Johnny Carson used his affable personality and acute gift for comedy to become nothing less than the king of late-night television and a cultural icon as host of Tonight’s show for almost three decades, from 1962 to 1992. But like the new biography Carson the Magnificent According to the late Bill Zehme (November 5), Private Carson, who died of emphysema in 2005 at the age of 79, was inscrutable – relatively shy – and had very difficult personal relationships.

Zehme, a longtime Carson fan and longtime celebrity journalist, nonetheless spent years working to uncover the man behind the myth. He had only written three-quarters of the biography before he died of cancer last year at age 64, so Mike Thomas, a former entertainment reporter for the Chicago Sun Timesfinished the book.

Thomas explains in the prologue why Zehme (and probably many other fans) revered Carson: The host offered his audience the assurance that “tomorrow will come and we can laugh about what just happened today, and we we can get up in the morning, and everything will be fine, here we go again.

It would really be difficult to overstate the influence of Nebraska’s celebrity. Like the New York Times wrote in his obituary: “(Carson) became the biggest and most popular star American television has known…. At its peak, between 10 and 15 million Americans slept better on weeknights because of it.

But who was this cultural icon, off-screen?

Here are 11 things we learned about Carson from his new biography:

Homer Carson and his wife Ruth Carson, Johnny Carson’s parents, in 1974.

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1. He had a complicated relationship with his mother

Ruth Carson was a tough, domineering woman with a sarcastic, biting sense of humor and a short fuse. (She reportedly once broke a whole set of dishes against the kitchen wall.) Even after Johnny’s success, she largely withheld his praise, and he spent his life trying to please her: in 1980, when he received the coveted Television Academy Governors’ Award. for his work, he called to tell him. His lukewarm response: “I guess they know what they’re doing.” When his mother died, according to Carson’s acquaintance Burt Reynolds, Carson declared, “The wicked witch is dead!” »

Johnny Carson, seen in this undated photo from his childhood, was billed as “The Great Carsoni” while performing magic shows.

Norfolk Daily News/AP Photo

2. Magic was his first love and main interest

Almost pathologically shy his whole life (parties made him extremely uncomfortable), Carson told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, “I think that my reading of a book at age 12 called Hoffmann’s Book of Magic probably changed the course of my life. From that point on, the Great Carsoni, as the teenager called himself, was obsessed, playing every chance he got and training on his family. Even though he was almost as lonely as Howard Hughes when he wasn’t on the air during his Tonight Show For years, Carson summoned the greatest magicians to his Malibu home to perform and show him the latest developments in the art.

Johnny Carson in the Marine Corps during World War II.

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3. He learned the hard way the need to laugh

Enlisted in the Navy during World War II, he became a communications officer who decoded encrypted messages. At one point, he was tasked with descending into a hole in the stern of a bombed ship to supervise the recovery of 20 corpses. “Jesus, it was a horrible experience,” he told Time magazine in a previously unpublished interview. “At that point they had been there for 18 days and I want to tell you it was a terrible job. » Author Zehme wrote: “He deeply understood the importance of inciting laughter as an essential means of diverting attention from daily human fatigue and solitary misery. »