The late great Johnny Carson is known as one of the funniest men of all time. For 30 years, he dominated the world of late night while hosting The Tonight Show from 1962 until 1992.
Behind the scenes, however, Carson was dealing with a battle with alcoholism that wrecked three of his marriages. This is explored in the new biography “Carson the Magnificent,” which was released earlier this month. The book was written by Mike Thomas and Bill Zehme, the latter of whom sadly died last year.
Carson’s ‘Problems With Alcohol’
“He had major problems with alcohol, especially early on, that turned him into a demon,” Thomas told Fox News. “There are instances where he becomes violent, and he just turns on a dime, and it didn’t even take that much.”
Throughout his life, Carson was married four times. His first marriage was to Jody Wolcott, who he was married to from 1949 until they divorced in 1963. Throughout their marriage, Wolcott allegedly enjoyed getting a rise out of Carson by flirting with other men.
Though they had three sons together, the marriage quickly turned toxic. Zehme wrote that when alcohol was involved, “they both would act out, very badly.”
“She would reportedly dance on tabletops at parties, taunt and ooze caustic sarcasm, and flirt recklessly enough to provoke red-hot demons within him,” Zehme alleged.
“And, if suitably lubricated (it never took more than a couple pops for him to achieve blotto), those demons went on a rampage, and whomever he had been only moments prior would be instantly displaced by an unrecognizable hellion so utterly possessed that he would never quite know the havoc wrought by this doppelgänger… Who had seemed to be him… but it was never really him… except of course it was,” he continued.
“Occasionally he would wake the next day to discover that some such havoc had bruised the flesh of his sons’ mother,” Zehme wrote. “And, in those moments of grim reckoning, nobody could presume to fathom the depths of mortification and self-disgust that metastasized inside of him.”
Sounds pretty scary, and not at all like the Johnny Carson we all know and love.
Carson’s Second Marriage
Carson was then married to Joanne Copeland from 1963 until they divorced in 1972. She would later describe his drinking as “a nightmare.”
“I was married to two different people,” said Copeland, who died in 2015. “He became a tiger… He had a low tolerance….He had blackouts.”
Copeland claimed that some nights, Carson would come home after filming The Tonight Show and rip the sheets off the bed as she slept.
“He’d say, ‘I’m working my a– off, and you’re sleeping in bed,’” she recalled. “This is three in the morning. I was dealing with two people. He had a tremendous anger about women that would come out.”
Related: Johnny Carson Pulls Random Guy Out of Audience – Changes His Life Forever!
Carson’s Third Marriage
Immediately after his divorce from Copeland was finalized in 1972, Carson married his third wife, Joanna Holland. Once again, his relationship with alcohol became a problem in his marriage.
“During that black drunk phase, I was scared,” Holland later said. “Sometimes anything could set him off. Those were the scary times… I tried. I really tried.”
In 1979, Carson admitted during a 60 Minutes interview that he “just did not drink well.”
“And when I did drink — rather than a lot of people who become fun-loving, gregarious, and love everybody — I would go just the opposite,” Carson added. “And it would happen just like that!”
While married to Holland, Carson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of driving over the legal limit in 1982. This resulted in a $603 fine and three years of probation. Carson and Holland divorced three years later in 1985.
“Oddly though, his second and third wives remained close to him – Joanne and Joanna,” Thomas explained. “His third wife became a sounding board for him towards the end of his life. But they were always there. Make of that what you will.”
Related: The Five Best Johnny Carson Show Guests Of All Time
Carson’s Final Marriage
Thankfully, Carson’s final marriage appeared to be a happy one that wasn’t destroyed by alcohol. In 1987, he married Alexis Maas, and they remained together until he died in 2005 at the age of 79.
“It seems like his last marriage to Alexis was the most placid,” Thomas explained. “She let Johnny be Johnny… He was an older guy by then too. He retired five years after they married. And so, of course, he didn’t have the pressures of ‘The Tonight Show.’ As a result, he was likely, at least, a different person than he had been when he was working.”
“People said they saw a lightness in him when she came into his life,” Thomas concluded. “It was probably the least fraught of his relationships from what I’ve gathered.”
Carson’s story serves as a reminder that you never really know what someone is going through behind the scenes. While it’s sad that Carson had these struggles with alcohol, it’s a comfort to know that he overcame them enough to end his life on a happy note!
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