In Arnie Kogen's fine piece on the legendary comedy writer Pat McCormick, much was made of the time Pat "streaked" The Tonight Show during one of Johnny Carson's monologue. A video clip was also included. This led to this question from Andy Rose…
Do you have any idea if that was planned? Johnny seemed genuinely surprised, and you can see a cop hovering behind Ed afterward. On the other hand, both the cameraman and the spotlight operator seemed prepared for it.
Utterly, absolutely planned. First off, earlier in that monologue, Johnny said something like, "There's a rumor that we're going to be streaked this evening." Now, how would such a rumor have been floating around unless it was planned? Real streakers don't announce their intentions in advance and put Security on alert. And why would Johnny mention it if it wasn't sure to happen?
Secondly, to get in and into a position where you could do that on that stage was just about impossible unless the staff arranged it. And getting outta there was even more difficult.
Thirdly, if an unwelcome stranger had done that, NBC Security would have tackled the guy, had him arrested and cut the whole thing from the tape. They would have done that even if he hadn't been naked because they wouldn't want to give anyone else the idea of disrupting a taping. (Carson, who didn't like surprises, would probably have had the entire Security Squad there fired.)
And finally, Johnny didn't like surprises.
The interesting thing about this, of course, is that it was Pat. Streaking was big at the time, mostly because it was something titillating that the news broadcasts found they could get away with airing. They could claim it was news. So it was kind of natural that someone at the Tonight Show said, "Hey, we should have someone streak during Johnny's monologue" and of course, Johnny okayed it. He was doing streaking jokes every night so it seemed a natural.
Then they had to decide who to have streak, and I'll bet someone's first idea was to get some lovely college-age kids — both male and female. Then, I'm guessing, someone got worried that that would seem exploitative and more like porn than humor…and maybe Standards and Practices got into it and said, "If you block the naughty parts out on the screen, okay but only one streaker." That meant a guy since that was less sexy than a woman…and also, the most publicized streakers were male.
So someone says, "Okay, we need a male streaker who's not too sexy. Who can we get?" And Pat happens to be walking by at that moment.
That was one of the things Pat's friends loved about the guy: He would do anything. Around this time, I was writing a variety show for Dick Clark that taped at NBC, so we often saw Pat in the halls. He was appearing on a lot of sleazy cable shows and for some reason, our writing staff had a little contest amongst ourselves. It was to "invent a mythical cable show that Pat McCormick would refuse to be on for reasons of questionable taste."
We thought of dozens of entries and I wish I could remember the names of any of them…but I recall that we never had a winner. Every time we saw Pat, someone would run to him with the current list and read it to him and Pat would say, "I'd do that show…Sure, I'd do that one…yes, I'd be on that…yes, of course…Oh, I taped that one last week…" He was one of a kind.