Most companies hold a picnic or Christmas party for their employees. At Carson Tonight, our big annual event was a party following his anniversary special.
I was told that in the old days (i.e., before my arrival in 1986), the party was only open to the above-the-line members of the staff. And they were required to sing for their supper: perform in a talent show. Mercifully, that practice had ended about the time the guest list was expanded to include the entire staff and crew.
By the time I got there, the special was held on a Thursday night with the show dark on Friday -- the night of the party.
In 1987, Johnny was celebrating 25 years as host of the Tonight Show and the writers were brainstorming over an appropriate gift. They settled on a brilliant idea: a silver-plated rubber chicken. It then fell upon me to make it happen.
So I started out by calling a trophy shop recommended by our prop guy -- first of all, to ask if they could do it. I was told it would be a two-step process: first, the item would have to be bronzed and then plated with silver. But the chicken in question couldn't be made of rubber. It was too soft. I needed to find a rubber chicken made of hard plastic.
As a TV production assistant, I was often given hurried research tasks needed for completion of a script. Remember, this was before the World Wide Web and Google made it possible to search for just about anything you wanted -- I had to do this the old-fashioned way, by making phone calls to businesses in hope that whoever answered the phone would be willing to drop everything and answer my silly questions. On other shows, I had store clerks refuse ("This sounds like research. Buy something and we'll help you.") It was different when you introduced yourself as a staffer at the Tonight Show. I had store managers run to the shelves to read me the labels off the products they stocked. I remember calling Sears to ask them the name of their best selling paint. (It was "Weather-Beater," which ended up in a joke about Tammy Faye Bakker's mascara.)
So when I called a Studio City novelty shop to ask if they carried hard plastic rubber chickens, I was quick to identify myself and my reason for asking. Unfortunately, they did not have anything like that in stock -- but they did give me the name of one of the city's largest distributors of novelty items, located in Culver City.
And they actually did carry hard plastic rubber chickens. The problem was, they only sold them in bulk. It was going to cost a hundred dollars for something like a gross of chickens -- when we only needed one (two at the most). So once again, I pulled out the Tonight Show card, and how it was going to be a gift for Johnny. They relented and sold me two chickens. We sent one of them off to be bronzed and plated, and we got the job done in time for the big day.
TV writer Mark Evanier has posted links to a wealth of articles about Johnny on his terrific pop culture blog. While there, I read a 2002 Esquire piece which was Carson's last interview. Writer Bill Zehme visited Johnny in his office, and I was gratified to read this:
"...there was a conference table stacked with books and jazz CDs, and various artifacts on display, including a bronzed rubber chicken presented to him by his writers at the end."
Maybe it was tarnished, or perhaps the silver had rubbed off, but I'm pretty certain that was the chicken the writers gave him five years before his retirement.
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