Johnny Carson she was at once the most watched and the most elusive star in television history—a familiar and even intimate presence inside American homes for three decades, yet impossible to truly know.

Bill Zehmauthor and famed magazine profiler, doggedly followed Carson through the final years of his own life, seeking to craft a biography that would delve deep into the murky waters that made up Carson’s ever-stirring personality.

For a long time, the world of books, the world of late-night TV, and the wider world of fans of the megastar that was Carson, wondered whether Zehme’s exhaustive effort to capture the man would ever be published.

When the author died in 2023, 18 years after his Moby-Dick-like subject, it seemed the answer would be no.

But thanks to a devoted editor and the work of a longtime colleague and friend of Zehme’s, Mike Thomasthe book, Carson the Magnificentfinally arrived. (It hits bookstores today.)

It is not, Thomas said in a telephone interview, intended to be an official and definitive biography of the King of Late Night, despite Zehme’s massive to staggering accumulation of what Thomas called “Carsonia.” It is instead very much Bill Zehme’s personal take on the comedian, a tribute more than a standard biography, but not a hagiography. “It’s a wart and also a tribute,” Thomas said.

Zehme, who has already interviewed Carson for an article in Esquire after the star’s withdrawal from Tonight’s showsigned his book deal in 2005. From there, he painstakingly assembled what Thomas describes as “a huge storage cabinet” containing audio tapes, DVDs, photographs, transcript sheets of taped interviews with everyone , from Carson’s writers and poker buddies, to two of his ex-wives, as well as memorabilia from a comedy album he made in the 1960s with Ed McMahon, to a tie from the Johnny Carson fashion line, to a giant pink check made out to the band leader Doc Severinsenfor some reason.

It also amazingly contained verbatim transcripts of each edition of the Tonight’s show which Carson has hosted since 1972, along with assorted other shows from the 1960s. (Most of Carson’s 1960s shows were infamously and shockingly deleted by NBC.)

Thomas received Zehme’s 75,000-word unfinished manuscript. Not surprisingly, when approached a little over a year ago by Simon and Shuster CEO Jon Karp, who originally commissioned Zehme’s book, to try to complete the work, Thomas was “completely discouraged.”

“We had Bill, who was big in the magazine world, and Johnny, who was big in the television world,” Thomas said. After gaining access to all the materials Zehme had collected, he said, “I was totally overwhelmed.”

In addition to the pressure to do justice to capturing the enigma that was Carson, Thomas faced the challenge of collaborating with an author he admired so much and one who wrote in such a distinct style that he would have been a foolish to try to imitate him.

“To repeat Bill’s style would have been a travesty,” Thomas said. All he could do was ‘write the way I write, which is more of a simple style and I hope it blends in with Bill’s style. My side is linear. I don’t write as fancy as Bill Zehme, let me put it that way.”

Thomas had a lot of ground to cover. Zehme’s script, which flashed back and forth idiosyncratically, effectively ended when Carson moved The Tonight Show to LA in 1972. That meant Thomas had two-thirds of Carson’s career to deal with—primarily based on the impressive research of Zehme, although Thomas conducted a number of interviews on his own.

The book speaks distinctly in Zehme’s voice for the first half; the author frequently introduces himself in the first person. This was characteristic of Zehme. “There’s no royal third person with Bill,” Thomas said with an affectionate laugh.

It is evident in Zehme’s part of the book that the author was looking to somehow duplicate the success he had in capturing the essence of another iconic star, Frank Sinatra, in his previous book, The way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’.’

Thomas said, “Initially, Bill thought his performance might be a lot sharper than it turned out, because he had done it with Sinatra. But Johnny wasn’t giving in to the Sinatra treatment. It was indoors where Sinatra lived his life out loud. So that was part of Bill’s frustration.”

The book delves into some aspects of Carson’s dark side. “Not everything is a tribute,” Thomas said. “There’s Johnny drinking; Johnny makes a woman; Johnny’s bad behavior.”

That darker side formed the core of an earlier Carson chronicle written by his personal attorney and close friend, Henry Bushkin. The salad stories described by Buskin are not included here. Bushkin, despite the ugly breakup of the association (Carson accused him of business betrayals), is mentioned only in passing. So did Joan Rivers, who had the famous fight with Johnny.

“It was a choice,” Thomas said. “There were certain aspects of Johnny’s life that I had to tune into shortly after.”

The deeper stuff, the more meaningful stuff, Thomas said, is what makes up most of the book: the talent, the dynamism, the social awkwardness, the personal shortcomings, the vulnerability that made Carson who he was.

It may not be a book marked by a long list of definitive revelations, as they can be largely within reach in such an elusive figure, but “There are little revelations about him after all,” Thomas said.

He expressed pride in his own contributions to the book, but said it remains Bill Zehme’s interpretation of Johnny Carson, expressed in his own personal, non-linear and non-literal style. “Johnny is best described in metaphor,” Thomas said.

Dive deeper:
Read an excerpt from Carson the Magnificent