Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (65 page)

      
You’ve got six minutes to do your thing. And you better be good, or they’ll go to the commercial after two minutes….The producer, all the federales are sitting like six feet away from that couch. And
they’re right on top of you, man, just watchin’ ya. And when they go to a break, they get on the phone…They whisper in John’s ear. John gets on the phone and he talks. And you’re sitting there, watching, thinking…and then the camera comes back again and John will ask you something else or he’ll say, “Our next guest is…”

Other Changes

• Whenever possible, Stark scheduled an attractive woman as the first guest, to appeal to what he felt was a largely male-chauvinist audience…and to break up what was otherwise an all-male show.

• He scheduled the biggest stars to run just
after
the midnight hour, so that viewers would have something to stay up for.

• The third guest would often be a singer or instrumentalist, and the fourth, an author. (When the show was cut from 90 minutes to an hour in 1980, authors disappeared almost completely.)

• And where Paar had abandoned comedy sketches entirely, Carson began putting them back in, borrowing liberally from the comedians of the day. Carnak the Magician was a recreation of Steve Allen’s Question Man, Aunt Blabby borrowed heavily from Jonathan Winters, and Art Fern was inspired by Jackie Gleason.

CARSON ON STRIKE

By the mid-1960s, the show was on its way to becoming a national institution. Ten million people tuned in every night. Carson was a superstar: when he performed a stand-up comedy routine at the Las Vegas Sahara in 1964, he broke the all-time attendance record.

The program was also making huge money for NBC. It had a smaller audience than most prime-time shows, but because it was produced at a lower cost—and was on five nights a week—it earned more money.

Where’s Johnny?

Despite his success, Carson was becoming increasingly unhappy with NBC—he didn’t feel the network was giving him the star treatment he’d earned. On his second anniversary as host, NBC threw him a party. But instead of renting a swanky nightclub or restaurant for the occasion, they held it in a conference room on the fifth floor, and served cold hors d’oeuvres and drinks in plastic cups. “I’ve seen smoke come out of a guy’s nose before,” one person who was at the party recalled, “but I’m telling you this was steam. [Carson] was pissed off.”

Another thing that drove Carson crazy was the show’s 11:15 p.m. starting time. During the Paar years, most television stations had 15-minute newscasts at 11:00 p.m. But in 1965, many stations expanded to a half-hour, which meant they didn’t switch over to “The Tonight Show” until 11:30—after Carson had finished his monologue.

One evening Carson decided he’d had enough. He refused to come onstage until 11:30, leaving Ed McMahon and band leader Skitch Henderson to fill in the first 15 minutes themselves. When he strode out at 11:30, Carson explained that the only people listening at 11:15 were “four Navajos in Gallup, New Mexico, and the Armed Forces Radio on Guam.” NBC moved the starting time to 11:30. It was the beginning of a series of confrontations that would last as long as Carson was host.

Taking Control

The next big showdown came in April 1967, when the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) struck all three networks. Carson, a union member, participated in the walkout. The networks responded by playing reruns, with little protest from AFTRA members…but when NBC played a “Tonight Show” rerun, Carson accused NBC of violating—and thereby voiding—his contract. He refused to go back to work even after the strike ended. “I know of no business except the broadcasting industry in which a performer becomes a scab to himself and his union because of videotape,” Carson said at the time. Like Paar before him, he went to Florida for the duration of the fight.

Who Do You Trust?

Cynics suggested that Carson, who was making an estimated $700,000 a year, was really using the strike to get more money out of NBC. And while Carson admitted that money was an issue, what he really wanted was greater control over his show—and greater independence from NBC.

He got it. Americans were already hooked on “Tonight,” and NBC was hooked on the estimated $25 million a year the show was bringing in. Besides, after years of ceding the late-night audience to NBC, ABC had launched “The Joey Bishop Show” opposite Carson. Bishop, a nightclub comic, had a style similar to Jack Paar’s, and ABC hoped that he would enjoy similar success.

If NBC lost Carson now, his audience might leave, too. NBC couldn’t afford to take the chance, so they agreed to Carson’s demands for greater control and renegotiated his salary. Carson returned on April 24, 1967, one week after “The Joey Bishop Show” made its debut. Bishop, whose ratings were only half those of “The Tonight Show” even on his best nights, limped along until December, 1969.

LATE NIGHT FIGHTS

“The Joey Bishop Show” was one of the first attempts to steal Carson’s crown as King of the Night, but it wasn’t the last. Here are some other also-rans of the 1960s and 1970s:

•
“The Les Crane Show”
(1964-1965). Crane’s show bore more similarity to a tabloid talk show than it did to “The Tonight Show”: Crane and his guests tackled the controversial topics of the day, including homosexuality and adultery. He was fired four months into the show, rehired, then fired a final time on November 12,1965.

•
“The Las Vegas Show”
(1967). In 1967 a consortium of independent TV stations calling itself the United Network made a stab at becoming America’s fourth television network. The Las Vegas Show, featuring top casino acts, went on the air on May 1, 1967 …and went off the air on May 31, when the United Network ran out of money.

•
“Merv Griffin” (1969-1972).
Griffin—Carson’s original rival for the “Tonight Show” gig—had his own syndicated evening show when CBS came to him about going up against Carson. Griffin didn’t want the job—so he demanded double the salary that Carson was rumored to be getting, knowing that CBS would refuse. They didn’t. According to Griffin, they agreed to pay him $80,000 a week. “Suddenly I felt sick,” Griffin recalls, but he agreed to do the show. Griffin’s ratings were consistently higher than Joey Bishop’s, but remained far behind Carson’s.

• “Dick Cavett” (1969-1974). When Joey Bishop got the axe in 1969, Dick Cavett, a former writer for Jack Paar, signed on to replace him. Promoted as “the intellectual Carson,” Cavett won strong critical praise, but low ratings

• “Jack Paar Tonite” (1973). Paar is said to have envied Carson’s celebrity as it grew. So when ABC scaled Cavett’s show back from four weeks a month to one in 1973, Paar agreed to take one of the weeks for himself. Paar, however, had lost touch with his audience. Ronald Smith writes in
The Fight for Tonight:

      
Parr looked like a refugee from another era with his bowties and wet-look toupee. Viewers didn’t understand why he was being a cornball and showing his home movies. He embarrassed himself with his tirades against rock music and long hair….His sidekick was Peggy Cass, and together they looked like someone’s parents videotaping an evening with dull friends.

Paar’s ratings were terrible—worse than Cavett’s—so in the Fall of 1973, he announced that he wasn’t renewing his contract. “I guess the next event in my life will be my death,” he lamented.

KING OF THE NIGHT

Once again, Carson was the unchallenged king of late-night television. His next serious challenger would not emerge for a decade.

Still more to come? Maybe…turn to
page 418
to find out.

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LOST TRADEMARKS

These generic terms were once registered trademarks.

Cellophane:
Invented by a Swiss chemist around 1900 and sold to DuPont in 1915. It was declared a generic term by a N.Y. court in 1941, because no other word could adequately describe it.

Dry ice:
Once registered by the Dry Ice Corp. to describe “solidified carbon dioxide.”

Escalator:
Otis Elevator Co. had this trademark.

Linoleum:
Originally a trademark of the Armstrong Cork Co.

Uncle John has been itching to write about this subject for a long time. He bets you can’t read to the end of this chapter without scratching at least once…

I
TCH, ITCH, ITCH

“The itch,” says Jeffrey Bernhard, of the Massachusetts Medical Center “is one of, if not the, most mysterious of all ‘cutaneous intrusions.’” No one knows exactly why we itch, or how it works.

• Some scientists speculate that its function is to remove parasites and other foreign objects from the skin. Or it may serve as an “early warning system” for the body’s borders. Sometimes itching is a warning of a serious disease.

• Itching has a lot in common with pain—they even travel through the same kind of nerve cells (neurons). In fact, scientists once thought itching was a
kind
of pain. Now they’re pretty sure itching and pain are two entirely separate functions.

• Health experts divide itches into two different categories:
sensory itches
and
allergic itches
. They also say that scratching almost always makes itches worse.

SENSORY ITCHES

• These are caused when special nerve endings in your skin called
Merkel’s discs
(but referred to by doctors as “itch nerves”) detect pressure on your skin. They immediately send nerve signals to the spinal cord…which sends them on to the brain.

• Your brain checks out the signals: if they’re caused by something your body’s used to—like clothes you wear all the time—it files the signals away in your subconscious. You don’t even notice they’re there.

• But if the stimulus is new and unfamiliar—say you’re wearing a new hat, or you have several days of new beard growth—your brain sends out a “foreign irritant” alert and makes you aware something’s there. How? By making you itch—trying to get you to brush the irritant away.

• At the same time, your brain is sending signals to the muscles in your hands and arms to start scratching. That’s why you scratch even when you sleep.

• Fortunately, your brain adapts to new sensations fairly quickly. So if the irritant hangs around for a while, the brain will calm down and start rerouting signals to your subconscious. The irritant is still there, but the itch goes away.

ALLERGIC ITCHINGS

•
Allergic
itching is what happens when a foreign body—e.g., medication or an insect bite—irritates your immune system. The immune system responds by releasing
histamine
, the chemical that is the body’s main response to allergies. Histamine is the stuff that gives you rashes.

• Histamine does several things to the nearby cells that makes it easier for them to fight off the allergen—it causes the blood vessels to dilate; it makes it easier for fluids to pass through the affected skin cells; and it stimulates nearby nerve endings.

• In most cases, your body will get rid of the histamine naturally in 18 to 24 hours; antihistamine medications can do the same job in a couple of hours, but serious allergies can take much longer.

WEIRD ITCHES

Of course, there are always itches that break the rules—inexplicable itches with no identifiable cause. Four, that Scott LaFee, in the San
Diego Union-Tribune
, has picked as the most interesting:

Mitempfindungen:
“Otherwise known as a referred itch, occurs more or less in one spot when another spot is scratched.”

Aquagenic pruritus:
“Itching provoked by contact with water.”

Atmknesis:
Itching caused by, or apparently caused by, exposure to air while undressing.”

Pruritus prohibitus:
“An itch that can’t be scratched because your hands are full, because you can’t reach it, because it would be unseemly or embarrassing to do so. Most famous case involved Huckleberry Finn.”

SCRATCH FEVER

• Why do itches get worse when you scratch them? Because when you scratch, you irritate a
second
set of nerve endings—the ones that transmit pain. So even if you get rid of the original irritant, you’ve created a whole new one—
you.

• Scratching also temporarily thickens your skin. “It sets up what I call a hot spot,” says Dr. Nia Terezakis, a New Orleans dermatologist. “Scratching thickens the skin, and when skin gets thicker, it itches more. You’ve got a nervous itch going. You stimulate the nerves to fire more and more.”