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Heeeere’s Johnny!

By Caryn James

• Dec. 6, 2013

The day after he was hired by Johnny Carson, an obscure young lawyer named Henry Bushkin tagged along with him and some thugs in the night as they broke into an apartment searching for proof of Carson’s wife’s infidelity. They found plenty, as Bushkin tells it, and Carson leaned against a wall and wept, revealing the .38 he was carrying in case things went wrong. That was in 1970, when Carson had already settled into his role as superstar host of “The Tonight Show.” Over the next 18 years, Bushkin was his lawyer, fixer, friend and liege, “like all those guys on ‘Entourage,’ except there was only me.”

His gossipy, self-aggrandizing memoir is a breezy read, but adds little to our picture of Carson beyond some lurid, unverified stories. Did NBC really cut a deal with the Mafia to cover an Italian-American rally on the news in exchange for calling off a hit on Carson, who had pursued the wrong wiseguy’s girlfriend? Did Bushkin once find him at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a woman who “had always seemed to be a close friend” of Carson’s own wife?

Otherwise, Bushkin simply ramps up the image that has become familiar, especially since Carson’s death, in 2005: brilliant comic, cold human being. The cheap but probably accurate psychology says that Carson’s emotionally icy mother left him unable to sustain any of his four marriages or show affection to his three sons.

Then there was the Hollywood-size ego, which Bushkin seems strangely baffled by, even while displaying an outsize ego of his own. Recalling life at his boss’s side — traveling with him luxuriously to Wimbledon and Las Vegas, negotiating contracts that made Carson Midas-rich — Bushkin says without a hint of humor that he was Thomas à Becket to Carson’s Henry II. Yet, a few lines later he expects us to believe he remained “a kid from the Bronx” at heart. This naïve pose deprives the book of some badly needed context.

Bushkin sounds shocked at the fiasco surrounding Carson’s role as host of a live show for Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Joanna Carson, wife No. 3, was incensed because Ed McMahon’s wife got better seats, which caused Carson to become furious with Bushkin. Things got worse when a conciliatory invitation for the Carsons to visit the White House turned out to be a group tour, not a private audience with the president. None of this imperiousness should surprise anyone who has spent half a minute around show-business success.

Bushkin was touched and astonished when Carson, in a New Yorker profile by the critic Kenneth Tynan, called him his best friend. Apparently even now it hasn’t occurred to him that a famous person — especially one as savvy and guarded as Carson — might not be blurting out the whole truth to an interviewer. At least Bushkin was shrewd enough to see the end coming, and was more hurt than surprised when Carson cut him off. By his own account, he had gone behind Carson’s back on a business deal. No need to go into his dull, self-justifying details here except to say that after being fired he never saw Carson again.

Carson’s influence on pop culture remains powerful. Jimmy Fallon, who is set to take over “The Tonight Show” in February, wasn’t born when Carson began as host in 1962. Yet even on his current show Fallon is tethered to the prototype that Carson perfected and network television still uses: a gently topical monologue, followed by interviews at the desk. Neither of those elements plays to Fallon’s strength — his brilliant “Saturday Night Live”-style sketches — but the Carson template has become a late-night straitjacket.

That legacy doesn’t seem to interest Bushkin. In his heady days as an insider, he regularly popped up in Carson’s monologues with the nickname “Bombastic Bushkin.” Now we know why.

JOHNNY CARSON

By Henry Bushkin

Illustrated. 294 pp. An Eamon Dolan Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

Caryn James writes the James on Screens film and television blog for Indiewire, and is the author of the novels “Glorie” and “What Caroline Knew.”

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JOHNNY CARSON

by Henry Bushkin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2013

Carson partisans may find this memoir self-serving (what memoir isn’t?), but most readers will be captivated by this...

The King of Late Night’s lawyer, confidant, tennis partner and butt of his “Bombastic Bushkin” gags appraises their 18-year relationship.

Mainly due to the often bitter jokes he began making about marriage, often at his own expense, around the time of his expensive divorce from his third wife in the early 1980s, Johnny Carson (1925–2005) is known for his marital troubles. Though the late-night host is also known for his reclusiveness from the Hollywood scene—a reputation Bushkin demonstrates was not entirely warranted—most casual observers may not know that Carson had difficulty with all sorts of relationships, beginning with his praise-stingy mother Ruth, whose approval Carson vainly sought until her death, and continuing with his three sons (Carson admitted to being a poor, distant father). Fresh out of Vanderbilt Law School at 23, Bushkin began working for Carson in 1970 and had, arguably, the closest and sturdiest relationship with Carson of the entertainer’s entire life until its acrimonious end in 1988 (“Johnny terminated our relationship in a mere three-minute conversation….There was no final act”). The secret to his success? At the expense of his own marriage and relationships with his children, Bushkin made it his career to keep Carson happy at all hours of the day and night. This might mean getting him a contract with NBC that made him the highest-paid entertainer in the world. It could also mean breaking and entering into Carson’s second wife’s adulterous “love nest” to gather evidence for divorce, listening to a drunken Caron’s self-psychoanalysis at an after-hours watering hole, disappearing discreetly when one of the boss’s many voluptuous playmates appeared, or stepping between Carson and people he wanted to hit or who wanted to hit him.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-544-21762-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Share your opinion of this book

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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BOOK REVIEW

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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Book offers juicy peak inside Johnny Carson’s life

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“Johnny Carson” (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Henry Bushkin

Hell hath no fury like a lawyer scorned.

“You must never, ever repeat a word from last night,” Johnny Carson told Henry Bushkin after sobering up from a barstool confessional. Bushkin gave a lawyerly assurance to “The Tonight Show” host, saying in part, “I would lose my license if during your lifetime I repeated it to a soul.”

Maybe Carson’s head hurt too much to catch that little caveat. Had he noticed the words “in your lifetime,” the entertainer might not have been so keen on hiring a 27-year-old lawyer who likely would outlive him and might one day reveal his personal and professional blemishes.

Is Bushkin’s writing about his famously private client an act of betrayal tinged with revenge? Carson did fire him after nearly two decades of devoted service.

Putting that matter aside, few books like “Johnny Carson” have been more engrossing. It’s not just a juicy peek inside a celebrity’s life from the view of a hanger-on. Bushkin’s memoir is also a well-written corporate tale that reveals the tough business of staying America’s favorite late-night host, full of stories of money, sex and skullduggery, peppered with plenty of laughs.

Bushkin began handling Carson’s affairs in 1970. Carson needed additional legal advice on how to execute a pre-emptive strike on his second wife (there would be two more). Bushkin writes that he proved himself by joining Carson, who was armed with a .38-caliber handgun, and a few others in a raid on the love nest shared by Mrs. Carson and athlete turned sportscaster Frank Gifford. Packing heat didn’t protect Carson’s emotions: He wept when he realized that he was indeed losing another wife.

Not that Carson had to worry about being lonely — just being careful. Sometime around 1970 his skirt-chasing earned him a beating from a mobster’s entourage and a contract on his life. Bushkin says some high-level talks allowed Carson to walk the streets of New York again without fear of being killed for hitting on the wrong guy’s girl.

Family and finances were sore spots for Carson. His mercilessly cool mother remained unfazed and unappreciative of his incredible success. He had his own problems relating to his three boys. When son Rick landed in a mental hospital for two weeks, Bushkin writes, Carson refused to drive across town to visit. Pleading that the publicity would not be good for either Carson, he sent Bushkin instead.

In Bushkin’s telling, Carson was too trusting of managers and other financial advisers, making him an easy victim of bad deals. He had other weaknesses, too. Mrs. Carson 3.0 was willing to sign a prenuptial agreement designed to protect Carson’s fortune. But he balked at the last minute, saying it was a terrible way to start a marriage. “This romantic gesture,” his lawyer says, “would cost Johnny $35 million.”

Bushkin’s memoir adds shading and detail to the portrait of Carson already established. The master of the talk-show medium was often uncomfortable with individuals. In the right mood, he could be witty, generous and fun to be around — and, in a flash, turn cruel and cold. Late-night TV’s naughty Midwesterner was also a roving husband, unpredictable when drunk, a four-pack-a-day smoker prone to obscenity-laden rants. When he drove a car he usually carried a handgun for protection, the book says.

Carson fired Bushkin over a business matter, the lawyer says, and litigation ensued. All these years later Bushkin seems torn between reveling in their friendship and taking an opportunity to get even. He tries to absolve himself of wielding a literary dagger by imagining that Carson, who he says was suspicious of flattery and sentimentality, would have been happy with this book because it’s accurate.

Imagine instead that self-serving statement in the hands of one of Carson’s late-night characters, Carnac the Magnificent. The envelope he tears open might well reveal this answer: “Fat chance.”

Douglass K. Daniel is the author of “Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks” (University of Wisconsin Press).

http://henrybushkin.com/

• Recent Reviews

Johnny Carson

“. . . apparently in author Bushkin’s mind his requirement of confidentiality expired along with his client. The secrets Bushkin reveals about Carson are by turns hilarious and depressing—sometimes both at the same time.”

There’s a show business expression attributed to just about everyone who’s ever been in show business: “The most important thing in performing is sincerity. Once you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy.”

If there were ever a performer for whom that expression was perfect, it was Johnny Carson, the host of The Tonight Show for almost three decades and the man who defined the role of talk show host.

Now comes his former attorney, confidante, procurer, and running buddy, Henry Bushkin, with an intimate—at times too intimate—portrait of the king of late night.

If Bushkin’s last name rings a bell, it’s because you’re old enough to remember Carson referring to him in his monologues as “Bombastic Bushkin,” his business partner who was constantly bringing him terrible deals in which to invest.

It turns out there really was a Bushkin, a living, breathing attorney who was no figment in the imagination of Johnny’s writing staff. Bushkin was a 27-year-old New York lawyer of no particular note who had been recommended to Carson to help clean up a mess the TV star faced. By this time, Carson was already the most revered talk show host in the nation, beloved by legions of fans for his good looks, quick wit, and aw-shucks Nebraska style. 

The first meeting between Bushkin and Carson went well. To his astonishment, Bushkin had been recruited to be the attorney on a raid of Carson’s soon-to-be second ex-wife’s apartment. Five men, including Bushkin and even Carson himself, broke into her apartment and found evidence that she had been indeed cheating on Carson—with none other than former football star and current sports broadcaster Frank Gifford.

That’s how the book begins. It continues for 304 pages of equally upsetting memories from the man who may have known Carson better than anyone else. Bushkin straightened out Johnny’s finances, which were in a terrible mess, and set Carson on the road to massive wealth. He also traveled with Carson to Vegas, played tennis with him almost daily, and basically did whatever Carson needed him to do. For Bushkin, Carson was his most important client. Bushkin was astonished, therefore, to read in an interview that Carson considered his attorney his best friend.

At one point, Bushkin assures Carson that he would never reveal any of Johnny’s secrets “in your lifetime.” But apparently in author Bushkin’s mind his requirement of confidentiality expired along with his client. The secrets Bushkin reveals about Carson are by turns hilarious and depressing—sometimes both at the same time. Bushkin presents Carson as a shameless womanizer who sought to find in relationships, both meaningful and meaningless, the affection he never received from his impossible-to-please mother.

Bushkin’s book implies that Carson may never have reached Wilt Chamberlain-like numbers of female conquests, but surely he approached Magic Johnson levels. It’s painful to imagine Carson, who succeeded so royally onstage, screwing up his life so thoroughly when the red light was off.

Bushkin writes that Carson’s insistence on his partaking in sexual romps in Las Vegas and elsewhere cost him his marriage. The real question is why Bushkin felt compelled to write a book that destroys whatever infallibility Johnny might have enjoyed with his still-adoring audience.

That part becomes clear late in the book, when we discover that Carson ultimately tossed Bushkin aside with apparently the same lack of remorse with which he dispatched three wives and countless girlfriends. Bushkin may not be bombastic in the book, which is actually extremely well written. But he certainly does indulge himself in the time-honored tradition of “getting back a bit of his own.”

If you want to read the ultimate insider’s take on the king of late night, then Bushkin’s Johnny Carson is your book. On the other hand, if you’d like to keep the image of him as that witty man behind the desk, cupping a cigarette for a quick drag, performing in the Mighty Carson Art Players, or laughing hysterically and enthusiastically at yet another new comic’s one-liners, this is one book you may want to leave unread.

New York Times bestselling author and Kindle #1 Business Book author Michael Levin has been referred to by Michael Gerber as "the world's greatest writing teacher" and runs BooksAreMyBabies.com, which provides access to more than 190 videos on writing and publishing.

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Book review: 'Johnny Carson,' by Henry Bushkin

By dallasnews Administrator

2:11 PM on Nov 30, 2013 CST

Henry Bushkin was 27 years old, a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School and working for a small entertainment law firm in Manhattan when he got a call that changed his life. Popular talk-show host Johnny Carson needed a lawyer. Was Bushkin interested?

Of course, but first there were a couple of tests.

Number one: He was asked to join Carson and a squad of men, including a private eye, and break into the "love-nest" of the TV star’s second wife one night to gather evidence so he could file for divorce. Horrified at first, Bushkin ignored his conscience and went along on the raid, rationalizing that "maybe the whole thing wasn't so illegal."

Number two: An inebriated Carson called Bushkin at 2 a.m. to meet him at Jilly's, a Manhattan saloon that catered to celebrities. When Bushkin arrived, Carson — "lost in regret and self-loathing" — talked about what a rotten husband and father he had been. Then he switched the conversation to his mother, angrily describing her in four-letter words. "She's Lady Macbeth," Carson told the young lawyer, impossible to please and the cause of his failed marriages.

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Bushkin met Carson both nights and kept quiet about what he saw and heard. He got the job, becoming Carson’s attorney, best friend, tennis partner and fixer for the next two decades.

Johnny Carson "was endlessly witty and enormously fun to be around," Bushkin writes in this compulsively readable book about the notoriously inscrutable man who ruled late-night television from 1962 till 1992. "He could also be the nastiest son of a [expletive] on earth."

One of Bushkin's first assignments was to file divorce papers for his famous client. He would soon discover what a mess Carson’s life was. In spite of his enormous success, he had very little money "because the people around him, whom he trusted, were serving him poorly," Bushkin writes. And Carson’s personal life was a wreck. At age 45, he had been through two marriages that ended painfully, was the father of three sons he seldom saw, smoked four packs of cigarettes a day and drank to excess nearly every night.

Bushkin learned quickly that his new client demanded total loyalty. He also learned that in spite of Carson's enormous charm on his nightly TV show and with a few select friends, he was a loner who hated small talk and gatherings with people he didn't know. He could be a caring and giving man, but if you crossed him you never heard from him again.

Bushkin's job involved seeing Carson almost every day and playing tennis with him at the Vanderbilt Club several times a week between 10:30 a.m. and noon.

Three or four nights a week they also got together, hitting hot spots of the rich and famous. Other people, including Carson’s TV sidekick Ed McMahon, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin would often join them.

Bushkin's spirited account includes many other aspects of his life with Carson: the negotiations with NBC, the move to Los Angeles from New York, the European vacations to watch tennis tournaments in London and Paris, the traumas when Carson hosted Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the falling-out with Joan Rivers, and of course, the women in Carson’s life.

Carson liked being married, Bushkin writes, but being married never kept him from pursuing other women. He was wed four times, with the longest marriage lasting until his death in 2005  at age 79.

Bushkin himself lasted 18 years. In 1988, Carson fired him, accusing him of trying to steal Carson Productions, a multimillion-dollar company including The Tonight Show . Bushkin does a terrible job of defending himself, writing a last chapter in the book so bogged down in legalese that it's hard to know what really happened.

Most of the book, though, is a highly readable account of almost two decades in Johnny Carson's life. Bushkin has written a fascinating tale about life in the fast lane with one of the most enigmatic figures of our time.

Elizabeth Bennett is a freelance writer in Houston.

Johnny Carson

Henry Bushkin

(Houghton MifflinHarcourt, $28)

dallasnews Administrator

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King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson

Laurence leamer.

476 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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Opinion Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkiin

When legendary “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson signed off as the king of late-night TV in 1992 after 30 years, he had three ex-wives, two estranged sons and millions of adoring fans. What Carson, who died of respiratory failure in 2005, did not have was lawyer Henry Bushkin, whom he fired in 1988 for alleged financial chicanery and insufficient loyalty after 18 years of beck-and-call service. It is now payback time for Bushkin, whose book “Johnny Carson” offers a fallen insider’s look at the high-maintenance superstar who dominated the small screen with brilliant monologues, famous guests and headline-driven, headline-making jokes that remain the gold standard of the genre.

Bushkin is hoping that two decades after Carson’s “Tonight” exit, and with several books about his former boss already in print, Johnny junkies remain insatiable. He dishes freely about life in the cutthroat world of network television, including his tense, highly successful contract negotiations with NBC brass and his secret talks with ABC execs eager for Carson to jump ship. He rehashes the comedian’s well-known feuds with Joan Rivers and Wayne Newton, describes Carson’s insistence that a drunk Dean Martin not perform at Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural gala and provides copious details about the high life the duo shared — usually without their wives — in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Europe.

“Bombastic Bushkin,” as Carson dubbed him on the show, is a facile writer, by turns funny, dark, gossipy, angry, morose and self-serving about their lucrative bromance gone wrong. He was just 27 when hired for what became the “most rewarding and the most disappointing” relationship of his life. The Bronx-born lawyer morphed into a minor Hollywood player as Carson’s “Swiss Army knife of a companion, attorney, manager, agent, henchman, crony, tennis pal and corkscrew, all in one.”

Bushkin glides through Carson’s early years — born in Iowa, reared in Nebraska by a passive father and a toxic mother — to focus on the man at the top of his game. Wildly successful on television and in clubs, Carson was, in private, a roiling mass of contradictions. He could be “endlessly witty and enormously fun,” but also “the nastiest son of a bitch on earth. The truth is that he was an incredibly complex man: one moment gracious, funny, and generous; and curt, aloof and hard-hearted in the next. Never have I met a man possessed of a greater number of social gifts — intelligence, looks, manners, style, humor — and never have I met a man with less aptitude for or interest in maintaining real relationships.”

For Carson, the phrase “family man” was an oxymoron and fidelity impossible to maintain. Though he and his college-sweetheart first wife, Jody, had three boys, active fatherhood was not part of his DNA. Indeed, when Ricky, their middle child, was committed to Bellevue Hospital’s psych unit for several months, Carson declined to visit on the grounds that his presence would “mortify” his son and create a media circus. That abdicated task fell to Bushkin. Carson was not close to the other children, either, although when Ricky died in a car crash in 1991, Carson paid him an emotional on-the-air tribute.

Being the comedian’s wife was no picnic. One of Bushkin’s early missions was a walk on the noir side, with a pistol-packing Carson leading “a squad of men with downturned mouths and upturned collars through a rain-swept Manhattan evening” into the secret love nest of his second wife, Joanne. He was furious and devastated to discover photos of Frank Gifford, the pro football great turned sportscaster, on a table and men’s clothing in the closet of an apartment he was paying for.

Carson walked out and soon married divorcee Joanna Holland, who persuaded him to move the show, and Bushkin, to Los Angeles. Within three years, that marriage was over, too, and because Carson had gallantly ignored entreaties to sign a pre-nup, the breakup cost him $35 million, Bushkin writes, although other accounts put the figure somewhat lower. Carson and his fourth wife, Alex, 30 years his junior, separated well before his death.

Bushkin, like many others, blames Carson’s icy mother for her son’s relationship woes, calling her the kind of parent “who inflicts consistent emotional pain” because she is “impossible to impress and impossible to please. She seemed to take no pride or pleasure in her son’s accomplishments.”

We’ll let legal ethicists decide whether Bushkin has violated attorney-client privilege in sharing Carson stories, licit and illicit, or whether he has merely exercised his First Amendment right to cash in and lash out after losing nearly everything after their acrimonious break. Bushkin was sued for malpractice and held liable for Carson’s failed business and real estate deals, and he spent four years litigating to clear his name, including a protracted trial. He just about broke even after recouping $17 million in a jury award and an insurance settlement.

He had already lost his wife, Judy. She left him in the early ’80s using celebrity divorce lawyer Arthur Crowley, who’d secured the aforementioned whopping settlement for her dear friend, Joanna Carson. Doing business deals from California to Kyrgyzstan, Bushkin insists he’s been happier since his firing than he ever was working for Carson.

Even from the grave, however, Carson remains a looming presence who “continues to provoke, irritate, delight, amuse and sadden me.” But if all goes according to plan, and the book is a big seller, the King of Late Night may once again line the pockets of Bombastic Bushkin.

is a Washington journalist who writes widely about culture, politics and design.

JOHNNY CARSON

By Henry Bushkin

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 294 pp. $28

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• Lawyer writes tell-all book about his life…

Lawyer writes tell-all book about his life with late-night TV king Johnny Carson

By Martha Neil

October 21, 2013, 9:11 pm CDT

Henry Bushkin was a junior attorney at an entertainment law firm when he first met Johnny Carson, far from an obvious choice of counsel for a man who could afford pretty much whatever he wanted.

But the NBC late-night entertainment show host took a shine to the 27-year-old, and wound up using him as his personal lawyer, confidant, wingman and tennis partner for nearly two decades, from 1970 to 1988. Then, encouraged by his fourth wife, who disliked Bushkin, Carson fired Bushkin over a business matter, as the attorney tells the story. After Carson died in 2005, Bushkin began writing a book about his onetime client and mentor that seemingly pulls no punches.

“The question that people most frequently ask me is what was Johnny really like. They are usually happy to hear the first part of my answer: he was endlessly witty and enormously fun to be around,” Bushkin writes. “Their interest flags when I add that he could also be the nastiest son of a bitch on earth. The truth is that he was an incredibly complex man: one moment gracious, funny, and generous; and curt, aloof and hard-hearted in the next.”

The Associated Press , the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) are among the publications that review the book. All describe a compelling and unusually candid account of the life of a man who did what he did in front of the television camera about as well as it can be done, yet struggled in his private life to enjoy the riches that life offered him.

Bushkin writes in the book that an early assignment that helped prove his mettle involved joining a pistol-packing Carson and others in a raid on a secret love nest shared by the entertainer’s then-wife (two more followed) and sportscaster Frank Gifford. Carson cried as he realized he and his wife were at the end of the road on their marriage, then quipped: “Joanne has broken my heart … to the extent that I even have one.”

Entertainment Weekly provides an excerpt of the book. Fox News interviews Bushkin about why he wrote the book.

Buffalo News : “Doc Severinsen blasts attorney’s book on Johnny Carson”

Las Vegas Sun : “Strip Scribbles: Vindication in long-ago lawsuit involving Johnny Carson, lawyer”

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Book Review: Henry Bushkin’s Biography Johnny Carson

by Scott Holleran | Oct 22, 2013

A new biography of Johnny Carson by the lawyer he fired, Henry Bushkin, is ultimately too shallow and calculated to be credible.

The book, simply titled  Johnny Carson , is a major publishing event. There’s not much that’s known about the talented Midwestern comedian and host of the Oscars, President Reagan’s inauguration and, of course,  The Tonight Show  (1962-1992). He was famously private. He lost a child to addiction and married several times and he pioneered both television and the entertainment industry, with highly profitable deals – apparently made after learning lessons from some bad deals – in media, real estate and men’s fashion. The reader learns about the business of Johnny Carson’s show business.

But something’s off. Author Bushkin, whom Johnny hired through a referral early in his career for no apparent reason, as reported here, delivers a crisp, curt narrative. In fact, it’s too clipped. Sentences feel overly edited, as if important information is deliberately left out, and in every chapter it seems like there must be more to each story. For example, Bushkin writes that he lets Johnny win at tennis because he says he’s afraid of being fired, but Johnny hasn’t fired a single person without cause in the past. By Bushkin’s telling, which comes early in the telling of this tell-all, he fears for his job when he says he has no reason to worry. So, one already has reason to suspect his motives. Something doesn’t add up.

As I read on, the sense of omission increased. A minor error, the misspelling of boxer Joe Frazier’s name, made me wonder if there were other errors as well as omissions, which may have escaped notice or scrutiny by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Johnny Carson was a powerful, intensely entertaining host and humorist. His nightly monologue was, like Carson, groundbreaking in wit, depth and relevance. Decades later, the format he perfected dominates late night television. At times, he was silly. Other times, he was serious. He interviewed the nation’s top stars and intellectuals, bringing both a touch of lightness and a graceful dignity to everything he discussed. And he did discuss. Unlike today’s smarmy TV cynics masquerading as comedians, such as Jon Stewart, Greg Gutfeld and Stephen Colbert, Johnny Carson took ideas seriously.

Some of that sensibility can’t help but come through. More than a few of Johnny’s jokes, which are best described as witty observations, are retold. They’re still spot on. I laughed out loud at several of them. His ability to grasp the irony and humor in a given topic was extraordinary, a fact which is ignored in these pages, and his timing and delivery were perfect. Johnny Carson had both a twinkle and a reality-driven, Midwestern accessibility that made his knowing look and distinctly controlled lack of expression communicate a response to something in an instantaneously universal way. After Johnny visited London for Wimbledon and found himself in a hotel without air conditioning during a prolonged and sweltering heatwave, Bushkin came with his wife to pick him up and found him in a tub filled with ice and water. The author writes that Johnny Carson looked up at them and said: “I don’t care what you have to do but get us the hell out of here tomorrow. Charter a 747 if you must, but get us out of Dodge.”

Bushkin speculates with some degree of plausibility that the  Tonight Show  host was driven in some fundamental way by his inaccessible, unloving mother’s lack of approval.“Ruth Carson was a person who was impossible to impress and impossible to please,” he observes. “She seemed to take no pride or pleasure in her son’s accomplishments.” He suggests that Carson, who he says could be biting and cruel, became like his mother: “There came to be too many moments when Ruth Carson’s chilly influence abruptly took over his disposition.”

There are too many instances to the contrary to count. According to Bushkin’s version, Johnny Carson, who died in 2005, was also meticulously kind and generous. Of course, Johnny was fastidious about his work and reputation, the responsibility for which appears to have been lost on Bushkin, who as Carson’s attorney was the recipient of the barbs, kindness and attention to detail. When Johnny Carson sued a manufacturer of “Here’s Johnny” toilets for trademark violation of his individual rights, the lawyer accuses Carson of being petty. Never mind that the signature phrase powered Bushkin’s countless escapades and indulgences. Among these include the author’s extramarital affairs – he writes about Johnny’s infidelity in more detail – and trips around the world. But constantly and insidiously Henry Bushkin drops the context that he, unlike Johnny Carson, was not the king of late night television and a brand unto himself for over 30 years.

Never mind, too, that, as Bushkin reports, his boss was singled out for attack time and again. For instance, Carson, a father of three boys, was threatened with a grenade by a German couple demanding money at a time when the children of Sinatra, Hearst and Getty had been kidnapped. When Los Angeles Police advised Carson to defy the criminals’ demands and let police deliver a bag to a location on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood near NBC’s  Tonight Show  studios in Burbank, Johnny Carson said No, insisting that he personally deliver a decoy bag of money rather than risk harm and injury to his wife and her child. Whether being targeted in bars or being the second name on John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman’s list, “Here’s Johnny” carried with its instant association of good humor and an upright posture a huge target for pure post-New Left envy and hatred of ability, achievement and success.

Bushkin himself seems to realize this, though he doesn’t grant Johnny much understanding, which reinforces the impression that he sought to profit from his association with Johnny Carson without regard to what made Johnny great. It’s a common flaw in today’s celebrity biographies and in  Johnny Carson  it’s less obvious, which makes the omission worse. Without any interest in Johnny Carson the artist, we are left with a cold and calculated assessment of Johnny Carson the brand that seeks to cash in on Johnny Carson without earning it. So the narrative reads like a bean-counter passing judgment on an artist. In the scope of the entire book, there is not a single sentence or thought describing Johnny Carson at work on his monologue, for example, or preparing for an interview with one of his guests, so we’re left empty of any examination of his ability to create humor and induce laughter, which is a tremendous skill. Johnny Carson’s talent and ability are taken for granted.

All that’s left is celebrity and that’s the appeal of this book. Writing about a cultural icon of late 20th century America does have an upside and it’s fun to read about someone who was a titan of comedy and television. When Johnny and his third wife, Joanna, decided to spontaneously marry in private at the posh Beverly Hills Hotel on a day he was being honored with some other award for achievement, Bushkin writes that Johnny informed the gathered guests: “A lot of columnists have been asking why me and my gal haven’t set a date for the wedding, so I think I will tell you that we were married at one-thirty this afternoon.” Bushkin continues: “Johnny then leaned down and kissed Joanna. Flip Wilson, wearing his Geraldine drag, kissed Johnny. Noting that all three of Johnny’s wives had names that started with the same letter, Bob Newhart concluded, “Obviously Johnny didn’t want to have to change the monograms on the towels after every marriage.” The secret had been kept, romance had triumphed, the laughs were plentiful, and the party rocked. No marriage ever had a more promising beginning. In time, when the marriage ended and the divorce was settled, this romantic gesture would cost Johnny $35 million.”

How Johnny earned the money is left essentially unsaid, probably because Bushkin doesn’t know or care to know the source of Johnny’s wealth. The deals are one thing and Bushkin may have arranged, papered and closed them as he says. But the talent that made the deals – and profits – possible is something else. Instead, we get glimpses of glimpses of Bushkin in Vegas with women. Bushkin in the south of France with Mary Hart ( Entertainment Tonight ). Bushkin in Hawaii with Joyce DeWitt ( Three’s Company ). The story of Carson Productions, the business failures and success, the Hart, Schaffner and Marx company’s Carson suit designs are left untold, listed in dollars, cents and snippets. Again, there’s next to nothing about how Johnny worked, studied and made choices – did he watch clips of comedy routines, listen to songs or albums or read book excerpts before guests appeared on  The Tonight Show  and was he involved in creative meetings? – let alone deeper insights. Only in the last chapters does Bushkin disclose that “the man smoked four packs a day or more.” Why? Did he try to quit? Blank out. The death of Johnny Carson’s alcoholic son, Rick, is barely mentioned let alone explored.

Politically, Bushkin writes that Johnny Carson – who interviewed everyone from Bobby Kennedy to  Ayn Rand  on  The Tonight Show  – was “strong on integration and civil rights, skeptical of the military and war, big on personal responsibility. Overall, you’d have to say he was anti-big: anti–big government, anti–big money, anti–big bullies, anti–big blowhards.” Carson’s politics sound interesting. So does his friendship with flamboyant gay writer Truman Capote ( Breakfast at Tiffany’s ,  In Cold Blood ). So does the fact that Johnny chose not to attend either of his parents’ funerals. Bushkin never goes into any of that.

The man, the artist, the host, the master of ceremonies – all remain elusive to the man who was Carson’s longtime lawyer and it isn’t hard to see why. Bushkin reports that his then-romantic partner, actress Joyce DeWitt, once suggested to Johnny that he should play Puck in Shakespeare’s  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Bushkin writes that Carson responded by lecturing DeWitt in why his audience would never want to see him in that. It’s probably one of the most interesting untold stories in this biography. But again, we never get to read a word of Carson’s lecture, which might have contained his philosophy of humor or at least his approach to doing comedy or at minimum understanding his appeal.

At the end of one chapter, Bushkin says that Mary Hart called Johnny Carson insane. We are expected to take her word for it via the author, but in the very next chapter Johnny Carson is angling to get a job for his alcoholic son in order to help him recover. He doesn’t sound remotely irrational let alone insane.

This sense of there being more to the story and huge gaping holes in Bushkin’s account is especially true when it comes to Joan Rivers. The comedienne was once Carson’s handpicked substitute host and presumed heiress to  The Tonight Show ‘s hosting. But she went behind Johnny’s back and took a late-night show gig with then-fledgling Fox. Why she did do what she did, which led to a ratings disaster and may have contributed to her husband Edgar’s suicide, is another untold story here. Elsewhere, Bushkin describes himself as the middleman between Johnny Carson and Carson Productions chief Ed Weinberger, then admits that he asked Ed to be the one to tell Johnny that his son Rick had been fired. Bushkin clearly expects the tale to reflect poorly upon Johnny. Instead it reflects poorly on Henry Bushkin. Did Bushkin forget that he was the middleman? Or just that he’d told us he was?

Tellingly, when speaking of Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson, Bushkin intersperses the terms envied and admired.

In the end, the lawyer who waited until Johnny Carson – and his TV sidekick Ed McMahon, who hardly rates a mention here and there – died to write his superficial  Johnny Carson  confesses that he went behind Johnny’s back and tried to undersell Carson Productions by $30 million. He says he did it because he thought he was suited to run Carson Productions and therefore didn’t think it was “that big of a crime”. But he didn’t object when Carson found out about the double-cross and called him into his Malibu beach house to fire Henry Bushkin. The author describes Johnny Carson as “the most interesting man I had ever known.” He doesn’t come close to exploring or explaining why. (Read  my 2005 obituary of Johnny Carson here .)

Scott Holleran

The views expressed above represent those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors and publishers of Capitalism Magazine . Capitalism Magazine sometimes publishes articles we disagree with because we think the article provides information, or a contrasting point of view, that may be of value to our readers.

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Books | Review: ‘Johnny Carson’ by Henry Bushkin

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It is difficult to imagine that anybody would be interested to learn that Henry Bushkin purchased a brand-new Aston Martin while on vacation in England during the annual Wimbledon tennis championships. But it is telling that he also writes that “every day, (my wife) Judy and I were the embodiment of arrogant Americans as we rolled up to the tournament in our fantastic, brand-new air-conditioned British sports car. And we loved it.”

This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

A great deal of palpable hubris shadows the pages of “Johnny Carson,” Bushkin’s new book about the 18 years he spent in the employ of the “Tonight Show” host.

There is no denying that Bushkin had an intimate relationship with Carson from 1970 to 1988. He tells us on the first pages of the book: “I was his attorney, although that term hardly expresses all I did; more properly, I was his lawyer, counselor, partner, employee, business advisor, earpiece, mouthpiece, enforcer, running buddy, tennis pal, drinking and dining companion, and foil.” Lest we forget, he tells us almost the same thing again 53 pages later. And then, less than 30 pages later he reminds us that he was Carson’s “Swiss Army knife of a companion, attorney, manager, agent, henchman, crony, tennis pal, and corkscrew all in one.” And, of course, he quotes Carson, who once said, “Henry Bushkin, my lawyer, who’s probably my best friend.”

Bushkin became, as he puts it, “a pop-culture footnote” when Carson created a character named Bombastic Bushkin for his monologues.

Of the pair’s frequent tennis matches, Bushkin gets hyperbolic: “We practiced more diplomacy in those games than Henry Kissinger did during his entire career.”

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boldface names here. Most are just names, but you do get a few stories, such as one about Jack Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, lighting “up a joint of marijuana and was passing the fat doobie.”

There are many stories that reflect Carson’s darker sides: Johnny breaking into his wife’s apartment in Manhattan, which she allegedly used to have an affair with former football player Frank Gifford; Johnny getting drunk and surly; Johnny being thrown down a flight of stairs by “a major figure in the underworld.” Bushkin tells us that “Johnny was not a very good father,” and was an aggressive womanizer.

There are cliches aplenty, and awkward sentences such as “My words hung in the air without reply and eventually evaporated.” There is also some nickel-and-dime psychology: Johnny’s mother “was indifferent and lacked emotion.”

Bushkin and Carson had a bitter breakup in 1988 when Carson learned that Bushkin was trying to make a business deal involving Carson Productions (the deal, which didn’t occur, involved Tribune Company) without telling Johnny. “I hear you’re trying to steal my goddamn company,” Carson said, at which point Bushkin “realized the guillotine had fallen.”

The two never saw one another again. There’s no denying Bushkin cut some good deals for Carson, but there is something distasteful about this self-aggrandizing rehashing.

Rick Kogan is a Tribune senior writer and columnist.

“Johnny Carson”

By Henry Bushkin, Eamon Dolan, 304 pages, $28

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Files Of The Unexplained’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About Encounters With Aliens, Ghosts And Other Unexplained Phenomena

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• Files of the Unexplained

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Files Of The Unexplained is an eight-episode docuseries, produced by Vox Media, that examines famous cases where ordinary people had encounters with unexplained phenomena. It could be anything from alien encounters to ghosts to disappearances. In one episode, the case of severed feet washing up on the shores of the Salish Sea is examined.

FILES OF THE UNEXPLAINED : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a marshy scene at night. Then a man talks about seeing War Of The Worlds as a kid.

The Gist: In the first episode, a 1973 alien abduction incident is revisited. In Pascagoula, Mississippi, Charles Hickson, then 42 and Calvin Parker, then 19, were fishing on the river at night after their shift working on the local shipping port. Both men report two bright lights hovering right above the water and beings with pinchers for hands coming out. Then both report that they were brought into the ship and examined; Hickson even describes a giant eye looking him over. Then they were deposited back near the river.

Via animated reenactments, archival footage and interviews with Parker (who died in 2023, after the episode was filmed) and Hickson’s son Eddie, among others, the show’s producers break down the encounter to show whether the men’s accounts of the abduction seemed credible. This wasn’t an incident that was swept under the rug; while Parker was always reluctant to talk about the incident, Hickson took advantage of the media opportunities that came his way, including an interview with Johnny Carson and a stage show that brought him some income.

The abduction affected both men greatly; both ended up being changed forever by the incident, and even Hickson was affected as he was pulled in multiple directions by people wanting to hear the story, as well as straining under the skepticism of the American public. But a recording between the two men that was made without their permission when they reported the incident to law enforcement was released in 2020, showing that both men believed in what they saw, even when no one else was there to listen to their story.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Files Of The Unexplained reminds us of a slew of docuseries about unexplained phenomena, but the ur-example of these shows is In Search Of… , which we used to watch when we were kids in the late ’70s and early ’80s (the show came back in 2002 and again in 2018).

Our Take: Speaking of which, the formula that Files Of The Unexplained is pretty much the formula that In Search Of… pioneered almost 50 years ago: Interviews, reenactments, and lots and lots of speculation. Which is absolutely fine, if that’s all you’re expecting from the series.

The episodes aren’t all that long; most are in the 30-35 minute range, with the longest being 48 minutes. So they’re not examining these cases with a fine-toothed comb; they’re going over the broad strokes, mostly interviewing people who were involved or at least related to those involved. Given that most of the episodes take place decades in the past, the perspective of those intervening decades are interesting to listen to.

For instance, hearing directly from Calvin Parker and his wife, who was his girlfriend at the time, about the Pascagoula incident was invaluable, because to him, the abduction gave him some severe PTSD, and he would rather forget about it. But half a century after it happened, it’s still at the forefront of his mind. It was good insight into how an incident like this can change a person, especially one that wasn’t inclined to wildly reporting about things like this to begin with.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Hickson, in an archival interview, says, “I know there’s other worlds out there with life on it. And someday, everyone will know that to be a fact without any doubt.”

Sleeper Star: You wonder why Rebecca Davis, the city’s events manager, is being interviewed until you see her collection of alien-related memorabilia. She was also instrumental in having the city place a marker near where the incident happened. Finally, she’s got an impressive helmet of hair that seems to have come straight out of 1987.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Like this show’s predecessors, the episodes of Files Of The Unexplained are designed to get you intrigued about the particular incidents in question and research them further if you’re interested. Given that we had either not heard of or forgotten the Pascagoula incident before watching this first episode, and now we’re curious, the show did the job it set out to do.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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