When Mr. Remnick asked me to write a seven-hundred-and-twenty-five-word Take on Kenneth Tynan’s 1978 Profile of Johnny Carson, I said, “My honor, cher David.” (New Yorker editors love when you use foreign words. They’re weak for anything italicized. Anything.) “I write a late-night show. I eat seven hundred words for breakfast.” In actuality, I host a late-night show and have a low-glycemic smoothie for breakfast. My doctor says the words were clogging my carotid, and, after reading “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” I need a statin.
That article is twenty thousand words. Let me repeat that: words. Can anyone read that much Tynan without adopting his native tongue wag? Can I possibly resist dropping in the occasional causerie, sodality, or antiphonal?
While I host a show in the same time slot and tradition as Carson, I am, per certo, not Johnny. Per Tynan, neither was “Johnny,” who is described as an “eighth” of Carson—the rest being hidden behind Midwestern and professional rectitudes and a protective sodality (there we go) of producers, lawyers, and execs who pronounced Johnny a reformed drinker, loving son, and husband faithful to the point of celibacy. (This last, from Swifty Lazar, is by Tynan unchallenged with the logical counterpoint of pointing out Johnny’s wife count.)
True or false, what care we? Johnny or “Johnny,” he was there every night like the tide, and we loved him. I have the Carson books; I have watched the Carson bios; I have a dear friendship with his old writer and peer Dick Cavett. Nothing in Tynan’s article surprised me, but I enjoyed it as a time capsule—or, given the submerged iceberg at its center, a cryogenic chamber.
When the “Tonight Show” started, it was a sort of public after-party hosted by Steve Allen at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre, with Steve’s famous friends and stars of the stage. Tynan seats us at the best table at Carson’s party, where, between sips of champagne, the author points a discreet, thin finger at a parade of the sparkling departed: Jack Lemmon, Orson Welles, Tony Curtis, Gregory Peck, Billy Wilder, James Stewart. (Why not Jimmy, Kenneth? Wilder got his Billy. Have a bit of the Bollinger and get back to me, won’t you?)
Forty-seven years on, some dropped names are less goggled at than Googled: Charles Aznavour, Roger Vadim, Michelangelo Antonioni, Lea Padovani. And Tynan liberally salts his voluminous causerie (!) with references unassociated with current (and what he might deem intellectually jejune) late night: Keats, Rabelais, Ezra Pound, and Hieronymus Bosch, though one can imagine H.B. appreciating the earthly delights of Floyd Turbo, Art Fern, and Carnac the Magnificent.
From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone. Where now is the audience for ten verbal tons on the King of Late Night? Where is that Kingdom? Narrowed dramatically since ’78, along with the lapels.
One disappointment: Tynan presents no process. How did Johnny arrive at “between sixteen and twenty-two surefire jokes” per monologue? What happened behind that rainbow curtain? I know the article is about the man, not the job, but we’re told that the show is Johnny; Johnny is the show. To be on the wire is life. The rest, as the dead man says, is waiting. We spend a lot of time in the waiting room.
I’m suddenly not sure what is meant by “Take.” Is this supposed to be a review?
Tynan is a great writer, and it’s a great read, but was he right for this subject? Johnny was very intelligent and very well read, with a keen interest in politics, but largely kept those sides to himself. Carson was smart in a quiet way, while Tynan was an intellectual-firework salesman. Tynan has a style so antithetical to Carson’s that, when we get a joke from Johnny’s monologue or a conversational one-liner, it sticks out like a Popsicle in a Pavlova. Tynan bakes a tasty meringue, but I prefer the Good Humor Man.
Does anyone write (or live) like Tynan anymore? The tone of his prose is not cynical so much as omniscient. A teacher supposedly once remarked that Tynan was “the only boy I could never teach anything.” Here is something Kenneth could have learned from Johnny: fewer words. ♦
