RIP Ed McMahon
Ed McMahon, a television pioneer who warmed “The Tonight Show” couch for nearly 30 years as Johnny Carson’s jovial sidekick and announcer, died early Tuesday. He was 86.
McMahon died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, according to his publicist, Howard Bragman. The cause of death was not announced, but McMahon had been in failing health for some time, with a number of issues that required his hospitalization.
He was the host of the syndicated “Star Search” for 12 years and a co-host of “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes” with Dick Clark on NBC for nine years.
He also played a clown for eight years on the “Big Top” live circus show on CBS in the 1950s, and co-starred with Tom Arnold in a sitcom, “The Tom Show,” on the WB network in the late 1990s.
And there were stints as host of the game shows “Missing Links,” “Snap Judgment” and “Whodunnit?” in the 1960s and ’70s.
In between, McMahon did commercials for Budweiser beer, Alpo dog food and hundreds of other products and services.
At one point in the early 1980s, he reportedly was the spokesman for no fewer than 37 banks around the country. And for years he served as the spokesman for American Family Publishers’ national sweepstakes, famously informing Americans that “You may already have won $10 million!”
More recently, McMahon turned up in commercials for FreeCreditReport.com that poked fun at his financial woes. And he appeared with MC Hammer in a Cash4Gold commercial that aired during the 2009 Super Bowl.
But McMahon will be best remembered as the prototypal late-night talk-show announcer and second banana, who enthusiastically boomed out in his rolling baritone the familiar words, “And now, heeeeere’s Johnny!”
As Carson’s loyal, quick-to-laugh sidekick and comic foil, McMahon had so many catchphrases he could have done a medley of them in his nightclub act.
And as a sign of his effect on pop culture, McMahon was the inspiration for Jeffrey Tambor’s late-night talk-show sidekick Hank (“Hey, now!”) Kingsley on Garry Shandling’s 1990s sitcom “The Larry Sanders Show.”
When Carson died in 2005 at 79, McMahon described his longtime friend and colleague as being “like a brother to me.”
This is “very sad for me,” Doc Severinsen, the longtime bandleader of “The Tonight Show” during the Carson era, told The Times. “Ed was one of those guys who was bigger than life and full of joy. Always lots of laughs around him. We worked together for 30 years and went through a lot of layers of life together.”
Edward Leo Peter McMahon Jr. was born in Detroit on March 6, 1923.
As a boy, he fell in love with radio. But it wasn’t the stars of the shows he most identified with; it was the announcers — men like Paul Douglas, Bill Goodwin, Harry von Zell and Don Wilson.
By age 10, having made up his mind that he wanted to be a radio announcer, McMahon would practice doing commercials and creating his own radio shows using a flashlight for a microphone.
