First published 2013
Henry Bushkin was twenty-seven when Johnny Carson hired him as his attorney in 1970. For the next eighteen years, Bushkin served as Carson's lawyer, confidant, and fixer during the peak of The Tonight Show era. Carson dominated American television from 1962 to 1992, becoming the country's highest-paid entertainer in the seventies and eighties. Behind the charming on-screen persona lay a mercurial and sometimes cruel man who trusted few people completely. Bushkin witnessed Carson's private world firsthand, from helping him break into his wife's Manhattan apartment to gather evidence of her affair, to protecting him from mob entanglements. The book reveals Carson's relationships with Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, Jimmy Stewart, and Kirk Douglas, along with moments like hosting Ronald Reagan's inaugural concert and preventing a drunk Dean Martin from taking the stage. Bushkin explores Carson's contradictions: why the talented womanizer always needed to be married, why he excelled at small talk despite hating it, and why he couldn't visit his hospitalized son or attend his mother's funeral. This insider account exposes both Carson's hidden nature and the star-studded world he commanded.
Genres: biography, 20th-century, american, non-fiction
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: insider-account, personal-life-exposed
Setting: Manhattan, United States
Period: 1970s, 1980s, 1992
279 pages · Hardcover · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt