Heeeeere's ... Remembering a late-night legend.(People)(Obituary)

IN a box, somewhere in my house, I have a picture of me and Johnny Carson on the set of the old Tonight show. We're standing affably side-by-side, me grinning like an idiot, him with lips pursed in a patient half-smile. We look like a rich uncle and a mildly retarded nephew, meeting awkwardly for the first time. Which in a way we were.

I was then a mid-level writer on the long-running television comedy Cheers, and Johnny had agreed to appear on an episode of the show. So we all trooped over the hill from Hollywood to Burbank--pretty much all of us who worked on the show, even those who, like me, had only the thinnest of reasons for doing so--and stood around in sheepish, clumsy little groupings as Johnny did his scenes, punched up our lines, asked a couple of vague questions, and posed for photographs.

At one point during the shoot, I found myself alone next to him at a small bank of video monitors.

Traditionally, this is the moment during a Hollywood anecdote when something touching or hilarious or meaningful is said, when wisdom is imparted, when insight is gained. What was supposed to happen, in my mind anyway (I was 27 at the time), was Johnny Carson's touching me lightly on the arm and saying, "You want to know the secret to all of this, Rob? The trick to making it through this business?" And then he would tell me, and I would nod and say something incredibly funny, and then he and I would be best friends.

What happened was this: After a few moments of standing side-by-side in total silence, I pointed randomly to one of the monitors and shrugged, all fake-casual, "We'll probably use this angle." To which Johnny Carson nodded and pursed his lips in a patient half-smile while I grinned like a drunkard. Click.

The photograph remains buried in a box in a room upstairs, and when I heard the news that Johnny Carson, the king of television, had died at 79, I fought the icky urge to dig it up, maybe smooth it out a bit, stick it in a frame and display it in some ostentatiously out-of-the-way place in my house, for snooping dinner guests to discover tucked away somewhere. "Oh, that?" I'd say. "Yeah. Johnny. Sad, you know?" And then a cryptic smile and nobody would ever guess that the reason I was smiling so oddly in the picture was that five seconds earlier, I had said something so gratuitous and stupid that I was actually wishing myself into another lifetime.

It wouldn't matter, of course, because a photograph of you and Johnny Carson still packs a bigger punch, status-wise, than a photograph of you and, say, Regis Philbin. Or Jay Leno. Or, really, any of the television personalities that plead from the screen for us to love them unconditionally. People talk about Johnny Carson as cool, or remote, or even a little bit uptight, but the truth is, he was just doing his job with as much dignity as a job like that would allow, which is why, twelve years later, his name still means something while other names--names of people who are currently on television--mean, as we say out here, bupkiss.