Bill Zehme

“According to (Johnny's first wife) Jody Morrill Wolcott, “When I wanted to go with John once [to a Hollywood function], he said to me, ‘Why take a ham sandwich to a banquet?’ ” Random cruelty, as such, tended to ride shotgun—most notoriously—with his drinking bouts.”
― Bill Zehme, Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait

“He needed to be with someone," Joanna would confide nearly four decades hence, at once wise and wistful. "If you look at the pattern-from Jody to Joanne, Joanne to me, me to Alex..." And, as went his Need To Be With connubial march, where it began naturally informed all private storms to come: Jody(legally Joan) Morrill Wolcott was of course the Nebraskan college-sweetheart/starter-wife, the mother of their three handsome sons, the innocent apple-pie ideal (in inception and in theory) who knew not quite what she had signed up for-and, legendarily, was also the first in his sublimely ridiculous procession of Jo-Brides, about which Bob Newhart would deliver the landmark quip (at the aforementioned 1973 roast). "Some of you may not know this," Newhart said indelibly. "Johnny's first wife was named Joan; his second wife was Joanne; his present wife is Joanna. The man just won't go for new towels." (Hereabouts may be as good a juncture as any to flash forward considerably, alas, to the salient deathbed anecdote relayed by trusted longtime Carson monologue writer Michael Barrie: "By coincidence, my father was on the same cardiac floor as Johnny during his final week, and on different days they had the same nurse. The nurse told me that when she had gone in to see Mr. Carson for the first time and he saw that her hospital name tag read JOANNE, he said, 'Oh no, not another one....'")”
― Bill Zehme, Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait