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  I certainly was not the only person perfecting my future craft. In Nebraska, nine-year-old Johnny Carson had sent away for a magic kit that was guaranteed to make him both a magician and the life of the party. He'd spend hours every day standing in front of a mirror perfecting card tricks. Out in the small town of Arlington, Oregon, Doc Severinsen was practicing his trumpet for hours and tie-dyeing his cowboy shirts.

  By the time Johnny was fourteen he was performing his magic act at the Rotary Club and local parties as the Great Carsoni. Doc was Oregon's champion junior trumpeter by the time he was twelve, and auditioned for Tommy Dorsey's band when he was fourteen. It was tougher for me; my biggest talent was speaking into a flashlight. There just wasn't a lot of work for a teenage announcer. I didn't even know what my voice sounded like to other people. There were no such things as tape recorders and no one in my family knew anything about show business. The only feedback I ever got was from my mother, who would remind me, "Children should be seen and not heard," which was not very good advice for someone planning on a career in radio. All I knew was that my dog seemed to like me. Of course, he also liked fire hydrants. Really all I had was determination, and that I had in abundance. And hope: I used to lie in bed at night and pray that I would have a good voice.

  I landed my first broadcasting job when I was fifteen years old. A small circus carnival was pitching its tents and sideshow on Lowell Common. In those days sound trucks, trucks with signs plastered on the sides and loudspeakers on the roof, were used to advertise events. As the sound truck drove slowly down the street, someone inside the truck would loudly promote everything from politicians to circus clowns.

  That's another straight line for you, just fill in your own punchline.

  I convinced the owner of the sound truck to hire me to be the mike man. It wasn't exactly show business—I was cramped in the back of the truck where no one could see me—but it was a microphone and people could listen to me. To be honest, they had to listen to me. The biggest advantage of a sound truck is that the audience can't change the channel or turn down the volume. I wrote my own patter. "Eight of the biggest days and nights of your life!" I boomed proudly as we drove through Lowell. "And the admission? Why, it's ab-so-lute-ly free." And then I reminded them of the biggest attraction, the sideshow, which featured girls "dancing as you have never seen them dance before!"

  The truck drove right down Main Street, right past a storefront my father had rented as the headquarters for whatever charity he was raising funds for. I wanted to surprise him. My mother made my father stand outside on the sidewalk as the truck drove by. I couldn't see him, but when he heard my voice, I felt him smiling.

  My father wasn't there for many of the important moments of my childhood. I understood why; he was working. He was on the road somewhere, selling something, promoting something, doing whatever it was he had to do to earn a living. It hurt, but I understood it. And I understood it even more when I had children of my own and missed major events in their lives because I was working. And that probably hurt a little more.

  My father was a hard worker. Every member of the McMahon family was a hard worker. And so I'm a hard worker. One of my greatest talents is that I show up on time wearing a clean shirt. I'm there, wherever it is I have to be, whenever I have to be there, and I'm prepared to work. If I have a script, I know my lines. I've always been that way, whether it meant producing and hosting the broadcast of a presidential inauguration gala or selling toy gyroscopes for a dollar in a department store on Christmas Eve. Some of the jobs I've had were incredible; it is a great pleasure to be able to banter with Carson, do commercials with Frank Sinatra, give away millions of dollars with Dick Clark, or introduce new talent like Rosie O'Donnell, Sinbad, or Drew Carey. But many of the jobs I've done haven't been that exciting. I've cleaned out soil pipes, sold pots and pans door-to-door, dug ditches, run a laundry delivery service, and even hawked the famous Morris metric slicer on Atlantic City's boardwalk. Like my father, I did whatever job I had to do to earn a living, and I did it to the best of my ability and I did it with enthusiasm.

  Johnny Carson would often kid me about all the different jobs I had, many of them at the same time. On the first Bloopers and Practical Jokes I cohosted with Dick Clark, Johnny walked onstage and explained to the audience, "From the first day on The Tonight Show, twenty-two years ago, Ed has treated The Tonight Show like . . . a part-time job. The man comes in, gets his mail, splits. . . . He's got three other jobs tonight after this. He's doing Celebrity Mud Wrestling, Bowling for Towels, and, a week ago, I opened my front door and there was Ed in a dress, claiming he was the Avon lady."

  I laughed. And protested, "You know I gave up mud wrestling."

  "Sure," Johnny responded, "but only because it conflicted with the paper route in the morning."

  I remember a story my good friend John Wayne once told me about the worst movie he ever made, a 1930s comedy for Fox titled Girls Demand Excitement . The key scene in the movie was a boys-against-girls basketball game to determine if the girls would be permitted to stay in college. Duke had played football at USC, so he was really embarrassed to be seen playing basketball against a girls' team in this movie. He was walking on the Fox lot muttering to himself when Will Rogers stopped him. "What's the matter, kid?" he asked.

  "Oh," Duke told him, "they got me in this movie playing basketball against girls. And they want—"

  Rogers interrupted him. "You workin'?"

  "Yeah."

  Rogers nodded. "Keep workin'," he said, and he walked away.

  • • •

  And that's exactly what I've done my whole life. When I was about ten years old I wanted a bicycle. But we were going through one of my father's cold-water-flat periods and he couldn't afford to buy one for me. I found out that if I sold enough subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post I could earn a bicycle. I sold three subscriptions my first afternoon. It turned out I was a born salesman. I was very sincere and polite. So I learned very early in my life that I could turn a few afternoons into a bicycle if I worked hard enough. Ironically, fifty years later, after decades with Johnny Carson, after appearing in movies and in the theater, after hosting countless television programs, I was right back where I started, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. This time, though, I was doing it by mail and I was going to just about every door in the country. But in all that time I had learned something extremely important about selling. Sincerity and politeness were still vitally important . . . but I could sell a lot more subscriptions if I also promised to give away ten million dollars.

  • • •

  In 1963 Time magazine reported that I often worked as many as four jobs at once and rarely worked less than seven days a week. Obviously that wasn't quite accurate; I can't remember the last time that I had only four jobs. I had learned very early in life that the answer to the question "How much money is enough?" was always going to be "Just a little more than I have." Hard work has never scared me. It's the thought of being without work that terrifies me. I started working when I was about ten years old and I've learned something from every job I had. So eventually I'm really going to figure it out. For example, my lemonade stand taught me that you cannot sell a product for nine cents that cost ten cents to produce and expect to make up the difference in volume. My shoeshine stand taught me the importance of location: businessmen waiting for the ferry were a lot more likely to have their shoes shined than women on the way to a big sale.

  When I sold the Bayonne Times I learned about advertising. That was a highly profitable situation; I bought my papers for a penny and sold them for two cents, earning a 100 percent profit on each transaction. It was very competitive, though; there were a lot of people hawking newspapers. To sell my papers I had to convince potential customers that there was something in the Bayonne Times that would make a difference in their lives. Let us say, for example, that a grocery store had cut the price of chopped beef. While I was selling papers in a wealthy neighborhood, I would
shout, "Read all about it! Big drop in the market today." If I was selling in a less prosperous neighborhood, I might scream, "Read all about it. Slasher at work in local grocery store." That's what is known as effective advertising.

  The first time I faced a tough audience was in a bingo parlor. I've worked on the Broadway stage, I've worked nightclubs; I estimate that in my career I've stood in front of at least twenty thousand different audiences. Twenty thousand. Please believe me, there is no tougher audience than serious bingo players waiting for their number to be called. Often there were hundreds of people in the audience, and they were there to win money and prizes, not to be entertained. And I was the entertainer. Somehow, I became responsible for the numbers I called. In all the years I did The Tonight Show, for example, no one ever said to me, "Gee, Robin Williams wasn't that funny tonight. What's wrong with you?" But bingo players often blamed the caller when they lost.

  Most of the bingo games I worked traveled with carnivals or small circuses. We carried the entire setup in the back of a large truck, including the tent and tent poles, the stools, the planks and legs that became long "tables," sound equipment needed to call the games, cards and prizes of all sizes and shapes, and yards and yards of black velour that added that je ne sais quoi to the operation. And believe me, these bingo games needed as much quoi as could be added. We would set up in the midway for a few days, then pack up and drive to the next town, never staying anywhere for more than a week.

  I had to work my way up to bingo caller. On occasion I had worked in a concession when a carnival my father was promoting came to the town in which we were living. My first job in a carnival was making change in the Hoop-La booth; that was a game in which prizes sat on wood blocks and if a customer successfully tossed a hoop completely over a block, he won whatever prize it held. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am not saying it was impossible to fit that hoop over the block on which the pricey camera was placed—I am not saying that—I'm just pointing out that it was much easier to get it over the block on which the rather inexpensive plastic toy was displayed.

  When I was sixteen years old my father got me a summer job at Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts, with Mulcahey and Dean, who operated several different carnival games, working in a Sport of Kings booth. That was a game in which customers raced their horses along a track by rolling balls into holes. I started as a counterman, making change, but eventually started calling the races. "Annnnnd they'rrrre off . . ." was one of my best lines, followed by, "at the clubhouse turn, numm-ba two, Fire Chief, is in the lead, but here comes numm-ba six, Wish Upon A Star . . ." After I'd called races for about a week, just like in the movies, the very, very low-budget movies, Gene Dean heard my spiel and said those magic words I had longed to hear, "Your kid's got a voice, Eddie. Let's give him a shot as a bingo announcer."

  It wasn't exactly A Star Is Born. I went on the road with a bingo game as a laborer. Our first stop was a carnival midway in Mexico, Maine. I helped pitch our tent, set up the sound and electrical systems, and did whatever was necessary to help the game run smoothly. Being sixteen years old and traveling with a carnival is the kind of adventure that prepares you for almost anything imaginable in later life. Except maybe things like working with Jerry Lewis, of course.

  From my first day I loved being "with it," the expression used to identify people working in the carnival. I loved the excitement and the color and the people who worked on the midway and in the sideshows. I was "with it," I was in show business. And I very quickly began to learn the code of ethics. The carnival had a girlie show called "Have You Seen Stella?" Now, the amount of Stella available to be seen varied from town to town, depending on the willingness of local law enforcement to accept gratuities. But whatever Stella was revealing in Mexico, Maine, was more than I'd ever seen, and during my very first break I got in line to see her show. One of the best men I worked with was an Indian known as Blackie. Blackie had once been a circus aerialist, a wire walker, but after ruining his back with a fall he became a carny. Blackie saw me standing on line and pulled me out. "You can't go in there, kid," he said. "You're 'with it' now. If Stella saw you in there and then met you over at the chuck wagon, she might get embarrassed." Show people, everybody from star performers to laborers, no matter what type of act or work they did, he explained, had to be treated respectfully. It was a good rule, and I remembered it many strange nights on The Tonight Show.

  I got my big break when our bingo caller got drunk. He was slurring his numbers. The players didn't like that and started throwing the hard kernels of corn used as markers at him. After a few games the manager of the game said something like, "Okay, McMahon, you think you've got what it takes to be a bingo announcer? Take the mike." He handed me the microphone.

  My primary qualification for the job was that I was sober. I took the mike. I loved the feel of the cool metal in my hand. Except for a few times in school, this was the first time I'd ever stood in front of an audience. I cleared my throat and looked out at a vast sea of hair, punctuated occasionally by a bright patch of bald head—every player was staring down at their cards, waiting for a number to be called. I took a deep breath, reached into the fishbowl, and pulled my first number. "Unnnda the O," I said happily, "sixty-four. Sixty-four under the O."

  I read the numbers just as I thought my idol, Paul Douglas, might have. Let me tell you something, Paul Douglas would have been a terrible bingo announcer. I was awful. I had no rhythm, no patter, I didn't know how to build excitement or suspense. Players began throwing corn kernels at me; I suspect this kind of behavior might be the derivation of the word "corny." I was corny. But I kept working, and ducking, and somehow I got a little confidence and I got better. By the end of that summer I had been sent to work as relief man for a legendary bingo caller, Whitey McTaag, on a twenty-counterman show. That was the bingo big time. With practice I had become smooth. I'd learned about timing and how to create suspense. When several players were one number away from bingo, I'd pick a number and stare at it, then announce, "Here it is. Who has it, who's going to be our big winner? The number . . . under the I . . . itttt'ssss . . . twenty-two! Twenty-two under the I."

  The next summer Gene Dean gave me the mike for my own show. And for an extra fifteen dollars a week I drove a big rig, an eighteen-wheel semi, from carnival to circus to fairgrounds. I was on my own, earning pretty decent money. For the first time in my life, I really was "with it."

  Somehow I always found a way to earn the money I needed. When I was at Boston College I chauffeured students back and forth to classes, worked as a laborer on a construction site, and serviced the vending machines at the mills in Lexington and Concord and the Bethlehem Steel Yard. I did whatever I had to do to pay tuition and buy the necessities.

  If I couldn't find a job that fit my schedule, I created one. After earning my wings as a marine fighter pilot in World War II, I came home with a wife, the former Alyce Ferrell of Lacoochee, Florida, a baby daughter, Claudia, big plans, and no money. This is when I really became a salesman. Selling appealed to me because I could make my own schedule, my success or failure depended totally on my own ability, and I got to deal directly with people. I was good at it and so I loved it, although that sentence might just as easily be written the other way around. I started with one of the most difficult of all selling jobs, hawking fountain pens on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

  I didn't actually sell the pens; I gave the pens away. I sold fountain pen points. How could I make money selling pens by giving them away? The same way the fine people at American Family Publishers make money by giving away ten million dollars to sell twenty-dollar magazine subscriptions. All I needed were a box of pens and points, a block to stand on, a big voice, and great patter. Great patter. There was a lot of competition for the same audience on the boardwalk, and the most entertaining pitchmen usually attracted the biggest crowds. "Ladies and gentlemen," I began in a booming voice, "please step right over here if you'd like your very own free fountain pen. That's right, step rig
ht up. Your eyes are not going to believe what your ears are hearing . . ."

  As the crowd gathered, I'd begin by demonstrating how a fountain pen worked. This was not a big secret; this was just before ballpoint pens became widely available and everyone used fountain pens with interchangeable points. "I am now about to shock you," I continued, "by announcing that I am not selling this beautiful pen for two dollars. Not for one dollar. Not even for fifty cents. No, ladies and gentlemen, I am giving this pen away . . . absolutely free to every man, woman, and child who buys one of these absolutely necessary gold-finish fountain pen points without which it is impossible to use any fountain pen . . .

  "Wait. Wait one second. What did I hear you say, sir? Did I hear you right? You think you have to buy this point to get the free pen? Oh no, not true my friends, not true at all. Do you think I would dare stand before you and make this offer if that were true? But show me a man who does not want one of these fine, durable, gold-finish writing pen points at the miniscule price I am allowed by special permission of the company to offer to you today, and I'll show you a man who doesn't recognize an incredible offer when he sees one, a man with no business sense whatsoever, and believe me, just by looking at you I can tell there are no such shortsighted people in this gathering . . .

  "Now friends, who will be the first person to step right up and buy one of these extraordinary gold-finish pen points for only fifty cents . . . that's right, you heard me, only fifty cents, one-half of one dollar, four bits, and receive this guaranteed fountain pen absolutely free!"

  It was a show and I was the act. I made people smile, I made them laugh, I made them like me. Once I had their attention I demonstrated my product and tried to convince them that they had to have it right then and there. My incredible offer wouldn't be repeated later or tomorrow. You had to put your money down now! There was no school that taught this technique. I learned it by standing in the back of the crowd watching boardwalk legends like Oshi Morris and Lester Morris kibitz with the crowd. I watched, I listened, I learned. And after only a few weeks, that's right, just a few short weeks, ladies and gentlemen, selling this remarkable gold-finish . . . Well, I got so good at giving away fountain pens that I began selling empty boxes.