Johnny

It was sometime in the afternoon, between laundry and sweeping the snow off the car. The news from Iraq is bad, and the terror thing is a dull ache that feels like the cold outside. I checked the e-mail and saw that the little news icon on the welcome screen had his picture on it.

I was curious. He had been in the news the other day, a bit celebrating his renowned and determined privacy, but that he still contributed an occasional joke to Jay Leno and Dave Letterman.

Then, yesterday he was dead. He was as regular a feature in my life as the Washington’s Monument in my morning commute. He came from Nebraska, and became the epitome of cool in the Big Apple and tinsel Town. He had a thirty year run as host of the Tonight Show, taking over the franchise bookend to the Today show on NBC with Dave Garroway.

I think I remember Jack Paar, the first host of the show. Maybe I remember only the washed-out kinescopes. But Johnny was there for all the days I was growing up, and the days of my adulthood. He retired in 1992, going out on top thirteen years ago. By my feeble math, that means he took over the show when I was ten years old, and a middle-aged man when he retired.

Every night, or almost every night he was right there in our bedrooms. He probably had passive intimate relations with most of America in his time. We participated in his epic battles with NBC management, the reduction of his show from 90 minutes to an hour, his relocation to the West Coast from New York, a metaphor for what was happening to the larger nation, the center of gravity shifting west.

We wondered what was in that coffee cup on his desk, and remembered when he stopped smoking on the air. Emphysema is what killed him, and I don’t know if he continued to smoke off camera, like Tom Brokaw. He was intensely private, considering that he slept with all of us.

I remember his lapels over the years, and his haircuts. He had a short crew-cut when he started, and a button-down shirt under his three-button suit. His lapels rose and fell with the times, sometimes peaked and prominent and sometimes narrow and subdued.

I remember he adopted one of those hairstyles with short bangs that made the celebrities look like Ceasar Augustus. I don’t know how long that lasted, but I’m glad it ended. It must have been in the seventies sometime.

It is astonishing how deep that intimacy was. Jack Nicholson used Ed McMahon’s trademark greeting in the movie The Shining, when he punched through the door with the fire ax, his manic rubber face screwed up as he said: ”Heeeeeres Johhhhny!”

Ed is still alive, someplace. I read an article about his life and times in the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine that I get monthly, complements of my life membership. I read it on the airplane going south for a memorial ceremony last week. That is normally how I get rid of the stack of magazines that pile up unread in a stack by my brown chair. I read them and leave them behind in the waiting areas and on the airplane seats and bedside.

Ed was interviewed because, in addition to everything else, he had been a Colonel in the Marine Reserves. He was called back to active duty for Korea. He talked about what it was like in the early days of television, how his life had overlapped vaudeville and the strange new medium.

Johnnie was a vet, too, a ninety-day-wonder Naval Officer. They talked about their service once in a while on the air. It was not a big deal for them, since everybody went off to the War. He invented the format, pioneered the monologue, and the desk and the couch alongside are all his.

Immutable. Timeless.

A different generation, and now they are leaving us. I got an e-mail from a friend this morning who observed that ”The rest of our lives will be spent first watching as our childhood idols continue to die, and then we get to watch our peers and each other die.”

He didn’t say Carpe Diem. He just suggested that we have a great time now, while it lasts.

It seems reasonable to me. I will go to work this morning, since I still have some obligations to take care of. But I will go into the icy blast and slippery streets thinking that the world is a little smaller. And that I should reach out and seize the day.

One never knows how many there will be.

Copytight 2005 Vic Socotra

Go Back