Who Was Joanne Carson?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
After months of high anticipation, Ryan Murphy's Feud: Capote vs. the Swans finally premiered earlier this week. The series, which is based on Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer, follows Truman Capote and his relationship with elite NYC women, otherwise known as his "swans."
Among the A-list cast starring in the show is Molly Ringwald, as Joanne Carson. But who exactly was she, and what was her relationship with Capote?
Here, everything you need to know about the Joanne Carson as you continue to watch Feud:
She was famously Johnny Carson's second wife.
Joanne went on her first date with the legendary personality in 1960, when she was a struggling model and he was an up-and-coming game show host. The two were reportedly set up through her father.
"Johnny kind of said to me on our first date, 'You love comedy so much, would you like to come up and see a show that I did?'" Joanne said on CNN’s Larry King Live in 2007. "And I said, 'Is this a new way of saying come up and see my etchings?'"
Joanne and Johnny went onto marry in 1963, a year after he landed The Tonight Show gig. In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Joanne recalled Johnny's trepidation of taking the job: "He said, 'It frightens me to take it, because I think I might lose you.' I said: 'Are you crazy? You couldn’t lose me if you tried.'
The two did end up splitting in 1970, and officially divorced in 1972. According to close friends, Joanne and Johnny had a tumultuous relationship, with lots of arguments and accusations.
"I was living this ivory tower lifestyle that’s not really me," she told King. "I loved Johnny, but I really needed to go home. I needed to come back to California."
Per a 1978 New Yorker feature about Johnny, Joanne was awarded a settlement of nearly half a million dollars, as well as an annual hundred thousand in alimony. According to biography written by his former lawyer, Henry Bushkin, Joanne also received "a pretty nice little art collection."
She was very good friends with Capote.
Following her divorce from Johnny, Joanne became very close with Capote. The two met at a dinner party thrown by publishing legend Bennett Cerf in 1966, and he was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show.
According to The Los Angeles Times, "Carson hated the social whirl and class consciousness of New York but bonded immediately with Capote, a famous social climber. In him, she said, she saw a 'wounded child,' someone with whom she, a girl from a broken home who was sent to a convent school, could identify."
At one point in their friendship, he urged her to write an autobiography. "I was going to write a lovely story about my friendship with all these people," she said, noting that Capote even edited a sample chapter. "When I saw the ‘dishy’ kind of autobiographies selling in the ‘80s, I knew my simple book of friendships would not be interesting."
Capote had a writing room in Joanne's house.
Capote spent much of his time writing his work in Joanne's Bel Air home, and it was there were he wrote Answered Prayers about his swans.
"Before he died, when I asked him about Answered Prayers and how it would be perceived, Truman said to me, ‘People will cut their own throats with their own tongues,'" Joanne once recalled. "A lot of people said how outrageous this piece was and how they wanted nothing to do with it... yet today, it’s an important piece of literature. I know people who say to me today, ‘Oh, my grandmother was in Answered Prayers. I’m so proud.'"
While Joanne was not a swan, she did make an appearance in one of his chapters, La Côte Basque 1965, which first appeared in Esquire in 1975. The premise of her character, Jane Baxter, is loosely based on her marriage to Johnny (who is known as late night king Bobby Baxter in the chapter).
"It was a devastating depiction, and immediately recognizable to anyone who knew anything about Johnny Carson’s famously roving eye," writes Leamer. "But Joanne was so insecure (and so desirous of having Truman as her friend) that she did not let the shattering portrayal bother her."
Leamer continues, "At first, Truman was giddy with anticipation about the reception his brilliant work would receive. But as news started trickling in about how upset his friends back east were with their portrayal, Truman’s excitement curdled. Joanne said that week Truman 'looked like a baby who had been slapped.' As close as he was to Joanne, he did not talk to her about the pain he felt. Instead, he went into his bedroom and lay there reading and rereading the passages that had so offended.”
Capote died in her house.
According to Leamer, Truman booked a one-way ticket to L.A. on August 23, 1984 where "he met up with his longtime friend Joanne Carson, who watched over him as she always did."
He passed away two days later at her home at the age 59 of "liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication."
Capote was cremated and his ashes were reportedly divided between Joanne and his novelist, Jack Dunphy. Capote also left a lot of his belongings to Joanne, who later auctioned off over 330 of his items at Bonhams in New York in 2006.
She was somewhat of a multi-hyphenate.
Joanne began her career as stewardess for the now-defunct airline, Pan Am, in the 1950s. According to the Los Angeles Times, she helped calm film studio exec Howard Hughes during a flight, and he later offered her a screen test at his RKO studios.
By the early 1960s, she landed her first major gig as a co-host of a game show called Video Village, and later had her own syndicated health-and-fitness talk show called Joanne Carson’s V.I.P.’s. She has also been referred her as a model and occasional actress.
Per the New York Times, Joanne later went on to earn a master’s degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry and physiology.
She remarried later in life.
Joanne went onto marry Richard Rever, but that also ended in divorce. She never had children.
She died in 2015.
Carson passed away in her L.A. home at age 83.
Feud: Capote vs. the Swans (originally titled Feud: Capote's Women) is available on FX and Hulu.
You Might Also Like
