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Tuesday, June 23. 2009
End of the Legacy
After nearly 40 years, I no longer watch The Tonight Show. I’ve never considered Conan O’Brien funny and would only watch his show if there was a guest I wanted to see. Jay Leno was a great host and a good fit to take the place of Carson in 1992 when the “King of Late Night” retired.Leno was forced to retire this year to make way for O’Brien, who was promised the chair of The Tonight Show about three years ago so NBC could hold onto O’Brien and the younger demographic audience he attracted. But he isn’t funny.
It was 1969 when I first got hooked. The Tonight Show was still broadcast from New York City and on occasion the show would air from Los Angeles. Those were special shows with a brighter set and the funny skits were geared to all the clichés we harbored concerning Hollywood and California. Johnny Carson was the host and Ed McMahon his trusty sidekick.
They moved the show permanently from New York to Los Angeles in May 1972. People under the age of 45 probably have no idea the show was once broadcast from New York. Before I started watching the host was Jack Paar and before him Steve Allen.
Johnny mastered the talk show monologue and even when the jokes were bad he could wring a laugh from his audience. It helped to have a sidekick who laughed at just about everything and there was no mistaking Ed McMahon’s deep booming laugh.
In the late 1990’s Garry Shandling had a show on HBO called The Larry Sanders Show about a TV talk show host, Larry Sanders, played by Shandling, and the characters that made up the program. The Sanders sidekick was a man named Hank Kingsley, played by Jeffrey Tambor.
On the show Hank was a bumbling idiot, often the butt of Larry’s jokes and the one who got screwed when “things changed.” He got no respect and was often reminded that before he was the sidekick of Larry Sanders he was just a cruise ship comedian.
Hank Kingsley bore no resemblance to Ed McMahon though. The Tonight Show icon was a Marine Corps fighter pilot when he broke into show business in the 1950’s. When McMahon was serving his country he flew missions over Korea and before that, was about to be deployed in the South Pacific during World War II. The atomic bombs saved McMahon from that tour of duty.Garry Shandling famously said the fictional relationship between Larry Sanders and Hank Kingsley was based on the one between Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon.
That’s often been a source of wonderment for me because the fictional character Hank bore no resemblance to Ed. It’s true Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson were never real personal friends, but there always was a current of respect between the two when the program was on the air. Not so with Hank Kingsley and Larry Sanders. That Carson treated McMahon the way Sanders treated Kingsley was and is a hard pill to swallow.
The sad news today is that Ed McMahon has died. He was going through financially difficult times, has law suits against him to collect money, almost lost his Beverly Hills home to foreclosure, fell and broke his neck a while back which probably contributed to the pneumonia that finally ended his life.Despite all that, Ed McMahon was/is a beloved figure in America, more so than Johnny Carson. Gregarious, McMahon was a pitchman for many products, most notably Budweiser beer and went on to host several TV shows including Star Search, a program that launched the careers of many artists from a variety of genres.
Ed McMahon, despite his human flaws, is a person to be admired.
Mark Sanford, Republican governor of South Carolina, is someone to question. The chief executive of a state takes off for several days without telling anyone, well he may have told his wife he was going, doesn’t tell anyone where he is until people start asking questions.
His apologists are miffed because he is being criticized for being out of touch for six days now, but if an emergency were to arise, could the state of South Carolina afford the delay of trying to find the governor to make crucial decisions.
As we have found out the governor decided to hike the Appalachian Trail, to do some writing were told. He wanted to get away from his kids over Fathers Day. This man gets more curious the more we read and hear about him.
Sanford was the most outspoken governor in opposition to President Obama’s stimulus package. He refused to take the stimulus money if it couldn’t be used to pay down South Carolina’s debt. Members of his own party, along with Democrats, in South Carolina sued him to take the money. He lost that battle and was forced to accept the money for the projects and purposes the president imposed. Like a good Southerner, Sanford resurrected the old cry, “States Rights!” That fell flat.
Not much of a battle cry when a vast majority of your constituency, regardless of party affiliation, disagrees with you and demands the money be accepted. So the governor had to go lick his wounds and disappeared for a week to do so.
The story is the governor let his staff (but not his wife) know where he was going and would be “hard to reach.” Yeah … the staff had no idea when the mini-crisis first hit the airwaves. They probably didn’t know until Monday when the governor checked in with his office.
The problem with any chief executive disappearing for a week is that for governors, by law they are the only ones who can make certain decisions, including on when and how to use the state National Guard. If a governor is incapacitated or otherwise unable to make decisions, there is a process to transfer power to his Lieutenant Governor. Sanford didn’t do that and potentially could have caused a serious crisis if an emergency had occurred. But the governor didn’t care. He needed to get away and the rest of his state be damned!
The problem for the rest of us is this: he plans to run for president in 2012. Gotta ask yourself before you make your selection in the Republican primary: Do you want a guy who walked out on his job and left his state in a potentially dangerous lurch as president? Pundits believe this incident won’t make a difference in three years, but Republican voters may want to remember it. It goes to the question of trust; can we trust a man as president who is so cavalier about his job, not to mention his attitude towards his family. He wanted to get away from his kids over the Fathers Day weekend?Where is that covered in the Republicans’ “family values?” he didn’t even tell his wife where he was going, unless she lied to everyone when she said she didn’t know. Isn’t lying covered in the Ten Commandments?
Mark Sanford for president — we’ve already had eight years of a dishonest, absentee president, we don’t need a disappearing president.
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