Andrea Shea King at Big Hollywood on Ed McMahon - When Late Night Television Was Young
McMahon told of how he and Carson met.
“The first day I ever worked, I did a show with him called “Who Do You Trust” on ABC. It was a quiz show, a game show in the afternoon, it was live, and he hosted it. He had another announcer, a fellow named Bill Nimmo who got his own show and he had to leave.  I came up and auditioned for the show and I got the job. Which was a wonderful, lucky happenstance for me.
“What happened was, on the very first show here I am a little nervous, you can imagine. I’m doing the first show, and I’m replacing somebody. I want to do a good job, and I’ve got a script in front of me and on this script it’s got these six responses of the day: “Swansdown Cake Mixes, the cake mixes you can trust.” I have to read this. Now, the audience at home doesn’t see me of course, but the audience in the theater does. Johnny Carson comes over and sets fire to my script. That’s the very first day I ever worked with him!
“Talk about buddies! That kind of sealed us forever. For at least thirty-seven years anyway. And forty-seven years of friendship. But that sealed it. When he set fire to my script, I knew we were off and running, this is gonna be different than any other show I was on. And then of course, when he got the Tonight Show he took me with him, which was another happenstance for me. And we had thirty years of wonderful times on the Tonight Show.”
There never was a disagreement between them. “We’d have dinner once a week or a couple of times a week. We just became buddies. We were like two kids kicking a can down the street, we just enjoyed each other, we liked to be with each other.”
The Funniest Bit
McMahon recalled the funniest moment on the show, the one that to this day holds the record for the longest sustained audience applause.
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