Latest news with #CarsontheMagnificent
Time of India
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Joanna Carson passes away: All about Johnny Carson's third wife's net worth
Joanna Carson, model and third wife of , passed away at the age of 88. As per the reports, her death was announced privately in July this year. Reportedly, the funeral was held last week. The AIDS Foundation confirmed the news with a Facebook post on July 30. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The post read, "Remembering ETAF's dear friends and supporters, Joanna Carson and Wallis Annenberg, who embodied our founder, Elizabeth Taylor's spirit of love and support." Now, for those who have come to read about Joanna's net worth, let's check it out. Joanna Carson's net worth According to a website named BiographyKind, the estimated net worth of Jonanna was USD 20–30 million. On the other hand, Global Stardom reported it to be between USD 5 million and USD 12 million. As per the report, Joanna's sources of income were said to be her divorce settlements and other investments, along with what she earned during her modelling days. Joanna divorced Johnny Carson in 1985, ending their 12-year marriage. And as per HOLA!, the settlement amount paid during that time was USD 20 million. Also, it goes without saying that the divorce is considered as one of the most expensive ones in the entertainment world. Joanna and Johnny's love story The couple got hitched in 1972. Their romance started after they met at the 21 Club in New York a year before. The TV host and comedian once told PEOPLE that he was flirting like a "sophomore" when they met for the first time. Reportedly, she was the highest-paid model at that time. She was living with her son Tim from her first marriage with former World Backgammon Champion Tim Holland. Johnny and Joanna later moved to California. Though she was not keen to shift her base from New York to California, Johnny's The Tonight Show was moved to the latter state. The TV host convinced her when he said that they are going to get married. In the biography, 'Carson the Magnificent', Joanna mentioned Johnny's drinking habit. Also, even the comedian himself admitted the same in an interview with 60 Minutes.
Hindustan Times
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Joanna and Johnny Carson: How they met, relationship details and divorce reason
Joanna Carson, Johnny Carson's third wife, has passed away. Her demise was reportedly announced privately in July and the funeral was last week. Johnny and Joanna ended up having their first date celebrating Carson's 46th birthday.(X/@NyraKraal) Joanna, born Johanna Ulrich, was raised in New York and before meeting Carson, was married to world famous backgammon player Tim Holland, with whom she had a son – Joe. They were together for six years, after which she turned to modelling as a way to sustain herself. How Johnny Carson met Joanna Modelling might have been the means to an end for Joanna at the start, but by the time she met Carson in 1971, she was already one of the top-paid models in Manhattan. The two met at the 21 Club New York, and the Tonight Show host would later tell People magazine that he was 'flirting like a sophomore' the first time they met. Johnny and Joanna ended up having their first date celebrating Carson's 46th birthday. Reportedly, after that he would call her each day at 4:30 pm for a year. The two ended up marrying in 1972 – a year after they met – and also the same year Carson divorced his second wife, Joanne. Carson reportedly surprised everyone by announcing his marriage while celebrating his 10th anniversary at the Tonight Show on September 30, 1972. Ruta Lee, actor-turned-socialite, who knew the two, told People 'Joanna's very accomplished at being a woman. I admire her femininity—her accommodation to men. It's as if she made a study of how Josephine handled Napoleon. I don't mean she's manipulative. She just has a wonderfully sensitive approach to men.' However, Carson and Joanna would divorce in 1985. Why Johnny Carson and Joanna divorced While the exact reason for Carson and Joanna's split is not known, the talk show host has, in the past, shared his struggles with marriage. 'If I had given as much to marriage as I gave to The Tonight Show, I'd probably have a hell of a marriage,' he had once told People. Carson also often made self-deprecating jokes over his divorce settlement. Joanna had demanded $220,000 a month in the divorce settlement, and ultimately got $35,000, as per the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, Extra reported that the 1985 settlement gave her a whopping $20 million. A biography, titled Carson the Magnificent written by Bill Zehme, claims that his struggles with alcohol cast a shadow on all marriages, including that with Joanna. 'During that black drunk phase, I was scared,' she reportedly said in an interview, as per the book, adding, "Sometimes anything could set him off. Those were the scary times.'
Hindustan Times
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Joanna Carson dies: A look at Johnny Carson's third wife's net worth
Joanna Carson, a model and Johnny Carson's third wife, has died at 88. Extra cited social media posts from friends saying Joanna's death was announced privately in July. Her funeral was held last week. Joanna Carson dies: A look at Johnny Carson's third wife's net worth (The Way We Were Photos/Facebook) The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation announced the model's death in a Facebook post on July 30. "Remembering ETAF's dear friends and supporters, Joanna Carson and Wallis Annenberg, who embodied our Founder, Elizabeth Taylor's spirit of love and support," the post read. What was Joanna Carson's net worth? According to Jonanna had an estimated net worth of $20–30 million as of 2025. However, Global Stardom says Joanna's estimated net worth is between $5 million to $12 million. Her main sources of income, besides what she earned in her modelling career, are believed to be her divorce settlements and investments. Read More | Frederick Smith net worth: Here's how much late FedEx founder earned in his career Johnny and Joanna divorced in 1985 after 12 years of marriage, and their divorce was estimated at $20 million ($48 million inflation adjusted), according to HOLA! The pair's divorce is considered one of the most expensive divorces in history. Johnny and Joanna married in 1972 after meeting at the 21 Club in New York the year before. Johnny later told People that he was "flirting like a sophomore' during their first meeting. At the time, Joanna was one of New York's highest-paid models and had been divorced from former World Backgammon Champion Tim Holland since 1966. She was living with her son Tim in a small apartment when the two met. Johnny and Joanna landed in trouble when The Tonight Show, which Johnny hosted, was moved from New York to California. Joanna, who was a die-hard New Yorker, refused to make the move, but Johnny demanded it, 'You're coming to California with Tim and we're going to be married," she recalled him saying. Read More | Anne Burrell net worth: How much did Food Network star earn in her career? The couple eventually moved to Burbank, California. Joanna, however, did not have a very keen interest in Johnny's work. 'I don't have that much to say about Johnny's work,' she previously said. 'It's not my place." Later, in the biography Carson the Magnificent, Joanna recalled Johnny's drinking habit. In fact, Johnny himself admitted to his temper in a 1979 interview with 60 Minutes. "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," he said. "And it would happen just like that!"
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Book excerpt: "Carson the Magnificent"
We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. Journalist Bill Zehme profiled Johnny Carson for Esquire magazine in 2002 – it was the only interview the "Tonight Show" host did following his retirement – and when Carson died in 2005 at age 79, Zehme embarked on an exhaustively researched biography of the man who remade late-night TV. But a cancer diagnosis stalled his work, and Zehme died in 2023, his Carson biography unfinished. His former research assistant, Mike Thomas, set out to complete it, and last November Simon & Schuster published Zehme's "Carson the Magnificent." It earned stellar reviews and landed on The New York Times Bestseller List. Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Jim Axelrod's report on the legendary Johnny Carson, including an interview with Mike Thomas, on "CBS Sunday Morning" March 2! "Carson the Magnificent" Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. "I'd like to say hi to my mom. Unfortunately, she's watching Ted Koppel. That's her idea of a son!" — Johnny Carson, outset of The Tonight Show monologue, August 6, 1982 (ten weeks before his 57th birthday "One got the impression that Johnny's relationship with his mother was complex. Once, when I came into his office, he told me that his mother had just angrily hung up on him. I asked why, and he said, 'I called and asked her how things were going. She said, "Not so good. Yesterday, we put Walter Burbage in the ground." I said, 'Was he dead?'" —Emailed anecdote from Carson monologue writer Michael Barrie The complexities of Ruth Elizabeth Hook Carson—woman of grand flair and mannered propriety, poker-game hellcat, preternaturally withholding, crisp, exacting, colorful, misunderstood—imbued her son Johnny, in particular, with even deeper complexities. But without them, he would not have grown into what he needed to be. Which is how it has worked, vis-à-vis powerful men re: their mothers, since time and nimble psyches began ticking. Arguably, traces of this mother mixed throughout the bulk content of her middle child's infamous tightly packed suitcase. The parts of her that he would directly adopt into his own makeup were also, in no small measure, the same parts of her to which he was forced to adapt—or steel himself against—from tender years onward. So it followed that he had sired three sons who would also never quite believe they were unconditionally adored (or, at times, much cared for) —no matter that his own cloistered heart wanted far better for them than he had ever gotten. Demonstrating the difference, of course, was the big hitch, since no affirming example had been drummed into him. Instead, his protectiveness for the boys showed up as a brisk tough love (with sweet dashes of twinkle)—which mostly left them wanting, especially in a household that grew more and more unstable and where their father was mostly missing in action. Thus, the circle stayed unbroken—a fact he would later grasp with sizable remorse. Except it was a frozen, paralytic remorse that all but stymied him from correcting matters. "It was very hard," says Suzanne Pleshette, who saw the toll of these struggles across many years. "I know all of the children of all of the big stars. And all of these kids have a lot of legitimate complaints—and yet it's these guys' demons that made them who they are, and also who their children ended up becoming. Johnny's relationship with his sons was difficult and bittersweet—especially knowing that he felt that he hadn't given what they deserved to have. In some ways, he had probably replicated what was painful for him. And he didn't quite have the ability to know how to fix it." At best, he did find a way to address that niggling impulse—by proxy, anyway. Long after the die was cast and the boys had become men, he would softly bolster younger fathers who found themselves in grim marital straits, almost wistfully forking over his two cents in a manner akin to don't-do-as-I-do-just-do-as-I-say. (It was a singular exception to his tendency to stifle advice dispensation.) The comedian and fail-safe guest Robert Klein, whose only child, a son, was born in 1983, had been one such beneficiary—absorbing repeated doses of concern during Tonight Show commercial breaks (which was when the host deigned to socialize, selectively but also genuinely, with preferred or privileged seat-fillers). "He was very, very kind to me when I was going through a terrible divorce [in 1988]," Klein told People. "He advised me to make sure to let my boy know that I love him very much, and he kept telling me this over and over." Like any comedy pro, Johnny Carson knew that misadventures in fatherhood were tantamount to gold, especially after intervening years, or decades, had diluted whatever traumas may have been part of the payoff. (See comedy theorem of tragedy-plus-time-equals-funny.) Like the night of December 10, 1981, when he was caught, post-commercial break, interacting with his Burbank studio constituency: "I was telling the audience the story about the guinea pigs," he explained to viewers, a bit ominously. "I don't want to repeat it—maybe later. But never buy your children little guinea pigs in New York and then put them outside at night. They were hard as a carp!" This material, of course, was basically the benign stuff of typical suburban cocktail party patter—except his shaggy parenting tales were magnified via coast-to-coast broadcast, albeit in distant aftermath. "I know my dad enjoyed wearing the mantle of fatherhood with his friends and acquaintances," Carson's youngest son Cory mordantly notes. "Always been a part of the irony for me. And it's okay." But The Tonight Show was always going to be where he shared himself most generously (eking out, via chatty dollops of personal history, the autobiography he refused to write) and, during those confessional or conversational asides, his sons' names and pursuits would often trip eagerly—and proudly—from his tongue. As these things went, his fame would certainly, if unintentionally, form their lives as much as he fought against it by leaning hard on them. Phil Donahue aimed in early 1970 to pry open that worm-can, asking him: "When you first signed an autograph in front of your kids, how did they respond? Did it affect them in a way that undermines your ability to be their father?" To which he replied, after a confounded pause, "I don't know. It's hard to ask your own children." Email from Cory Carson, August 2, 2005: My feelings about my Dad are quite mixed. Professionally he was without a doubt most suited for the career he sought. The right man for the job and ... at the right time in history. On the personal side of the coin, he left his kids and family as a consequence to [pursue] that professional end and, as a result, made life most difficult for those left to watch the "magic" unfold without the benefit of experiencing it with him. I think he was typical of most entertainers in that area though, so whaddaya gonna do? Work was easy for him, family was not. Email from Cory Carson, August 3, 2005: I understand my dad's foibles better than any, been a lifetime study. I am free of feeling unworthy though, that was a biggie many years ago. 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? Ten minutes of material! Hey!!! (snare-kick sound) Show bidness. Gotta love it. *** While Carson's love for his sons rarely manifested in hugs and attaboys, it was nonetheless tucked away in subterranean seams awaiting extraction. On June 21, 1991, it exploded to the surface. Carson was only a month into his valedictory season when, toward the end of a two-week vacation, he learned that his son and middle child, Rick, had died in a car accident near Morro Bay, on the Southern California coast. Investigators determined that the thirty-nine-year-old amateur photographer had likely been taking or setting up for photos when his SUV plunged 125 feet down an embankment, fatally injuring him. There was talk of Carson's returning to The Tonight Show as scheduled, but he was too devastated and needed more time. Only a few weeks later, however, he was back on the job. "The first time I spoke with him [on the phone], I didn't know what to say," says Helen Sanders, Carson's longtime executive assistant. "The thing that came out of my mouth was 'I just wish I could give you a big hug.' Afterward, I thought, What a stupid thing to say! Why did I say that? I felt so dumb. The day he came [back] to do the show, the first thing I noticed is that he had no energy. He always had a sparkling energy; you could see the sparks come off him. But he was like a shell. It scared me. I said, 'Hi.' I didn't really know what to say; I was trying to act normal. He just stood there and said, 'Can I have that hug?' I got up, and I just gave him a big hug. We hugged and cried together. I felt him just take my energy. I feel really good about the fact that I made a really safe, calm place for him to be that afternoon." When Carson's writers gathered that day for their regular meeting, he told them, "Don't ever go through this, guys." Then it was business as usual, the show going on as it must. Rick had been a second assistant director on the pilot for Amen, recalls Ed. Weinberger, a short-lived Carson Productions president and former Tonight Show writer. "But he wasn't prepared to work, and I feel very bad about that. That's a very serious regret that I was not more patient or understanding—but [we were] in the midst of doing the show and with actors saying, 'He can't do his job' and 'I didn't come out of my dressing room because I didn't know that I was due.'" There were all kinds of things, so I let him go. He called me one night when he had obviously been drinking, and he said, 'I know why ... I understand ... You're a lot like my father …' He went on for thirty-five, forty minutes just rambling about who he was, what he was. He was lost." Rick's pal Danny Robinson, son of Tonight Show talent manager Bud Robinson, knew him on a much different level. "He was hilarious—killer sense of humor," Robinson says, adding that of Carson's sons, Rick most closely reflected his father. "He had the same sort of energy, the same sense of humor." Carson, too, saw the resemblance, telling second ex Joanne that "he was so like me in so many ways." But Carson could be cold and cruel. According to Tonight Show associate producer Tom Boles, "there was not a mean bone in [Rick's] body. I think his own individuality was so eclipsed by Johnny's mega-stardom that he was unable to exist as his own individual. It was impossible for him to be anything more than Johnny's son." Boles also notes, "I would see [Johnny's youngest son] Cory in the halls of NBC. He'd be around the Tonight Show irregularly. You could tell he didn't bear that same weight that Rick did. It's hard to put your finger on Rick. There was something troubled about him. You kind of felt bad for the guy." After Rick died, Danny and Boles attended a memorial that Rick's girlfriend and some of his friends held at the tiny and historic Little Brown Church, on Coldwater Canyon Avenue in Studio City. Attendees received laminated memorial cards that bore one of Rick's lush landscape photos—a blue sky, brown mountains, and water. On its flip side were Rick's birthdate and words typically attributed to Scottish poet Thomas Campbell: "To live in the hearts of those you leave behind is not to die." By Robinson's account, former Tomorrow Show host (and Rick's former boss when he worked on the program as a stage manager and associate director) Tom Snyder attended. So did various Tonight Show staffers, people from the Today show, and others who'd known Rick. "Johnny didn't come, and I get it," Robinson says. "I buried my parents, and that was as hard as anything I ever want to do in my life. And I've buried, unfortunately, enough friends. I can't imagine burying your child. But here's what Johnny said: 'Where I go, the press will go. I don't want it to turn into a circus.' Personally, I would have loved for Johnny to be there because he would have gotten to see a side of Ricky that maybe he never saw." During Rick's stint at the Tomorrow Show, he'd become friends with producer and director Andy Friendly (son of CBS legend Fred Friendly). "His death, following a difficult time in his life, was devastating to me, and to all of his friends and Tomorrow Show colleagues," Friendly wrote in an excerpt from his 2017 memoir Willing to Be Lucky: Adventures in Life and Television. "I wrote a long letter to his dad expressing my sympathy and describing the kind, fun-loving, great person and colleague Rick was." Carson replied with a brief note of thanks. During the first Tonight Show taping after Rick's death, on July 17, 1991, Carson made no mention of the sensitive subject up top. ("We were all on tenterhooks, walking on eggshells," Ed McMahon says. "Worrying about how he was gonna do the show.") Instead, he delivered a joke-filled monologue and interviewed guests Bernadette Peters (who also sang) and Earvin "Magic" Johnson before delivering a eulogy for Rick from behind his desk near the show's end. For such an interior and private man it was no small feat, and at times he stifled tears. Two days after Rick died, he said, Carson's good friend, the actor and director Michael Landon, had called to offer consolation. Landon was deeply unwell at the time and died of pancreatic cancer the following week. "So these have not been the most happy several weeks," Carson said. With a photo of his handsome boy displayed on monitors—not to be "mawkish," he assured, but because it was a better representation than the driver's license shot used in press reports—Carson described Rick as "an exuberant young man, fun to be around. When Rick was around you wanted to smile." Carson briefly glanced off to the wings, where he could hear de Cordova on the phone with director Bobby Quinn, letting him know they were running long. De Cordova also flashed Carson a stunningly ill-timed sign to wrap things up. (The gaffe damaged their decades-long relationship, though they reportedly mended fences before de Cordova died in 2001.) Tamping down his anger like a musket ball, Carson went on as if nothing had happened: "He tried so darn hard to please. He had a laugh that was contagious as could be. Luckily he left some marvelous memories for the whole family, and that's what you kind of hang on to." A montage of Rick's photographs followed, accompanied by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble's languid jazzy-bluesy tune "Riviera Paradise"—urban vistas and rural horizons; shores beneath mountains and crashing surf; a wildflower field and a poplar grove. ("This one goes out to anyone who's suffering in any way," Vaughn said before an October 10, 1989, performance of the song at Austin City Limits.) The moving segment lasted five and a half minutes. Prolonged emotionalism, even in the wake of such a crushing personal loss, wasn't Carson's style. Offstage, though, his quiet grieving never ended. Recalling the impact of Rick's death two decades after it happened, Severinsen said, "Johnny was never the same, ever, after that." Excerpted from "Carson the Magnificent" by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas. Copyright © 2024 by Bill Zehme. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Get the book here: "Carson the Magnificent" Buy locally from For more info: "Carson the Magnificent" by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas (Simon & Schuster), in Hardcover, Large Print, eBook and Audio formats Preliminary autopsy report findings in deaths of Gene Hackman, wife Heated Trump-Zelenskyy meeting in Oval Office | Special Report Iconic rollercoaster Kingda Ka imploded at Six Flags
CBS News
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
The hidden side of Johnny Carson
It may not look like much now, but once upon a time, Stage 1 at the Burbank Studios was where the king of comedy held court, addressing his subjects at the end of each day. Johnny Carson presided over not just late night, but American popular culture. "Johnny Carson was the biggest star in America," said writer Mike Thomas. "Movie stars, rock stars, I don't think anybody was bigger than Johnny, because he was on night after night after night." Thomas' new book is "Carson the Magnificent," a biography of Carson his late friend Bill Zehme started. Everybody who was anybody appeared on "The Tonight Show," and 17 million Americans tuned in – many from their beds. It was Johnny Carson vs. sleep, and sleep usually lost. "It did!" said Thomas. "I think Johnny brought a lot of people peace at the end of the day. People love to laugh, but I think he gave them hope that the world would go on the next day no matter what was happening." His audience – more than triple the size of all three current network late-night shows combined – made him the national agenda setter of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. "Johnny would say things and do things that became water cooler conversation the next morning," said Thomas. It also made Johnny the pre-eminent Hollywood talent broker for several generations. Fifty-seven years after comedian Robert Klein made the first of his 97 appearances on "The Tonight Show," he's still grateful for the rocket fuel career boost that Carson's imprimatur provided. "He's one of the most important people in my life, and we were not personal friends," Klein said. For his career, Klein said Carson was the most important: "Appearances on that show were everything. I am a creature of 'The Tonight Show.' That was the vertebra of my career." Comedian George Wallace knew what was on the line when he did Carson: an invitation to "The Tonight Show" was a necessary bullet point on his resume – and each appearance was a climb up comedy's Everest. And then, when the routine would end, comedians would look nervously at the desk, waiting to see if Carson gave then the OK. "Always got that," said Wallace. I asked, "Were you looking for it?" "Hell, yeah. I was looking for it!" he said. But what he was also looking for was a gesture from Carson to come over to the couch. "I didn't get that," he said. Forty years later, this big-time comedy headliner still feels he didn't make the "Tonight Show" summit. I asked, "What did that mean to get called over?" "That meant that you're in," said Wallace. "You got called over, you're in the club." He said the fact that he did get that "kinda hurts today." All that power, rested in the hands of a complicated man: master connector at work, cold and aloof at home. "I think there were two Johnnys to a certain degree," said Thomas. "On screen, impossibly cool guy. But there was also the side of Johnny that was introverted off-screen. I think some of the aloofness may have been introversion." In Mike Wallace's classic "60 minutes" profile in 1979, Carson acknowledged the dichotomy. He said, "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. See, when I'm in front of an audience, it's a different thing." Life with no audience was challenging for Carson. He was married four times. "Johnny needed to be married for some reason; he needed to be with someone," said Thomas. "He didn't need to stay married. They would fall out. Johnny's behavior would pry them apart. They just never lasted." But actress Dyan Cannon has a different story to tell. "Aloof and cold? Never." She described him as "Warm, open, willing. I've never known anyone like him. I've never known anyone like Johnny." And this from a woman who was married to Cary Grant. "Cary was more of an enigma," said Cannon. "Much more of a, 'Can I approach him or can't I?' But people would approach Johnny as if he were family." "So, it was a different kind of star?" I asked. "There was nobody as big a star as Johnny." In a "Tonight Show" episode from October 1985, where Cannon and Carson are chatting, she flustered the normally unflappable Carson as she held his hand. "Hi, sweetheart," she said. "We've gone out a couple of times, right?" he said. Cannon erupted in laughter – as did Cannon today, re-watching the video. "He still makes me laugh," she said. Asked what exactly was going on there, Cannon laughed again: "Well, you will never know! You will never, never know!" "You gotta give me a little somethin' here." "Oh, no, I don't!" she laughed. To hear her tell it, this was not a man who had trouble understanding women. "How do I describe a relationship where you're so intimate with somebody, and yet, you haven't been intimate physically? We were closer than that." I asked, "Would you describe it as a love affair?" "Yes, absolutely, a love affair," Cannon said. "Absolutely. Real love. Physically, we were never together. But spiritually, we were." "In some ways, it sounds like you're describing the love of your life?" "Isn't that interesting?" said Cannon. "Wow. Hope you're hearing this, Johnny!" Maybe Carson was just like so many of us, full of contradictions … only ours aren't examined by millions under the brightest lights our culture has to offer. Whoever Johnny Carson was, safe to say, in our deeply fragmented culture, there will never be another. As Mike Thomas put it, "We're all siloed. We're all watching things that either confirm our own biases or that are attuned to our own specific sense of humor. There will never be that communal experience again where people watch the show at the same time and then talk about the show the next day. It was a communal experience. That was part of the magic of Carson: community."
