Heeere’s Johnny, Not Quite Fully Formed
IT is a television moment almost no one has seen in more than half a century: On the evening of June 30, 1955, an eager 29-year-old comedian emerged from behind a curtain and onto a CBS stage in Hollywood, propelled by coincidence and good timing into the starring role of his first prime-time series. Just before he stepped forward to meet his audience — each strand of his close-cropped haircut perfectly in place, his handkerchief neatly folded into his left breast pocket, his frame so thin that a round of applause could bowl him over — the untested host paused visibly, uncertain perhaps if he was about to encounter his destiny or just another dead end in his struggling career.
With similar ambivalence an announcer delivered an introduction written by the comic himself: “And here’s the young man who has to account for this half-hour — Johnny Carson!”
Less than a year later “The Johnny Carson Show,” a weekly live comedy and variety series, would be canceled, and its host would not get another crack at a national, post-dinnertime viewership for six years. Carson came to view this 39-episode series as a kind of instructive failure, an opinion he held right up until his death in January 2005.
Yet to Joanne Carson, the second of Carson’s four wives, the rare films are much more: they are documents of a nascent but remarkably poised talent, as well as a memento of Carson’s courtship of her in the early 1960s and a portent of how their relationship would ultimately break apart. And on Tuesday Shout Factory is releasing a DVD of 10 of the show’s episodes, kinescopes of which she kept after the couple’s divorce in 1972.
“This is a part of him that nobody knows about but everyone will appreciate,” Ms. Carson, a slender, sprightly woman of 75, said over tea at her home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. “The American public saw Johnny as a good and decent man, a little boy from the Midwest who never completely grew up, and I want them to know they were right.”
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With similar ambivalence an announcer delivered an introduction written by the comic himself: “And here’s the young man who has to account for this half-hour — Johnny Carson!”
Less than a year later “The Johnny Carson Show,” a weekly live comedy and variety series, would be canceled, and its host would not get another crack at a national, post-dinnertime viewership for six years. Carson came to view this 39-episode series as a kind of instructive failure, an opinion he held right up until his death in January 2005.
Yet to Joanne Carson, the second of Carson’s four wives, the rare films are much more: they are documents of a nascent but remarkably poised talent, as well as a memento of Carson’s courtship of her in the early 1960s and a portent of how their relationship would ultimately break apart. And on Tuesday Shout Factory is releasing a DVD of 10 of the show’s episodes, kinescopes of which she kept after the couple’s divorce in 1972.
“This is a part of him that nobody knows about but everyone will appreciate,” Ms. Carson, a slender, sprightly woman of 75, said over tea at her home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. “The American public saw Johnny as a good and decent man, a little boy from the Midwest who never completely grew up, and I want them to know they were right.”