Had America asked Carson for his own take on himself, we might have been left with a far different opinion.
“I’m a s – - t. I have three kids with my first wife and I don’t see any of them,” Carson told his new lawyer, Henry Bushkin, one night in 1970 at Jilly’s Saloon on 52nd Street and Eighth Avenue while blasted on Tanqueray and tonics, adding, “I can’t quit smoking and I get drunk every night and I chase all the p – - – y I can get. Make sure you understand this.”
In his new book, Bushkin — who served as Carson’s lawyer and confidant for almost two decades — reveals the bitter side of this TV legend, who, while married at the time, followed that pitiful speech by leaving the bar with a young starlet in a short skirt and thigh-high boots.
Carson blamed his personal coldness on his horrible unfeeling mother, Ruth.
“She’s the toughest son of a bitch of them all,” Carson once said of his mom. “There is no goddamn way to please that woman. She’s Lady Macbeth! My marriages failed because she f – - – ed me up!
(When she died, Carson’s comment was, “The wicked witch is dead.” He did not go to her funeral.)
Bushkin, who also praises Carson’s uncanny talents as a performer and says he could be the most charming man alive when he chose to be, tells tale after tale of Carson treating those around him with contempt or abject cruelty, from berating his wife in front of others on their honeymoon to refusing to see his son Rick when he was committed to a mental hospital.
“He could be the nastiest son of a bitch on earth,” writes Bushkin. “He was an incredibly complex man: one moment gracious, funny and generous; and curt, aloof and hard-hearted the next.”
The latter qualities came out often when Carson was drunk, but that was much of the time.
Carson hated Tom Snyder, the “Tomorrow Show” host whose show followed Carson’s on NBC, thinking him a no-talent bore. Out for drinks one night in the late ’70s at the popular LA eatery Chasen’s, Carson became what Bushkin calls “Bad Johnny” after two glasses of wine.
Synder was dining alone across the room, and Carson glowered at him, his mood growing dark.
“Johnny kept eyeing him,” writes Bushkin, “and finally said, ‘Why the f – - – is he staring at me? I’m going to go over there and kick the s – - t out of that guy.”
With some at Carson’s table, including his wife and the wife of longtime sidekick Ed McMahon, beating a hasty retreat, Bushkin, McMahon and another friend followed Carson as he approached Snyder’s table and drunkenly took a seat.
Carson then “lunged across the table and grabbed for Snyder’s throat,” landing “nowhere close” as his three friends quickly separated the two. McMahon smoothed things out by suggesting a location change for more drinks, and he, his boss and Snyder ended the night at the Beverly Comstock, where they were treated with great celebrity care by the maitre d’, a pre-fame Richard Simmons.
Carson’s ire was felt by anyone who even remotely displeased him, however minor the transgression.
In 1987, after Carson married his fourth wife, Alexis Maas, Bushkin and then-girlfriend Mary Hart met the honeymooning couple in Italy for a yacht trip. Carson quickly fell into a foul mood toward his new bride, telling her at one point in front of others, after some inconsequential remark he didn’t care for, “We’ve been married for three weeks. If you say something like that again, this marriage won’t last another three weeks.”
One night during the trip, the yacht captain was to pick up Carson and Maas at the dock at 11:30, with Bushkin and Hart joining them at 2 a.m. When Bushkin arrived on time, he found Carson standing by the dock, enraged. The captain quickly explained to Bushkin that he had arrived six minutes late, but Carson would not accept his apology.
Because he had to wait for six whole minutes, Carson stood on the dock fuming for over three hours.
On his honeymoon.
“F – - – this,” Carson said. “I didn’t pay $150,000 to have you late in picking me up. We will be leaving the boat tomorrow.”
Carson verbally abused the captain throughout the night, even after the man offered to have himself replaced with a captain who would meet them from London.
“We spent the next few hours trying to reason with Johnny,” said Bushkin. “By 4 a.m. he was willing to accept a new captain. At 6 a.m. he finally decided the old captain could stay, and we finally went to bed.”
That Carson was willing to napalm so meaningful an event seems a theme in this book; another tantrum over something minor almost destroyed a $2 million deal.
In 1976, Bushkin arranged for Carson to headline Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for eight weekends a year at $250,000 annually, plus the finest in accommodations. When Carson flew in from LA for the first performance, the driver picking him up at the airport had gone to the wrong gate. When he finally found the now-livid host, Carson “told him to get lost and hopped in a cab.”
When he arrived at Caesars and was informed that his suite was still 30 minutes from being ready, Carson “went nuts” and began “yelling at the clerk.”
“Damn it, Henry,” Carson said. “Charter me a plane and get me back to Los Angeles. I will not work here.”
Carson’s nastiness knew no bound s. In October 1987, NBC threw him a swanky 25th anniversary party aboard the Queen Mary, and Carson’s son Rick — who, like his dad, had a significant drinking problem — was there.
The younger Carson was sloshed, and when his father went to check on him, “a screaming match ensued.”
On a ship packed with network executives, media and Carson’s family and friends, Carson “lost his temper and began yelling, and Rick responded in kind. Johnny pulled back his fist — he was going to slug his son — but somebody stepped in and hustled Johnny away.” (Rick Carson died in a car crash in 1991.)
Such a horndog was Carson that while embroiled in harsh divorce proceedings with his second wife, Joanne, he still could not stop himself from frequent sleepovers with a Playboy model named Angel Tompkins. When Bushkin tried to warn him that he would be jeopardizing any settlement if his wife’s lawyer found out, Carson replied, “F – - – him. A stiff p – - – - has no conscience.”
During his third marriage, his wife Joanna constantly received exorbitant gifts from him, from an apartment at The Pierre, to a Rolls-Royce Corniche, to diamonds galore, as compensation for his many indiscretions.
Joanna discovered a film of Johnny in flagrante with a comely young lady,” Bushkin writes, “after which she furiously shattered every vase, every picture frame, every single thing made of glass in her living room, creating such a dangerous mess that a hazmat team had to be hired to clean up.”
During a Vegas trip in 1980, at a time when Carson and Joanna had been fighting frequently, Carson seduced two “very good-looking girls” during a performance weekend and invited them, plus Bushkin and his date, back to his palatial apartment for dinner.
Bushkin excused himself at one point, and when he returned, he found that “the three girls were skinny-dipping in the rooftop swimming pool, while Johnny, wearing nothing but an apron, served them wine from a silver platter.”
“ ‘Come on, Henry,’ Johnny shouted. ‘Take off your clothes and join the fun!’ ”
Carson’s behavior might have been slightly more in check around his peers, but his anger was not.
Frank Sinatra produced President Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Gala and told Bushkin that he would consider it a “personal favor” if Carson would host — meaning that if the late-night king refused, Sinatra would take it as a personal insult.
Carson reluctantly agreed, but every aspect of the experience riled him. When informed that the request actually came from Reagan himself, Carson, who had served in the Navy during World War II, initially replied, “God, January in Washington — one of America’s most charmless cities in one of its most charmless months. Ronnie does know that I answered my country’s call once already, doesn’t he?”
At a luncheon scheduled for Carson to greet various senators and congresspeople, the anti-social host was “practically coming out of his skin.”
“This is a goddamn three-ring circus,” Carson said. “We have got to get out of here.”
Carson slammed Sinatra’s coordination of the event behind his back every chance he had, and when Dean Martin showed up drunk, Carson refused to introduce him at the inaugural.
“Dean, do you know where you are,” he asked.
“Dean looked at Johnny, not comprehending. Finally he murmured, ‘Do you have any lamb chops?’ ‘Dean, I’m not the goddamn maitre d’,’ Johnny sputtered. ‘I’m hosting, for chrissakes, not serving.’ ”
In the end, only a personal apology from the president himself could smooth things over.
When Carson died in 2005, there were tributes galore, and the overall impression that the King of Late Night left us a much-beloved man.
But Bushkin says that Carson died alone, estranged from his family, friends and the many — including Bushkin, whom Carson broke ties with in a blunt, three-minute firing after 18 years of service, due to a dispute involving Carson’s production company — who were there for him and who tried, unsuccessfully, to get close to the man whose off-screen personality consisted almost entirely of emotional walls.
“I don’t have much of a talent for happiness,” Bushkin quotes Carson telling him early in the ill-fated honeymoon. “I never have. My mother saw to that.”
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