The photograph from 1970 shows nothing at all, because it was never published and almost nobody has ever seen it. It was taken inside a small Manhattan apartment late at night by a private detective, while the most trusted man in America stood against the wall of that room and wept. Johnny Carson’s four marriages were messier than his television persona. The night in the apartment began with a job interview.

A young lawyer named Henry Bushkin was in New York in 1970, twenty-seven years old and four years out of law school, and the man interviewing him was the host of the most popular program on American television. The night after the interview, he found himself in a car with that man and two private investigators, on the way to break into an apartment. The apartment belonged, in the technical sense, to Carson’s second wife, Joanne. She had rented it quietly.

He had been paying for it without knowing what it was for. He had grown suspicious, and rather than ask her about it, he had assembled a small team and decided to go and look. Bushkin, whose practice so far had consisted largely of unglamorous work, talked himself into it on the way. His reasoning was that if the husband’s money had paid for the apartment, the husband had some claim to walk into it.

It is not a defense that would survive ten seconds of cross-examination, and he knew it at the time, and he went anyway. That is the first thing worth noticing about the effect Carson had on the people around him. They got in. What they found inside was enough.

Personal items, photographs, and pieces of furniture that had come out of Carson’s own home. The photographs on the windowsill were of a man. According to the account Bushkin published decades later, that man was a famous football player, one of the best-known athletes in New York. There was no ambiguity about any of it.

It was not a set of circumstances that could be explained away over dinner, and everyone standing in that room understood within about ninety seconds what they were looking at. The detective began taking pictures of the room for evidence. Everyone else tried to look at the floor. And then the man whom forty million people watched at the end of every day leaned against the wall and cried in a tiny rented apartment in front of three near-strangers in the middle of the night.

Bushkin wrote that while all this was happening, he happened to glance over and notice that Carson’s raincoat had fallen open, and that underneath it he was wearing a revolver in a holster. Nobody said anything about it. One of the detectives quietly turned the framed photographs face down so their subject was not looking into the room. Then the mood snapped back, the way it always did with him.

Within a few minutes, he was making a joke about it, a good one, built on a comparison between the football player’s position on the field and the state of his marriage. And he said out loud that he thought he might use it in the monologue the following night. They went to a restaurant afterwards, a place in Manhattan where Carson drank late, and he talked for hours. Bushkin, who had known him for roughly thirty-six hours, sat and listened to the most famous broadcaster in the country go through his mother, his childhood, his children, his drinking, his marriages, and his own character in language that was not remotely kind to himself.

At one point he wondered aloud whether he had driven his wife to it. At another he said without any softening that he was not much of a father and did not see his sons. That is the whole man in one evening. The armed break-in, the tears, the joke, the instinct arriving before the grief had even finished, to turn the worst night of his year into material.

Bushkin stayed in the job for eighteen years. After that night, he became the lawyer, the business partner, the tennis partner, the traveling companion, and, in Carson’s own description to a magazine writer, the best friend. A description that apparently surprised Bushkin when he read it in print. That is how the relationship started, with a break-in on day two.

The claim about who the other man was has been disputed by that man’s family, and it came out forty-three years after the fact in a book by somebody Carson eventually fired. But the break-in itself is not in dispute, and neither is what it ended. To understand why a man that beloved was standing in that room at all, you have to go back to a house in Nebraska and to the one person he spent his entire life trying to impress. The boy from Norfolk.

He was born in Corning, Iowa, in 1925 and raised mostly in Norfolk, Nebraska, a small town in a flat state where his father worked for the power company. It was not a poor household, and it was not a dramatic one. It was a respectable Midwestern family in a town of a few thousand people where the winters were long and nobody talked much about how they felt, and the children learned very early that showing too much of anything was a kind of bad manners. At twelve, he found a magic kit, and that was that.

He performed at church functions and service clubs as the Great Carson. He was a shy child who had discovered a way to stand in front of a room full of adults and be in complete control of it, which is a fairly good description of what he did for the next sixty years. The magic is worth pausing on, because he never really gave it up. He kept practicing sleight of hand into his seventies.

He put magicians on the show constantly, and he was the only host in the country who could actually follow what they were doing. The whole discipline is built on one principle: you are in total command of what the audience sees, and they never find out how. He served in the Navy at the end of the Second World War, went to the University of Nebraska, and worked his way up through local radio and television in Omaha and then Los Angeles. In 1962, he took over the Tonight Show.

Within a couple of years, he was the most powerful man in American entertainment. On camera, he was the warmest man alive. Relaxed, quick, generous to guests, capable of sitting in silence for four seconds and getting a bigger laugh from the silence than from anything he could have said. He came into people’s bedrooms every night for thirty years, and he was for most of that country the last friendly voice of the day.

The show itself became an institution in a way that is genuinely hard to explain to anyone who did not live through it. There were three networks. There was one late-night program that mattered. A comedian who did well on that stage had a career the following morning.

A comedian who did not, did not. And the man deciding which was which was sitting six feet away behind a desk. He decided it with a look. Off camera, people who worked with him for decades described somebody almost impossible to reach.

Not cruel. Distant. He did not socialize much with the staff. He did not go to parties if he could avoid them.

He could be in a room with old colleagues and simply not talk. A famous magazine profile of him in the 1970s described the gap between the two versions at length, and everybody who knew him said the profile had it right. In his own accounting, the source of the gap was his mother. Every single person who wrote about him seriously—the profile writer, the lawyer, the biographers who spent years on it—arrived at the same door and found the same thing behind it.

Ruth Carson was, by every description that survives, a cold woman. She did not praise him. He became the most successful entertainer in the country, and it did not appear to move her. There are accounts of him telephoning her after enormous nights and getting a flat response, and of him keeping a note she had written about one of his performances, because it was as close to approval as he ever got.

There is a detail that has stuck with everyone who has ever written about him. When she died, he did not attend the funeral. That is the account given by the man who worked for him at the time, and nobody close to the family has contradicted it. He talked about her when he drank, and he was blunt about it.

He told Bushkin in a restaurant after that night in the apartment that there was no way on earth to please the woman, that she had left him and his siblings without any real warmth, and that this was why his marriages did not work. That is his own explanation, offered while drunk and grieving. So take it for what it is. But it is the one he gave repeatedly across decades to different people.

The marriages he was talking about had started twenty-one years earlier, when he was a twenty-three-year-old radio announcer with no money and an enormous amount of nerve. It began the way most of these stories began in that generation, which is to say young and at a university. He married Joan Walcott—everybody called her Jodie—in Nebraska in October 1949. They had met at the University of Nebraska.

He was twenty-three. She was a few years younger. He had almost nothing when they married. He was working in radio in Nebraska for a wage that did not cover much, doing a bit of magic on the side for extra money, and the two of them lived the way young couples lived in 1949 in that part of the country, which is to say carefully.

Their three sons arrived quickly. Christopher, then Richard, then Cory, all of them born within the first few years. The family moved as his career moved, from Omaha to Los Angeles to New York, into progressively better apartments and then houses, following the work. And the moves themselves were part of the problem.

Every step up in his career meant a new city, a new house, new schools for the boys, and a wife who knew nobody. He was building something, and building it took everything he had, and the family followed the building rather than the other way around. It was, from fairly early on, a difficult marriage, and it was difficult in both directions. There was drinking.

There were arguments in front of other couples at dinner parties, of the kind that make everyone else study the tablecloth. There were long stretches of silence afterwards. A biography published in recent years, drawing on interviews conducted over many years with people who were there, described the pattern in exactly those terms: loud rows or wordless resentment, with not much in between. And there was infidelity on both sides.

That part has never really been contested by anybody, including by him. He was, by his own description and everybody else’s, a man who chased women constantly and did not make much of a secret of it among his friends. The years in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s were also the years he was failing professionally, which did not help. He had his own daytime program for a while, and it was cancelled.

He took work where he could get it. A man who is not succeeding and is drinking and is angry about both is not easy to live with, and by everybody’s account he was not. She filed for divorce in the late 1950s, and it did not take then. What finished it was the biggest thing that ever happened to him professionally.

In October 1962, he took over the Tonight Show, and within months, after fourteen years, the marriage was finished. The divorce came through in 1963. There is a detail about that period that says a lot. In the same stretch of months, he became the most watched man in America and stopped living with his children.

He was thirty-seven. Whatever else was true about the arrangement, the boys were the ones who absorbed it. Three children between the ages of roughly nine and thirteen watched their father become, over the course of a single season, the most recognizable man in the country, and simultaneously stop being in the house. He did not become a present father afterwards.

He was honest about this, brutally so, in private. He told people flatly that he did not see his sons, and he used a word about himself while saying it that was not flattering. His eldest, Chris, went on to become a professional golfer and later worked on the show’s staff. His youngest, Cory, became a musician.

The relationships existed. They were just conducted at a distance that everybody involved understood and nobody quite fixed. That is the marriage that ended in the year he became famous. The next one ended in the apartment with the private detectives.

And the eight years in between are stranger than the ending. He did not spend any time single, then or later. Three of the four marriages began within months of the previous one ending, and the people around him were consistent about the reason: he could not be by himself. Whatever the drinking and the distance and the affairs were about, being alone in a house was not something he was willing to do.

Within months of the first divorce, he married again. Joanne Copeland was a model and television presenter, and by the accounts of the people around him at the time, she was the one who pushed him towards taking the Tonight Show seriously and committing to it rather than treating it as a stopgap. They married in August 1963. She was also, by several accounts, genuinely good for the show in the early years.

She paid attention to it. She had opinions about it, and she told him things nobody on the payroll was willing to tell him. In the period when he was still deciding what the program was going to be, that mattered. For a while, it was the glossiest thing in New York.

They lived well. They were photographed constantly. She gave interviews, appeared on his show, and was, in the terms of that period, a public wife. But the shape of his life had already set into the pattern it would keep for thirty years, and it did not leave much room for anyone.

He taped in the late afternoon, went out afterwards, came home extremely late, and slept into the day. The people he actually talked to were the handful of men who drank with him. His wife lived in the same building as a man who left when it got dark and came back when the city was empty. It is a complaint that sounds trivial when a marriage is glamorous, and it is not trivial at all.

The schedule was not going to change. It had not changed for the first wife, and it would not change for the third. The program came first every day for thirty years, and he said as much himself later: that if he had put into a marriage what he put into that show, he would have had a marriage worth having. She has said since that the loneliness of it was the thing she was least prepared for.

It is worth being even-handed about it, because the account that survives is largely his lawyer’s, and his lawyer worked for him. Carson was not a faithful husband in any of the first three marriages, and made no real attempt to pretend otherwise among the men he drank with. Whatever happened in that rented apartment happened inside a marriage where the traffic had been running in both directions for years. By 1970, it had gone badly wrong in both directions.

And that is where the night in the apartment comes in. What he found there ended it emotionally. The legal end took another two years, and it was ugly and slow, the way those things are when there is money and publicity involved. The divorce was finalized in 1972.

The settlement gave her a monthly payment that continued until she remarried or he died, along with a share of his art collection. She remarried once, briefly. She lived in California for the rest of her life and became, in her own right, a well-known figure in Los Angeles social circles. She was a close friend of the writer Truman Capote, and he was staying at her home in 1984 when he died there.

She died in 2015. There is something almost tender in how she handled it. She had every commercial reason to write the obvious book, and she never did. She kept his name socially for the rest of her life, and the circle she moved in in Los Angeles knew her as somebody who simply did not discuss it.

Asked about him over the years, she talked about a man who could not be reached, rather than a villain. And in the very same year that divorce was finalized, at a party celebrating ten years of his own show, he stood up in front of a room full of people and made an announcement that nobody present had the slightest idea was coming. On the 30th of September 1972, the Tonight Show threw a party for its tenth anniversary under his hosting. Partway through it, he told the room that he had got married that afternoon.

The names have confused people for fifty years, and it is worth saying plainly. The second wife was Joanne. The third wife was Joanna. Different women, one letter apart, married to the same man in consecutive decades.

He noticed the joke in it himself and used it. The bride was Joanna Holland, a former model who had a young son from a previous marriage. Almost nobody at that party had known it was happening. His second divorce had been finalized only weeks earlier, and there was something else that nobody in the room knew, which only came out in Bushkin’s book forty years later.

There had been a prenuptial agreement. It had been drafted, negotiated, and prepared. And in the hours before the ceremony, Carson tore it up. Bushkin, whose actual job was to stop exactly that kind of thing happening, watched it happen and could not prevent it.

By his estimate, that single impulsive gesture cost his client tens of millions of dollars when the marriage eventually ended. There is no good explanation for why he did it, and Bushkin never got one. The likeliest reading is the simplest. He did not want the day to have a document in it.

He wanted, for a few hours, to be a man getting married rather than a corporation merging, and he paid an enormous amount of money for those few hours. For a while, the marriage was the most visible part of his life. They moved into an enormous house in Bel Air. She redecorated it at a cost that became a running joke.

They were photographed at every significant event in Hollywood for a decade, and by the standards of a man who did not like going out, he went out. Her son from the earlier marriage lived with them, and by the accounts that exist, Carson was reasonably good with the boy, which several people around him noted at the time with a certain sadness, given the situation with his own three. There is also an episode from those years that almost nobody remembers, and it is genuinely frightening. Somebody made threats against Joanna and her son and demanded money.

The advice from the police was to let them handle it. Carson ignored that advice and personally delivered the money himself. The man was arrested immediately afterwards. That is a very strange thing for a television host to do.

It is also completely consistent with the man who went into an apartment armed three years earlier rather than ask a question over breakfast. When something threatened him, his instinct was never to delegate it and never to talk about it. It was to go and deal with it himself, quietly, and never mention it on air. The move to California in 1972 changed the arithmetic again.

The show relocated to Burbank, and the life around it became a Los Angeles life. The house, the tennis, the circle of men, the long stretches in Las Vegas where he performed for enormous fees. She had married a New Yorker and ended up somewhere else entirely, married to a man whose working hours had not changed in a decade. The marriage lasted about eleven years in practice.

She filed for divorce in March 1983. The filing itself was a surprise to almost everyone outside the house. The two of them had been photographed together at the presidential inauguration two years earlier, at the center of everything, and the public version of that marriage right up to the last minute was of a couple at the top of Hollywood society. What followed was two years of extremely public legal warfare, conducted while he went out in front of a camera five nights a week and made jokes about it, which he did frequently and savagely at his own expense.

It was at the time the only way America found out anything at all about what was happening in his house. He turned the whole thing into a running segment. For two years, the divorce was one of his most reliable sources of material. Jokes about the cost, jokes about the lawyers, jokes about what was left.

Audiences loved it. What almost nobody noticed at the time is that the jokes were doing the same job the joke in the apartment had done fifteen years earlier: putting a piece of glass between him and the thing that was actually happening. The settlement was finalized in 1985. The document ran to about eighty pages.

She received a reported $20 million in cash and property, a sum that would be worth several times that today, and it was one of the largest divorce settlements in American history at that point. Bushkin’s view was that the missing prenuptial agreement accounted for the bulk of it. She stayed out of public view almost completely afterwards. Her son died in 1994.

She died in July 2025. Underneath all three of these marriages, from Nebraska onwards, there was one thing that every single person who was there has pointed to, and he eventually admitted it himself on national television. Alcohol runs through all of it from the beginning, and it is the one thread that connects the Nebraska years, the New York years, and the California years without a break. He did not drink often, by the accounts of the people who watched him closely.

He drank badly. That is the distinction everybody who knew him made, and it is an important one. He was not a man permanently in his cups. He could go long stretches on very little.

But when he did drink, something in him reversed. The warmth went. The wit turned, and it turned on whoever was closest. His third wife described the period she called the black drunk phase and said it frightened her, that almost anything could set it off, that there were nights she was genuinely scared, and that she tried, and kept trying.

There is an incident from the 1970s in which, drunk in a bar, he made a pass at a woman who turned out to be attached to a man with serious criminal connections, and the situation escalated to the point where Bushkin had to spend a considerable amount of effort making it go away. That is not a colorful anecdote. That is a man’s lawyer negotiating with organized crime because his client could not hold his liquor. In 1979, in a television interview, he addressed it himself.

He did not dress it up or blame anybody. He said simply that he did not drink well. That is the whole confession, and it is characteristic. One flat sentence, no elaboration, no self-pity, and then a change of subject.

What made it so hard for outsiders to see is that it never touched the work. In thirty years, he did not miss shows for it, did not appear impaired on air, did not lose his timing. The professionalism was absolute. Whatever was happening at one in the morning, he was in the chair the next afternoon, and he was flawless.

That reliability is a large part of why the country trusted him so completely. He largely stopped in the years that followed. The people around him in the 1980s and 1990s describe a much quieter man, still remote, but no longer volatile. Which brings us to the fourth marriage, the one that lasted longer than the other three put together, and the one that almost nobody knows anything about at all, because he finally worked out how to keep something for himself.

By the mid-1980s, he was in his late fifties, three divorces down, living in a house on the sand in Malibu, and about as private as a man that famous can get. The four years between the third divorce and the fourth marriage were, for him, unusually quiet ones. He was working, he was sailing, he was seeing very few people. The men who had been around him in the 1970s noticed that the circle had thinned out considerably, and some of that was deliberate.

The way he met Alexis Maas is a story that his friends told for years, because it was so unlike everything else about him. She was walking on the beach past his house. He was on the deck with a glass of wine. He held it up and asked whether she would like one.

He was by then one of the wealthiest entertainers in the country and one of the most recognizable faces on earth, sitting on a deck in a dressing gown, offering a glass of wine to a stranger who had wandered past. It is completely ordinary, and it is completely out of character, and everybody who heard the story told it for that reason. She was not in the business. She had worked at a stockbroking firm.

She was considerably younger than he was. She had, by every account, no interest whatsoever in the machinery around him. There was also a rupture that year that mattered more than most people realized. He and Bushkin, the lawyer, the tennis partner, the man Carson had once told a magazine writer was his closest friend, fell out completely in 1988.

It ended with accusations and lawyers on both sides after eighteen years. The man who had been in the apartment in 1970 was gone from his life. They married on the 20th of June 1987 in a private ceremony at that beach house, performed by a judge, with a very small number of people present. There was no announcement at a party this time.

There was barely an announcement at all. And then, this is the remarkable part. For the next eighteen years, almost nothing about that marriage reached the public. No interviews, no magazine spreads, no stories from the staff.

When he retired, they traveled. He sailed. He learned Swahili at one point, for no particular reason other than that he wanted to. He watched an enormous amount of astronomy programming and read about it seriously.

She traveled with him constantly on the boat, which was the thing he loved most in the last part of his life: long stretches at sea with a small crew and no telephone, which for a man who had spent thirty years being looked at was close to paradise. The friends who did see them together in those years have all said the same thing: that this was the one that worked, and that she was the person he should have found forty years earlier. It is a strange thing to say about somebody who was on television every night for three decades, but the last twenty years of his life are close to undocumented. There are a handful of photographs.

There are no interviews to speak of. The most famous man in America managed, in the end, to disappear in plain sight. He had figured out, finally, how to have a private life. What he had not figured out, and never would, was how to be close to his children.

And in 1991, that became something he had to face in front of the entire country. In June 1991, his middle son Richard died. It is the kind of loss that has no useful commentary attached to it, and the family said almost nothing publicly at the time. He was thirty-nine.

He was a keen photographer, and he had been out on the central California coast taking pictures when his car went off a steep road near the sea. The three sons had grown up in the shadow of all of it, and Richard had been finding his own way. He had worked in television himself for a period, and the photography was the thing he had settled on and got serious about. There is almost nothing in the archive of that program more difficult to watch than what his father did a few weeks later.

He closed the show alone. He talked about his son for a few minutes, about what he had been like, about the photography he had been doing, about the fact that he had been getting good at it. And then he put his son’s photographs on the screen, one after another, pictures of the California coast that the young man had taken, and he talked the audience through them the way any proud father would. He did not cry on camera.

He came close. Anyone who had watched him for thirty years could see exactly what it was costing him to get through it, because thirty years is long enough to know a man’s face. It is the only time in three decades that the performance and the person were in the same place at the same time in public, on purpose. He had already decided to leave by then.

Some of the people close to him believed afterwards that the timing was not accidental in the other direction either: that having decided to stop, and then losing his son within weeks of announcing it, fixed the decision in place beyond any possibility of changing his mind. He announced his retirement in May 1991, a few weeks before his son died. The final program aired on the 22nd of May 1992, after just under thirty years and more than four thousand episodes. The last two programs are still watched today.

On the penultimate night, two guests came on, and the whole thing turned into something closer to a farewell than a talk show, and the room understood what it was watching. On the final night, he did not book anybody at all. He sat, he talked to the audience, he thanked his family, and he finished. Then he did something almost unheard of in that business.

He stopped completely. He turned down every offer. He made one brief appearance on another late-night show a couple of years later, walked out, sat down, waved at the audience, and left without saying a word. There is one more thing from the retirement years that people find hard to believe.

He had the money and the standing to do anything he wanted in that industry, and what he chose to do was nothing at all. Networks came with offers for decades. He turned all of them down without drama and never explained himself publicly. For the last decade of his life, he lived in Malibu with his wife, saw a very small circle of people, and quietly sent jokes by fax to David Letterman, who used them in his monologue.

Nobody knew that was happening until after he died. He had a serious heart operation in 1999 and recovered from it. After that, he was seen in public even less. He had smoked for most of his life, heavily, and it caught up with him.

He died on the 23rd of January 2005, at seventy-nine, of respiratory failure. Alexis was with him. There was no funeral service of the public kind, at his own instruction. The strange thing is that the persona was not a lie.

The man on the screen—the patient one, the one who let a guest have the laugh, the one who could be silent and trust the room—that was a real capability he genuinely had. It just only worked at a distance of several feet, with a camera between him and everybody else for ninety minutes at a time. Off the set, the same man went into an apartment with a gun rather than ask a question, tore up a legal document on his wedding day because the moment felt better without it, could not visit his own children easily, and by his own flat account failed at the marriage department four times over, while being for thirty years the person a whole country most wanted to spend the last hour of the day with. It would be easy to make him a monster, and easy to make him a victim of a cold mother, and neither one holds up.

He was generous with money and quietly paid for things he never mentioned. He gave hundreds of performers their careers. He was also, for long stretches, a bad husband and a mostly absent father, and he knew it, and saying so did not change it. Three of those four marriages ended badly.

The fourth one, the quiet one, lasted eighteen years and produced almost no stories at all, which is probably the highest compliment available. And the joke he made in that apartment in 1970, standing in a room full of the wreckage of his second marriage with a revolver on his hip and his eyes still wet—he really did put it in the monologue the following night. Nobody watching had any idea what it was about.