On this week’s episode of You Are What You Read, we are traveling back in time to 1962 when the one-and-only Johnny Carson redefined late-night television as host of The Tonight Show. Traveling with us, is Mike Thomas with the best selling biography he co-wrote with Bill Zehme, Carson the Magnificent. In 2002, Bill Zehme landed one of the most coveted assignments for a magazine writer: an interview with Johnny Carson—the only one he’d granted since retiring from hosting The Tonight Show a decade earlier. Following Carson’s passing in 2005, Zehme embarked on an exhaustive nearly decade-long research journey, interviewing dozens of Carson’s colleagues and friends to craft this biography, although his efforts were halted by a cancer diagnosis. ” Mike Thomas, Zehme’s former research assistant, completed Carson the Magnificent to offer this honest assessment of who Johnny Carson really was.

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