Jason Czeskleba wrote me to ask…
A couple of the Joan Rivers obituaries I've read have made note of the fact that she did not appear on the Tonight Show for some 28 years, after her rift with Johnny Carson. They have said that Carson banned her from the show, and that Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien continued the ban to respect Carson's wishes. That latter assertion doesn't seem plausible to me, that Leno would refrain from booking a guest because simply Johnny was angry at her. Since I know you know several people who worked on Leno's show, I'm wondering if you know whether there's any truth to that claim, and if not, what is the real reason Leno never booked her on his show?
As I understand it, there were several reasons, one being that Jay seems to have not thought she was all that funny…and reportedly, that feeling was mutual.
This whole thing about someone being "banned" is kind of a silly way to look at the booking process on a show like that. I would imagine the talent coordinators could make up a list of several thousand people who wanted to be on The Tonight Show and never got on, including a lot of folks who were regulars with Carson. Was Milton Berle "banned" because he never appeared with Leno? (I'm told he had his agents calling constantly…)
For the cartoon show I voice-direct, I am pitched hundreds of actors for work on the series — submitted by their agents or themselves. Simple math tells you that if there are four openings and 300 submissions, most folks are going to go unhired. After two or three submissions without employment, one or two have gone around claiming that I "banned" them from my show. To me, that's a way of playing the Victim Card, trying to assert that you lost work because of some conspiracy against you personally. I seem to have been banned from winning the California State Lottery.
In Jay's case, there were probably other reasons to not have her on. They'd pretty much have to have talked about why he was host of The Tonight Show and she wasn't — a topic which could have been awkward and too "inside." I don't think Jay would have wanted to say, "Thank you for making some bad career decisions which opened doors for me."
She probably would have engaged in some passive/aggressive Carson-bashing, and some might have interpreted the booking as Jay flipping the bird to Johnny, which he surely did not want to do. I seem to recall Howard Stern, back when he was friendly with Leno, urging Jay to book her as a big F.U. to Carson. If I were Jay, I don't think I would have wanted to open that can of nightcrawlers.
Speaking of which…
Verne Gay over on Newsday recently set out to decide who was in the right in the Johnny Carson-Joan Rivers feud…and he did this without being in a position to know a lot about what was going on between them. Clearly, this was both a business and a personal spat.
Joan was losing ratings and favor as Johnny's regular guest host and would probably not have stayed there for very long. This is something that happens all the time in television. Joan was hired to guest host not forever but for as long as they felt she was doing the job…and I've never heard anyone say she had a promise — verbal or on paper — that she would succeed Johnny. At that point, I don't think Johnny wanted NBC to even be thinking about that…and let's remember: That job did not come open for another six years. And if Johnny was even thinking about who'd succeed him, he was likely thinking Letterman.
I've heard people who were around Johnny cite a number of reasons he was mad at her: He was already unhappy with how she was doing his show. She didn't call to tell him about the new show until it was common knowledge. She tried to hire a lot of his key people away to work on her show. After her show debuted, the set and camerawork looked way too much like his show. She was giving too many interviews trying to portray Johnny as the Bad Guy who was afraid of her and had been rude to her. He felt she was trying to bait him into a big public feud that might attract viewers to her show. And so on.
This "feud" always struck me as pretty one-sided, meaning Joan ran around crying that she was the injured party. She was injured the way anyone involved in any TV show is injured when The Folks Upstairs decide they can put someone or something better in your slot. And she wasn't even injured that much because once she realized she wasn't going to guest host for Johnny indefinitely and then get his job, she made a very lucrative deal with Fox.
I don't think there was anything wrong or unusual about Joan taking that offer. I don't think there was anything wrong or unusual about Carson and/or NBC beginning to talk about replacing her as guest host. And once they found out she'd be competing, I don't think there was anything wrong with NBC yanking her immediately off The Tonight Show, lest she use it to promote her new venture. (If she'd had her way, she would have been hosting The Tonight Show the same week it was announced that she would soon be competing with it.)
As for the personal stuff — why Johnny never spoke to her again, why he allegedly hung up on her — I suspect that was about…personal stuff. Things between them that we don't know about.
Mr. Carson could be a very cold bastard and I gather he attributed his long, long run on TV to sometimes being one. He was pretty ruthless with a lot of people who were at times probably close to him, perhaps closer than Joan Rivers ever was. Not all of those stories make total sense to an outsider, either.
I don't think we'll ever know more than we know now. And what we know now is that she got an offer, she took it and Johnny was pissed about some aspect of that.