An immensely informative and insightful account of the personal and professional life of this heretofore inscrutable entertainment icon ... Full of compelling vignettes.
Short but florid, Carson the Magnificent is a memorial of the monoculture; a steady parade of mostly men chatting companionably to one another on a padded sectional ... Carson’s work was to keep the show going, not to dwell on unpleasant topics (including politics), and Zehme follows suit ... The book’s title, and its light glide over his womanizing and sometimes violent alcoholism, suggest that in real life, too, he was a master of disguise and escape.
Its prologue, written by Thomas, is moving and crucially important ... The backstory doesn’t upstage the biography; it deepens it, imbuing what might have been a conventionally snappy celebrity showbiz tale with a bittersweet sense of loss and accomplishment ... Until Zehme could discover a eureka insight to Carson’s encased personality, he was compelled to construct his biography from the outside, zealously collecting as many clips, scraps of personal memorabilia and insights ... Delivers the man in full while keeping the mystery of what made him tick alive.
An impressionistic, besotted portrait that has the obsessiveness of your favorite deep-dive podcast ... Zehme leans into Carson’s incongruities with unconcealed pleasure. Zehme made his reputation writing about celebrities for Rolling Stone and Esquire with discursive brio and high style ... An ode to an inscrutable man, a thoughtful appreciation for how Carson’s televised presence reassured a nation as he sent us off to dreamland.
Despite Zehme’s years of doubt and apprehension, however, the pair ultimately did a masterful job of revealing the unseen side of a man ... Zehme seems to have discovered that being 'Johnny Carson' was ultimately the Great Carsoni’s most magnificent trick of all.
As much the definitive testimony of a Carson fan as it is a definitive biography, a decades-long labor of love ... Zehme’s research was voluminous ... More disturbing is Zehme’s willingness to underplay Carson’s lifelong habit of infidelity and his catastrophic relationship with alcohol ... Zehme is too good a journalist to ignore the more troubling aspects of his subject, who was often described off-stage as cold and aloof, but he is also too big a fan, perhaps, to explore them fully.
Perhaps because Zehme’s style cannot be imitated, or because Thomas had to work fast, or because he loved and idolized Zehme just as Zehme loved and idolized Johnny Carson, he appears to have left Zehme’s work completely untouched, and focussed solely on writing the final chapters of the story ... An exquisite corpse. The first three-quarters is chronologically scrambled and written in Zehme’s fevered post-Tom Wolfe style, filled with parentheticals, italics, digressions, and sentences that rival Victor Hugo’s in length. Then, at the beginning of the sixth chapter, the book becomes a competently told, straightforward biography of the end of Carson’s life. What emerges from all this is less a portrait of Carson than a portrait of Zehme’s obsession with Carson. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Writers’ obsessions can illuminate their subjects in ways that more dispassionate approaches can’t. But, in this instance, Zehme’s compulsive overwriting and anti-dramatic priorities settle over Carson like a fog ... One problem complicating Zehme’s bid to solve the Carson mystery is that he often dwells on odd irrelevancies ... Thomas is far more comfortable with the biographer’s traditional role.
He jumps time and space seamlessly and creates an immediacy with his prose ... Zehme digs deeply into the public and private lives of Johnny Carson and presents them unvarnished ... There is much to this entertaining and informative biography, including the analysis of this particular time and place in American life, as well as the history of television.
Zehme opens the first chapters of his Carson biography in the style of comedic monologue, every sentence carrying some connotation of wink ... Ultimately best as an introduction to the generations that never knew Carson, and are looking to get a feel for the glamor and impact of the most influential late show host of all time.
Perceptive and beautiful ... Filled with tidbits such as the origin of the famous golf swing and humanizing stories of regret over losing his first wife to divorce and his son to a car accident, Zehme expertly fully captures a full portrait of Carson.
Despite the purple prose, the result is an entertaining look at not only a unique figure in 20th-century popular culture but also a bygone era in American television. A fun if overly flamboyant appreciation of a TV giant.
