Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin

(Eamon Dolan, $28)

“This is not the Johnny Carson we saw on television every night for 30 years,” said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. While the longtime Tonight Show host charmed millions with his affable onscreen demeanor, Henry Bushkin, Carson’s former lawyer and confidant, has written a credible tell-all that paints a far uglier picture. A drinker and philanderer capable of withering cruelty, this Carson cheered his mother’s death, refused to visit an adult son hospitalized for showing suicidal tendencies, and once got so friendly with a mobster’s girlfriend that he had a contract put on his head. Given that Bushkin is betraying a friendship, “it’s an appalling book on its face.” Yet “don’t, for a minute, think that I didn’t devour it.”

Bushkin isn’t the first writer to explore Carson’s dark side, but he “seems to have a true inside track,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. On the very night after his 1970 job interview, he accompanied Carson as the gun-toting star sought to expose his second wife’s infidelity by breaking into an apartment she was keeping. But after 18 years of responding to Carson’s every beck and call, Bushkin was fired by his friend and sued for alleged malpractice. That’s why a reader needs to be wary of trusting Bushkin, said Robert Bianco in USA Today. Even when he’s admitting his own marital infidelities, he throws in the “jaw-dropping” claim that he was just following Carson’s lead.

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But Bushkin’s “often insightful” memoir is not a mere hatchet job, said Malcolm Jones in TheDailyBeast.com. We hear about Carson’s virtues, too, such as his generosity and his willingness to let other performers—including many young comedians—upstage him on The Tonight Show. TV’s greatest straight man was also acutely aware of his flaws, once admitting to Bushkin after a few drinks, “If a doctor opened up my chest right now, he couldn’t find a heart, or any goddamn thing.” That moment aside, the Carson we meet in Bushkin’s memoir remains an enigma. “But so what? Johnny Carson was the perfect host. Don’t get greedy.”