Midnight Idol

TELEVISION

(See Cover)

An elderly woman in Columbus, Neb., turned on her color TV set, tuned in the Tonight show, and settled back to watch Johnny Carson. "And now--here's Johnny!" called Announcer Ed McMahon as the star skipped onstage--fetchingly handsome, slat-thin, loose-limbed, and wrapped in a Continental-cut suit. "My name is Shirley Hoffnagel," he began with eyes laughing, "and I'm here to talk tonight about the wonderful progress that medical science has made in sex-change operations."

The studio audience rollicked to that line, but the lady in Nebraska rose from her chair, muttering, "That's not so funny, McGee!" With that, she swept into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. And no doubt to ponder the mysterious equations of show business that have enabled her son John to become the nation's midnight idol by telling silly jokes like that.

Mrs. Homer L. Carson knows that there is more to the equations than an occasional misfiring joke. Her son, at 41, is an institution, a cup of bedtime coffee with none of the caffeine removed. "We're more effective than birth control pills," says Carson, improvising a bit on his own slightly leering line that people watch him "through their toes"--that is, lying down in bed. On good nights in midwinter, there might be as many as 10 million viewers, according to Nielsen. But if there are fewer on other nights, Carson at least gets a crack at his audience five nights a week on NBC stations from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. (an hour earlier in the Central Time zone).

Whether they are in bed or chairs, the viewers' reward is the most consistently entertaining 90 minutes to be seen anywhere on television. Tonight was a lively enough show in the five years when it was run by that mercurial madcap Jack Paar, but since Carson took over in 1962, it has become brighter, smoother and more sophisticated. Carson's opening six-minute monologue is generally humorous, despite an unfortunate preoccupation with bathroom jokes. The rest of the bill is filled with two or three musical turns, a guest comic's bit or a mildly satirical skit, and--best of all--engaging conversations with guests who range in celebrity from Vice President Hubert Humphrey to people who are merely interesting--an Australian stowaway, a clearly spurious seer, a subway conductor turned poet.

Muzzy Hours. But Carson's chief attraction is Carson. An assured, natural entertainer--he was already a network headliner at 29--Johnny is the epitome of cool. He is intelligent, laconic, deferential and facile. On occasion, he asks the studio audience to submit questions to him on any subject. Somebody once asked: "Are women permitted in Hurley's bar [the NBC hangout in Rockefeller Center]?" Replied Carson swiftly: "Permitted to do what?"

Most of all, Carson is a master of the cozy pace and mood that he believes are appropriate for the muzzy midnight hours. Unlike Paar, he avoids meet-the-press-style interviewing, and never goes beyond his intellectual depth. Neither does he use his terrible swift wit to cut down his guests. One night, Zsa Zsa Gabor hogged the show terribly. While Carson will sometimes needle her to her face ("Any girl who has a drip-dry wedding dress can't be all bad"), he held off this time till the next night, announcing: "We got a call from the Stage Delicatessen after the show. They wanted to hang her tongue in the window."

Commercially, the show is sold out well in advance, and its annual network billings of $20 million enable Tonight to gross more than any other entertainment program on television. It is not only the size of the audience that attracts Carson's advertisers, but its quality as well. His viewers are mostly urban and at least high-school-educated--young enough to stay up late with ease, or successful enough not to have to show up too early for work. Jimmy Stewart watches, and so do Bobby Kennedy, Ed Sullivan, Darryl Zanuck, New York's Mayor John Lindsay, Nebraska Governor Norbert Tiemann, Robert Merrill and Nelson Rockefeller. Rocky was Carson's guest recently and suggested that Johnny run against Bobby for the Senate in 1970. There was much good-natured kidding, and the next night Carson was still playing the gag. "I have no intention of running for public office," he said. "As I was telling my wife Joanne Bird. . ."

Nielsen Quaver. Carson's dominance of nighttime television gave him the clout to beat NBC into a big raise after the recent AFTRA strike. Previously, he was getting about $15,000 for doing five times a week what Dean Martin does once for $40,000, and he was paying his own staff, to boot. Johnny's new contract gives him fuller control of the show. NBC now pays the extras and gave Carson a raise to about $20,000 a week, bringing his annual TV income to more than $1,000,000.

Carson had NBC at his mercy, of course. Thanks to his popularity, the network is dominant in the late-night time slot, but the other networks and independent challengers were moving in to get a piece of the action. CBS, whose affiliates generally run movies opposite Carson, tried to buy him away from NBC, but as Johnny put it, "I would feel as out of place on another network as Lurleen Wallace giving a half-time pep talk to the Harlem Globetrotters."

Meanwhile, ABC signed Nightclub Comic Joey Bishop as host of a copycat show opposite Tonight, but Bishop is being clobbered in the ratings by nearly 3 to 1. The even newer syndicated Las Vegas Show with Bill Dana scarcely excites a quaver on the Nielsen meters. Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. has two talk-variety entries--Mike Douglas in 142 cities, Merv Griffin in 90. But Carson is considered so formidable that Griffin opposes him head-on in only one market, New York City, while Douglas is programmed nowhere after 6 p.m.

Sporadic Specials. All this late-night TV activity, says Actor Tony Randall, a frequent Carson guest, is a response to "an unwritten law that says people must be entertained 24 hours a day and must have a choice of six channels all the time." If that's a law, there are a lot of people who don't obey it. But latest studies show that the average TV set burns more than six hours a day, and that the average viewer spends more than three hours before the tube. This helps to explain why TV advertising has grown to $3 billion a year in billings and why the nation's TV stations earned about 30% profit before taxes in 1965, the last year tabulated by the FCC.

Any similarity between those outsized statistics and quality programming is, of course, incidental. The "wasteland" that Newton Minow complained about in 1961 is still parched; a Roper Research study found that 18% of TV viewers agreed with Minow in 1963, and 29% are with him today. Television journalism and sports coverage are getting better, and even commercials are improving; but regularly scheduled programs are still as vapid as ever. Mindless game shows and cheery-teary soapers dominate daytime television. Prime-time TV (7:30-11 p.m.) is hardly more satisfactory. The top-rated Nielsen shows for 1966-67 are either tired adventure series such as Bonanza and Dragnet or low-IQ sitch-coms on the order of Beverly Hillbillies and Bewitched. The only steady programs that offer the hope of entertainment are Old Standbys Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan and Dean Martin--and movies, for which TV can claim no creative proprietorship. The only spice in the schedules are the sporadic specials, many of which are first class; to their credit, the networks next season will produce 300 such programs, including two Truman Capote adaptations on ABC, and at least four newly commissioned works on CBS Playhouse. About half of the specials will be documentaries--among them an NBC study on the state of U.S. justice, a four-hour ABC essay on Africa.

Dial-the-Radio. The trend away from packaged format continues, and the direction is toward talk, talk, talk. Joe Pyne, who gives his viewers a thrill by insulting guests, is running on 46 stations. David Susskind's discussion show hits 17 stations. William F. Buckley Jr., on 20 stations, commands one of the more intelligent talk shows. Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty is a regular chatterbox on local TV, joshing away with Pierre Salinger or George Jessel, and Comic Mort Sahl has found a Los Angeles TV soapbox from which to harangue an avid following with his prophecies of Armageddon.

Radio, too, is talking as well as rocking around the clock. For cheap entertainment, there's nothing like the hotline show. All it takes is a know-it-all at the mike, a big switchboard at the station, and listeners with telephones. People who used to have nothing more to do than Dial-a-Devotion, Dial-the-Weather, Dial-the-Time, Dial-the-News and Dial-a-Senator, can now Dial-the-Radio. New Yorkers will hold the phone for ages waiting to tell WNBC's Brad Crandall what jerks the other listeners are. There is a prestige that accrues to the hot-line caller who succeeds in saying his piece on Viet Nam, abortions, pollution, church and state, and unkempt lawns; and, indeed, WNBC urges people not to call if they have already been on the air once that week.

Lonely People. One way or another, it is audience involvement that makes the talk shows successful--whether the listener is actually participating or just watching or listening. What engages them is a matter for the social psychologist. NBC Vice President Paul Klein suggests that "people are always lonely at night. Forty or fifty percent of the people have bad sex partners or none at all." Klein's statistics may be suspect, but after all, he is NBC's man in charge of audience measurement. Sylvester L. Weaver Jr., onetime NBC president and instigator of the Tonight, Today and Monitor shows, believes that the new interest in broadcast conversation is a sign of a higher level of education in the country. Bill Buckley perhaps correctly explains it as "a negative reaction to the situation show" and "gratitude on the part of people who are unable to externalize their feelings."

It could also be that by the time the 11 o'clock news has rolled by, audiences are ready to put their minds up in curlers and just plain relax. They have followed the puerile plot lines of the regular adventure and comedy programs only to find themselves despairing once again in the land of dej`a vu. "In all these series," says Johnny Carson, "the characters are predictable, the dialogue is predictable, the format is predictable. The audience is interested in something where they don't know what's going to happen next."

Performer & Critic. Carson's bag is unpredictability, not only in his offhand humor but in his visual performance. He is General Eclectic himself, a master of a thousand takes. He's got a Jack Paar smile, a Jack Benny stare, a Stan Laurel fluster. If a joke dies, he waits a second, and then yawns a fine Ed Sullivan "Ho-o-okay. . ." A sudden thought--either his or a guest's--will launch him into an imitation of Jona than Winters imitating an old granny. He can spread his eyes wide open into a wow. Semi-emancipated puritan that he is (he was reared a Methodist), he can, when a guest goes off-color, freeze his face into a blank that shows nothing but eyes and innocence. He is performer and critic, rapping out a whole percussion section of effects to suit a funny line--a wince that clacks like a rim shot, a wagging paradiddle indicating consternation, a flam of the head that says go, baby, go.

Frequently, he uses an expression that disassociates him from the proceedings: a visual sigh suggesting that this dame is boring the life out of him, too; or a shake of the head, wondering where the devil this geek got all that garbage. He is often at his best when his material is worst--a handy knack for a man who has to come up with 60 laughs a minute. When a gag clunks to the floor, he'll say: "Never buy jokes from people on streets. Give 'em a quarter but never buy a joke from 'em."

Nebraskan Politesse. Some of his seeming ad libs come from a computerlike retrieval system. He has apparently never forgotten a joke, constantly spins off variations on old ones. Once, when he and Exercise Expert Debbie Drake stretched out on mats for a demonstration, he asked: "Would you like to leave a call?" Last month, five years later, he was still using the same line when Singer Roger Miller was doping off during a discussion. Similarly, Carson's L.B.J. inaugural gag "As I was telling my bellboy, Dean Burch," was transformed a month later, during a CBS upheaval, into: "The television business is tough, as I was saying just the other day to my waiter, Jim Aubrey."

And that is about as tradey as Johnny ever lets himself get. None of the competition can match Carson's audience empathy. He never comes on too worldly or too show biz, shuns its phony language and, whenever possible, the greeting kisses from celebrities who brush cheeks and smack air. In sum, he plays the audience's ambassador to his own show. The idea is not to be too thick with the celebrities or too awed by them. His job is to set them up, to put them on gently, and to raise the questions that his viewers might ask, though always with a Nebraskan politesse. As a result, the viewers get a refreshing view of a celebrity in a personal, informal moment. Says Comic Bob Newhart, who sometimes substitutes for Carson: "The show is people being themselves."

Just Folks. "I don't think there's ever been a mind like it in show business," says Ed Sullivan of Johnny, which may or may not be meant as praise. Steve Allen, who ran the Tonight show from 1953-1956, says that Carson "just doesn't look like show biz. He's got that just-folks, Kansas City-Oklahoma City look about him. He doesn't let that professionalism show through." Cartoonist Al Capp, a frequent visitor on the program (who is just now starting up his own late show in Boston) attests to Carson's "intellectual superiority" over the other sit-down comics. Says Capp: "Although he keeps the outward appearance of a bright-eyed Nebraska boy, he really isn't and couldn't play the part nearly so well if he were."

It may be that Carson is applying the McLuhanesque principle that "cool" performers are more popular on a "cool" medium like television than, say, a "hot" fast-talking cabaret comic. A relaxed, low-key operator like Johnny invites audience involvement, whereas someone like bellicose Les Crane, who preceded Joey Bishop on ABC, came on so strong that he blew the viewers right out of the bedroom.

Carson thus deliberately controls the temperature of discussion and avoids shooting of star shells. "People ask me," he says, " 'Why don't you have anything controversial on your show?' But all the shows that have tried to exist with that format have failed. Look at Mike Wal lace. Look at Les Crane. Anyway, people mistake what controversy means. We've talked about narcotics addiction, we've talked about civil rights, we've talked about liberalizing divorce and abortion laws. I've even discussed my own divorce. But it's all in the way you do it. Some people think controversy is inviting a homosexual on the show and asking him 'Should we legalize homosexuality?' That's not controversy--it's an obvious attempt to stir up sensation.

"I've always felt that a show that's on from 11:30 to 1 at night should be entertaining. I've never seen it chiseled in stone tablets that TV must be uplifting. Once you take yourself too seriously, as a humorist--or a comedian--once you start to pontificate, you lose your value as an entertainer. If you're a big movie star, you can do that sort of thing, because you're an actor: your audience sees you as somebody else, and when you step out of the part you're something different--it won't affect your work. But I'm myself on the show; I can't. I could name a lot of guys who have damaged their careers doing that kind of thing."

Switching Subjects. He was not referring to Jack Paar--the two politely decline to discuss each other--but it is true that Paar sometimes confused him self with Walter Lippmann, promulgated a foreign policy (pro-Castro) and in 1961, to the State Department's consternation, played the Berlin Wall. If he were still running Tonight today, Jack would probably be telecasting from a foxhole in Viet Nam, with Doris Day as his guest. On the other hand, Johnny has never told the viewer where he stands on political matters. "I have opinions like anybody else," he says, "and I might even be better informed than the average person, because it's my business to keep up on what's happening. But who am I to foist my opinions on the public?"

What he is skilled at is eliciting the opinions of his guests. Admirer Al Capp notes that "so many other interviewers are so busy trying to formulate the next question that you can say, 'I just murdered your sister, and am planning to rape your grandmother,' and they'd say, 'That's great, A1. Now . . . ' Moreover, Johnny does not step in to kill his guests' lines. Says Comic Woody Allen: "He appears to be most pleased when the guest scores. He feels no compulsion to top me." Adds Actor George Segal, another Tonight veteran: "Johnny always makes people look good." Carson describes that talent as "an affinity for editing and pacing"--putting together the right combination of guests, switching subjects when things get dull, throwing in a lively comment at the right moment. "I feel uncomfortable making the guest uncomfortable," he explains. "I don't like to embarrass people on the air."

The one person who is required to play strictly second banana is Ed McMahon, 44, who serves as straight man and prompter as well as announcer. For example, when Carson got caught in a dangling conversation and extricated himself with a cliche, "The grass is always greener," McMahon chimed in: "Could I write that down?"

Certain other contributions are considered "stepping out of line," says McMahon. "Johnny was doing a thing once about how mosquitoes only go after the really passionate people. Without thinking, I slapped my arm. It was instinctive. But it killed his punch line." For restraining himself, McMahon is well reimbursed. Just as Announcer Hugh Downs rose from the brow of Jack Paar to become a TV "personality" (Today, Concentration), McMahon is now a "star." He is host of his own daily daytime show, Snap Judgment, handles NBC's Monitor mike on Saturday afternoons, and plays "spokesman" for Budweiser beer. He's got his own suite of offices and a 14-man staff, and earns about $250,000 a year.

"Take a Card." Today an announcer, tomorrow a spokesman. Such is another peculiarity of the show-biz equation. For Carson, the rise was a little more gradual. He is not a Horatio Alger hero but an updated and inner-directed Huck Finn. He was born in October 1925 in Corning, Iowa, where his father Homer--dubbed, inevitably, Kit--worked for a utility company. When Johnny was eight, his family moved to Norfolk, Neb. (pop. 15,200), where Homer (who is now retired) was appointed to the district managership of the Nebraska Light & Power Co.

By the time he was twelve, Johnny had found his course. "That's when I answered a magazine ad that promised to make me a magician and also 'The Life of the Party.' " Not to mention the death of the household. He worked for hours every day at card tricks in front of the mirror. His mother says he was a pest: "He was always at your elbow with a trick." To this day, reports his sister Catherine (now a Philadelphia housewife and secretary), "whenever the family wants to needle John, we say, Take a card, take a card.' " Still, determination paid off. At 14, Johnny was a pro. His mother stitched up an impressive black banner emblazoned with yellow Chinese-like characters reading THE GREAT CARSONI, and Johnny played the Norfolk Rotary Club and local parties at $3 per gig.

Cleopatra. From high school in 1943, the Great Carsoni joined the Navy V12 program, served aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania and later in Guam. He saw no combat, but he had plenty of time to polish his magic act and work on ventriloquism. He recalls that he devoted a long night to decoding a Navy message, and delivered it to the admiral's quarters at 7 a.m. Visiting with the admiral was Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who asked the young ensign what he was going to do after the war. "I hadn't really given it much thought," says Carson today, "but I had to say something." So for the next few hours, he entertained the SECNAV with card tricks.

The great rehearsal continued after the war at the University of Nebraska. Johnny majored in English, Speech and Alpha Phi girls when he wasn't off broadcasting for the local radio station or working magic on the service-club circuit. He was strictly an average student and strictly show business. He played Cleopatra in a fraternity spectacular called She Was Only a Pharaoh's Daughter, But She Never Became a Mummy. His senior thesis, titled Comedy Writing, was not in manuscript but on tape. Its quotes and footnotes contained excerpts from Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Bob Hope shows. Carson's analysis of timing and his appreciation of other crucial matters was somewhat naive ("A good comedian can get you to buy his sponsor's products"), but "not bad," he insists, "for 18 years ago."

Outlandish Guests. To put it all into practice, Johnny launched an afternoon TV variety show, first for a year and a half over WOW-TV in Omaha, then in Los Angeles. "KNXT cautiously presents Carson's Cellar," he used to say. Thirty weeks later, KNXT threw caution and Carson to the winds, and he fetched up as a writer for Red Skelton. One night, during a preshow rehearsal, Skelton got a concussion bonking into a "breakaway" door, and Writer Carson went on in his place. With assurance and finesse, he laid out an ad-lib monologue mocking the economics of the TV industry. It was good enough to prompt critical applause and comparisons with the then reigning comic, George Gobel. "The kid is great, just great," said Jack Benny the next day. Thus was Johnny rewarded at 29 with his own variety network TV show. He thrashed through image changes, seven writers, eight directors and 39 weeks before CBS replaced him with The Arthur Murray Show, ABC then tried him on a daytime show, Who Do You Trust? The quiz part of the program was downplayed just as in Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, and Johnny proved himself so droll at japing with his outlandish guests that he was soon pinch-hitting for Jack Paar on Tonight. When "King" Jack decided to quit, he anointed Carson as "the one man who could or should replace me."

Limitless Pool. The Tonight show is one of the most pulverizing grinds in the business. Says Comic Dick Cavett, a frequent guest: "It's like going to 200 cocktail parties in a row and being the life of all of them." Johnny's workdays usually start around 8:30 or 9 a.m. in his $173,000, nine-room duplex at Manhattan's United Nations Plaza. He reads newspapers and magazines, and works out for a while in his den gym. By 2 p.m., his chauffeur, one of the Carson staff of five (none of whom live in), ferries Johnny to his Radio City office in a 1967 Fleetwood Brougham.

The rest of Tonight's 37-man staff has already been scrambling since 10:30 a.m. in their dingy old headquarters. One of the critical functions--shared by the show's producer, its two associate producers, four writers and four talent coordinators, and supervised by the star--is the selection of the Tonight guests. The pay is only $320, but the pool is limitless, explains Tony Randall, because the show "is plugsville." Bob Hope, for example, came on recently, chatted a bit, and then showed a 21-minute clip from his latest film, Eight on the Lam. At Tonight's going commercial rates, that air time would have cost United Artists $40,000. The second attraction to the stars, says Actress Susan Oliver, is that "when you play a part onstage or in a film or TV, you can't appear as the person you are. But on something like this, you can be yourself--you can show your own colors."

What sort of colors is Carson looking for? "The best guest," he has discovered, "is someone who is not trying to protect his image, somebody who lets his interests run a little bit, who can converse. Someone who can put words together easily, who can relate to what's going on"--someone like Lee Marvin, for example, or Gore Vidal, George Plimpton or Greer Garson (who once played a tiny harmonica held between her teeth). Some of the liveliest moments have been provided not by celebrities but by people with unusual interests. Carson had a hilarious workout recently with William Ottley, a sky diver who gave Johnny a lesson in the art right on-camera. On the other hand, the worst guests, says Carson, are "movie stars in quotes"--the people who have no interests beyond their own careers.

Freer Format. Lesser-known prospects get screened at pre-interview sessions. Comedienne Joan Rivers was rejected six times before she was considered ready; she has been on 18 times since. After the talent is selected, Tonight staffers rough out a crib sheet for Carson, proposing possible lines of questioning and the guest's likely answers. Carson rarely talks to the guests beforehand, lest "they leave their fight in the gymnasium."

He first sees his opening monologue at 5:30 p.m., about one hour before the taping begins. Some of the original concepts may have come from Carson's weekly staff conference, but the daily script is worked up by two writers who are well in tune with Carson's personality. "I edit it," says Johnny, "and I may add a few jokes of my own, or shift things around a little. But I couldn't possibly write a good six-minute monologue every night."

He also brings to the taping a wiry grace and spontaneity that successfully hide all the tensions that contribute to the show's success. Precisely what those tensions are is something that the Tonight staff prefers not to discuss. There is no problem with TV Director Dick Carson, who is Johnny's 37-year-old brother, nor with Announcer McMahon, who is one of Johnny's closest friends, despite gossip to the contrary. On the other hand, Carson did fire Tonight Producer Art Stark, who was also a close friend and associate for eleven years. Explains McMahon: "Art was more fixed in his idea of the show. Johnny has a freer idea--more explosive." Staffers say that Carson insisted on format changes--chiefly bits that would allow him to get out of his chair for more skits and business with guests--and that Stark was all for adhering to the successful formula.

Similarly, about a year ago, Johnny abruptly canned his manager of eight years, Al Bruno. The story is that the intricate sound and tape effects that go with Carson's cabaret act got snarled by a technician three shows running during an engagement at Miami's Eden Roc. Johnny called up New York, says a friend, actually sobbing. "They didn't laugh," he said. Carson blamed Bruno and bought out his contract.

"Johnny gets angry at ineffectual, inefficient people who don't do their job properly," says McMahon. "It bugs him when people don't pull their oar." Sometimes it bugs him on the air. Not long ago, when some stagehands were chattering while Carson was on, the star turned and snapped coldly: "Are you fellows through now?"

Paper Terrier. When the taping is over, Johnny has a Coke or Michelob, slips into a turtleneck jersey and a cardigan, then, to avoid the ambush of autograph hounds, takes a side elevator down and makes a fast getaway in his waiting limousine. From then on, he writes his own script--one he likes to keep a closed book. Sometimes it is an open ledger. The Chicago Tribune paid him $25,000 for a 14-part syndicated interview series just completed last week. A top editor of the Trib concedes that its penetration was "pretty thin."

That is not surprising, for the off-camera Carson is intensely a private man who lacks the peacock fever that afflicts most entertainers. When he goes home after the show, he stays there. He and his second wife, Joanne, 35, a petite ex-model and decorator, get out to dinner only about twice a month, to about half a dozen plays a season and regularly only to pro football games. Joanne "almost never" entertains. Muffin, their Yorkshire terrier, is paper-trained, so they don't have to walk her. "We enjoy spending our time here," says Johnny. "We have a comfortable home, and we like each other's company. I'm not going to sit around in a roomful of people pretending to have a good time and saying 'Oh, isn't this fun?' when it isn't. I think it's a waste of time doing something you don't really want to because people think you ought to."

Tight Suitcase. Besides, Johnny cannot walk a block without being bugged for autographs or buttonholed by chirping women who invariably announce: "I undress in front of you every night, and my husband doesn't mind." Equally oppressive are the men who ask coyly: "Can't you come on a little earlier--you're ruining our love life." Carson knows these lines well: he has used them himself. Still, he laughs on the outside, cringes on the inside, and shrugs, "I guess it goes with the territory."

Last week he surprised New York showfolk by hosting a post-premiere party after Singers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme opened at the Waldorf-Astoria. He was as ill at ease as he is cool on the air, and his eyes twitched noticeably before he and Joanne finally called it a night, long before many of his guests had left.

Yet, says Carson, "I get annoyed when people tag me as a loner. Jackie Gleason loves to mix with people, so they say he's a boozer. You can't win. Because I don't like cocktail parties, some writers translate this to mean 'Carson is hostile to people.' " If he is not precisely hostile, he at least shares a celebrity's distrust of strangers--and distrust sometimes seeps over into contempt. Johnny and Joanne are people who do not need people. "Johnny," says McMahon, putting it mildly, "is not overly outgoing or affectionate. He doesn't give friendship easily or need it. He packs a tight suitcase." One lady author, who was a guest on the show, puts it more bluntly: "He is a cold fish."

What Counts. Johnny's kicks, says Joanne, "are challenges, any kind of challenges--a book, a person, a sport, a show." His latest reading ranges from his attorney Louis Nizer's The Jury Returns to Vidal's Washington, D.C. Once he has mastered something--scuba diving, archery and flying--he tends to drop it and move on. Right now he is playing the drums to stereo-set accompaniment, studying astronomy with his 2.4-inch Unitron telescope, and fiddling around with motion-picture photography and video taping.

He also visits a good deal with his three sons who attend boarding school on Long Island. Carson divorced their mother, a University of Nebraska girl, in 1962. That subject is barred from discussion, although one associate explains: "Johnny is a man of tremendous growth, and people who don't grow with him, don't stay with him."

What counts with Carson is that his audience, faceless and distant, stays with him. "I think you can tell I'm having fun out there," he says. "I love the applause, the cheers, and sometimes when an audience rises to their feet--that's a hell of a thrill. It's a great thrill to go home in the evening and know you've entertained thousands of people--that all those people are saying, 'Gee, I had a good time.' I wanted to be an entertainer and to be myself, and I made it."

Not that he ever doubts it himself, but it is not at all unusual to find him at home--like millions of others--tuning in the show that begins, "Here's Johnny!" He thinks it's pretty funny, McGee.

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