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Where's Johnny?
By Bob Shayne, July & August 2002
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For three days now I've been driving around Malibu, begging
people to talk about Carson, and I'm completely striking out
(an embarrassment considering I once arranged interviews for a
living). I check in with some of the show's former writers
and talent coordinators. No luck. I try chatting with some of
Johnny's poker game buddies, including Steve Martin. Nothing.
It could be because I'm a former employee. Most of us
ex-Tonight Show staffers remain loyal to Johnny, but at
least one disgruntled worker wrote a tell-all book that
couldn't have thrilled its subject. But if there's a
Malibu conspiracy when it comes to Johnny, it's easy to
understand. He's earned his privacy. Back in the early
'70s, when I was working on the show, Johnny received an
extortion threat. It was a badly spelled letter accompanied by a
dummy hand grenade, threatening harm to his family unless he
delivered $250,000 in cash. This was soon followed by phone
calls. The staff knew a bare minimum about this, but a pall fell
over the show as the drama played out.
On a Friday picked by the extortionist, Johnny drove with the Los
Angeles police trailing behind him to a designated phone booth
and then the delivery point. He left the money as ordered. And
then something went wrong. Two ardent young fans noticed him
during this clandestine activity and followed him in their red
Camaro, hoping to get an autograph. Instead, mistaken for the
extortionists, they were arrested and one of them was allegedly
beaten by police. Suddenly, a man dashed for the briefcase and
the police pounced on the real extortionist, one Richard
Dziabacinski, whose accent matched that of the phone calls.
In typical Johnny fashion, the story didn't receive much
attention. And really, that suited both him and his audience. We
didn't want to see Johnny in the tabloids; we wanted to see
him as Aunt Blabby or Art Fern, or with a monkey climbing on his
head. It's an infomercial clip of Carson getting creamed with
cream pies (a phony ad with the line "I just want to say a
few words about ... diarrhea") that inspires me to call his
nephew, Jeff Sotzing, who runs Carson Productions—the
company that sells collections of old Tonight Show clips.
Jeff is kind enough to forward my request for an interview to
Carson, who eventually declines, politely, through Jeff.
"Johnny constantly receives requests like this,"
Sotzing tells me, "and if he did one he'd have to do
them all." It feels like old times.
A few days later, I receive a call from comedian Carl Reiner. A
few years ago I worked with Carl, and he gives me an
update—a brief one—on Johnny's post-Tonight
Show life. "He sails—he's a big
yachtsman," says Reiner. "He travels, he reads, he
dines. He loves astronomy. He's a language
person—he's studied Russian and Swahili (Carson
reportedly has enjoyed frequent jaunts to Tanzania during his
retirement). He's very happy with his hobbies. He has no urge
to perform. He's really retired. Nobody's ever done 30 years of nightly
shows. Enough already."
I've always believed that the end of my Tonight Show
days was connected to one event: the booking of Monty Python.
Peter told me he'd booked a comedy group who were unknown in
America, but had their own show in England. Then he gave me a
film of their sketches so I could choose material for the show.
He'd booked them for a night when Joey Bishop was
guest-hosting.
I came out of the screening room shaking. I rushed to Peter's
office and told him I had a lot of trouble with their material: a
skit about dead canaries, a sketch about an architect who designs
a slaughterhouse instead of an apartment house, an
action-adventure about a Church of England bishop. I knew the
Joey Bishop audience wouldn't get it. Peter said not to
worry. He was doing this for a friend. Just do the best I could.
I spent days trying to get the most accessible material I could
from the Pythons, and they spent days arguing amongst themselves
about what sketches to do. When Joey introduced them they did
about 10 minutes, and there was not a titter from the audience.
It was absolute death. The quietest 10 minutes I'd seen on
the show. Ever. They were devastated, Joey was furious, I was
depressed. Peter said, "Don't worry." A few weeks
later, Fred fired me.
In the end, it was the best thing that could have happened.
Leaving The Tonight Show freed me from a life stuck in
relatively low-paying, non-union talk show jobs to the world of
prime-time comedy and drama where I wanted to be. At the time,
however, I was stunned.
On my last day at work, I went to Johnny's dressing room to
say goodbye, having prearranged it with his secretary. (One
didn't just drop in.) I'd never been there longer than
the time it took to drop off a book or some interview cards.
This, my longest stay, lasted maybe 60 seconds.
Johnny, shy as always, smiled at me and said, "Don't
take it personally, Bob. I'm sure Fred just wanted to go a
different way." It seemed like a very nice thing for him to
say. I've been trying for 28 years to figure out what it
meant.
After working on The Steve Allen Show and The
Tonight Show, Bob Shayne wrote for such programs as
Murder, She Wrote and Remington Steele. He recently
sold his first feature film screenplay, Once a Thief.
Now, watch video
clips of Johnny Carson in action, and take our
quiz to see how much you really know about America's
favorite late-night host.
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