Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal

influence the way the people at large thought about many things that were often unexamined in the media until he put his satiric spin to them. Montaigne wrote to influence the kings of France and Navarre and so was heeded in a way that the performer Carson was also able to influence, in a much smaller way, American politicians. He once told me that he could predict the winner of any approaching presidential election by the reactions to certain jokes he’d tell to the live audiences at his Burbank studio. He’d make amiable fun—at least it
seemed
amiable—of the entire field but all the time that sharp ear was listening carefully to the laughter and, even more attentively, to the silences. He read this microcosm of the American people like a barometer.
    What was he really like? Well, he was better looking than he looked. Clowning distorts regular features and his were most regular. The eyes were sharp but the most powerful of his senses was that of hearing, detecting false notes and the lessening of an audience’s attention during a joke. The monologue that opened each evening’s
Tonight Show
was carefully written out on long rolls of paper that were unfurled as the monologue got read, and the roll of abandoned script would then float from the stage down into the audience where, like Chinese paper dragons, one could read what he had often abruptly cut on air. The face in repose was as composed as that of Buster Keaton if not as comically frozen. One night in Ravello, after his wife Joanna had gone up to bed, we sat on the balcony overlooking the Gulf of Salerno and talked politics and comedy and got quietly drunk.
    “You know,” he said, “people keep thinking I am this kindly little old Irishman when I’m not little, not kindly, and not Irish but English.” Finally it was that ear, sharp to nuance, which directed his performance. We all have multiple responses to what people say particularly if one is on air and must respond quickly. And so, the appearance of amiability is the wisest defense if what you say might break the spell you are spinning. Hence: mock amazement if sex is in the air or wide-eyed bewilderment at a dangerous turn in a political observation. One night before I came out onstage the producer Freddie De Cordova caught me halfway through the curtain: “No mention of abortion; we’re having trouble this week!” I said, “All right” and stepped into the spotlight upstage center, then turned right to walk to John’s desk where he was unexpectedly beaming. This was unusual. I tried to read his look as I sat in the chair to his right, a swivel chair that tended to slip out from under you in order to face the adjacent couch where other guests might be. “So, Gore, what do
you
think of this right to life movement?” With that, he shoved me into the water, as it were. Offstage, De Cordova looked grim. I started to improvise.
    Unlike most talk-show hosts John liked for his guests to be entertaining and so give him a respite from talking as opposed to reacting. Once, in a break, I told him I’d thought of a funny line about someone but I was afraid it might be too sharp. He drummed on his desk with a long pencil and frowned: “If you ever have the
slightest
doubt about a line
don’t
say it.” The best advice. In front of him just above the camera was a huge clock which, as the minutes passed and guests turned boring, he tended to stare at, waiting to be released from his role. One performance, when he wasn’t looking, a member of the crew pushed back the hands of the clock fifteen minutes. Carson’s momentary look of despair when he saw the clock got a laugh even though the audience had no idea why.
    I first came to his program when he was in a studio on the sixth floor, I think it was, of the NBC building at Rockefeller Center. He had inherited me from his predecessor, Jack Paar, a popular but somewhat eccentric host of
The Tonight Show
.

    John Carson and I warming up on
The Tonight