When ‘Tonight’ Was a ‘Lifeline to New York City’

Associated Press Steve Allen, the first host of “The Tonight Show,” rehearsing at the Hudson Theater in Manhattan in 1954. The theater was the show’s first home.

So we called Dick Cavett to ask what “The Tonight Show” had meant to New York when it originated from Midtown Manhattan. Our idea was to follow up on reports that NBC planned to bring “Tonight” back to New York after a 41-year exile in California and name Jimmy Fallon the host, replacing Jay Leno.

Mr. Cavett was in mid-anecdote when his other phone rang. Jimmy Fallon was on the line, he said.

“Of course I can’t tell you anything he said,” Mr. Cavett said when our conversation resumed.

But the old days, before Mr. Leno, before Johnny Carson took “Tonight” to California Mr. Cavett â€" who said he stood backstage with Mr. Carson on his first night as the host, in 1962 â€" remembered the original home of “The Tonight Show.”

It was the Hudson Theater, on West 44th Street, which NBC had bought in 1950. “Just off the crossroads of the world, Times Square,” as Gene Rayburn, the original announcer, described it on the first night of the program in September 1954, before introducing the first host, Steve Allen.

Mr. Allen said “Tonight” would be “a mild little show in a theater that sleeps 800 people” â€" and that had a sidewalk out front. It proved useful the night the cameras watched him fry hundreds of eggs in a giant frying pan, or try to. (The show later moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza.)

In those early days of television, New York was a cultural exporter. Someone who lived in, say, Arlington, Va., could keep up with what stars were in what Broadway shows from what the hosts said about them on “What’s My Line” or “To Tell the Truth.” And someone outside New York could watch dramas on programs like “Studio One,” “Kraft Television Theater” and “Philco Television Playhouse,” which had writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Sumner Locke Elliott.

“‘The Tonight Show’ was a lifeline to New York City, a place I loved, even though I didn’t live there yet,” said Mr. Cavett, who was an undergraduate at Yale when “Tonight” was new. “But later, ‘The Tonight Show,’ whoever was doing it, was that same lifeline, when I was out on the road or acting in the summer at Williamstown. You were welcomed back each night into Manhattan. It seemed to epitomize New York and all that was wonderful and glamorous and entertaining.”

So the move to California was jarring, and still is.

“‘Tonight’ just seems wrong to come from California,” Mr. Cavett said. “Johnny was not totally convinced he was better off in California, I think. I know one thing, he thought he’d be better off doing only an hour, and then he confided to me, ‘I think I made a mistake here, Richard.’ I first heard that from Gore Vidal, who’d just been on the show and said Johnny’s not happy the way he thought he’d be, doing only an hour.” (The program was shortened from 90 minutes in the 1980s.)

The next time Mr. Cavett was a guest on the program, he said that he asked Mr. Carson if he was happy to be rid of the extra 30 minutes.

“He said, ‘I’m not, really,’” Mr. Cavett recalled. “There’s really no difference in doing an hour and doing 90 minutes.’”

But that is so 20th century. This is obviously the 21st and if Mr. Cavett wouldn’t say what Mr. Fallon told him, he did share one piece of advice that he said he had given Mr. Fallon: “Watch out for advice about what you have to change about yourself on ‘The Tonight Show.’”