Johnny Carson revealed in tell-all
Henry Bushkin’s Johnny Carson is that rare celebrity tell-all by an author who knows whom and what he’s talking about. Though early readers have been shocked, just shocked, by Bushkin’s treachery, they have also been drawn ravenously to his book.
Bushkin was a young lawyer in 1970 when Carson, quite inexplicably, decided to become his client. He was a sadder but wiser one by 1988, when Carson abruptly fired him and then went to war, accusing him of negligence, malpractice and other improprieties. But between those temporal bookends, this lawyer and his star client shared a lot of time and a complex bromance.
Still, Bushkin did not regard himself as very important to Carson, so he was surprised to learn from Kenneth Tynan’s 1978 New Yorker profile of Carson that Carson thought Bushkin was his best friend.
It’s easy to approach this book thinking that its author has an axe to grind. Maybe he does, but his account sounds unexaggerated, credible and willing to place blame wherever it belongs. Bushkin wonders now at his own naïveties when Carson instantly adopted him as a constant companion. But he was recruited when Carson was ending the second of his four marriages, and a malleable new lawyer would be handy.
Bushkin could also play tennis with the boss, a major job requirement. And he had no clients who outranked Carson. Carson liked his friends/flunkies’ attention undivided.
Bushkin writes that his initiation was intense. The night after his job interview, he joined a gun-toting Carson and entourage as they broke into an apartment that Carson’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Joanne Copeland, kept on the sly. Bushkin forced himself to reason that if a husband’s funds were used to pay for an apartment, the husband had a right to break and enter. When they found damning evidence of an affair, Bushkin awkwardly watched America’s biggest, best-loved television star cry.
The good, the bad and the ugly are all on display in a book that sometimes depicts Carson as a kid in a candy store, and Bushkin as happy to share the perks. “Nipper hears his master’s voice, ”Bushkin’s wife once complained, invoking the old RCA dog and Victrola to describe her husband’s slavish situation. Hot- and cold-running women were part of Carson’s preferred environment, and the book describes these goings-on frankly. Neither man’s marriage could weather the competition.