part0061

People wonder if the mass media will replace oral tradition, making folk stories as obsolete as pet rocks. This may seem plausible, but, in fact, the modern mass media enhance rather than inhibit the spread of urban legends.

Radio and television talk shows—like electronic grapevines—are actually conduits of urban folklore. Radio shows allow many people to call and exchange tales with a vast audience, while the national TV talk shows give us celebrities and hosts who swap gossip and yarns. Among all the chatter, a good deal of folklore is generated.

It’s not surprising, then, that there is a whole body of folklore surrounding broadcast talk shows themselves. Most folklore focuses on “The Tonight Show,” starring Johnny Carson. Johnny, though not the most daring host in action now, has inherited Groucho Marx’s reputation for racy wit, used to the disadvantage of the show’s guests.

Unfortunately, I cannot quote many specifics of such stories here without risking the results that are alleged in the same folklore—lawsuits for character defamation—as well as gasps from those who do not appreciate sexually explicit remarks in print. In general, however, I can say that in folklore, Johnny is credited—unfairly—with insulting the likes of Ann-Margaret, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Raquel Welch with double-entendre responses to their accidentally suggestive questions.

Often, Carson’s alleged remarks involve a female guest appearing on the show with a cat on her lap. That seems improbable enough to anyone who has tried to make a pussycat sit still on command, not to mention the unlikelihood of the female cat-cuddler asking Johnny just the right loaded question to set up the joke.

It didn’t happen, I assure you. Nor did Carson’s alleged punning reply to Mrs. Arnold Palmer’s claimed remark about how she assures her husband’s good luck in tournaments. Funny story, but I can’t repeat it here.

On the other side of the coin, certain actresses are attributed in folklore with having shocked Johnny by announcing on his show radical changes in their lives and sexual orientations. (For instance, one sexy star supposedly confessed that she is a lesbian.) But where are the follow-up news stories, I ask you?

Did anything at all like this ever happen on “The Tonight Show”? Not likely, since one only encounters people who know the anecdotes from friends of friends, never firsthand. Besides, all these shows are broadcast on a tape delay, and any such incidents would be edited out. The standard Carson Productions response to questions about such stories is “We cannot verify any of them.”

The most persistent “Tonight Show” tradition is that either Carson himself or a famous guest once gave out his personal telephone-credit-card number for viewers to use for unlimited free calls. The number sometimes is circulated in underground newspapers and on college campuses.

That one is apocryphal, too, whether you heard it about Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Sammy Davis, Jr., Robert Redford, or (the all-time leading favorite), Burt Reynolds. In every version, the claim is made that the star won a gigantic settlement against AT&T—to be paid off in free calls—and invited his fans to help use up the winnings.

This story has been around for nearly twenty years—about as long as telephone credit cards themselves. Each time it appears anew, many people fall for it and begin reaching out to touch someone, charging the calls to good old Burt, or whoever is mentioned in the story. Unfortunately, some of the fourteen-digit credit card numbers are real, as the tiny Wabash Telephone Cooperative of Louisville, Illinois, found out in 1981, when it received more than $100,000 in billings supposedly being charged to Burt Reynolds’s number. The telephone company, of course, bills the calls back to the caller whenever possible.

A version of this story appeared in 1986 in Dorothy Herrmann’s biography of humorist S. J. Perelman. The book said that Perlman had seen a movie star on TV announcing the free phone calls some time around 1970. Perelman “jumped at the opportunity,” reported Herrmann. I suspect that the irrepressible Perelman told this story to his biographer as a gag.

One TV talk-show story that I checked out in person concerns Carson’s fellow NBC host David Letterman. The story was that Letterman has a clause in his “Late Night” contract that forbids the showing of his behind on television. That’s why, after the opening monologue he always invites the audience to say hello to bandleader Paul Schaefer. The cameras swing to Paul, so that Dave can make his way discreetly to his desk.

I asked Letterman about this when I was a guest on “Late Night” on April 29, 1987. He not only denied the story definitively, but also obligingly raised his coattails and turned a full circle before the live audience and cameras.