Goodnight, Johnny…

I was home with my mom Sunday night when I heard that Johnny Carson had died, which was only fitting, since it was thanks to my permissive parents that I got to stay up late so often as a child and watch The Tonight Show. I think if I could pick an entertainment figure I'd most want to emulate, it would be Johnny Carson. "You should live your life"—I'm paraphrasing Mark Twain here—"such that when you go, even the undertaker will be sad." And that's exactly what it seems Carson did. If you've paid any attention at all to the various obituaries and tributes over the past couple of days, no one seems to have an unkind word for him, unusual in this day and age. It's hardly the usual deferential not speaking ill of the dead. Johnny Carson, it seems, was nothing but genuine and absolutely nice.

That was certainly my experience.

When I was nine years old, I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to be a professional magician when I grew up. I'd read in some fan magazine or another that Johnny Carson had performed magic when he was younger and so, seeing him as a successful TV star and seeking advice for my future career, I sat down at my mother's tank of an IBM electric typewriter and hunted-and-pecked a note to him, enclosing a Polaroid photo of me holding a fanned deck of cards and wearing an absurdly oversized felt top hat.

Looking back as an adult, I would say the best I could have expected was a form letter or canned response sent by a flunky and mechanically signed. What I received instead a few weeks later was a handwritten two-page note, encouraging me to keep practicing my tricks, and an 8x10 personally autographed photo of Johnny Carson. I still have and treasure them both.

Several years later, I was in Los Angeles visiting a friend who worked at NBC whose office happened to be on the same lot as Carson's production company. While waiting for Marc to meet me for lunch, I glanced across the parking area and, in the distance, saw someone I was sure was Johnny Carson. He was chatting with someone and when his companion walked away, he looked up and almost directly at me. It was him! Impulsively, I raised my arm and waved vigorously. I almost immediately felt the fool but, to my astonishment, he waved back, smiled then turned and walked into a nearby building.

I never got to step through that rainbow-colored curtain. I never got to sit on the couch next to Ed McMahon and plug my latest book. I never got to hob-knob in the green room with Joan Embry and Charo. But Johnny Carson gave me career advice and Johnny Carson waved me a jaunty hello. I wish there was—as those colorful interstitial cards on TV used to say—"More to Come" but there's not.

Goodbye, Carnac the Magnificent. So long, Floyd C. Turbo and sayonara Art Fern. Goodnight, Johnny...and thanks.

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