He was JOHNNY CARSON, and he believed in me more than I believed in myself. I always thought that somewhere behind his shell, he was the one person in the business who understood me and really wished me well.

STILL TALKING 151

Looking back at these years, I can now see that beneath the joy and the camaraderie with Peter Lassally and Freddie De Cordova there was a tension that slowly built to a crescendo during my eight weeks a year as host. I think they eventually saw me as their baby who had grown away from them.

But I also know the Freddie and Peter, each for his own reasons, were glad when my shows were terrific. They wanted me to succeed. Their careers were involved with me. Peter particularly was an ally. Though I constantly struggled against his taste, he was still a close friend Edgar and I saw socially. He had considered himself my champion and enjoyed my success personally.

Freddie, however, considered me rude and crude. After he was hired in New York, he demoted me from occasional host back to a mere guest. Three years later, at the urging of Peter Lassally, I was reinstated. I wanted to believe that Freddie had changed his mind when I became permanent guest host, wanted to believe in all the dressingroom bonhomie. And Edgar and I saw the De Cordovas socially, for dinner on many occasions. But then Freddie wrote an autobiography that was a valentine to Johnny Carson, and I was virtually the only person in the book who was not “wonderful” and “marvelous.”

Neither man wanted me to do so well that I challenged Johnny’s preeminence.

Peter especially believed Johnny had a proven, wildly successful formula, and any violation of it-by anybody but Johnny-would be perilous. He had a crystallized vision of The Tonight Show audience and what it expected. And I was sitting in for Johnny Carson on his show, and nothing should alter that show-which in justice to them had been the dominant late-night show for more than a decade. It will be interesting to see what Jay Leno’s formula will be.

I think in their view of me, they believed a Marshall Mcluhan theory about cool and hot TV personalities: Carson was cool and therefore welcomed into homes night after night. 1, on the other hand, was hot, and people could only tolerate me in short bursts. The more comfort-

able I became, the bolder, the hotter I became-the more I was somebody to be kept in control. Nobody from Carson’s staff ever walked into the dressing room and said, “God, the ratings were terrific this week.” They always found the one failure. “Jesus, you lost Detroit.” And we would think, Oh my God.

We lost Detroit. That kept us off-balance, and for a long time I was quiet, not wanting to cause any trouble.

The primary way Freddie and Peter could keep meand any of the other previous guest hosts-in line, was in their choice of guests. There were what we called “Lassally rules”: No authors or politicians were allowed.

Hard news was out-no relative from the KAL plane shot down by the Russians, not Corazon Aquino, now running the Philippines, not Christine Craft, the newscaster fired for being too old. A singer had to sing-so we could not have Cher, who had begun an acting career and had temporarily stopped singing. I wanted Brooke Shields, but knew we could not ask a teenage celebrity to fly from New York alone. Too many people would approach her.

But it turned out there was a Lassally rule against paying for two tickets, so Edgar and I offered to pay for the second one.

Certainly my panels should not include anybody Johnny might want himself-or who would embarrass him. I remember one of my guests brought on a Yorkshire terrier dressed in a tuxedo-apparently too weird for The Tonight Show.

Afterward, Freddie De Cordova hunted down Billy Sammeth, who booked the guests we chose, and yelled at him, “No surprises!” They wanted my segments to be safe, uncontroversial entertainment. Edgar used to say, “They don’t want Italian opera, they want Strauss waltzes. “

But, of course, when the guest is terrific, the host is terrific. I keep pushing to do better, which probably makes me an annoying nudge. But I am terrified of coasting. I believed on The Tonight Show that the more I could be myself, the better I was, the better the show. Edgar and Billy Sammeth in particular spent hours wringing out their brains trying to think of names who were unfamiliar on the talkshow circuit and would volley with me on cam-

STILL TALKING 153