“Let’s have it quiet, people, please,” the floor manager said pleasantly, and the audience quieted like obedient children. Doc Severinsen’s drummer ran off a fast little riff on his snare and then held his sticks easily between thumbs and fingers, wrists loose, watching the floor manager instead of the clock, as the show – people always did. For crew and performers, the floor manager was the clock. When the second-hand passed the ten, the floor manager counted down aloud to four, and then held up three fingers, two fingers, one finger…and then a clenched fist from which one finger pointed dramatically at the audience. An APPLAUSE sign lit up, but the studio audience was primed to whoop it up; it would have made no difference if it had been written in Sanskrit.
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So things started off just as they were supposed to start off: dead on time. This was not so surprising; there were crewmembers on the Tonight Show who, had they been LAPD officers, could have retired with full benefits. The Doc Severinsen band, one of the best showbands in the world, launched into the familiar theme: Ta-da- da-Da-da … and the large, rolling voice of Ed McMahon cried enthusiastically: “From Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the world, it’s The Tonight Show, live, with Johnny Carson! Tonight, Johnny’s guests are actress Cybill Shepherd of Moonlighting!” Excited applause from the audience.
“Magician Doug Henning!” Even louder applause from the audience.
“Pee Wee Herman!” A fresh wave of applause, this time including hoots of joy from Pee Wee’s rooting section. “From Germany, the Flying Schnauzers, the world’s only canine acrobats!” Increased applause, with a mixture of laughter from the audience. “Not to mention Doc Severinsen, the world’s only Flying Bandleader, and his canine band!”
The band members not playing horns obediently barked. The audience laughed harder, applauded harder.
In the control room of Studio C, no one was laughing.
A man in a loud sport-coat with a shock of curly black hair was standing in the wings, idly snapping his fingers and looking across the stage at Ed, but that was all.
The director signaled for Number Two Cam’s medium shot on Ed for the umpty-umptieth time, and there was Ed on the ON SCREEN
monitors. He barely heard someone mutter, “Where the hell is he?”
before Ed’s rolling tones announced, also for the umpty-umptieth time:
“And now heeeere’s JOHNNY!”
Wild applause from the audience.
“Camera Three,” the director snapped.
“But there’s only that – ”
“Camera Three, goddammit!”
Camera Three came up on the ON SCREEN monitor, showing every TV director’s private nightmare, a dismally empty stage…and then someone, some stranger, was striding confidently into that empty space, just as if he had every right in the world to be there, filling it with unquestionable presence, charm, and authority. But, whoever he was, he was most definitely not Johnny Carson. Nor was it any of the other familiar faces TV and studio audiences had grown used to during Johnny’s absences. This man was taller than Johnny, and instead of the familiar silver hair, there was a luxuriant cap of almost Pan-like black curls. The stranger’s hair was so black that in places it seemed to glow almost blue, like Superman’s hair in the comic-books. The sport-coat he wore was not quite loud enough to put him in the Pleesda-Meetcha-Is-165
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. “Did 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 166
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 167