(2 of 2)
To Tonight's guest hosts, McMahon, a 6-ft. 3¾-in. 215-pounder with the face of a friendly brown bear, is "the Rock of Gibraltar" (Joan Rivers), or "my security blanket" (Newhart). Once, when Newhart and Guest Bobby Morse were lulling the audience to sleep with reminiscences, McMahon piped: "Gee, have you two ever thought about putting a book of these stories out?" Says Newhart: "The relief was marvelous. Bobby and I would have kept going all night if Ed hadn't saved us." Jerry Lewis tried to break Ed up during commercials and even kept it up when Ed was trying to say something laudatory about him. "You're such a great mimic," said Ed, "why don't you act humble for a minute?" Silent and unsmiling, Lewis mumbled a humble, "I've got to admit, that's a good one."
McMahon attributes his success to a lonely childhood. His father was one of the first of the professional fund raisers, and the family was always on the move. By the time he was four, he had moved through 40 states. By high school graduation he had attended 15 schools. Throughout it all, he was earning his own spending money. At 10, he bought copies of the Bayonne Times on the newsstands for a penny, hawked them in bars and restaurants for two cents. He shined shoes, dug ditches, sold peanuts, labored on a construction gang. At 18, he toured New England with his own bingo game. After four years as a Marine fighter pilot in World War II, he got a degree in speech and drama from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., then moved to Philadelphia, where, among other things, he found a job as a circus clown. It was not long before he was one of Philadelphia's best-known TV personalities. He met Carson on a trip to New York, and Johnny hired him in 1958 as his sidekick on ABC's Who Do You Trust? In 1962 Carson took him along to Tonight, and they have been sinking baskets ever since.
ABC's Dick Cavett, a former Tonight writer and more recently a guest host, says that "Ed has mastered a very tricky thing. It's like a man learning to dance well without leading. There is an unslick look to him, which is good. For an announcer, he seems human—and so often announcers don't because they are too well-spoken, too well-groomed and too regular-featured." He can be sharp and funny, even at Carson's expense. Last week, when the boss muffed an imitation of John Wayne, Ed cracked: "You sound like David Brinkley." Because he is willing to jab Johnny every once in a while, he says: "I think I appeal to every guy who ever wanted to punch his boss."