JOHNNY CARSON.(The Talk of the Town)(Obituary)

How strange it was to learn, on a Sunday, that Johnny Carson had died. Strange that it was a Sunday--one of only two nights of the week that he had not owned. That day, we didn't even have Letterman or Leno to look forward to in the hope that they would say something trenchant and touching. They did issue statements, but, because they weren't there in person to deliver them, their words went no deeper than the quite good statement put out by President Bush, who didn't know Carson and doesn't owe his career to him. (We can only dream about the jokes that Carson might have made about Bush.) But that was fine. This time, our own thoughts were enough. If Johnny hadn't made our careers, he had, after all, made our nights, and almost thirteen years after he was gone from public view--and there has hardly been a figure in show business who was as gone as Carson was after he did his last show--we could still hear his voice and see his slow burns and double takes. His show, inevitably, had become cornier and less appealing to young people as it, and they, aged, and all those reruns in the later years were a drag, but, until the end, our pleasure in witnessing Carson's snap-to bearing, his perfect pauses, and his collapses into laughter, sometimes to the point of tears, stayed at full brim.

Carson aged remarkably well, in terms of both his looks and his well-stropped performing edge, and even when he retired, at sixty-seven, he made it possible for fans to maintain an image of him as being perpetually in the prime of his life. Not middle-aged; not that. Never that. But definitely an adult, and fixed in a certain time when adulthood was something to aspire to, not something to be avoided. (Or perhaps it was just that adulthood came knocking, regardless of your aspirations. In old home-movie footage shot by Carson's father which is included in a 1982 NBC special called "Johnny Goes Home," a sentimental journey back to Norfolk, Nebraska, Carson and six of his friends are shown smiling for the camera the day before they all headed off to military service, in 1943. They had just graduated from high school.)

Think of Carson and the picture that comes into focus is that of a debonair man in his mid-forties, in well-fitting sports jacket and tie and pressed slacks--the kind of dress that upper-middle-class men used to wear to dinner parties until the seventies, when there was at least a little formality at almost every occasion except a barbecue. He represented a world, and a time of day, that had nothing to do with children, and if you were quite young when you first watched him that made him even more glamorous and mysterious--much as adulthood itself was glamorous ...