Johnny Carson presented a confident, quick-witted persona on “The Tonight Show,” but his personal life was not so smooth. He had three marriages that ended in divorce and were marred by issues with alcohol.
The late-night host’s first marriage to Jody Wolcott was volatile, marked by infidelities committed by both parties.
“There would be boozy rows aplenty — some in front of other couples — or long silent stews of resentment or recrimination or shame,” writes Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas in the biography, “Carson the Magnificient.” “Alcohol (while hardly a constant in their early years) was a friend to neither man nor wife; whenever lit, they would both act out, very badly.”
Zehme writes that Wolcott, who had three sons with Carson, would “reportedly dance on tabletops at parties, taunt and ooze caustic sarcasm,” and flirt recklessly with men, driving her husband crazy.
And if Carson was sufficiently “lubricated,” his inner demons went on a “rampage, and whomever he had been only moments prior would be instantly displaced by an unrecognizable hellion…”
“Occasionally he would wake the next day to discover that some such havoc had bruised the flesh of his sons’ mother.”
The couple divorced in 1963 and Carson married Joanne Copeland the same year.
Copeland also complained about Carson’s Jekyll and Hyde personality once he began imbibing.
“I was married to two different people,” she recalled. “He became a tiger. He went over to beer for a while, thinking it wouldn’t happen and it was just as bad. It didn’t make a difference. He had a low tolerance. He had blackouts.”
Copeland remembered Carson coming home and ripping off the sheets while she was sleeping.
“He’d say, ‘I’m working my ass off and you’re sleeping in bed.’ This is three in the morning. I was dealing with two people. He had a tremendous anger about women that would come out.”
Copeland noted that Carson was always incredibly remorseful the following morning, vowing never to drink again but the cycle would resume weeks later.
He and Copeland divorced in 1972 and the NBC star married model Joanna Holland the same year.
During a 1979 “Sixty Minutes” interview, Carson admitted that he had an adverse reaction to drinking.
“I found out I just did not drink well,” he told Mike Wallace. “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. And it would happen just like that!”
Holland confirmed Carson’s self-assessment.
“It came to a point in our marriage where when we’d be out, I would see this — go out with one person and come home with somebody whose was completely different in temperament,” she told Wallace. “And it got more difficult.”
In an interview decades later, Holland was more forthcoming.
“During that black drunk phase, I was scared,” she shared. “Sometimes anything could set him off. Those were the scary times.”
In October 1982, Carson pled no contest to a misdemeanor count of driving over the legal limit. He was fined and placed on three years of probation.
