Johnny Carson – Henry Bushkin, 2013 ★★½

Keeping Uneasy Company with America's Host

One day, while being interviewed by a British journalist for an article that would appear in a February, 1978 issue of The New Yorker, the celebrated talk-show host Johnny Carson gave a strange answer to a routine question. Asked whom he regarded as his best friend, Carson named his lawyer, Henry Bushkin.

This must have come as a surprise to many readers, accustomed as they were to Carson’s smooth repartee with a wide range of guests on NBC-TV’s “The Tonight Show.” It certainly surprised Bushkin. 

But it won’t surprise anyone reading Bushkin’s memoir of life with Carson. By the time the anecdote occurs, almost halfway through the book, one senses Carson was a man without much in the way of friends or sentiment.

“The question that people most frequently ask me is, What was Johnny really like?” Bushkin’s book begins. “They are usually happy to hear the first part of my answer: he was endlessly witty and enormously fun to be around. Their interest flags when I add that he could also be the nastiest son of a bitch on earth.”

According to Bushkin, Carson himself would have concurred on the SOB part: Carson reportedly hated his mother, Ruth, for being hard and unyielding in her attitude toward her successful son. Bushkin blames her for much of Johnny’s difficulties regarding human interaction, especially as it concerned his wives. Johnny was divorced three times, and separated from his fourth wife by the time of his death in 2005.

“He loved his mother as a son must,” Bushkin writes. “But he did not like her.”

Bushkin lays a lot of Carson’s issues on his mother, more than she deserves. Carson was a bad drinker who was prone to fits of frightening anger when intoxicated. He was an epic and reckless womanizer, once even falling afoul of the Mob when he set his sights on a made man’s moll. He had a habit of cutting people out of his life over misperceptions regarding their loyalty, which for Carson usually worked one way.

Yet as Bushkin describes him, Carson was also a man of rare charm worth hanging around, warm and funny on his good days, of which Bushkin saw quite a few.

“Henry, did you know that it’s a proven fact that married men live longer than single guys?” Carson asked early in their relationship. “It’s also a proven fact that married men are far more willing to die.”

Chapter 2 is the book's high point for me: Imagine yourself a young lawyer being asked to meet one of television's biggest stars, having what amounts to a desultory conversation, and being told after that the guy likes you enough to take you along on a raid of his wife's love-nest apartment. En route, in the midst of other legal concerns, you discover the celebrity is packing a gun.

“The act he proposed clearly bordered on ethical misconduct or possibly criminal behavior,” Bushkin writes. “But I wanted to become his lawyer, not his conscience. And maybe the whole thing wasn’t so illegal.”

Thus Bushkin delineates just when he crossed the line from officer of the court to courtesan, though as the chapter is so well written, and Carson comes across as such a charming but moody enigma, you understand why he crossed over.

Chapter 2 not only puts you in Bushkin’s shoes effectively, it presents the experience of meeting Carson as something with the snap of vitality about it. Carson walks out into a rainy Manhattan street in London Fog raincoat and sunglasses, his television-friendly countenance as overcast as the skies above as he goes about the business of uncovering his wife’s infidelity. Yet as soon as he reaches his destination, an apartment building, he’s immediately recognized by the doorman, making an already uncomfortable experience more so.

As Carson and his team, which includes an ex-cop used as muscle by the entertainer, go through the apartment and uncover evidence of Wife #2’s trysts, Carson’s composure melts. Soon he cries. It’s a rare moment of sympathetic engagement with the title character; through the rest of the book, nothing quite like it ever happens again.

Bushkin is but an onlooker here, brought in case someone raises a legal question about Carson’s right to break into an apartment he pays for. But later, at a bar named Jilly’s, Bushkin is summoned to talk to Carson, and essentially listen while his prospective client unburdens himself of what to do about his cheating spouse.

After a while, Bushkin is struck by the surrealism of the situation: Here he is, a one-man audience while America’s talk-show king throws himself a pity party. Then a door opens, and a woman enters.

“As she drew closer in the dim light, one could gradually see that she was a young woman – tall – with long brunette hair – and even longer legs, in a short skirt and thigh-high boots – and nearly as famous as Johnny was.”

With that, Bushkin’s private audience comes to an abrupt end. “Henry, we’re done here, right?” Johnny asks. Bushkin takes his cue and leaves, and the chapter, along with the best part of the book, comes to a close.

Bushkin passes the audition, and becomes Carson’s attorney. Soon, he realizes Carson is being poorly served by his business partners, and takes steps to push them out, steps that serve to draw Bushkin and Carson closer. You aren’t meant to think that Bushkin was doing anything more here than looking after the interests of his client in a truly professional manner. But afterwards, you wonder.

The rest of Johnny Carson both depicts and bears the price of Bushkin’s Faustian bargain. Bushkin not only sacrifices his marriage, his self-respect, and his tennis game in pursuit of keeping client number one happy, he writes a book of lessening interest about the experience.

Henry Bushkin, on the left, and Carson on the right bookend "Three's Company" co-star Joyce DeWitt, which Bushkin points out, was one Hollywood celebrity Bushkin, not Carson, got to take home. [Image from http://keenlykristin.com/2012/12/14/hard-act-to-follow/]

Johnny Carson is never a dull read, and you learn quite a lot about the business side of Carson's life, even to the point of actual contract terms. But the character of Johnny, so well introduced in Chapter 2, recedes more and more, until the very absence of any knowable personality becomes a key theme.

Bushkin brings out this point to explain how unknowable Carson was even to those like him who were in his inner circle. But I’m not reading a book with the title Johnny Carson to be told he’s beyond my ken. The most Bushkin manages is to lay the blame for Carson’s remote character on his mother, which seems a stretch. The only time we encounter Ruth Carson in the whole narrative, Johnny is laughing off her lack of gratitude about a six-week cruise he bought her. She seems an issue here, but hardly the creator of all her son’s faults.

Those reading Johnny Carson to know what it was like to be on the set of “The Tonight Show” while Carson held court will be disappointed. Johnny’s famous sidekick Ed McMahon is barely mentioned, getting the most attention when his wife gets a better seat than does Johnny’s own spouse to Ronald Reagan’s first Presidential inauguration. Joanna Carson, who emerges from this book something of a complex character as well, pitches a fit over the perceived slight, and Carson makes sure Bushkin hears about it. Other rifts between lawyer and client develop as well.

The most Bushkin does regarding the show is bring up how he got a plug in the form of a recurring bit of comic business, where Carson talked up his financial advisor “Bombastic Bushkin.” When Bushkin’s mother got upset by the apparent insult, Carson took time out to call her and assure her it was all in good fun, one of the times in this book where Carson comes off favorably.

Bushkin’s place with Carson was more often in an office suite, or at a box in Wimbledon. Bushkin’s most critical role came when Carson renegotiated his contract with NBC in 1980, terms of which would do a lot for Carson, not to mention a comic named David Letterman who got a show thanks to Carson's new deal. Bushkin played the role of wheeler-dealer masterfully, and a bit unethically by his own admission, allowing ABC to court Carson before NBC’s contract had expired. You can see how different he had become from the guy with serious qualms about a love-nest raid.

By now Bushkin was in too deep, pulled in by Carson’s spell, not to mention his access to money and beauty. Bushkin itemizes his fancy digs for you, brags about the big law firm he turned down, and even tells you what famous women he was sleeping with before and after his marriage ended.

Bushkin’s relationship with Carson hit troubled waters not long after his new NBC deal. By 1988, Carson had a new wife and Bushkin was out, developments Bushkin suggests were related. By this time, Carson had become less pleasant company anyway, more arrogant and domineering, prone to rages. When Bushkin began looking after himself, Carson took notice, and acted with the same cool dispatch with which he handled his other relationships.

I can’t say I felt that badly for Bushkin, and that affected my enjoyment of his book. But the book does have a story to tell, sometimes in its subtext, that’s worth reading, especially if like me you grew up watching Johnny and wondered what made him tick. Too bad for Bushkin it was a time bomb.