What was he really like? Well, he was better looking than he looked. Clowning distorts regular features and his were most regular. The eyes were sharp but the most powerful of his senses was that of hearing, detecting false notes and the lessening of an audience’s attention during a joke. The monologue that opened each evening’s Tonight Show was carefully written out on long rolls of paper that were unfurled as the monologue got read, and the roll of abandoned script would then float from the stage down into the audience where, like Chinese paper dragons, one could read what he had often abruptly cut on air. The face in repose was as composed as that of Buster Keaton if not as comically frozen. One night in Ravello, after his wife Joanna had gone up to bed, we sat on the balcony overlooking the Gulf of Salerno and talked politics and comedy and got quietly drunk.
“You know,” he said, “people keep thinking I am this kindly little old Irishman when I’m not little, not kindly, and not Irish but English.” Finally it was that ear, sharp to nuance, which directed his performance. We all have multiple responses to what people say particularly if one is on air and must respond quickly. And so, the appearance of amiability is the wisest defense if what you say might break the spell you are spinning. Hence: mock amazement if sex is in the air or wide-eyed bewilderment at a dangerous turn in a political observation. One night before I came out onstage the producer Freddie De Cordova caught me halfway through the curtain: “No mention of abortion; we’re having trouble this week!” I said, “All right” and stepped into the spotlight upstage center, then turned right to walk to John’s desk where he was unexpectedly beaming. This was unusual. I tried to read his look as I sat in the chair to his right, a swivel chair that tended to slip out from under you in order to face the adjacent couch where other guests might be. “So, Gore, what do you think of this right to life movement?” With that, he shoved me into the water, as it were. Offstage, De Cordova looked grim. I started to improvise.
Unlike most talk-show hosts John liked for his guests to be entertaining and so give him a respite from talking as opposed to reacting. Once, in a break, I told him I’d thought of a funny line about someone but I was afraid it might be too sharp. He drummed on his desk with a long pencil and frowned: “If you ever have the slightest doubt about a line don’t say it.” The best advice. In front of him just above the camera was a huge clock which, as the minutes passed and guests turned boring, he tended to stare at, waiting to be released from his role. One performance, when he wasn’t looking, a member of the crew pushed back the hands of the clock fifteen minutes. Carson’s momentary look of despair when he saw the clock got a laugh even though the audience had no idea why.
I first came to his program when he was in a studio on the sixth floor, I think it was, of the NBC building at Rockefeller Center. He had inherited me from his predecessor, Jack Paar, a popular but somewhat eccentric host of The Tonight Show.
John Carson and I warming up on The Tonight Show.
As we sat drinking on the balcony in the moonlight, we recalled Paar’s tantrums and how he had once, in a rage, walked off his own show. Also, how he had asked me if I’d like to be his summer replacement. I had said no. Paar was amazed, but then so was De Cordova who asked me half a dozen times over twenty or thirty years if I’d like to sit in for Carson when he was performing at Las Vegas. “After all,” said De Cordova, “when you’re in that chair, you’re the king.” “No,” I said. “I may be in the chair but everyone knows that the king is elsewhere. No thanks.” John wanted to know the “real” reason. I said that I had noticed that almost every TV host had written a book that no one wanted to read because they felt that they already knew the author far too well from television to want to know more. So, as a writer for life, I didn’t want to lose readers.
It is now time for me to explain what a writer for life—a novelist—was doing on television even though, as of 1962, I had had two successful plays on Broadway and was writing films, but not novels.
TEN
In World War Two, I was first mate of an army freight-supply ship in the Aleutians. At nineteen, on the long night watches in port at Dutch Harbor, I began a novel set on a ship in the Aleutians—where else? At twenty I was transferred to Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, California: hypothermia—from exposure to the icy Bering Sea—had led to what was misdiagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. I was offered a lifelong pension if I stayed in the army for another two years (the war had just ended). I said no to the pension if I could be let go right away. Characteristically, on principle, the army held on to me another year and so I became a mess officer at Camp Gordon Johnson on the Gulf of Mexico. After my wisdom teeth were pulled (an eccentric army “cure” for what was finally diagnosed as osteoarthrosis) I was freed. Today I have an artificial knee and no pension. The novel Williwaw was published in 1946 to amiable reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere. A second novel did less well; a third, The City and the Pillar, earned me a letter of congratulations from Dr. Kinsey, himself about to be world famous for his report on the sex life of the human male. But the daily reviewer for the Times, a Mr. Prescott, told Nick Wreden, my editor at E. P. Dutton, that not only would he not review my story of a love affair between two “normal” male athletes, but because of the great horror that I had perpetrated in book-chat land he (the most powerful reviewer of the day writing regularly in the daily Times) would never again read much less review a book of mine. That was how seven novels of mine went unreviewed in the daily Times. Since Time and Newsweek usually followed the Times’s lead, I was neatly erased as a novelist in Freedom’s Land. A professor who lectures on my work tells me that academics to this day refuse to believe that the Times could ever have done such a thing. Such is simple faith. Happily, England continued to take notice of the books. But, in order to make a living, I turned to one Harold Franklin, an agent at the William Morris office. Since he was more virtuous rabbi than showbiz hustler, he patiently introduced me to live television drama in 1954, where I flourished until branching out into films for Hollywood (as the last contract writer hired by MGM) and from there I moved on to the Broadway stage with Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man. I had also found that I enjoyed essay writing, particularly in a recently established publication called The New York Review of Books. Finally, by 1964, I was back to novel writing, obliging the aged Mr. Prescott to break his vow and come out of retirement to attack Julian, with no discernible effect: his day was done while I had a number of days newly begun. In 1960 I staged a political play on Broadway at the same time I was also the Democrat-Liberal candidate for Congress in New York’s 29th District, polling the most votes for a Democrat since 1910 when Franklin D. Roosevelt won a seat in the state senate because so many of the local Republican voters thought that he was his distant cousin Theodore and so voted for him. But once “tricked” they never voted for him again. Since I had practically no money to buy radio time (there was no TV station in the district) for a congressional race, I went on the various national talk shows of which there were at least a dozen. Several insisted that my opponent, the incumbent Republican, be given equal time. Although he’d served several terms as representative to Congress, he had wisely remained unknown to his constituents, secure in the knowledge that the McKinley vote was forever his. He did not go on television, and won. In 1964 I was again offered the nomination but as I was again a novelist I passed the nomination on to Joe Resnick of Kingston who did win. During 1960, I appeared with Jack Paar, Carson, Steve Allen, Merv Griffin: in fact, anywhere that I could get through to the large audience. In the process, I may, also, inadvertently, have changed American publishing. Julian, my return to the novel, was not exactly a crackling sexy airport noveclass="underline" this reflective narrative was about the origins of Christianity and the Emperor Julian’s failed attempt to establish religious tolerance in the place of that Christian absolutism installed by his kinsman, Constantine. I had written a book plainly ill suited for raffish bestsellerdom.