Book Review: Carson the Magnificent, by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas (2024)

The cover of Carson the Magnificent, by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas, 2024. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Johnny Carson last hosted The Tonight Show in May of 1992, 32 years ago. Yet the late-night talk show format that he innovated, and many would say perfected, lives on in the shows currently hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers.  

From the time that Carson first hosted The Tonight Show on October 1, 1962, there have been no shortage of attempts made to understand the personality of Johnny Carson. Bill Zehme toiled on his Carson biography, titled Carson the Magnificent, on and off, for twenty years, until his death in 2023. Mike Thomas, an author and one-time assistant to Zehme, finished the book, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2024.  

For all of the ballyhooed research that Zehme did, and the decades he spent toiling in the fields of Carsonia, there is an inevitable letdown when one reads Carson the Magnificent. The book clocks in at a relatively trim 295 pages of text, and many events are either glossed over or not mentioned at all. Do you know want to know about the time Johnny quit The Tonight Show in 1967 for three weeks? You won’t find anything in Carson the Magnificent about it. You’ll have to track down Nora Ephron’s excellent 1968 book And Now...Here’s Johnny for the full story. 

Zehme doesn’t make much of an attempt to summarize what it was that made Johnny Carson such a great entertainer. When analyzing art of any kind, one might argue that words are superfluous, that to understand the brilliance of Salvador Dali, Bob Dylan, Edith Wharton, or Johnny Carson, you need to experience the art itself. I agree with that somewhat, but I’d argue that part of the job of the biographer or cultural critic is to try to convey to the reader why this person was so noteworthy.  

In my own modest attempt to summarize the gifts of Johnny Carson, I would say that he was an amazing combination of the skills required to be a great talk-show host: he was an excellent stand-up comic who could deliver a great opening monologue—Carson could get laughs even when the joke itself bombed—he was a talented enough actor that he could convincingly portray characters in comic sketches, and he was a terrific interviewer, possessed of a curious mind, a quicksilver intelligence, and the ability to make it seem as though the person he was talking to was the only person in the world that mattered at that moment.  

I didn’t grow up watching Johnny Carson—I was 11 years old when he stepped down in 1992, and I remember all of the media coverage of his final shows. At that time, I wasn’t staying up late enough to watch any late-night shows. My knowledge of The Tonight Show has come later in life. I remember having a conversation when I was 20 years old with a co-worker who was a little older than me. We were talking about late-night hosts, and I said that I was a big fan of Conan O’Brien. She was a fan of Carson, and she said “Conan always turns the spotlight back on himself when he’s interviewing guests. Johnny never did that.” I don’t remember exactly what I said in response, but in my head a light bulb went off, and I knew that she was right. It’s a generalization and an oversimplification, but the fundamental point rang true. Carson made a similar statement in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1979, saying “You should try to help the guests be as good as they can be, because the better the guest is, the better I'll be.” 

Zehme’s writing style is a throwback, as it is full scale, breathless, old-school, New Journalism 1970’s magazine stream of consciousness. Zehme is not as fond of exclamation points as, say, Tom Wolfe was, but man, Zehme loves the parenthetical aside, and you’ll find yourself sometimes barely hanging on to sentences as they careen along. As an example, here’s just one sentence, after Zehme has informed us of the title of the game show that Carson hosted for five years, Who Do You Trust? “And, here, further irony requires noting that—far more than a quiz show moniker—this was already, and would remain, the single most salient, gnawing, often debilitating existential question to reside within the winsome host’s shielded soul.” (p.136) Are you still with me?  

The contradiction of Johnny Carson was that while he appeared in millions of homes across America nightly for 30 years, there was some part of him that he seemed to hold in reserve. Virtually every magazine article and book written about Carson has operated on this assumption. Carson bluntly summed up the contradiction between his public and private persona by saying in a 1979 Rolling Stone interview “I'm an extrovert when I work. I'm an introvert when I don't.” That might be the best distillation of any of the attempts made by writers to analyze Carson’s personality. 

Zehme makes the odd choice of not mentioning any of the characters Carson portrayed on The Tonight Show until the part where he mentions the last time Carson played those characters before his retirement. It’s strange to have Zehme write about the last time Carson played Carnac the Magnificent, and then he has to explain the character because he’s never mentioned Carnac before. 

The fundamental problem with Carson the Magnificent is that it does not differentiate itself from the other biographies of Johnny Carson. Carson the Magnificent doesn’t have much new to say about Johnny Carson, and thus it simply isn’t as good as the definitive Carson biography King of the Night, written by Laurence Leamer and published in 1989.  

Part of the problem with writing a biography of Johnny Carson in 2024, or the decade leading up to 2024, is that most people who knew Johnny Carson well are probably getting up there in age. Because Zehme worked on Carson the Magnificent for such an extended period of time, reading the interviews is like going back in time, as we hear from many people who have since passed on, like Dick Carson (Johnny’s brother and the longtime director of The Tonight Show), Johnny’s second wife Joanne Carson, Hugh Downs, Skitch Henderson, Ed McMahon, Bob Newhart, Suzanne Pleshette, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, and Betty White.  

Carson the Magnificent is actually strongest on Carson’s retirement years—which are covered at the beginning of the book. Carson had no desire to simply keep being on TV just for the sake of being on TV, and I admire how Carson’s sense of self was not dependent on fame and adulation. Johnny Carson was a fascinating person and a fantastic entertainer and reading Carson the Magnificent will inevitably send you back to Carson’s time hosting The Tonight Show.  

The Best Books I Read in 2016

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr., 2004.

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts, 2011.

The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, 1963.

Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi, originally published in 1947, first English translation published in 1958.

Wilson, by A. Scott Berg, 2013.

King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson, by Laurence Leamer, 1989.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe, 1970.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979.

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, 1987.

I read 33 books in 2016, most of which I reviewed on this blog. Here are my favorites that I read this year. The links will take you to the full reviews of these books.

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, by William F. Buckley, Jr. 2004. WFB makes the list for a second year in a row. Miles Gone By isn’t a strict autobiography; rather, it’s a collection of autobiographical writings from throughout Buckley’s long career. Miles Gone By is really about the man behind the politics, and partisans of either stripe can enjoy Buckley’s wit, joie de vivre, impressive vocabulary, and generous spirit, all of which are on full display. It’s a marvelous read, and time spent in the company of the witty, passionate, intelligent Buckley is always time well spent.  

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts, 2011. Roberts also makes the list for a second year in a row, for his superb overview of World War II. Roberts brings the conflict to life, and he’s an equally good writer on military or political matters. His chapter on the Holocaust is superb and haunting. Roberts is also very strong on the Eastern front, and convincingly makes the argument that it was Russia who bled the Nazis dry. The Storm of War captures the global scope and sweep of World War II while still reminding us of the stark tragedies that each one of the 50 million deaths in that conflict represents.

The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin, 1963. Baldwin’s searing look at race in America is still relevant today, more than fifty years after it was written.

Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi, 1947. For anyone wanting to understand more about the Holocaust, Levi’s eloquent memoir is a superb place to start. Levi was a prisoner in Auschwitz for more than a year, and in Auschwitz, he saw mankind at its worst. Levi summed up the entire experience of the Holocaust with this anecdote:

“Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.” (p.29)

Wilson, by A. Scott Berg, 2013. An excellent cradle to grave biography of our 28^th President. Berg paints a vivid picture of one of our most accomplished presidents. Wilson’s writings are quoted from liberally, so the reader gets a vivid sense of his personality. 

King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson, by Laurence Leamer, 1989. A slight change of pace from the books listed above. This summer I attempted to learn all that I could about the enigmatic Johnny Carson. While Carson’s off-camera life was sometimes quite messy, (he was married four times) on screen he was the personification of cool, and he always seemed to have the perfect quip at hand. Leamer’s diligently researched biography is a superb portrait of the Tonight Show host.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe, 1970. My new favorite author, Tom Wolfe, makes the list again, this time for three different books! Radical Chic describes a party that Leonard Bernstein threw for the Black Panthers at his thirteen-room, two-story, penthouse duplex. Wolfe’s writing is as sharp as a knife throughout the essay: “God, what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one’s head at these Radical Chic events…But it’s delicious. It is as if one’s nerve endings were on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status.” Wolfe is always on red alert to the most intimate nuances of status! That’s his calling card! This is right up his alley! 

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979. Wolfe’s chronicle of the early U.S. space program is an engaging look at the Mercury 7 astronauts. Along the way, Wolfe explores the mythic “right stuff” that test pilots and astronauts must have to remain cool under pressure. The sections where Wolfe re-creates the astronaut’s Mercury flights are superb. One of the main figures in the book is the late John Glenn, who was the most media friendly of the Mercury 7, and was also a strict moralizer who sometimes clashed with the other astronauts. 

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, 1987. Wolfe’s first novel, Bonfire was a massive study of New York City, specifically the justice system, the one part where different strata of society interacted. Wolfe captures the zeitgeist of the 1980’s in all its money-lusting glory with the character of Sherman McCoy, a wealthy bond trader. It’s a marvelous book, nearly 700 pages long, with 2,343 exclamation points.