Kabir Bhatia has a question…
I figure you can answer this. When Johnny Carson was hosting The Tonight Show, what was the order of succession for people to fill in for Ed McMahon? I have it as:
Doc, Tommy Newsom, Ed Shaugnessy. What about beyond that? Was it different when the show was in New York?
When the show was in New York and Ed McMahon was out, they'd bring in a substitute announcer. Jack Lescoulie did it a few times as did a number of different staff guys at NBC.
Once they'd relocated to Burbank, Ed began getting a lot of outside offers and taking more and more nights off. Johnny decided it didn't work to put an outsider in that slot so they set up a simple rule. When Ed was out, Doc Severinsen would move over from bandleader to act as announcer while band member Tommy Newsom would serve as bandleader. If Ed was there and Doc wasn't, Tommy would serve as bandleader. If Doc was serving as announcer and Tommy was out, another band member — Shelly Cohen — would be the bandleader.
I don't recall Ed Shaugnessy, who was the Tonight Show drummer for a long time, ever announcing. I do have a vague memory of him being bandleader a few nights when both Doc and Tommy couldn't do it. And maybe one other guy from the band got to do it once or twice. But usually the line of succession for bandleader was Doc, Tommy and Shelly — in that order.
An old Tonight Show staff member told me the following. One night, both Ed and Doc were off and so Tommy Newsom was the announcer and Shelly Cohen led the band. I think this happened more than once and Johnny was very unhappy about it. Tommy was a great musician and arranger but he wasn't great as an announcer…and there were two other problems.
One was that part of the announcer's duty was to handle the audience warm-up and one night when Tommy announced and the audience didn't laugh a lot at Johnny, that was blamed on Tommy's limited ability as a warm-up guy. Also, whenever Tommy announced or was out in front of the band, it inevitably led to jokes about him being dull and boring. Johnny had decided that those bits with Tommy were getting dull and boring and that Tommy should no longer announce or front the band — or appear in sketches as he sometimes did.
Ed and Doc were told to knock off their extra-curricular activities and Ed (especially) had to be there any time Johnny was hosting. Ed moved all his outside gigs (Star Search, Budweiser, Publishers Clearing House, etc.) to the nights when guest hosts were there. Doc stopped taking nights off and when Ed wasn't present, Doc would serve as bandleader and announcer. Tommy Newsom — still in the band — could step in if Doc was out due to illness, which I'm not sure ever happened once these new rules were in place.
Before they got this system working, there were a few nights when they needed a fill-in announcer and they tried using Carol Wayne — which didn't work at all — and there was one night when producer Fred DeCordova was the announcer. And I guess it's safe to tell you that the person who told me most of this stuff was Fred DeCordova. After Leno took over, Freddie stayed on for a time as a consultant and he seemed to have nothing to do but tell stories to people like me who ran into him in the halls.
During Jay Leno's long run as substitute host, he occasionally had Ed McMahon there as his announcer but usually, it was Doc doing double duty as announcer and bandleader. I heard a story once — I can't vouch for its accuracy — that there was talk of adding someone else to the team who could serve as Jay's announcer-sidekick and possibly even be there if needed for a Carson night. Furthermore, the story goes, the main person mentioned for this position was Phil Hartman, who was then ready to leave Saturday Night Live.
Hartman, it is said, felt he'd gone as far as he could on that show and wanted to live full-time at his home in Los Angeles (out in Encino, actually) for personal reasons and also to get a film career going. This is one of those stories that made the rounds in two different versions and that always causes me to wonder if either is true.
In one version, it didn't happen because Lorne Michaels objected. Even if Hartman wanted to make the switch, Michaels didn't like the idea of another NBC late night show stealing away one of his key cast members. In the other version, the notion was killed because everyone at NBC was afraid it would piss off Michaels so it never became an issue. I would guess that if either version is true, it would have been the latter.
