We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.Journalist Bill Zehme profiled Johnny Carson for Esquire magazine in 2002 – it was the only interview the "Tonight Show" host did following his retirement – and when Carson died in 2005 at age 79, Zehme embarked on an exhaustively researched biography of the man who remade late-night TV.But a cancer diagnosis stalled his work, and Zehme died in 2023, his Carson biography unfinished.
His former research assistant, Mike Thomas, set out to complete it, and last November Simon & Schuster published Zehme's "Carson the Magnificent." It earned stellar reviews and landed on The New York Times Bestseller List.Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Jim Axelrod's report on the legendary Johnny Carson, including an interview with Mike Thomas, on "CBS Sunday Morning" March 2!"Carson the Magnificent" $20 at Amazon Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.Try Audible for free "I'd like to say hi to my mom.
Unfortunately, she's watching Ted Koppel.That's her idea of a son!" — Johnny Carson, outset of The Tonight Show monologue, August 6, 1982 (ten weeks before his 57th birthday"One got the impression that Johnny's relationship with his mother was complex.
Once, when I came into his office, he told me that his mother had just angrily hung up on him.I asked why, and he said, 'I called and asked her how things were going.
She said, "Not so good.Yesterday, we put Walter Burbage in the ground." I said, 'Was he dead?'" —Emailed anecdote from Carson monologue writer Michael Barrie The complexities of Ruth Elizabeth Hook Carson—woman of grand flair and mannered propriety, poker-game hellcat, preternaturally withholding, crisp, exacting, colorful, misunderstood—imbued her son Johnny, in particular, with even deeper complexities.
But without them, he would not have grown int...