Assistant: McMahon residence.

J.T.: Hello, is Ed McMahon there please?

Assistant: Yes, may I ask who's calling please?

J.T.: Yes, this is J.T. Ryder.

Assistant: Oh, yes. Can I get you to hold for one second, please?

(Several minutes pass until Ed picks up the phone.)

Ed McMahon: Good morning! Well, it's morning here in L.A., anyway.

J.T.: It's still somewhat morning here.

Ed McMahon: Well, not so much in Dayton.

J.T.: Well, that depends on your perspective on life. How are you doing today?

Ed McMahon: I'm doing good, thank you. I'm glad that your taking the time to this, I really appreciate it.

J.T.: And I am equally glad that you're taking the time to talk to me.

Ed McMahon: Right!

J.T.: I'm probably one of the youngest fans of The Tonight Show. Well, I'm forty now, but I grew up with The Tonight Show. My mother and I are both night owls, so…

Ed McMahon: I hear that a lot as I travel. I travel a lot. I was just in Milwaukee doing a speech, yesterday, as a matter of fact. I got home late last night. But, uh, I was part of that motivational show, you know, 12,000 people in a basketball arena and, uh, I followed Suze Orman and ahead of her was Zig Ziglar, so…it's an all day thing and I'm like the comic relief. I do thirty minutes, but I still have motivational things, telling how I got started in television, and, you know, that kind of stuff. Anyway, uh, I'm here and I'm ready to go anytime you're ready.

J.T.: Well, as a personal note, as a kid, I kind of patterned myself after you guys. I'm Irish like you and I share Johnny's birthday, so…

Ed McMahon: Wow…October, 23rd, huh?

J.T.: Yeah…I thought I was covered. I don't know what the hell happened.

Ed McMahon: Well, I think your credentials are perfect! (Laughs)

J.T.: Now, I read your book Here's Johnny (Rutledge Hill Press - 2005) back when it came out in 2005…

Ed McMahon: Yeah.

J.T.: …the first thing I'd like to say is it was really refreshing to read a memoir that didn't turn into some nasty, tabloid style tell all book.

Ed McMahon: I would never do that. I would never, ever do that…at gunpoint I wouldn't do that.

J.T.: Now, my only critique of the book is that the anecdotes didn't seem to go far enough. It was like '…and then what happened?'…and it was off to another story. Now, is your series, Ed McMahon's Memories of the Tonight Show, an extension of the book?

Ed McMahon: Uh, yes. In other words…well, both things, in my mind, are tributes to Johnny. In other words, the book was…we can talk about the book briefly. My thing about the book was that uh, that uh…sorry, my (withehld for privacy) just came in with her girlfriend from (withheld for privacy). She's graduating tomorrow. We've been raising her since her mother died some years ago. They just came in and I haven't seen her…(To his relative) I'm doing an interview. Come here and give me a kiss. I just got back late…(kissing sound)…how are you darling? I'm so glad you're here. (Talking to me) We have people coming in from the hinterlands to witness the graduation tomorrow. (Withheld for privacy)with one of her girlfriends…we had to take her out of (withheld for privacy)… I'm giving you a lot more information than you need, but anyway, getting back to the question. My idea with the book was, everybody wants to hear the 'Heeeere's…', you know, J.T.? I get that all the time, all over the country. 'Will you say hello to my mom?' 'Well, what's your mom's name?' You know, everyone in the world has a cell phone with a camera now…so anyway, I'll do a 'Heeeere's Mary!' or whatever it is…

J.T.: So you're like the most recorded cell phone answering machine.

Ed McMahon: (Laughs) Yeah, that's right! So anyway, I thought the book should be, not the 'Heeeere's Johnny' but here's Johnny. Everybody wanted to know what he's like, you know, ‘What's Johnny all about?’…they ask me that as well. ‘What was he really like?’ So, anyway, that was my idea. So then, with Memories of The Tonight Show, it's just another tribute, and, of course it's another way for me to keep having a career, so it's two things. So, it's some of the book, but it's more like a night club show.

J.T.: Oh, O.K. Now is it more of a conversational theater type show or is there a multi-media aspect to it?

Ed McMahon: Oh sure, I have clips. I have clips that people have never seen. Like an Aunt Blabby skit that fell apart one night. I have things like that and I have silly things that we did, like the thing I call 'The Tie Fight'. One night, we got involved with something, and all of a sudden, we're trying to pull each other's ties off, you know. Reflecting, that’s reflecting the fact that we were pals, you know. People wonder are they really, you know…and a lot of the couplings in our business, they were not pals. Like Laurel and Hardy were not pals, the Marx brothers feuded all the time and there was a thing where people thought they were buddies. You know, we were buddies. If we had met in the Marine Corp, we'd have gravitated towards each other because we liked the same things and we laughed at the same things. So there was a camaraderie that’s explained and shown in a clip where it's just so silly, like two kids kicking a can down the street. You know, just wrapped up in each other. There's this humor and the feeling that you know what the other guy is going to do. That's pretty good if you have a coupling like that.

J.T.: Your relationship with Johnny is definitely unique and has never come close to being duplicated, as far as mutual respect. It seems that many these comedic teams allow their egos to destroy what they have…

Ed McMahon: Right!

J.T.: …did you both know how far to push the limits?

Ed McMahon: Oh, I think so. Yeah. It's like, we had the same tastes. In comedy, we had the same tastes. We had the same taste in anything we were fooling around with. You know, we had a thing…you probably remember…where we had this rivalry about who was smarter; a pig or a horse. Well, that just came out one night and I defended the horse and he defended the pig, and he was right. A pig is a smarter animal. I knew that, but to make it work, I to say things like 'Well, they never put a wreath around a pigs neck' or 'They never put roses on a pig' and he would say some sort of fact about a pig. We kept that going until we ran that baby dry! But that's the kind of stuff when two guys really like each other and they can have a rivalry that doesn't hurt anybody. You know, it's just playing around. That's what I try to show with this tie fight thing, just to explain that.

J.T.: Well, with your other projects, did any of them ever come close to interfering with your relationship with Johnny?

Ed McMahon: No. You know what I did? I was very smart…I'll brag a little bit. What I did was, I always went in and took everything by him When I was offered Star Search, they were going to use another guy for Star Search…I won't mention his name…anyway, it didn't work in the pilot and they came to me and I wasn't going to do it, but they convinced me that it was not going to be an amateur show, it was going to be a real star finding show...and look at the stars we found! Anyway, they convinced me, so I said 'OK, let me run it by Johnny'. That was the customary phrase, 'Let me run it by Johnny'. When I got that film Fun With Dick and Jane with Jane Fonda and George Segal, that was a big moment for me. You know, getting a secondary role in that. I was even…Columbia pictures thought I would be nominated for 'Supporting Actor' Oscar and they took out ads in all the trades. Well, before that happened, I went to him. You know, I would go to him and run everything by and say, 'What do you think about this?' 'What do you think about Star Search? They tell me that they're really going to finds stars.' So I would explain to him what my cautions were, but get him in on it, and he'd say something like, 'Well, I think that would be alright . That would be fine.' You know, other people didn't do that and got in a lot of trouble.

J.T.: Yes, most definitely. Now, going way back, when you were paired with Johnny on the game show Who Do You Trust? in 1957, do you think that you both would have made it as big had the Tonight Show not been available as your vehicle?

Ed McMahon: I think so, because I was doing shows in Philadelphia. When I had Star Search…well, that was later on, but when I had Who Do You Trust? I had shows in Philadelphia and I had to commute back and forth to New York. I commuted back and forth to New York for seven years. The first three years of The Tonight Show I commuted. I had just built a house in Philadelphia…the day I got the call that I was going to have Who Do You Trust?, that particular day, I had moved into a new house that I had built in the suburbs of Philadelphia. So that meant, here I got a new house in Philadelphia that I love, it's my dream house, right, and now I've got this job in New York. So I commuted all those times. Now sometimes, if we went out to have some fun, I'd be on a late train back to Philadelphia, but there were a lot of trains between Philadelphia and New York. My attitude was, I just thought that 'Who Do You Trust?' was fine, that was a big thing to me, a network show and so forth. If it hadn't have worked, I would have gone back to Philadelphia or I'd keep plugging in New York, and do something else, you know. I don't think there was any question…you know, we both had talent and it was unique that we found each other. The fact…when I say that in my motivational speeches…’I ran into a guy named Johnny Carson’…well, that old phrase 'hitch your wagon to a star'? I hooked my wagon to a star.

J.T.: Later on, when you would do various tour across the country, performing at state fairs and such, would you ever arrive in some backwater dump and just look at each other and say, 'Why are we doing this?'

Ed McMahon: (Laughs) That’s a good question! You've done your homework! Anyway, we always had a great spot. We'd do like the Ohio State Fair, we'd play the New York State Fair. We always geared what we were doing right to the audience. In other words if we were in a town where there was a lot of oil drilling, I'm not making this up because it really happened, but that would be a guide for us. Johnny would be an oil rigger and I would be interviewing him. He'd be Wildcat Sam, I'd have the clipboard, and I say…you know, and then we'd have to joke. But we would tailor it to the locale, so that helped us, you know. Even if we hit any…we never really hit any bad spots, but if you hit a bad spot, it was so right on that the audience was with us. Let's say your in Houston, Texas or you're in a smaller town like Milford, Texas where oil rigging is a big thing, you know, we were right on. Regardless of what else happened, we had that. We had preparation.

J.T.: When you toured did you ever do any of the USO shows or spots at the military bases?

Ed McMahon: No, but I'm very military. I was in two wars , so…I was in the Marine Corp. for, between active duty and retired duty, twenty-three years and I came out of the Corp a Colonel, so I was very active in the Marine Corp, but we never…I did some USO shows, but we never did any together.

J.T.: That kind of leads into my next question which deals with your program Operation DVD doing? Is it garnering support from the movie distribution industry?

Ed McMahon: Would you mind repeating that…they paged somebody here.

J.T.: No problem. I asked how your program Operation DVD doing? Is it garnering support from the movie distribution industry?

Ed McMahon: Yes. Well what happened with I was out to do something, I was going to entertain…let me have them shut this door. Amanda! Amanda! Could you shut this door for me here? It's getting too noisy in here. Quiet everybody down. Oh boy! I live in an active house.

J.T.: I understand. I have two boys who are thirteen and seven and they make it sound like a bowling alley is in my house.

Ed McMahon: Well, yeah, then you know what I'm talking about. When you have an eighteen year old, they always have two friends with them. I'm sorry. Give me that question again.

J.T.: No problem. I asked how your program Operation DVD doing? Is it garnering support from the movie distribution industry?

Ed McMahon: I just got into that. It's a brand new thing. I went down to Palm Springs to entertain what I call the 'flyboys'. These are all the guys that got the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross), and they have an organization and they've been after me to go down and talk, so I said, 'All right, I'll do it.' They do every last Wednesday of the month, so I said I'd do it, but I picked the last week of the month, which happened to be May. When I went down there, somebody heard that I was going to be down there, so they also called me in to do the DVD thing, which I think is a sensational idea, and they're looking to open up a USO at the LAX, and I'm probably going to do something there. But it was very small, as far as the location. The venue was the USO at the Palm Springs Airport, just a small little room they had. But, they had this concept, and they'd collected 250,000 DVDs so far, and now they're coming in at a couple of hundred thousand a day. It's unbelievable. It's quite a thing. They gave me either, uh…Flying High I think it was…I can't remember. They gave it to me as a tribute and I took it over and dropped it into the DVD box and I said I wanted this to go to somebody who is protecting us over in the war zone. So, anyway, I'm strong military guy.

J.T.: I was never in the military, but I have been in the quasi-law enforcement arena and a lot of people would look at this and say, 'Are people just sitting around in Iraq watching DVDs all day?' and they don't understand that that type of life is ninety percent tedium and ten percent sheer terror.

Ed McMahon: Yeah and the fact that you can't play baseball, you can't play soccer, you can't play basketball because you're a target. People just don't understand that. My attitude is that, and I said this while I was doing publicity for this, no matter what you think about the war, it doesn't make any difference: young men are fighting it, so you've got to support them. We're in it no matter what and you've got to support them. The fact that they don't get any other recreational activity, you might as well get involved in sending a DVD.. You send one of your DVDs or all of your DVDs that are used and we also pick up brand new ones as well. I think it's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg.

J.T.: That is a fantastic program though. Now, two things on a personal curiosity note. You kind of touched on it in the book, but didn't really go into depth: was Charles Grodin really that weird or was the bantering between him and Johnny staged?

Ed McMahon: Oh, that was a put on. No it wasn't staged, they just fell into it, you know. It's again like the pig and the horse. That kind of worked and once they knew it. Two professionals know that you can take that and have some fun with it. Grodin would say, 'You never invite me out to play tennis at your tennis establishment.' and Johnny would say, 'That's right.' and Grodin would ask 'Well, why is that?' and Johnny would reply, 'Because I don't want you out there.' So, once you established…

J.T.: Well, it was done so realistically and you're sitting there watching it and it so antagonistic and you wonder if it's for real or not.

Ed McMahon: Yeah, yeah. Johnny would never see the guests before the show. Leno is completely different. Leno is gregarious and outgoing, like I am, so he wanted to meet everybody. Leno comes out and does a warm up. He comes out before he ever goes on the air. Johnny didn't want to waste the interview in the hallway. If you didn't see the guests beforehand, when you saw them on the air, it was fresh stuff. You didn't want to hear a story in the dressing room and then you’re on the air and you’re like, 'I hear you have this story…' and you've already heard it, your attitude is…you don't have the same approach to it. So anyway, he would not meet beforehand with Charles Grodin. That was all started one night during one of the interviews and then they played on it. He said, 'You've never read my book' and Johnny would say, 'That's right' and Charles would say, 'Why is that?' and Johnny would say, 'I made it a point not to read it.'

J.T.: Going back to your book, it kind of touched me on a personal level. My best friend of many years died suddenly about two years ago. We had a real sick sense of humor that nobody else ever got. We would call each other up in the middle of the night with some moronic joke or something we saw that we thought was funny. After his death, I would see things that I knew he would find hilarious and I would hear his voice start out the joke, and I'd finish it. Until I read your book, I thought I might need clinical help for the voices in my head, so it was reassuring to hear that I'm not the only one.

Ed McMahon: (Laughs)Yeah, when you have that connection, it never gets broken.

J.T.: Well, I hope to see you when you perform in Dayton on the fifteenth…

Ed McMahon: If you come to the show, be sure to come backstage because you did a good interview. You did your homework. If I don't see you before October 23rd, happy birthday!

J.T.: Well, thank you, sir. I should be there and I will talk to you then and thank you for a great interview.

Ed McMahon: That's great. I'll see you there then. Bye-bye.

(Interview Time 21min 51sec)