JOHNNY, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

Mixed Media

As Johnny Carson bows out of the heat of Tonight, he takes the last cool breeze with him

JAMES WOLCOTT

'That plastic character on the Coast" is how S. J. Perelman dismissed Johnny Carson during one of his snit fits. Like most word-men, Of Picklepuss preferred rival Dick Cavett, who could play patty-cake with puns, lines of poetry, anagrams, palindromes. Carson? A mere cue-card reader.

America's night-light. A test pattern for lonely hearts. To culture's snooty squires, Carson has always been antiseptic to anything smacking of pungency. Even Kenneth Tynan in his famous adulatory profile of Carson in The New Yorker felt obliged to sigh, ''It is depressing to reflect that if Rabelais were alive today he would not be invited to appear on The Tonight Show."

Over the years such once fashionable put-downs have receded into the annals of received opinion. Perelman's fang marks and Tynan's love bites have both faded. The man has shown through.

"He's the cream of middle-class elegance, yet he's not a mannequin," the director Billy Wilder told Tynan. No life-size plastic replica could have hosted NBC's Tonight Show for nearly thirty years without becoming warped beyond recognition. No reasonable facsimile could have sustained such high wattage in the dismal hours of divorce, drunken arrest, and the death of a son. If Johnny Carson solos in the jet stream of American comedy—the earth below cigarette-burned with the crash sites of Cavett, Merv Griffin, Regis Philbin, Joey Bishop, Alan Thicke, Pat Sajak, and every other talk-show host who has engaged him in dogfight—it isn't because he's been on autopilot. His reign, which spans J.F.K. to JFK, reflects a washboard stomach of Wasp stamina and character. His professionalism has paved a shining path.

On May 22, Johnny Carson (bom 1925) will pass the mike to a new generation, in the person of Jay Leno. Before The Tonight Show under Johnny Carson became a lost bit of Americana, I hithered to the NBC studios in Burbank, California, to pay homage. I journeyed to "beautiful downtown Burbank" with my head bowed, as befits a pilgrim. I only hoped I wouldn't mope home disillusioned. (I'm still at that impressionable stage.)

Aside from a few people of color, it's a long loaf of white bread formed in front of Studio One. The audience queued for The Tonight Show looks like Carson cloned. Or, rather, Carson if he had remained a bumpkin from Nebraska. The men shuffle as if they'd left their lawn mowers behind. Their wives inch forward with locked hips. America being a land of crazed loners (before killing John Lennon, Mark David Chapman considered targeting Carson), we're herded single file through a metal detector. Flashlights probe the inner recesses of women's handbags.

As NBC pages seat us cattle, members of the Tonight Show band trickle from the wings. Gray of hair and ashen of skin, the band members look like the board of directors of an insolvent bank. Providing a palette of color is their conductor, Doc Severinsen, who prances like a show pony in harem jammies. He introduces Ed McMahon, who's been Johnny's loyal echo since the game show Who Do You Trust? During the warm-up, we're shown a highlight tape of Johnny's greatest hits, from the hippy-dippy sixties to the polyester seventies to the Armani eighties. The last clip includes Leno, underscoring the orderly transition through the nineties.

"Let's get this baby cranked up," says Ed, taking his position at the announcer's stand. Tension ticks in the air. "These last few minutes are exciting, aren't they?" he says. The stage director raises his hand for the countdown. Three, two, one—go. The band slams into the Tonight Show theme, Ed reels off the guest list, and with a vocal sweep cries:

"herrrre's—Johnny! ' '

The curtain parts, and after a pause, out bounds Carson. His appearance sends a jolt. On TV he looks light as a kite. In person he projects power. With his albino hair, flagpole spine, and thumblike head, he carries the smack of Lee Marvin in Point Blank. (Between marriages Carson dated Point Blank costar Angie Dickinson.) Glancing at a joke board slanted at knee level, he does a news wire rip of the day's events—the primary races, the Michelangelo computer virus, the repackaging of fat from Geraldo Rivera's fanny to his face. "He may have overdone it. Today he stuck his head out of the car window, and was arrested for mooning."

The TV screen flattens the field of Carson's stand-up routine. Shields him, to an extent. Seeing him live reveals how much more exposed he really is. Beneath the boom mike he works a naked circle of space. He has nothing to

Carson is leaving the greatest gig and longest grind in American television with his mystique intact.

lean on or hide behind. Even with his crack timing and prepared "savers" (booed after a bad joke, he'll retort, "You didn't boo me when I smothered a grenade at Guadalcanal"), he's one step away from a clifflike drop into deaf air. No wonder his heart rate used to double before he did the monologue. He's auditioning for death every time he steps on the mound. Even when the monologue zips by like a slick bird, as it did when I saw him, failure isn't far from the forefront.

After his trademark golf swing takes us into commercial, Carson entertains questions from the audience. What are you going to do after retiring? someone asks. "I'm going to become a Jehovah's Witness. I like rejection." A joke to ward off a jinx.

He stations himself at the desk. Nearly all of the copy on Carson describes him as cool, aloof, armored (Tynan: "You get the impression that you are addressing an elaborately wired security system"), irritable, and, when crossed, shark-toothed. Longtime associates have sunk without a trace. He had Joan Rivers for fish bait when she defected as Tonight's guest host to head her own show. Certainly he was no ride on the merry-goround during his drinking days. Alcohol made him cocky, abusive, unstable. He allegedly abused his first wife, bullied his sons. Once, while sitting in a bar, he even dared tear a strip off Frank Sinatra:

The door swung open, and Frank Sinatra walked in with more bodyguards and hangers-on than an Arab potentate. An aura of uncertainty, of danger, surrounded Sinatra. The room grew so quiet that you could hear the flattery drop. Johnny waited until the singer reached his table. He looked at Sinatra, then at his watch, and back at the singer. "Frank," Johnny said, "I told you twelve-thirty." [From King of the Night, by Laurence Learner]

It was Ed who was deputized to clamp Carson in a bear hug and carry him to safety. Alcohol was the one release valve from the pressure cooker holding Carson prisoner during Tonight's early heyday. Now he seems in no need of pissing his name in acid. On the set it's the supposedly bonhomous Ed who seems down, perched on the sofa like a parrot under a drop cloth. Congratulating Ed on his recent marriage, the comedian Don Rickies turns to Johnny and confides, "I give it about a week, tops." During the commercial breaks Carson doesn't lower the Cone of Silence, as I'd so often heard, but jollies up a storm with his guests, beating time on the desk with a pencil. The entire show, he vicariously jams with the band.

Carson's nonstop drumming is the key to his persona. He's always had a drum set in the house. He was once filmed behind the skins for 60 Minutes. Profiles of Carson usually describe his drumming as a way of blowing off steam, flexing his chops. But it's more than a habit or hobby; it's image-defining. Significantly, the most undone Carson's staff remembers seeing him was when his friend the riotous jazz drummer Buddy Rich died. It was one of the rare times he canceled a show. Rich's death hit him hard because Rich was his unrepressed alter ego. For Carson is comedy's last practitioner of white jazz. Such jazz is often derided for not clawing to the raw bottom of experience, the syringe-littered hellhole of Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce. Angst-ridden it's not. It belongs more to the bachelor pad of passe legend, where the cocktail hour unfolds against a "Playboy After Hours" skyline. But time has given Carson's pristine jazz touch steel tips. Early on he mastered the knack of lying back and adding casual fill to an interview rather than flailing away with all fours. His staying power is due in part to his steady pistons. When Jay Leno assumes the top spot on The Tonight Show, it will be more than one comedian succeeding another. It will represent the rock generation's completing its long coup d'etat of pop culture, finally putting the jazz influence of the forties and fifties out to pasture. (If Bill Clinton becomes president, we'll have an Elvis in the White House, and an Elvis on Tonight.)

Factory-made though it is, The Tonight Show has its awkward patches. As Carson authenticates himself, he's less able to fake prefab hype. He floundered with twin-injected Melanie Griffith, asking her if she was a good homemaker. Although Elizabeth Taylor was a hoot, squeezed into leather like a Swiss-roll motorcycle moll, Carson blanked when she announced she was tossing herself a sixtieth-birthday bash at Disneyland to celebrate her inner child. (Although a reformed drinker, Carson never has peddled A. A.-speak.)

It's also become tedious hearing one celebrity after another eat up the clock offering him farewell testimonials, although I suppose such thanks are inevitable. Carson may become choked up the closer he gets to sayonara, but so far he's kept his emotions in check. He always has. One of his chief attributes is that he's never been a pimp for cheap schmaltz or personal pain. The clownmask pathos of Jerry Lewis or Joan Rivers is beneath him. Unlike most comics, he's never seemed to bleed for audience love. He's more like Sinatra, tucking his ego into a holster. "You just get moody and walk away," gibed Don Rickies, who knows them both. Which enables him to leave the greatest gig and longest grind in American television with his mystique intact. Because of his self-containment, we'll probably miss Johnny Carson more than he'll miss us. Not to be maudlin, but I miss him already.