Between You and Me (34 page)

Carson had to be coaxed into giving his consent to a 60 Minutes profile, and that did not surprise me. It had long been known that behind the genial facade he presented to the millions of viewers who tuned in to The Tonight Show, he was a deeply private man who had a reputation for being standoffish. In particular, he was wary of reporters who tried to pry into his personal life. So getting him to go along with our proposal was a hard sell, and even then the sale did not go through—or at least it did not go through at the time, as planned. Shortly after the event at Harvard, and before I had a chance to interview him, Carson sent word that he had changed his mind; he was no longer amenable to being the subject of a 60 Min-

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utes story. He offered no explanation, and we didn’t press him for one. His decision left us with no choice but to abandon the project, and that was how matters stood for the next two years.

In March 1979, I was a guest on The Tonight Show, and I seized the opportunity to rag Carson—in his own domain—about the way he had “chickened out” on us. I challenged him to reconsider his decision. “What are you afraid of?” I asked in a teasing tone. “What are you trying to hide?”

I really didn’t think that my lighthearted effort to shame him would work, but it did. Not long after my appearance on Tonight, Carson changed his mind again and gave us the green light to do a profile. When I interviewed him that spring at his home in Bel Air, I asked him about his flip-flop reaction to our entreaties.

W A L L A C E : Why are you doing this now?

C A R S O N : Doing what?

W A L L A C E : This. You walked out on us once before. . . .

C A R S O N : Well, I understood that you were paying me a large amount of money for this.

W A L L A C E : You’re wrong!

Much of my work at that time dealt with the misdeeds of rogues and con men, like the ones I wrote about in Chapter Six. I was so deeply immersed in investigative journalism that it had come to be regarded by many as my raison d’être on 60 Minutes. Carson was well aware of that (he claimed to be an avid viewer of our show), and it was his turn to have a little fun at my expense.

C A R S O N : Why are you doing this now? I’m not running a boiler-room operation. I have no phony real-estate scam. I’m not taking any kickbacks. I did steal a ring from Woolworth’s

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once when I was twelve years old, and I think that’s why you’re here.

W A L L A C E : We’re doing this because you’re a national treasure.

That’s what they tell me, you’re a national treasure.

C A R S O N : And you know what the dollar is worth nowadays.

As the interview progressed, we talked about his reputation for being aloof and unfeeling.

W A L L A C E : There’s a stereotype of Carson. You know there is.

C A R S O N : Well, what is it? What is it?

W A L L A C E : Ice water in his veins.

C A R S O N : I had that taken out years ago. I went to Denmark and had that done. It’s all over now.

W A L L A C E : Shy, defensive.

C A R S O N : That’s probably true. I can remember when I was in high school—if I pulled out my old high school annual book and read some of the things, people might say,

“Oh, he’s conceited. He’s aloof.” Actually, that was more shy. When I’m in front of an audience, you see, it’s a different thing. If I’m in front of an audience, I can feel comfortable.

W A L L A C E : Why?

C A R S O N : I’m in control.

More than anything else, it was Carson’s nightly monologues that gave his program a distinctive edge over other talk shows. They were sharply written, and he delivered them with a crisp and precise timing that was one of his comedic strengths. The objects of his wit were not always amused by his put-downs, but he took care to keep

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the ridicule within certain parameters, and he had an unerring sense of where to draw the line. When I asked him about that, Carson cited the example of Congressman Wilbur Mills. Five years before our interview, Mills—who was then the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee—made a fool of himself when he got drunk and went on a moonlight romp in Washington’s Tidal Basin with a striptease dancer named Fannie Fox—aka “The Argentine Firecracker.” That escapade made Mills fair game, a most inviting target, and Carson put the wood to him in several monologues. But, as he made clear in our conversation, he abruptly stopped making fun of Mills when he found out that the congressman “was an alcoholic and had emotional problems and, in fact, was dependent on alcohol.”

Carson himself was known to have had some excessive encounters with the sauce, so when he alluded to Mills’s alcoholism, I couldn’t resist making the connection.

W A L L A C E : Of course, it takes one to know one.

C A R S O N : Ah, cruel. You’re cruel.

W A L L A C E : But there was a time—

C A R S O N : What?

W A L L A C E : Come on. There was a time when—

C A R S O N : I used to have a little pop? I sure did.

W A L L A C E : That’s right.

C A R S O N : I don’t handle it well . . . I found that it’s probably best for me to not really entangle with it, because I just found out that I—I did not drink well. And when I did drink, rather than a lot of people, who become fun-loving and gregarious and love everybody, I would go the opposite. And it would happen (Claps hands) just like that.

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Even though two years had passed since Carson’s award from Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club, we chose to end the piece with our footage of that event. Being honored by that citadel of Ivy League prestige had to be a heady experience for a fellow who had attended the state university in his native Nebraska in the late 1940s. In his acceptance remarks, Carson acknowledged that in his droll and cavalier way.

“This is really lovely,” he told his Hasty Pudding hosts, “but more important than that, I want to thank the club for letting me and my wife stay in the master’s residence last night at Elliott House. You really don’t know what that means. It’s the first time I’ve scored with a chick on a college campus since 1949.”

We repeated our profile of CarsoninMay 1992, when, after thirty years on the throne of late-night television, he finally passed the crown to his successor, Jay Leno. We broadcast the piece just a few nights before the cheery and familiar introduction—“Here’s Johnny!”—was heard for the last time. Inthe years since then, Carsonsteadfastly shunned the limelight, including the one that emanated from 60 Minutes. I tried onseveral occasions to persuade him to let us do anupdate of our 1979 story, one that would allow us to take a look at what he’d beendoing with his life since he left The Tonight Show. His replies were always courteous, evencordial, but the answer was always the same: Thanks, but no thanks. Once he crossed over into retirement, Johnny Carson became an even more vigilant guardian of his privacy.

M e l B ro o k s

I ’ V E I N T E R V I E W E D S O M E O T H E R C O M E D I A N S over the years, from Steve Allen in 1957 to Billy Crystal in 2002. I discovered

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early on that interviews with comedians can often be erratic and mer-curial, and that’s the main reason I’ve been inclined to avoid them or at least approach them warily, with my guard up and all my reflexes on full alert. A good interviewer does his best to control the verbal exchange, to follow the agenda he has put together for the occasion. But comedians resist that. They live for humor and revel in distraction.

Being compulsive jokers, they will say or do almost anything to get a laugh, even (or perhaps especially) if it’s at the expense of the poor souls who are trying to interview them.

As I noted a few pages back, when I interviewed Carson in 1979, he had gentle sport with me for my heavy concentration on investigative stories. It was really quite harmless, but beneath the whimsy, there was a tacit message. In effect, what Carson was saying to me was this: I’m wise to your tricks, Wallace, so don’t try to probe too deeply into my life. I’m not one of your crooks or con men.

Twenty-two years later, when I sat down with Mel Brooks, he quickly took control. The interview was designed to be the center-piece of a 60 Minutes profile of Brooks to be broadcast just before the Broadway opening of his musical The Producers, based on a 1968

movie he had written and directed. At first, when I tried to talk about the show, he preferred to focus on my jewelry and wardrobe.

W A L L A C E : Tell me something. The show—

B R O O K S : Is that a hundred-dollar watch? Let me see that watch.

W A L L A C E : It’s about a forty-dollar watch.

B R O O K S : It’s a beautiful watch.

W A L L A C E : Isn’t it?

B R O O K S : Yeah, I love that.

W A L L A C E : It’s a forty-dollar watch.

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B R O O K S : Really?

W A L L A C E : Yes, lights up in the dark.

B R O O K S : What a cheap son of a bitch you are.

W A L L A C E : You got that right. You’re a great judge of character.

Tell me this—

B R O O K S : What did you pay for your jacket?

W A L L A C E : I don’t know. This is hopsack.

B R O O K S : Hopsack is like fancy burlap, right? Am I right?

W A L L A C E : That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

B R O O K S : It’s like burlap shrunk down. Did you know that six months ago, that your jacket carried coffee beans? Do you realize that? And I’m telling you, that came from Colombia full of coffee. Wait a minute. (Sniffs Wallace’s sleeve) He reeks of Colombian coffee!

I didn’t mind playing straight man to Mel Brooks. As a young man, he was one of the gifted writers who created skits for Sid Caesar’s television show, a stable of talent that included such once-and-future hotshots as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen.

He eventually moved on from television to film, writing and directing such loony, over-the-top comedies as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. But his boldest and most outrageous movie—

and one that many critics and fans regard as his best—was his first feature-length film, The Producers.

The movie’s two main characters are a has-been producer and his accountant, who come up with a scheme to bilk thousands of dollars out of naive investors, most of whom are elderly widows just a few gasps away from their final breath. In order for the swindle to work, the new show for which they’re raising wildly excessive funds must be a surefire flop, a guaranteed loser. Their search for such a property

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leads them to an unreconstructed Nazi who has written a play called Springtime for Hitler, an engaging and nostalgic look at the leader of the Third Reich and his fun-loving cronies. The twist comes when, in the production of the play, Der Führer is portrayed as such a bum-bling buffoon that the audience responds to him with gales of laughter and applause. As a result, the show is a hit, the scam is exposed, and our two heroes are sent off to prison.

Brooks received an Oscar for that year’s best original screenplay, and although The Producers was not as big a box-office success as some of his later films, it did become a kind of cult classic. And that was that until three decades later, when he decided to revive the story as a Broadway musical.

When I interviewed Brooks in 2001, I asked him about his decision to depict one of the most evil men who ever lived as a goofball.

This was his reply:

“Hitler was part of this incredible idea that you could put Jews in concentration camps and kill them. And how do you get even? How do you get even with the man? There’s only one way to get even. You have to bring him down with ridicule. Because if you stand on a soapbox and match him with rhetoric, you’re just as bad as he is. But if you can make people laugh at him, then you’re one up on him. And one of my lifelong jobs has been to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.”

Throughout his long career, Brooks has worn his Jewish heart on his sleeve. There have beenother Jewish comedians who almost never drew attention to their ethnic identity—Jack Benny and Mort Sahl are just two who come to mind—but Brooks’s brand of humor has always beendrivenby a Jewish sensibility, evenwhenthe material was not overtly Jewish. Much of the time, his comedy has had a hard cutting edge; some of his silliest pranks and broad slapstick

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routines have revealed his lifelong resentment of the way Jews have beenpersecuted downthrough the centuries. Still, I never heard Brooks address the questionina serious veinuntil our interview.

WhenI asked him about his seeming obsessionwith Jews and Jewishness, his mood suddenly grew dark, and his voice snapped with indignation.

B R O O K S : Maybe because I’m angry. Who knows? It may be a deep-seated anger at anti-Semitism. Yes, I am a Jew. I am a Jew.

W A L L A C E : Yeah.

B R O O K S : What about it? What about it? What’s so wrong?

What’s the matter with being a Jew? I think there’s a lot of that way down deep beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.

W A L L A C E : You’ve never suffered for being Jewish.

B R O O K S : Oh, and I was in the army. “Jew boy, out of my way.

Out of my face, Jew boy.” This guy called me Jew-something, and I—I walked over to him. I took his helmet off. I said, “I don’t want to hurt your helmet, ’cause it’s GI issue.” And I smashed him in the head with my mess kit.

That outburst really caught me by surprise. Here was a man who had spent his life making jokes about almost everything, and now, in a dramatic turnabout, Brooks was giving our viewers a rare glimpse of the pain and rage lurking behind the mirth.