Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (60 page)

THE STAR:
Nicholas Daniloff, Moscow bureau chief for U.S.
News and World Report

THE HEADLINE:
U.S.
Reporter Held Hostage by Soviets

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1986 Gennadi Zakharov, a member of the Soviet Union’s mission to the United Nations, was arrested in New York for spying. A few weeks later, the Soviets retaliated, arresting Daniloff in Moscow and charging
him
with espionage—with a possible death penalty. His arrest was front-page news. President Reagan and Secretary of State Schultz called it “an outrage,” but swore they’d never trade a spy (Zakharov) for a hostage (Daniloff). The matter was so serious that it jeopardized the upcoming Summit meeting in Iceland between Reagan and Gorbachev. The United States even announced it was expelling 25 members of the Soviet delegation to the U.N. because they worked for the KGB.

Some fancy maneuvering followed. Daniloff was released. The United States waited awhile (so it didn’t seem like there was any connection), then released Zakharov in exchange for a Russian dissident and allowed some of the expelled U.N. workers to stay. Daniloff was welcomed home…but a
day
after his release, he was already old news. The Reagan administration changed the subject. Their new focus—it was to avoid scrutiny of the deal they’d made, political pundits suggested—was details of the Summit meeting.

AFTERMATH:
Daniloff surfaced again in 1988 when he toured the country promoting his autobiography,
Two Lives, One Russia
(published on the second anniversary of his imprisonment). He became a professor at Northeastern University in Boston and a respected expert on Russia.

THE STAR:
Lucy De Barbin, Dallas clothes designer who claimed to be Elvis’s lover and mother of his child

THE HEADLINE:
Dallas Designer’s Daughter Royal Descendent?

WHAT HAPPENED:
In 1987 De Barbin revealed her secret 24-year affair with Elvis in a book entitled
Are You Lonesome Tonight?: The Untold True Story of Elvis Presley’s One True Love—and the Child He Never Knew.
She said they kept their involvement a secret so it wouldn’t mess up his career. Later, she kept it quiet to protect Lisa Marie and the daughter she had with Elvis, Desir’ee. “I was so afraid of what was going to happen [if the secret got out],” she told a reporter. “I thought if one person found out, everybody would know.” She didn’t even tell Elvis they had a child, she said, although she hinted at it in a phone conversation just before the King’s death: “I just said things like, ‘I have a wonderful secret to tell you’ and ‘Her name is Desir’ee,’ things like that. And he said, ‘I hope what I’m thinking is true.’” De Barbin’s publisher, Random House, believed her. And several experts confirmed that a poem the King had reportedly written for De Barbin was in his handwriting. But neither the public nor the Presley estate bought the story.

AFTERMATH:
De Barbin never produced blood samples to prove that her daughter was Elvis’s. Apparently, she offered no real evidence that they’d been lovers. The Presley estate claimed that because the book was not a success (it actually was), they didn’t need to bother suing De Barbin.

THE STAR:
Matthias Jung, a German tourist in Dubrovnik, Croatia

THE HEADLINE:
Brazen Tourist Has Dubrovnik All to Himself

WHAT HAPPENED:
Dubrovnik, Croatia, was one of the world’s loveliest towns and a major tourist resort. But for seven months, from fall 1991 to spring 1992, the Serbs bombarded it with mortar shells. Tourism fell off, then disappeared. In August 1995, tourists warily started returning—only to be greeted with more shelling. They all fled…except one—Jung, a 32-year-old shopkeeper from Hanover. He wasn’t a thrill-seeker; he just wanted peace and quiet for his vacation.

AFTERMATH:
After a while, things got
so
quiet that Jung admitted he was bored and went north.

After
30
years on the tube, Johnny Carson became synonymous with “The Tonight Show” Here’s how he got the job.

R
ISING STAR

Johnny Carson had been working his way up the TV ladder for a decade. His first show was “Carson’s Cellar,” a comedy-variety program he created in 1951 for L.A.’s CBS affiliate. It only had a $25/week budget, so he couldn’t pay guests for appearances. Much of the time, he had to fake it.

One afternoon he had a member of the studio crew run quickly past the camera. “That was Red Skelton,” Carson joked. “Too bad he didn’t have time to stay and say a few words!” Skelton heard about the joke and was flattered. He made several appearances on the show…then hired Carson as a writer for
his
TV program.

OPENING DOORS

Carson left “Carson’s Cellar” in May 1954 to host a network game show called “Earn Your Vacation.” But he continued to write jokes for Skelton on the side. Then on August 18, 1954, while rehearsing a stunt for his show, Skelton threw himself into a prop door that was supposed to open on impact. It didn’t—Skelton was knocked cold with less than 90 minutes to go before airtime.

A few minutes later, Carson got a call from the show’s producers, who were searching frantically for a replacement host. Carson agreed to fill in…and so impressed CBS with his performance that the network gave him his own primetime show: “The Johnny Carson Show.”

It was Carson’s first big break…and his first big flop. Years later, Carson lamented: “They told me, ‘We’ve got to make the show
important.’…
How were they going to do that? With chorus girls. They were going to make me into Jackie Gleason! I’d come rushing on in a shower of balloons, with chorus girls yipping, ‘Here comes the
star
of the show,
Johnny Carson!’…
That was my first big lesson. If you don’t keep control, you’re going to bomb out, and there’s nobody to blame but yourself.”

BUILDING TRUST

Carson’s next job was hosting a game show called “Do You Trust Your Wife?” The program was failing: the host, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, had just been let go, and ABC was only renewing the contract month to month. Carson turned it around by dumping the husband-and-wife format and renaming it “Who Do You Trust?” so anyone could play.

Soon after, the show’s announcer left. Word spread that Carson was looking for a replacement, and Chuck Reeves, producer of Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” decided to help. He’d been at a party emceed by Clark’s next-door neighbor, a radio announcer named Ed McMahon. He liked McMahon’s style…so he got McMahon an audition on “Who Do You Trust?”

SECOND BANANA

McMahon went to New York and talked on camera with Carson for a couple of minutes. Then he went home. Weeks went by, and he heard nothing. So, convinced he hadn’t gotten the job, McMahon made plans to take a trip across the Atlantic.

As McMahon recalled in his autobiography, the day before he was scheduled to leave, he got a call from the show asking him to come back to New York. He cancelled the trip and went to meet with Carson’s producer, Art Stark. They talked for a few hours, but he still didn’t get a job offer. Finally, Stark asked McMahon if he was going to move to New York.

“I don’t think so,” McMahon replied.

“I thought maybe you’d want to.”

“Why?”

“Well, I thought it might be tough for you, doing the show.”

“What show?”

“Our show. You start Monday.”

“Next Monday?”

“For Chrissake, didn’t anybody tell you?”

And that’s how Ed became the world’s most famous second banana.

CANNED LAUGHTER

As on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life,” the jokes in “Who Do You Trust?” were scripted in advance. It was the best-kept secret of the show: only Carson’s copy of the script contained the jokes. The television audience—and ABC’s censors—were kept completely in the dark, which made for racier ad-libbing. With Carson at the helm, “Who Do You Trust?” became one of the surprise hits of daytime television. Meanwhile, Carson kept his talk-show skills fresh by guest hosting for Garry Moore, Dinah Shore…and Jack Paar.

HEEERF’S JOHNNY!

Carson guest-hosted “The Tonight Show” as early as 1958, but doubted whether he could ever fill Paar’s shoes as permanent host. So when Paar announced in late 1961 that he was getting out, Carson wasn’t sure he wanted to give up a safe, successful network quiz show to take a chance on “The Tonight Show.” “How could I follow Jack Paar? I just wasn’t sure I could cut it,” he wrote years later.

In the end, of course, Carson decided to take the chance. He and McMahon signed on as the host and announcer of “The Tonight Show.” On October 1, 1962, Carson made his debut. The deck was stacked wildly in his favor that first night—he was introduced by Groucho Marx and had Mel Brooks, Tony Bennett, Joan Crawford, and Rudy Vallee as his guests.

Overall, the reviews were positive. “Mr. Carson’s style is his own,” Jack Gould wrote in
The New York Times.
“He has the proverbial engaging smile and the quick mind essential to sustaining and seasoning a marathon of banter.”

PAAR FOR THE COURSE

For some viewers, however, Carson was a big letdown. “America can now go back to bed,” Robert Kennedy joked to Jack Paar a few days later.

Even the NBC pages were skeptical. “After that first night,” says Kenneth Work, a history professor who was an NBC page in 1962, “the pages went down to the NBC coffee shop and all of them were convinced Johnny wouldn’t make it. After working with Paar all those years, we were concerned he didn’t have the excitement and outspokenness Paar had. I didn’t think he’d last six months.”

More to come! See Part VII on
page 386
after these messages.

We all know these terms, but if someone were to ask you what they actually mean, would you be able to tell them? Here’s the difference between the different kinds of milk sold in most supermarkets.

Whole Milk.
Milk as it comes from the cow. The USDA requires it to contain at least 3.25% fat and 8.25% other solids. It’s also about 88% water.

Low-Fat Milk.
Milk with some fat (cream) removed. Depending on how it’s labeled, it can contain 0.5% to 2.5% fat
by weight
. By percentage of calories, it’s more. E.g., “1% milk” gets 24% of its calories from fat; “2% milk” gets 36% from fat. Vitamins A and D are found in the cream; when the cream is removed, the USDA requires dairies to “fortify” milk by putting the vitamins back in.

Skim Milk.
All—or nearly all—of the fat is removed.

Evaporated Milk
. Milk that has had 60% of its water removed. Sometimes it has a caramelized flavor, a result of the heating process used to remove the liquid.

Condensed Milk:
Whole milk, mixed with as much as 40% to 45% sugar, then evaporated over heat.

Cream.
When it’s taken from skim or low-fat milk, cream is made into four different products:
regular cream
(18% milk fat by weight—not calories);
light whipping cream
(30%-36% milk fat);
heavy whipping cream
(36% or more milk fat); and
half-and-half:
(half milk, half cream—10%-12% milk fat).

Buttermilk.
When cream is agitated, or “churned,” the globules of fat separate out from the cream and clump together, forming butter. The globules are removed from the liquid, which is called “buttermilk.”

Acidophilus Milk:
When milk is pasteurized to kill bad bacteria, a lot of beneficial bacteria is killed along with it. In acidophilus milk, the lactobacillus acidophilus bacteria, which aids digestion by regulating bacteria in the digestive system, is put back in after pasteurization.

Soy Milk:
Made from whole soybeans, which are pureed, boiled, filtered, and sometimes sweetened.

Everyone knows that Captain Kirk
said,
“Beam me up, Scotty” in every episode of “Star Trek” and that Bogart said, “Play it again,
Sam”
in
Casablanca.
But everyone’s wrong. Here are a few common misquotes.

L
ine:
“Beam me up, Scotty.”

Supposedly Said By:
Captain Kirk

Actually:
That line was
never
spoken on “Star Trek.” Not once. What Kirk usually said was, “Beam us up, Mr. Scott,” or “Enterprise, beam us up.” According to Trekkies, he came pretty close just once. In the fourth episode, he said, “Scotty, beam me up.”