11 Surprising Things We Learned About Johnny Carson From His New Biography

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Johnny Carson used his affable personality and keen gift for comedy to become no less than the King of Late-Night Television and a cultural icon as host of The Tonight Show for nearly three

decades, from 1962 to 1992. But as the new biography Carson the Magnificent by the late Bill Zehme (Nov. 5) details, the private Carson, who died of emphysema in 2005 at age 79, was

inscrutable — relatively shy — and had some very troubled personal relationships.

Zehme, a lifelong Carson fan and longtime celebrity journalist, nonetheless spent years working to uncover the man behind the myth. He’d only written three-quarters of the biography before

passing away from cancer last year at 64, however, so Mike Thomas, a former entertainment journalist for the Chicago Sun Times, completed the book.

Thomas explains in the prologue why Zehme (and, probably, many other fans) revered Carson: The host offered his audiences the assurance that “tomorrow will come and we can laugh about what

just happened today, and we can get up in the morning, and it’ll be alright, here we go again.”  

It would, truly, be hard to overstate the influence of the Nebraska-bred celebrity. As the New York Times wrote in his obituary, “[Carson] became the biggest, most popular star American

television has known…. At his height, between 10 million and 15 million Americans slept better weeknights because of him.”

But who was this cultural icon, offscreen?

Here are 11 things we learned about Carson from his new biography:

please Ruth. Frank Edwards/Fotos International/Getty Images 1. He had a complicated relationship with his mother

Ruth Carson was a tough, domineering woman with a sarcastic, biting sense of humor and a short fuse. (She reportedly once broke a whole set of dishes against the kitchen wall.) Even after

Johnny’s success, she largely withheld her praise, and he spent his life trying to please her: in 1980 when he received the coveted Governors Award from the Television Academy for his body

of work, he called to tell her. Her lukewarm response: “I guess they know what they’re doing.” When his mother died, according to Carson acquaintance Burt Reynolds, Carson declared, “The

wicked witch is dead!”

News/AP Photo 2. Magic was his early love and primary interest

Almost pathologically shy all his life (parties made him intensely uncomfortable), Carson told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, “I think my reading a book at 12 called Hoffmann’s Book of Magic

probably changed the course of my life.” From then on, the Great Carsoni, as the teen called himself, was obsessed, performing every chance he got and practicing on his family. Although he

was nearly as reclusive as Howard Hughes when he was off the air during his Tonight Show years, Carson summoned the leading magicians to his house in Malibu to perform and show him the

latest developments in the art.

Enlisted in the Navy during WWII, he became a communications officer who decoded encrypted messages. At one point, he was assigned to go down into a hole in the stern of a bombed ship to

supervise the recovery of 20 corpses. “Jesus, that was an awful experience,” he recounted to Time magazine in an unpublished interview. “They’d been down there 18 days by that time, and I

want to tell you, that was a terrible job.” Wrote author Zehme, “He profoundly came to understand the greater importance of inciting laughter as essential misdirection away from daily human

fatigue and lonesome misery.”