A Survivor of ‘Tonight’ and Thousands of Yesterdays

The hardest, the most elusive, the most frustrating of all the arts of show business is longevity.

Surviving the lethal caprices of moguls and consumers for any time at all makes the chances of a snowball in hell look like a sure thing. Where Are They Now? is a game you can play starting with yesterday’s trade papers.

Fred Allen once said he knew actors who had had sandwiches named for them a year ago and were now eager to autograph one with their teeth.

There are accidental overnight stars but there are no accidental survivors, in front of the cameras or behind them. The quarter-century run of Johnny Carson, despite all the attempts the other networks have made to dislodge him, is an amazement verging on the miraculous.

The 18-year survival of Fred de Cordova as the executive producer of the show, who took over in 1970 after a revolving-door succession of predecessors, is possibly not miraculous but it is an amazing display of resistance to daily pressures that would collapse a diving bell.

De Cordova has now written a blithe, brisk autobiography called “Johnny Came Lately” (Simon & Schuster: $17.95), a title devised by De Cordova’s wife, Janet, to indicate that there was life BC, or Before Carson. Among De Cordova’s prior credits, in fact, were directing Ronald Reagan in “Bedtime for Bonzo” and then in “Bonzo Goes to College.” Survival is not the half of it.

At a recent breakfast interview, De Cordova noted with pride and astonishment that he has not been off salary for a day since he took his first job as a gofer in the theatrical offices of Lee and J. J. Shubert in 1933. Now and again, segueing from one job to another, he has even been on two payrolls at once.

Doing a breakfast interview meant that De Cordova missed his ritual 10 a.m. call from Carson. He doesn’t miss many. “I’d better be doing something important or be dead,” he explained.

The call lasts only three or four minutes, but Carson will have read the Los Angeles newspapers, the trade papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post and have thoughts about the world, the opening monologue and present and future guests, in about that order.

The monologue is the one part of the show for which De Cordova is not responsible. The rest of it--guests, skits and music--are his worries, and the largest of the worries are the guests. Five full-time talent coordinators not only cruise the clubs and the news columns (and view the submitted videocassettes) for new faces, they mine repeat guests for new conversational lodes.

“A 10th visit is very hard on the guest, the viewers and J. C.,” De Cordova said. There have been complaints that some of the guests repeat too often, but De Cordova insists that the old reliables pay off in the end. Then, too, there is a list of guests the show would love to book but who steadfastly refused to appear (e.g., Woody Allen, Robert Redford, Katharine Hepburn).

De Cordova has special sympathy for the bumpees, the third guests on a night when the first two guests run long. “The guest has told his spouse, his family, the neighbors that he’s going to be on the show.” But then the guest sits in the Green Room, stomach knotting like a gourd, and at last is bumped.

“They get paid anyway ($490) but what consolation is that?” A few days ago De Cordova constructed a show of previous bumpees. “The last bumpee almost got bumped again,” he said, wincing.

De Cordova’s book is probably as good a look as we’ve had about the backstage workings of the show, and it’s a close, fond if not deep-probing look at Carson, trimming down some of the wilder myths about his holdings and his isolation.

(“Mr. De Cordova makes many flattering references to me. Therefore, I cannot recommend this book too highly,” says Carson’s tongue-in-dust-jacket blurb.)

At that, De Cordova’s own story has its own considerable interest. His father, De Cordova says, was a suave, high-level con man (in a Stork Club photo he looks, behind round glasses, like a bemused theoretical physicist). His mother was a helpmate in these matters and the family alternated between the comforts of wealth and periods of interrupted cash flow.

The good times saw De Cordova, who is 77, through Northwestern and Harvard Law and into the job with the Shuberts. When he had established himself and transferred to Hollywood in 1943, De Cordova brought his parents to live here in quiet retirement.

“You never knew a more relieved man when the con days were over,” De Cordova said, “or one who was as sorry for what he had done--and so he should have been.”

His own story, said De Cordova, has been the luck of being in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time. He moved from stage manager to director with the Shuberts, which led to a bid from Warner Bros. to be a dialogue coach and then a director in Hollywood (where he directed the Bonzos and much else).

Restless at Warners, he dined one evening with Deanna Durbin, who persuaded him to jump ship and direct her at Universal. “For the Love of Mary” was her last film but she persuaded him it was her decision to quit and not his fault.

Along the way De Cordova kept a starry dance card, dating ladies as various as Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead and Simone Simon. He did not marry until he was 53 but has lived happily ever after.

In 1953 he began his long affair with television, and was variously a producer-director for Jack Benny, Burns and Allen and “My Three Sons.” He was doing “My Three Sons” when he heard Carson was looking around for a new producer.

“All the years before ‘The Tonight Show,’ I was delighted to be doing well personally,” De Cordova said. “In the 18 years here, my delight has been in doing this job well. I go to work rather early and I don’t leave until after we’ve dissected that evening’s show. Nothing’s ever perfect but you know you’ve been associated with an enormously talented man.”

One of the casualties of the show’s reduction from 90 minutes to 60 was the so-called Author Spot (the night’s often-bumped last guest). But rank has its rewards. “I’d arranged to book myself on the show Friday night, first guest, to talk about the book,” says De Cordova. “Then the writers’ strike hit and we’re in reruns.”

There’ll doubtless be other chances. Despite all rumors, De Cordova figures that he and Carson are good for another year-and-a-half at least.