Here's Johnny! – Ed McMahon, 2005 ½★

A Sidekick's Lot Is Not an Easy One

Whenever I tuck into a celebrity memoir, great expectations are not an issue. Maybe I’ll learn something. Maybe I’ll be entertained. But it’s unlikely I’ll be blown away, or even remember much about the book a year later. Grant me pleasant diversion, and I’m satisfied.

I was never a regular watcher of The Tonight Show, but I was certainly familiar with it in its Johnny Carson heyday (1962-1992), enough to recall with fondness the sight of Carson bantering with his portly on-air sidekick, Ed McMahon, either between guests or doing a sketch to fill time. Throughout my youth, and well into adulthood, they were mainstays of pop culture, enjoying high popularity over a long period of time. Not Beatlemania, no, but impressively consistent.

So how bad could a book written by one of them about his time with the other be?

Here’s Johnny! provides a depressing answer. Quite bad. Bad enough to make me wonder: Were Carson and McMahon ever that good? Or was I too blinded by their success not to see the mediocrity behind it?

If there is a message in Here’s Johnny!, it’s that Johnny Carson was successful because he was a comedy genius, a television maestro McMahon compares at one point to famed conductor Leonard Bernstein, and a prince whose company McMahon was honored to share:

He was a shy and private man, who once said to me, “I’m good with ten million, lousy with ten.” He ran from tributes faster than he ran on the tennis court, faster than he ran from a growling baby leopard and jumped into my arms when I showed him that a good second banana knows how to catch the star. Of course, for every other moment in our thirty years on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson carried me.

The agenda is set forth in the introduction, and remains consistent to the end. Never mind those stories you may have read about the bitter ex-wives, the drinking, the anti-social character that was Carson in private. The real Johnny was a wonderful guy.

I’m not believing it. Not because I’m sold on a contrary view, represented by Carson’s former attorney Henry Bushkin in 2013, of Carson as total misanthrope. It’s because if Carson was so sweet, why does McMahon, who got Here’s Johnny! out just months after Carson’s death on January 23, 2005, seem so frightened of him still?

Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson together on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson is in costume as one of his most successful running characters, Carnac the Magnificent. Sample line: "May a love-starved fruit fly molest your sister's nectarines." Image from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/532761830890986840/.

At the outset, McMahon makes clear he had Carson’s blessings to write the book, having approached him months before Carson’s death to get permission. He includes long dialogue fantasy sections where a ghostly Carson stands over his shoulder, providing encouragement and occasional wry digs. At every chapter, McMahon seems eager if not desperate to explain how important Carson was, and how deep feelings ran between them. The nightclub-emcee blandishments get exhausting:

I don’t think I will ever be able to accept that Johnny is gone. His favorite song, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” is hard for me to hear now, much harder than hearing Stevie Wonder sing it to Johnny on one of the last shows. So often I look at a phone with a sinking feeling because I can’t pick it up and get to him.

Here’s Johnny! has other issues. It’s a boring read, repeating the same half-dozen points over and over. Anecdotes are offered with little context. The conversations McMahon recounts having with Carson back in the day read like practiced patter, rather than a realistic back-and-forth authentically remembered. He’s straining for laughs, coming up short:

Charles Darwin would have liked the long-running debate between Johnny and myself over which was smarter, the horse or the pig. Well, maybe not Charles Darwin, but certainly Charles Schultz.

Johnny thought the pig was smarter than the horse, and I agreed; but the good second banana had to take the second beast.

Occasionally the book gets interesting. McMahon notes how a good second banana needs a wit keen enough to sense comic potential, but not so sharp as to beat the boss to the punchline. You have to look slow without being slow, and develop a strange mentality in the process:

I’ve always liked the story about the straight man who was walking on a beach when he suddenly heard a woman screaming, “Help! Help! I’m drowning!”

“You mean to say you’re drowning?” he asked.

Much is made by McMahon of his drinking, a recurrent gag on The Tonight Show over the years. McMahon goes along with the idea of himself as a steady imbiber, noting how his preference for Gordon’s gin became a private joke he and Carson shared during commercial breaks. Especially early on, when the show aired out of New York City, the pair often visited favorite Manhattan watering holes after shows to relax, perform some amateur jazz (Johnny was a good drummer, and Ed liked to sing) and have a belt or two.

Carson has a cigarette while chatting with Ed early in their Tonight Show run. McMahon notes Carson was a chain smoker, a habit he tried to kick but found impossible as a result of his on-air performance anxiety. Image from http://newravel.com/pop-culture/tv/secrets-about-johnny-carsons-tonight-show-that-ed-mcmahon-would-have-never-announced-on-air/.

But Ed could hold his booze, something that could not be said for Johnny, who made headlines once for driving under the influence. McMahon notes the contrast, in one of the only moments of the book where he is less than obsequious about Johnny:

I allowed Johnny to create this besotted character for me because it played for laughs. And some of the laughs were my internal ones at thinking what the audience never knew: that I was holding my liquor while Johnny’s grip was not as tight.

Carson was no alcoholic, McMahon declares; just a problem drinker with poor social skills. Whatever the case, Carson had a sensitivity about the condition. McMahon recounts a congressman caught wading in Washington’s Tidal Basin with a stripper. Carson dutiful made wisecracks about the guy on his show, until he learned the congressman was an alcoholic. Carson’s jokes stopped.

“Alcoholism should never be spoofed,” McMahon recalls him saying.

There are precious few backstage peeks of that kind in Here’s Johnny! McMahon is more interested in packaging the official version, what went out on NBC for 30 years. Long sections of transcribed banter deliver little, either for laughs or nostalgia, probably because in the translation to the page, you lose the sense of the occasion, and of Carson’s impeccable timing. He had good jokes, too, but his fame rested more in how he delivered them.

McMahon’s portrait of Carson may be the polar opposite of Bushkin’s in many ways, but at least in their origin points, they line up.

Bushkin describes his first meeting with Carson as so quick and chilly he felt he blown it somehow – until he was asked to be Carson’s personal lawyer. McMahon was a scrapping TV host working on a local Philadelphia station when he met Carson in 1958 to discuss becoming the announcer for his NBC game show “Who Do You Trust?” Carson thanked him for coming, asked about McMahon’s alma mater, made a comment about the view from the window, then hustled him away.

The next time he heard from Carson, it was a call from the producer, telling McMahon to wear a suit for next Monday’s show. “We want to emphasize your size when you’re next to him,” he explained.

McMahon describes a Carson who had a telepathic ability to divine comedy possibilities no one else could see, and then clue McMahon in with a subtle gesture:

Just a knowing look, a half smile, a certain slight movement of the head, and the signal was sent. There were nights after Johnny’s monologue when he and I were ad-libbing and he seemed to have a resistance to bringing out the first guest. Seeing something in Johnny’s eyes, I knew that he wanted us to go on rapping together, playing back and forth and getting wilder and wilder, until perhaps the first guest had gone home and it was time for the first commercial.

Would Carson have objected to the notion of McMahon being so active a handmaiden of his greatness? No doubt any surviving Tonight Show writers would; in McMahon’s telling, the show’s conception as well as execution was a two-handed affair. The only time McMahon acknowledges writers is when relating a story of a sketch that bombed: “Sometimes The Tonight Show’s writers were on target, but other times, it seemed that they deliberately wanted to challenge Johnny’s powers of recovery by giving him material that belonged in intensive care.”

I often wondered when reading Here’s Johnny! if, given its impersonal tone, it wasn’t entirely the work of a ghostwriter. But a ghostwriter would have done a more professional job. After eking its way past 200 short pages, Here’s Johnny! turgidly wraps itself up with a long set of verses, set to the Bob Hope song “Thanks For The Memories”:

Thanks for the memories.

Our days were one long lark.

So many games,

Some bright with flames;

I felt like Joan of Arc.

If Joan of Arc had been bored to death at her execution, I might have felt the same.