That snowstorm would have been a breeze.
Name tags would have helped!
Posted on 01/26/2005 10:44:21 AM PST by tvn
January 26, 2005 Johnny Carson's Long Symbiosis With New York By SAM ROBERTS
If Jack Paar transformed his television studio into Everyman's living room, then his successor, Johnny Carson, transported viewers from their beds or couches to a hip New York nightclub where, with him as their unaffected host, they could be edified but feel perfectly at home even in their jammies.
For the first decade of his 30-year reign at the "Tonight" show, Mr. Carson broadcast regularly from Rockefeller Center, which seemed only fitting since the New York he conveyed to the rest of the country was the swinging, smart, sophisticated city immortalized earlier by big bands and make-believe ballrooms. Guests drank and smoked as Mr. Carson presided in Nehru jackets, then in his Gino Paoli merino-wool turtlenecks beneath black mohair dinner jackets, and eventually in his own brand of apparel. He introduced the theatrical and literary personalities of New York - Tony Randall, Truman Capote - and ever so gingerly nudged the big city's permissiveness onto network television. (He remarked that he could remember when not even a pause could be described as pregnant, but stopped short of introducing Bette Midler wearing only a towel.)
Mr. Carson, who died on Sunday at 79, was born in Iowa and grew up in Nebraska, but he seemed, at least to outsiders, to personify New York in the 1960's. The city had awakened from the Eisenhower years (in New York, they were dubbed the Wagner years, after Robert F. Wagner, the taciturn three-term mayor, not the Hollywood star) to give birth to the twist at the Peppermint Lounge, to celebrate its global status with a World's Fair, to revel in the unlikely Mets' World Series upset and a Jets' Super Bowl victory, and to briefly kindle hopes that John V. Lindsay, Wagner's telegenic successor, could succeed in a job that was dubbed the second toughest in America.
That New York - the New York of blackouts, daylight muggings, noisy middle-of-the-night street repairs and, of course, cabbies ("Any time four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place") - was also the butt of Mr. Carson's monologues wasn't beside the point. It was the point. His jokes did not diminish the city. They validated its uniqueness as the place to be, the place to make it, for out-of-towners like Mr. Carson and for natives who could still afford to laugh at themselves.
"If they had said, 'Let's do this thing to make people want to be in the East and in New York City,' that's exactly the way they would have done it," recalled Dick Cavett, Mr. Carson's occasional late-night competitor.
"I fell for the whole urbane party setup - the carpeted riser, the couch, the twinkling-night-sky backdrop," Jon Garelick wrote in The Boston Phoenix in 1997. "It was bizarrely adult, as exotic as New York itself."
Geoffrey Colvin wrote in City Journal magazine in 1995 that Mr. Carson "loved to make fun of Mayor Lindsay for calling New York 'Fun City,' but the whole nation laughed because New York was the center. It mattered."
Lindsay frequently joined in the fun. While The Daily News ranted that he was demeaning the mayoralty by appearing on the "Tonight" show, Lindsay would joke about never breathing air he couldn't see and about the computerized matchmaker installed in Central Park: When a young man described himself to the computer as sensitive and rich, the machine mugged him.
The "Tonight" show helped transform Lindsay into a national celebrity, which the mayor and his fans at home hoped would translate into political stardom. Dazzled by his own reviews, he ran for president in 1972, only to discover that more people wanted to see him than support him. That spring, in Wisconsin, his campaign invoked a television metaphor as its slogan: "The Switch Is On."
And it was, but away from Lindsay, who by then also embodied a city at war with itself over demands from blacks and Hispanics for parity, over feral youth, the South Bronx firestorm and by a looming fiscal collapse.
A month after Lindsay lost in the Wisconsin primary and withdrew from the presidential campaign, Mr. Carson decamped for California.
Broadcasting from a bigger studio and with access to more movie stars than his rivals in New York, Mr. Carson was, as Kenneth Tynan wrote in The New Yorker, able to soothingly practice "the art of the expected" as the United States entered "one of the grimmest and most divisive periods in its history."
Skitch Henderson, the "Tonight" show's music director, recalled: "The New York show had an edge to it that was healthy. Hollywood was like chocolate syrup; it smothered you. When the show went to California, it became their world."
As Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, "It was a migration that, along with the demise of 'The Ed Sullivan Show' on CBS the year before, essentially marked the end of Manhattan's parity with Hollywood as a glitz capital for a national audience."
And maybe, just maybe, for all the seeming self-confidence Mr. Carson felt more at home in California than in New York, which has since revived as a late-night television backdrop.
"I'm sure he was a little uncomfortable in New York," Mr. Cavett recalled, "in the way ordinary people from the Midwest are in making a faux pas, like a guy with some straw still stuck to his shoes."
Here's Johnny, Still Popular
Monday's "Tonight Show With Jay Leno" on NBC, which was a tribute to Johnny Carson, yielded the fourth-highest ratings for that show since it began in 1992, according to numbers gathered from Nielsen's local markets. The broadcast featured highlights from Carson's "Tonight" show run, as well as appearances by Ed McMahon, Don Rickles and Bob Newhart. David Letterman's "Late Show," which might have offered a tribute, was a repeat on Monday night. Unlike the overnight ratings for prime-time programs, the complete results for the "Tonight" show, including the number of viewers, will not be available until next week.
Does anyone know the real reason why NBC moved the Tonight Show from 30 Rock to Burbank?
I heard that as they were growing they had much better access to stars and to be closer to that environment to garner more star attention. He had more local folk in New York during the early years.......
Television as a whole industry moved west. Just like the movies did 50 years before that.
carson had been doing longer and longer visits to LA ever year. One winter in LA and the availablity of an ocean front home was enough to move Johnny out of an apartment onto the beach, plus he was looking at a change in his marriage.
Did Lindsey run in the Republican primary against Nixon? Was he crazy?
Bottom line LA was a career home town for Jonny long before NY
thanks for the update
Nope, he ran as a Democrat. In fact, Jeffrey Katzenberg (yes, “DreamWorks” Jeffrey Katzenberg) helped with that campaign, even dropped out of college to help in the campaign, and apparently he had a hand in acting as one of Lindsay’s political aids during the mayoral campaign when he was 14. Leaves me very disturbed with this, especially given the inherent implication that Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to spread the same disasters that Lindsay brought to New York as mayor up to the national level, thought THAT was good enough to be national policy. Anyone get the sense that Katzenberg is a psychopath?
A 2005 thread? Well, this is kind of random. I know the following is off-topic from what you posted to me, which was on topic to what I posted in 2005. But let me invite some Seinfeld friends over for no particular reason at all other than that Johnny Carson is the topic of this thread. RIP, Johnny.
**********
ELAINE: No. Let me see that. (Takes the paper from Jerry) Don’t-mess-with-Johnny.”
JERRY: Johnny? Johnny who? Johnny Carson? Did I insult Johnny on The Tonight Show?
ELAINE: Did you mess with Johnny, Jerry?
So long ago I don’t even recognize the OP handle.
That snowstorm would have been a breeze.
Name tags would have helped!
Name tags would have totally fixed that snowstorm traffic jam.
Lloyd Braun is quite the computer salesman from what I hear.
Say, didn’t footage from that snowstorm end up used in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’s opening? That image looked familiar, and I think the special aired around the same time.
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