Carson Bios As Rare As His Appearances

by Steven Zeitchik, PW Newsline -- Publishers Weekly, 1/25/2005

The death of even a celebrity who led a private life typically will still lead to a very public number of books. But Johnny Carson's passing has resulted in only small scrambles among publishers--and some unusual publishers doing the scrambling.

Whether it's sensitivity or the lack of fresh material, the usual glut isn't shaping up here. The most-up-to-date account--and one of the few books with a live Carson interview--is something called Here's Johnny: Thirty Years of America's Favorite Late-Night Entertainer. The book comes from the unlikely quarters of Nashville's Cumberland House, where author Stephen Cox had the coup.

"It's unusual for a small publisher in Nashville to be fielding phone calls about Johnny Carson," admits the house's Tracy Ford. But some radio interviews and bookseller alerts notwithstanding, the house doesn't seem to be expecting much in the way of new promotion. Though the title has the advantage of being only two years old (most of the Carson bios are clips jobs originally written in the '70's) there isn't a big push either here or anywhere else. (And yes we're aware that the second you write something like this some, new Berg-like project emerges. And not that this has stopped places like Salon from some shrewd clipping of its own; it's excerpted Tonight Show quotes from every celebrity memoir imaginable, from Rocky Graziano to Isaac Asimov.

Perhaps the more notable biographer to cover Carson, Laurence Leamer, has a book with SMP. The press has actually done a reissue...in 1992. Publicity director John Murphy noted some new marketing plans for but had few details by press time. And Warner, who has the Ed McMahon For Laughing Out Loud: My Life and Good Times (BEA trvialists may recall his Navy Pier benefit in support) says that after a Larry King segment tonight, it's not expecting much in the way of public interviews. "And if he's out there, he's out there to remember his friend, not to promote the book," says a spokesperson.

Is Carson, as he's always been, a celebrity-age anomaly, flouting the postmortem rush? Or could it be that we've headed so far into a post-celebrity age that the death of an icon no longer leads to the move-ups, the lay-downs and the out-of-the-woodworks? Perhaps. Or perhaps not yet--asked about new projects, an employee in the office of longtime Carson manager Ed Hookstratten said that the agent would get back to us