What Made Joan Rivers & Johnny Carson Never Speak Again?
A 1965 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson changed Joan Rivers‘ life in a minute (well, 90 minutes). After years of struggle —including sleeping in her car, working as a temp, and one appearance on the Jack Paar Show that got her banned — Rivers’ time cracking wise on Carson’s coveted couch caused the man to remark on-air, “You’re going to be a star.”
This led to more than just a change in Rivers’ immediate fortunes, though the club bookings did start pouring in. It was also the start of Rivers’ long professional relationship with Carson. Over the next 20+ years, she would appear on The Tonight Show almost 100 times. By the early ’80s, she was the show’s go-to guest host when Carson had time off. Though they weren’t close off-stage, Rivers considered Carson a professional mentor who had helped her get to the top. He even introduced her to her husband, Edgar Rosenberg.
Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson backstage in the 1960s. TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection
So what happened in 1986 that caused the pair not only to quit working together, but also to never speak for the rest of Carson’s life?
In the mid-’80s, when Carson had been hosting The Tonight Show for over 20 years, there began to be discussion of Carson’s eventual retirement, and who would host the show next. Rivers, having logged so many hours as the show’s honorary host, assumed her name would be on the short list. But when she saw a list of 10 possible replacements for Carson that had been circulating, she was shocked to find that she was not on it at all.
At the same time, NBC was also dragging their feet about renewing her contract, and Rivers thought she was not being paid what she was worth. Enter the then-new network, FOX, who came to her with a basically irresistible deal: The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, which would make her the first woman to ever host her own late night show. They also would give her husband a job as a producer, and offered her a five-year guaranteed contract, plus $15 million.
Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers and her Husband Edgar Rosenberg at the party after taping the 10th anniversary show in 1972. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Rivers’ husband advised her to not inform Carson about her plans until the deal was finalized, as other comedians who had been Tonight Show regulars were generally banned from the show as soon as they made their intentions to host their own shows known. If that happened to Rivers, it meant she might spend the year or 18 months until her show aired with no TV appearances. And what if she told Carson and then the deal fell through? The famously temperamental host might still give her the cold shoulder.
So Rivers waited until every aspect of the deal was finalized, and about to be publicly announced, before she told Carson.
According to an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, she called Carson up and said “‘Johnny, it’s Joan. I think I’m leaving the show, I have my own show on FOX.’ And he hung up.” She called back, and he hung up again. Carson claimed that the call never happened, and that he learned about the show through a press release. A Tonight Show producer told the L.A. Times that Rivers had not mentioned her own show ever, even when she appeared on The Tonight Show the week before her series was announced. “It came as a real surprise. It’s an unusual way to do business, to say the least,” he said.
In a 2012 article she penned for The Hollywood Reporter, Rivers claimed that Carson lied about never receiving the phone call, and he never spoke to her again: “I would see him in a restaurant and go over and say hello. He wouldn’t talk to me.”
Why did Carson react so harshly? Rivers felt that Carson now viewed her as professional competition and a threat to his business, which made her an enemy — her show was in the same time slot, after all. But she also thought her gender had something to do with it: “I think he really felt because I was a woman that I just was his. That I wouldn’t leave him. I know this sounds very warped. But I don’t understand otherwise what was going on.”
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Once The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers began airing, it had many problems, and some of them had nothing to do with Carson — Rivers’ husband, who was a producer, frequently clashed with the network. But some problems were definitely related to Carson’s wrath, such as her difficulty getting A-list guests to appear on the show. Most refused, either out of loyalty to Carson, or fear of getting on his bad side and no longer being invited on The Tonight Show. Some affiliates allegedly refused to air the show in solidarity with Carson.
After seven months, FOX asked Rivers to fire her husband. She refused, so FOX fired them both, and replaced her as a host. She and Rosenberg separated, and three months after that, he died by suicide.
Rivers was down, but not out. In 1989, she began her comeback with the daytime talk show, The Joan Rivers Show.
Carson never addressed it publicly, but Rivers has at length, both in interviews and in a 1992 segment on her daytime talk show, where she, on the verge of tears, discussed not being invited on The Tonight Show during Carson’s final episodes, and her memories of their better times. “It gave me everything, that show,” she recalled. But being left out of the Carson send-off made it feel “like I never was on that show and it hurts me so much…[Carson] doesn’t like me, too bad, I do like him.”
The story has a slight happy ending, though: In 2014, just a few months before her death, an 81-year-old Joan Rivers finally came back to The Tonight Show, which was by then being hosted by Jimmy Fallon. The pair joked about Rivers’ ban from the show, but when she appeared on Bloomberg afterwards, she called the experience “amazing.” Finally getting back on, she said, “was very emotional.”
Remind 
Classic Comedy Duos
March 2021
Chuckle at television & films funniest comic duos.
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