Heeeeeeeerrrrrrrreeee's You Know Who!

Johnny was always Johnny, but his Tonight Show evolved a lot in 30 years.

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, "Guests: Hedda Hopper, Sam Levinson, Jack Douglas & his wife Reiko, Jonah Jones"
OB: January 14, 1964, 11:15 p.m. EST, NBC
This broadcast aired the day I was born.

When I was young and I first tried to stay up late, it wasn't for comic books under the covers or horror movies on TV.  It wasn't to read or to give any of my siblings any grief.  (There was plenty of time for that during the day.)  When I was as young as nine (don't ask why, at that age, I would be so  interested), I was staying up for one reason and one reason only: for Johnny.

I wanted to hear his monologues.  ("It was so hot..." "How hot was it?" from the audience, then, "It was so hot, the Six Million Dollar Man got vaporlock in his shorts.")  I wanted to hear those bits he did with Ed after the first commercial.  I wanted to see if he was going to do his Carnac the Magnificent routine.  I was actually watching the night Carnac said "Sis-boom-bah" (a popular college football cheer), then opened the envelope and said "Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes."  That line cracked up Johnny and Ed so much, it broke the show's previous record for its longest laugh.

Carson's other characters that I watched out for, included Aunt Blabby, or Floyd R. Turbo (a right-leaning Archie Bunker type, in the guise of delivering a TV editorial), or Art Fern the Tea Time Movie Host with that hot chick from Celebrity Sweepstakes, Carol Wayne. ("Look for the fork in the road!")  I wanted to see some of the people he interviewed, like Michael Landon, Jimmy Stewart (reciting hilarious poetry), Jack Benny or Burt Reynolds.  I wanted to see him flirt with Angie Dickinson and watch her flirt back.  There was something intriguing to a child about seeing grown-ups chat and sometimes let their guard down, whether just telling a story about something that happened to them in Hollywood or suddenly pulling a prank like Reynolds or Robert Blake.

I wanted to see the standup comedians who might come out, like David Steinberg or George Carlin.  (That's where I first heard George's "Differences Between Baseball and Football" bit.)  And I wanted to see if any of those new standups, making their first TV appearances, were going to be invited to sit next to Johnny, an official sign the comedian just made it.  (And I was watching the night Freddie Prinze made his debut, and sure enough, got waved over to the chair by Johnny.)  I watched Jay Leno and David Letterman just starting out in the 1970s, with the likes of Harry Anderson, Jerry Seinfeld, Drew Carey and Roseanne Barr coming along later.

Those biggest laughs were special moments for me, especially when I would see them again on the anniversary show and know I saw them when they first aired (like the time he was demonstrating new Christmas toys, and he used a small, working cannon to "execute" a toy basketball player that couldn't make a basket; also the classic night the marmoset peed on his head, during one of animal expert Joan Embry's visits).

At the age of nine, on Friday nights (or any night during school vacations), I was already getting to know Johnny Carson, and why so many people liked him as much as they did.  In doing so, I was already getting to know at that early date...what late night television would be like for the rest of time.

Born in Iowa in 1925, Carson's family moved to Nebraska when he was eight.  Four years later, Carson saw a book about magic at a friend's house, and was inspired to get a mail-order magic kit.  At the age of 14, he debuted as "The Great Carsoni," and started booking local events.  He took his abilities in magic with him into the Navy, where he narrowly avoided combat late in the war due to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Carson continued his magic in college, at the University of Nebraska, and got his first broadcasting job at WOW radio and TV in Omaha.  One of the highlights of his morning show on that station--Michael Landon mentioned it on The Tonight Show as late as 1979--was Carson pretending to interview pigeons atop the courthouse.  (Landon also recalled hearing about Carson asking his boss, on the air, if he wanted to see something funny...then holding up his paycheck.  This would not be the last time Johnny would publicly feud with an employer.)   Connections at the Omaha station helped Carson get hired at KNXT in Los Angeles, a CBS affiliate where Carson developed a cult comedy show, Carson's Cellar.  One of the show's fans was Red Skelton, who hired Carson as a writer; when Red actually knocked himself unconscious an hour before airtime one night in 1953, Carson stepped in to fill in for him.  And that led to Carson's network career.  He hosted the game show Earn Your Vacation, a short-lived variety show that was called The Johnny Carson Show, guested on Jack Benny's show, and then got the plum hosting job of the ABC daytime game show Who Do You Trust?

The show quickly brought in high ratings for the fledgling network, and made Johnny Carson a household name.  It was Trust that united Carson with his longtime announcer, Ed McMahon, and also the same show that spotlighted Carson's ad-libbing skills.  On one occasion a disastrous attempt to do a live Jell-O commercial--Carson was supposed to make a banana dish on the air, and put the ingredients together in the wrong order, thus ruining the "easy to make" dessert--brought the house down, and foreshadowed the hilarious audience response he'd get decades later when a monologue joke didn't go off so well.  ("Yes, because...you know...Minnesota has record low temperatures...wish I was there right now!")  Carson also appeared on the panel of all three of Goodson-Todman's nighttime panel games, I've Got a Secret, To Tell the Truth and What's My Line?

The Tonight Show itself premiered 60 years ago this year on NBC (after a run on local TV), as a late night collection of comedy hijinks and conversation hosted by Steve Allen.  (Its 1950 predecessor, Broadway Open House, was your basic variety show.) Then (after a brief 1957 attempt modeled after The Today Show) it became more of a talk show under Jack Paar, who used the time to himself to basically engage in free-association (and in all fairness, Paar was a great storyteller).  But it was Johnny (reportedly hired via Paar's recommendation after guest hosting in 1958) who smoothed the edges and made the show what it, and its competitors, would become: a monologue, followed by a comedy bit, then celebrity interviews with the occasional oddball guest like Criswell, the so-called mystic/psychic.

Next month we'll see another historic change: Jimmy Fallon will take over the hosting duties from Jay Leno, whose own long run (interrupted by Conan O'Brien's brief tenure) still sits in Johnny's shadow.  Fallon's own Late Night show, which he inherited from David Letterman and Conan, also followed that same Carson format (although there was often a comedy bit at the halfway mark).  If anyone ever shakes up the format and makes it unrecognizable, I doubt it'll be Fallon; he, like Leno, and Carson's choice to replace him, David Letterman, still has too much reverence for Carson's memory.  "In our heads, we've been doing the Tonight Show for five years. We're just on at a later hour," Fallon said in an L.A. Times interview.  
But there is one big change that is significant to this post: Fallon will be moving the show's permanent home back to New York, for the first time in 42 years.  That's where Allen and Parr always did the show, and where Carson did it from 1962 to 1972.  Occasionally Carson made road trips to the NBC  Burbank studios (more on those later), but the show was still a New York show and even incorporated the falling ball in Times Square every New Year's, among the few times the show went live.  

The Tonight Show was always in color under Carson's reign, a practice that started on the RCA-owned network under Paar.  Each night, at the beginning, it actually began at 11:15 EST because so many local newscasts only lasted 15 minutes back then.  Carson would come out, do the monologue, cut up with then-bandleader Skitch Henderson (another Paar holdover; Doc Severinsen and Tommy Newsome were in the band) as he did musical numbers, then the guests would start showing up around 11:30.  


The show would last until one p.m., an hour and 45 minutes altogether, sponsors lining up to advertise in 15 minute increments.  And in those days before the 1971 cigarette advertising ban took effect, many of them were tobacco companies.  Carson himself often puffed away on the set, an ashtray strategically placed on his desk for himself and his smoking guests.
Shows from this era are very rare, treasured jewels.  NBC wiped, reused or destroyed most of the tapes (the show was recorded "day of" for broadcast, a practice that actually began in the Jack Paar era), and there are conflicting accounts as to whether Carson encouraged it (saying it included a lot of substandard material) or was outraged when he found out (he also said we lost a lot of very funny material from Peter Lorre's appearances).  Even most of his 1962 premiere is gone; all we have are audio of Groucho Marx introducing Carson, and Carson's very first monologue ("I want my Nana!"), plus a few stills.  The few that do exist are either special occasions (New Year's, for instance, or when Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki on the show in 1969), shows that were recorded by guests and kept in their private archives (which is why some that do exist are on black and white kinescope...that was actually a cheaper process in those days), or shows that turned up in the archives of the Armed Forces Television Service, perhaps to be rerun more than once. This is the only reason we have that legendary 1969 show from Burbank, featuring Dean Martin, Bob Hope and George Gobel (and again, more on that later), and the only reason the classic TV gods smiled upon me by having the one from the exact day I was born, manage to still exist to this day.

My birth date show (January 14, 1964) is a New York show (and if I'm not mistaken it's the very studio where Jimmy Fallon has been doing Late Night for the last five years).  It's a black and white copy of a color broadcast; it has no commercials and Johnny's interviews often end abruptly, apparently where his sponsor pitches were edited out (except one).  This indicates the source for this show is Armed Forces Television.  This show is a lot different than what you will see today from Leno, Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel, etc. which shows how Johnny and company tweaked it over the years, but many of the basic elements are already there.

It opens with shots of Manhattan and Times Square.  "Johnny's Theme," performed by Skitch Henderson and the NBC Orchestra, is slightly slower-tempo than we remember from the show's later years.  Ed's "Here's Johnny!" isn't as exaggerated as the more iconic way he stretched the word "Here's" in later years. What is already there, is Johnny's entrance, bows, golf swing and all.

Remember, the open ran at 11:15 most nights, followed immediately by Carson's monologue.  Not all stations carried this part, some with 30 minute newscasts (or syndicated sitcom reruns) joining at 11:30, so much of America actually didn't see Johnny's monologue yet, even though he always delivered one.

On a personal note, Johnny's monologue opens with a remark that takes me back to the stories I've heard about the day I was born.  My mother apparently went into premature labor, because she helped my dad push a 1956 Ford through the snow in Talladega, Alabama.  As a result I was born a month or so premature.  Johnny's opening joke, "It's nice to be entertaining the troops in Thule, Greenland!" is a very reference to the nationwide winter storm (part of an abnormally nasty winter) that determined the day I was born.  Carson tells us the winter weather was a "madhouse," and a contrast to his own sunnier weekend.

"Over the weekend I was in the Virgin Islands, and if you think I'm going to make a joke about that, you're nuts!"  (big laugh)  "You're all making up your own, aren't you?"  This tells us a lot about censorship in those days as well as Johnny's skills in getting material past the censors...he pretty much did just make a joke about the Virgin Islands.  Johnny then jokes about New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. and his snow removal efforts.  "He's right on top of things.  He came out with a brand new method of getting the snow out of the streets of New York.  You know what he did?  He challenged New Jersey to a snowball fight!"  Then he discusses how the previous day's snow actually stranded commuters in Manhattan., and takes us back to the Mad Men era with this nugget: it was "like an office party with eight million people.  The weather bureau got a call from 3,000 husbands thanking them for the blizzard!"  

Apparently Ed McMahon and Skitch Henderson filled in for Johnny during the two days he was off,  and during the course of this show we'll actually hear a lot about that.  "Got a telegram saying, 'I want to thank you for letting Ed and Skitch fill in, because it did me a lot of good.'  From Steve Allen!" (Johnny's syndicated competitor.)   Carson points out that Henderson almost didn't make the previous night's show due to the snow conditions (Henderson was in Vermont).  Tuesday was apparently much better for travel and Johnny reflects on the wild contrasts of his own day: "At seven o'clock this morning, I was skin diving."

After Johnny announces that night's guests followed by a commercial break, Johnny and Skitch start clowning around in the orchestra area.  They take turns throwing snow-like confetti at each other as the band plays "Take Good Care of Yourself," perhaps because the opening line is "Button up your overcoat..."  At one point Skitch plays the piano in mittens, but he doesn't do it for long.

After the next commercial, Johnny is back at his desk next to Ed, using a whisk broom to brush off the white confetti and getting a big laugh by invoking a dandruff shampoo commercial.  "Doctor, I haven't been able to wear a black dress ever since I had this trouble!"  Then he reads off a list of what he calls "What's Jokes," saying they were all the rage at the time (and I remember a few of these from my own childhood).

"What's purple and puts out forest fires?  Smokey the Grape."
"What's 50 feet long, is rubber and has a long tongue?  The Jolly Green Giant's sneaker."

"What's yellow and lies on its back?  A dead school bus."

After another commercial, we find Johnny in the audience as we hear the band finish up playing the theme song.  I'm thinking that may have been part of a second opening for stations joining in progress at 11:30. Johnny's getting ready to play "Stump the Band," a feature I remember well (and a holdover from Jack Paar).  It works the way I always saw it work: the band will attempt to play what they think is the suggested song (pretty much making one up on the spot), then the audience member will say "That's not it" and sing the actual song.  This crop includes "Did You Ever?", "Chicken Dinner," "Bring That Sinner Home" (an old hymn that I'm surprised the band didn't know..Johnny gets a lot of comic mileage out of that particular woman being a kindergarten teacher), and "Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinner," which the audience member didn't seem to know herself and may have even made up on the spot.  The audience members are rewarded alternately with a copy of a Skitch Henderson record album, or two tickets to the Broadway revue imported from England, "Beyond the Fringe".

After the next commercial, Carson brings out his first guest, jazz trumpeter Jonah Jones, whose appearances on this show actually made me want to seek out more of his work.  In his first number he plays, and sings a little bit of, the Duke Ellington song "A Monday Date."

After another break, Johnny discusses his trip to St. Croix, in Grape Tree Bay ("There was one grape tree"). It didn't go as well as he expected: he got a piece of rust in his right eye, and after a doctor fixed him up, he spent Friday morning through Sunday afternoon blindfolded.  That means he only got to enjoy the sunshine vicariously, through his wife Joann.  "How's the weather honey?" "Lovely."  These funny backstage stories, which I remember on rare occasions when I watched the show, were another Jack Paar holdover, in fact Paar excelled at these.

After the next break, comedian and comedy writer Jack Douglas joins Johnny, at a second microphone on his desk.  This was a common sight on Jack Paar's show, and I'm surprised to see it here as Johnny never did this in the shows I saw from the early 1970s to the 1990s.  (There's a photo of Johnny interviewing Colonel Sanders this particular way that often pops up in KFC restaurants even now.)  Douglas is the only guest who will be interviewed this way on this particular evening.

Douglas tells a few rather politically incorrect jokes, including one about a trip to Puerto Rico as an "exchange welfare case."  He also calls comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory "the only Negro in show business who is not Jewish...he's Italian."  But he also gets a couple of laughs by describing the wife-swapping parties in Connecticut, saying "it's a little tough on some guys, they have to give Green Stamps."

Douglas was a comedy writer whose credits including The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Tonight Show in the Paar and Carson eras, Jack Paar's later shows, and Fernwood 2 Night.  He won an Emmy for his work on The George Gobel Show in the mid 1950s, and may be best remembered as one of the writers for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.  When he married his third wife, acrobat Reiko in 1960, they began making successful nightclub appearances together and became darlings on the talk show circuit.

Here, Reiko appears in Japanese dress and speaks in broken, but very understandable English.  She comes out after both of Douglas' solo segments, and describes how her husband acts on vacation.  Apparently Jack hated Honolulu, and she says "He's a nut!"  That gets a big laugh, along with Johnny's comment about that being an "old Japanese expression."  She goes on to say she'd trust him on a separate vacation if he went to Tahiti, where the women are smart and "can't be fooled."  "I've never fooled a woman in my life," Jack replies, causing her to giggle.  She also discusses "plastic operations," either removing wrinkles from the 54-year-old Jack or adding some, and a gut, to her.

Johnny's next guest, Sam Levenson, is very similar to Jack Douglas: a writer and comedian who often appeared on talk shows, in his case mainly because he's such a great storyteller.  I read one of his books, "In One Era and Out the Other," years ago, and the Jean Shepherd-ish stories Levenson tells here are very similar to what's in the book.  Levenson hosted his own show on CBS in the early 1950s.  Classic game show fans might remember seeing him on the occasionally rerun extant episode of Two for the Money on GSN, when none other than Ed McMahon was his announcer.  He also appeared on Password and I've Got a Secret.  Levenson was very much a talk show favorite, appearing numerous times with Johnny, Paar, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett and David Frost.

Levenson tells a couple of very funny and familiar stories from his childhood in New York, saying his family was poor but didn't always know they were poor.  He recounts when he and his older brother were given a nickel to get to and from home via streetcar, and no other money, to get to Coney Island.  While Sam\ held onto his nickel, his older brother was subjected to the fans from the frankfurter and custard stands that sent the delicious smells all over the boardwalk.  The brother finally breaks down and declares, "I don't care if I never get home!" as he buys a frankfurter.  So Sam becomes an accomplice by sneaking his brother onto the streetcar, as the conductor then counts nickels and counts heads.  "My brother just sat there, eating a frankfurter quietly, while they put a little old lady off the trolley," he concludes to great laughter.

Another story is about a highly questionable decision from his mother, about the time "Uncle Louie, Aunt Lena and the eight kids, happen to be coming in from Connecticut or something," out of the blue to the Levenson family which, themselves, had eight kids.  Mom called an emergency meeting in the dark bedroom ("the one with the window") to ask the kids to do her a favor and pretend they don't like the chicken legs she usually served them (and that they actually loved).   Levenson recalls spending the entire evening trying not to drool as he watched everyone else eat the chicken legs he pretended not to like, and spent the evening cooperating and being "a good kid."  "When we got around to the dessert, Mom pulled a trick for which a psychiatrist would have her arrested today.  She gets up in cold blood and says, 'Now, all the kids who refused to eat chicken, don't get any dessert!'"  Sam never said what happened after that--how everyone reacted, if there was a bloody revolt the next time Mom asked for a sacrifice for company, etc.

The Douglases, Levensons and the next guest--Hedda Hopper--are all classic examples of something that's a lost art now: the professional talk show guest.  Today's talk shows are full of people promoting their next project, standup comedians hoping for a break from the hosts who were all standup comedians themselves back in the day, etc.  But some people were character actors, socialites (Zsa Zsa Gabor comes to mind), etc. who seemed to appear on talk shows more often than movies.  In the case of these four, they were on because they could always be counted on to tell a good story, in Levenson's case multiple stories.  You don't see people like that much anymore, and while, arguably, the Zsa Zsas of the world didn't bring that much to the table, we clearly lost something when the Levensons, the Shepherds, etc. moved on or passed on.

Hedda Hopper, veteran Hollywood gossip columnist, is the last guest to be introduced.  The politically conservative Hopper mentions being nervous when she's about to appear on television.  "I always say a little prayer, and then I thought, gee whiz, I can't do that because that's a federal rap!"  That gets a laugh and a smattering of applause as Carson speculates, "I don't know if that applies to television or not!"  Hopper then tells Johnny "I know I can't say anything political on any of your shows" Johnny says "Why not?" but she doesn't answer him.  (It's probably because of Carson's own more liberal views and his desire not to express his political opinions on his show, and therefore not being thrilled at a right-leaning guest trying to bait him.) Instead, Hopper makes a rather odd remark about "what to do about Cuba":  "I think Joe Kennedy is so rich he can buy it, Jackie Gleason can sit on it and sink it, and Harry Truman can tell you what to do with it!"

Hopper then describes a Rolls Royce that was just given to her as a gift.  (I'm struck that everyone keeps talking about all of these luxuries, like island vacations and expensive cars, as if they think the average person can relate; maybe that's why Levenson's Depression-era stories stand out like they do for me.)   She invites Johnny to go for a ride in it when he does a week of shows in California in the near future; he says "Then we'll have to go to Muholland Drive and neck!" which gets quite a laugh.  She also tells a story about a conversation she had with arch-rival Louella Parsons, who morbidly had said she thought she would die soon and suggested, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could die together?"  Hedda recalls telling her,  "You die on your time and I'll die on mine!"  She also boasts about her son's work on Perry Mason, with Levenson chiming in about how William Hopper's character does all the dirty work while Perry gets all the credit.

We actually see Carson hold up a sponsor's product briefly; this scene was probably left in because a joke was involved.  Hopper points to the small, model Hotpoint kitchen Johnny is holding up and asks what it is, and Johnny jokes, "It's Mickey Rooney's kitchen!"

The great Jonah Jones comes back for one more number, this time a fully instrumental version of the 1937 Bunny Berigan tune, "I Can't Get Started."  It's a beautifully haunting tune that evokes another era calling from far away, and ironically seems to fit the show in this 50 year later context.

The show ends like almost all talk shows did in those days (when the guests moved over and stayed on the couch, instead of all being "goodbye guests" and leaving right after their segments), with Carson re-iterating everyone's next appearances and the title of Hedda Hopper's book, then saying goodnight as the title appears on the screen.

Obviously the show would be tweaked heavily before the end of the decade.  Carson demanded his monologue be pushed to 11:30, as more local newscasts expanded to 30 minutes, leaving McMahon and Henderson to make up the difference in those first 15 "filler" minutes.  There's a very good example of one of these segments on Youtube as part of the 1965 New Year's Eve show, in which an impish Henderson keeps referring to Carson as "the prince" because it's not time for him to come out yet.  Eventually, Carson wasn't thrilled with the two having this segment to themselves and pushed for that segment to be eliminated, and the show to be a 90 minute show beginning at 11:30.  That's what happened in January 1967 and that's how I originally found it.

As it turns out, 1967 was a banner year for The Tonight Show: Carson walked off the show due to a dispute, was gone three weeks; the AFTRA strike affected the show, with Johnny accusing the network of violating is contract by rerunning older shows during the strike; and the show got a new, and its most famous, bandleader, Doc Severinsen, with Tommy Newsome as backup.

And there were other, more symbolic changes.  The censors' control over the show began to ease up, with the Ed Ames "Tomahawk Throwing Incident of 1965" being a watershed moment for the show.  (Ames, of NBC's Daniel Boone, was trying to help Johnny learn to throw a tomahawk; Johnny threw one and had it land between the legs of a human figure.  The audience roar, and Johnny's famous ad-lib--"Welcome to 'Frontier Rabbi'!"--set the laugh record broken by the 1979 "Sis-boom-bah" incident.)  Then, Johnny took more of his shows to Hollywood, bringing in a lot more celebrities like Lucille Ball, and fewer "talk show regulars" like the Douglases.  One memorable Burbank show from 1969 had Ozzie and Harriet, of all people, talking about the time Ozzie almost got caught with marijuana on a military base.  His excuse: he was holding it for someone.

Whenever the show was in Burbank, it was a different show.  It had a different atmosphere, a different personality.  Many nights it was "as spontaneous as a shuttle launch," as Time magazine once put it, but other nights it was freewheeling and unpredictable.  One such night was that legendary night in which a heavily inebriated Dean Martin whisked out one ad-lib after another, including a memorable rhyme from the era: "I love my wife, I could not ask for more, she's blind and mute and oversexed and owns a liquor store!" which brought down the house.  Then Bob Hope showed up (he had not been billed) and the three swapped ad-libs one after another.  George Gobel, drinking and watching in the green room and knowing he'd have to follow them all, came out still holding his drink (which Martin used for an ashtray in full view of the camera), and took stock of having to follow Hope, Martin and Carson on that night..and said the immortal line that is now in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: "Have you ever felt like the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?"  That was the line of the night, sending Carson, Hope, Martin and the audience into hysterics.

I'm immovably convinced, that was the show, the very night, that sealed the deal for The Tonight Show to move to Hollywood.   Even though the move didn't happen until 1972, Carson had been pushing for it for years.  Before the Fallon era, the show never again returned to New York until Leno brought it back for a special week in the 1990s.

As any employee with a company over a period of time, Carson started racking up more vacation time, bringing in more guest hosts, and eventually stopped doing Mondays.  His last, big change to the show was when it was reduced to one hour per night beginning in 1980.  That was the last step and now the blueprint was done.  Carson had transformed what Paar gave him into what Leno, Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, etc. now do.  (Oh, and the record for the longest laugh would finally go to the great "Potato Chip Incident of 1987."  Look it up, I can't possibly do it justice by trying to describe it.)

Carson's reign ended in 1992, with two shows that may very well be the best he ever did.  The next to last show featured Robin Williams at his funniest and Bette Midler at her best, singing "One More for My Baby" directly to a surprisingly tearful Johnny.  The following night, a clip show and a mini-documentary showing Johnny's typical day, led up to Johnny's final farewell, in front of the multi-colored curtains but this time (in perhaps one last nod to Jack Paar), uncharacteristically sitting on a stool.  "I am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it," he told us that night.  "It has been an honor and a privilege to come into your homes all these years and entertain you. And I hope when I find something that I want to do and I think you would like and come back, that you'll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been. I bid you a very heartfelt good night."  As a VIP studio audience stood up and cheered, and those of us at home started missing him badly already, Carson choked up as he stood and waved goodbye.

Disappointingly, Johnny Carson never did find something that he wanted to do that he thought we would like; the last we saw of him were in a hilarious vocal appearance on The Simpsons and cameos on The Late Show with David Letterman.  He never appeared on The Tonight Show during the Leno years, except for the clips Leno showed when Carson died in 2005.  Unlike most performers, like Milton Berle or Jack Benny, Carson actually stopped working and enjoyed life, traveling and playing cards.  But Carson secretly kept sending jokes to David Letterman, apparently missing his nightly monologue more than anything.  Letterman delivered an entire monologue the next show he did after Carson's death, then informed his audience that all of those jokes had been sent to him by Carson.  It was the master's last monologue.

But Johnny, that late night king from my lost childhood, is surprisingly, not hard to find. His shows are becoming more available, on video and online, in clips and entire shows.  His ghost still haunts late night TV. Every time you see a talk show after 11:30 EST and every time you see a comedian come out to do a monologue, then take his seat behind a desk, know that Johnny Carson led them there, after finding his own way through three decades of the greatest talk in television history.

Availability: Johnny Carson Productions is making more and more of Carson's shows available online, hoping one day to allow people to search a database at johnnycarson.com for any of Carson's existing shows.   Some are already starting to become available even with their original commercials and NBC promos intact.

Next time on this channel: The Fugitive.