11 Surprising Things We Learned About Johnny Carson From His New Biography

4. Carson had surprising other talents

He was wickedly good with a bow and arrow. In 1959, he went on I’ve Got a Secret and shot an apple perched on the head of its trembling host, Garry Moore. He was also not bad at dancing the hula.

5. The host was a victim of death threats and at least one extortion attempt

“He got death threats in the mail weekly,” former Tonight Show co-head writer Andrew Nicholls says. “And he still went through the curtain.” In the ‘70s, another Tonight Show writer walked into Carson’s office “to find him bare-chested, an F.B.I. agent fitting him with a wire” after Carson dropped off what the criminal thought was $250,000 in an extortion sting. Police nabbed the perp.

Johhny Carson and his first wife, Jody, with their sons Christopher, left, Richard and Cory at their home in Encino, California, in the mid-1950s.

Archive Photos/Getty Images

6. He was a lousy husband and father

Married four times, Carson always put the show before family. “He was too busy for us,” said his first wife, Jody, the mother of his three sons. Cory, the youngest of the three, noted, “Work was easy for him, family was not. Imagine witnessing the little guests that would frequent the show and having my dad absolutely enthralled with their every word. What did they have that we didn’t?” Years later, the famous host admitted, “If I had given as much to marriage as I gave to The Tonight Show, I’d probably have a hell of a marriage.”

Johnny Carson with his third wife, Joanna. The talk show host was married four times.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

7. Drinking made him mean, and his wives bore the brunt

Throughout his marriages, Carson, who was known to pound the wall with his fist after something went wrong on the air, took out his frustrations on his wives in “legendary rows,” Zehme writes. He often drank to blackout, and that, coupled with his nasty temper, made for frightening times in public (he tipped over a table in Las Vegas) and physical bruises in private. Said third wife, Joanna, “Anything could set him off. I remember my son ran out of the bedroom and said, ‘Did he hurt you, Mom? Did he hurt you?’”

As Carson put it to Mike Wallace in 1979, “I found out I just did not drink well. And when I did drink — rather than a lot of people who become fun-loving, gregarious, and love everybody — I would go just the opposite. And it would happen like that!” he added, smacking his hands together.

8. His personal pain was enormous

In an unusual moment of candor, he told Playboy magazine in 1967 that his divorce from Jody, his college sweetheart, was “the lowest I’ve ever felt, the worst personal experience of my life.” She didn’t feel the same; she said he totally dominated her (“He selected my clothes. I was a captive”), and prayed he would fall to his death while he was hanging outside of the house washing windows.

“I have never had a more intimate relationship with anyone than I have had with you,” he wrote in a letter to her as the marriage was crumbling. “Perhaps my own capacity for happiness is lacking. I feel so insecure at times that I lash out and make those closest to me miserable.”  

A possibly worse moment came in 1991 when his middle son, Rick, the one most like him, died in a car accident. Carson spoke emotionally of it on the air, but did not attend Rick’s memorial service, fearing his presence would turn it “into a circus.”

Wendy Perl/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images

9. He got the jitters

Though he practiced detached coolness on TV, privately, “the outward relaxed appearance often does not match the inner feelings,” he wrote in a survey for Esquire magazine in 1962. “Sometimes after a program someone will comment on how relaxed I seemed to be…when in truth, I felt like I was coming unglued.” To stave off anxiety, he drummed with his pencil, wore lucky cuff links, and bounced before he went on stage.

Johnny Carson bids goodbye in May 1992 after nearly 30 years as host of "The Tonight Show."

Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images

10. He blindsided NBC about his retirement

Carson was so secretive about his planned exit from The Tonight Show that when he made the announcement to an assemblage of NBC brass at Carnegie Hall in 1991, they hadn’t seen it coming. It “drove NBC crazy,” Bill Carter, then the TV reporter for the New York Times said. “They had no press release, they didn’t know what to do.”

"Tonight Show" announcer Ed McMahon, left, and Johnny Carson on set in the mid-1970s.

NBCUniversal via Getty Images

11. Carson said he would have done it all again — The Tonight Show part, anyway

In his moving, celebratory last night as host, the show played a montage of highlights from his legendary run, to which he replied, “If I could magically somehow make that tape you just saw run backward, I’d like to do the whole thing all over again.” Zehme adds, “In that moment, at least, he may well have meant it.”