not quite loud enough to put him in the Pleesda-Meetcha-Is-This-
The-Missus? car salesman category, but Carson would not have
touched it with a twelve-foot pole.
The audience applause continued, but it first seemed to grow
slightly bewildered, and then clearly began to thin.
"What the fuck's going on?" someone in the control room asked.
The director simply watched, mesmerized.
Instead of the familiar swing of the invisible golf-club, punctuated
by a drum-riff and high-spirited hoots of approval from the studio
audience, this dark-haired, broad-shouldered, loud-jacketed,
unknown gentleman began to move his hands up and down, eyes
flicking rhythmically from his moving palms to a spot just above
his head - he was miming a juggler with a lot of fragile items in the
air, and doing it with the easy grace of the long-time showman. It
was only something in his face, something as subtle as a shadow,
that told you the objects were eggs or something, and would break
if dropped. It was, in fact, very like the way Johnny's eyes
followed the invisible ball down the invisible fairway, registering
one that had been righteously stroked ... unless, of course, he chose
to vary the act, which he could and did do from time to time, and
without even breathing hard.
He made a business of dropping the last egg, or whatever the
fragile object was, and his eyes followed it to the floor with
exaggerated dismay. Then, for a moment, he froze. Then he
glanced toward Cam Three Left ... toward Doc and the orchestra,
in other words.
After repeated viewings of the videotape, Dave Cheyney came to
what seemed to him to be an irrefutable conclusion, although many
of his colleagues - including his partner - questioned it.
"He was waiting for a sting," Cheyney said. "Look, you can see it
on his face. It's as old as burlesque."
His partner, Pete Jacoby, said, "I thought burlesque was where the
girl with the heroin habit took off her clothes while the guy with
the heroin habit played the trumpet."
Cheyney gestured at him impatiently. "Think of the lady that used
to play the piano in the silent movies, then. Or the one that used to
do schmaltz on the organ during the radio soaps."
Jacoby looked at him, wide-eyed. 'Mid they have those things
when you were a kid, daddy?" he asked in a falsetto voice.
"Will you for once be serious?" Cheyney asked him. "Because this
is a serious thing we got here, I think."
"What we got here is very simple. We got a nut."
"No," Cheyney said, and hit rewind on the VCR again with one
hand while he lit a fresh cigarette with the other. "What we got is a
seasoned performer who's mad as hell because the guy on the snare
dropped his cue." He paused thoughtfully and added: "Christ,
Johnny does it all the time. And if the guy who was supposed to
lay in the sting dropped his cue, I think he'd look the same way.
By then it didn't matter. The stranger who wasn't Johnny Carson
had time to recover, to look at a flabbergasted Ed McMahon and
say, "The moon must be full tonight, Ed - do you think - " And that
was when the NBC security guards came out and grabbed him.
"Hey! What the fuck do you think you're - "
But by then they had dragged him away.
In the control room of Studio C, there was total silence. The
audience monitors picked up the same silence. Camera Four was
swung toward the audience, and showed a picture of one hundred
and fifty stunned, silent faces. Camera Two, the one medium-close
on Ed McMahon, showed a man who looked almost cosmically
befuddled.
The director took a package of Winstons from his breast pocket,
took one out, put it in his mouth, took it out again and reversed it
so the filter was facing away from him, and abruptly bit the
cigarette in two. He threw the filtered half in one direction and spat
the unfiltered half in another.
"Get up a show from the library with Rickles," he said. "No Joan
Rivers. And if I see Totie Fields, someone's going to get fired."
Then he strode away, head down. He shoved a chair with such
violence on his way out of the control room that it struck the wall,
rebounded, nearly fractured the skull of a white-faced intern from
USC, and fell on its side.
One of the PA's told the intern in a low voice, "Don't worry; that's
just Fred's way of committing honorable seppuku."
The man who was not Johnny Carson was taken, bellowing loudly
not about his lawyer but his team of lawyers, to the Burbank Police
Station. In Burbank, as in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Heights,
there is a wing of the police station which is known simply as
"special security functions." This may cover many aspects of the
sometimes crazed world of Tinsel-Town law enforcement. The
cops don't like it, the cops don't respect it ... but they ride with it.
You don't shit where you eat. Rule One.
"Special security functions" might be the place to which a coke-
snorting movie-star whose last picture grossed seventy million
dollars might be conveyed; the place to which the battered wife of
an extremely powerful film producer might be taken; it was the
place to which the man with the dark crop of curls was taken.
The man who showed up in Johnny Carson's place on the stage of
Studio C on the afternoon of November 29th identified himself as
Ed Paladin, speaking the name with the air of one who expects
everyone who hears it to fall on his or her knees and, perhaps,
genuflect. His California driver's license, Blue Cross - Blue Shield
card, Amex and Diners' Club cards, also identified him as Edward
Paladin.
His trip from Studio C ended, at least temporarily, in a room in the
Burbank PD's "special security" area. The room was panelled with
tough plastic that almost did look like mahogany and furnished
with a low, round couch and tasteful chairs. There was a cigarette
box on the glass-topped coffee table filled with Dunhills, and the
magazines included Fortune and Variety and Vogue and Billboard
and GQ. The wall-to-wall carpet wasn't really ankle-deep but
looked it, and there was a CableView guide on top of the large-
screen TV. There was a bar (now locked), and a very nice neo-
Jackson Pollock painting on one of the walls. The walls, however,
were of drilled cork, and the mirror above the bar was a little bit
too large and a little bit too shiny to be anything but a piece of one-
way glass.
The man who called himself Ed Paladin stuck his hands in his just-
too-loud sport-coat pockets, looked around disgustedly, and said:
"An interrogation room by any other name is still an interrogation
room."
Detective 1st Grade Richard Cheyney looked at him calmly for a
moment. When he spoke, it was in the soft and polite voice that
had earned him the only halfkidding nickname "Detective to the
Stars." Part of the reason he spoke this way was because he
genuinely liked and respected show people. Part of the reason was
because he didn't trust them. Half the time they were lying they
didn't know it.
"Could you tell us, please, Mr Paladin, how you got on the set of
The Tonight Show, and where Johnny Carson is?"
"Who's Johnny Carson?"
Pete Jacoby - who wanted to be Henny Youngman when he grew
up, Cheyney often thought - gave Cheyney a momentary dry look
every bit as good as a Jack Benny deadpan. Then he looked back at
Edward Paladin and said, "Johnny Carson's the guy who used to be
Mr Ed. You know, the talking horse? I mean, a lot of people know
about Mr Ed, the famous talking horse, but an awful lot of people