Perry Cross, Johnny Carson’s First ‘Tonight Show’ Producer, Dies at 95
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Perry Cross, who served as Johnny Carson’s first producer on The Tonight Show before he exited to run an ABC program hosted by Jerry Lewis that came and went after 13 episodes, has died. He was 95.
Cross died March 9 of kidney cancer at a hospital in Los Angeles, his son, Larry Cross, told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Cross started out producing Ernie Kovacs’ CBS weekday morning show in 1952 and also worked on The Red Skelton Hour, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, The Soupy Sales Show, Life With Linkletter, The Garry Moore Show and several Jonathan Winters live specials during his career.
Cross had been producing The Tonight Show in the immediate aftermath of host Jack Paar’s departure on March 30, 1962, guiding the NBC program in Hollywood and New York that featured guest hosts for six months until Carson took over.
NBC wanted Cross to be Carson’s producer, while the new host favored Art Stark, who had produced his ABC daytime quiz show, Who Do You Trust? To test out the chemistry, Cross, Carson, sidekick Ed McMahon and a few others spent a week frolicking in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“We went out every night, we went to different places, we laughed,” Cross told Mark Malkoff on a 2015 episode of The Carson Podcast. “We all were good drinkers in those days. That didn’t hurt.”
Cross said they danced onstage wearing hula skirts — “that’s after about four mai tais,” he recalled — and rode speedboats. Carson also came up with characters including Aunt Blabby and Carnac the Magnificent on the trip.
Cross got the job and said he was getting along famously with Carson when Lewis — one of the guest hosts in that post-Paar, pre-Carson stretch — offered him an “enormous” salary to come to Los Angeles to produce a Saturday night, two-hour variety/talk show he was putting together at ABC.
Cross told Malkoff that he didn’t really want to go and would have stayed had NBC given him a raise, but the network refused. Carson was upset and angry that he was quitting, Cross noted, and at a staff-organized goodbye party, he raised a glass to toast the producer and said: “Perry, here’s to you. I have one thing to say to you. Fuck you.”
Forty episodes of The Jerry Lewis Show were planned, but the program proved to be a disaster from the start and was canceled after its 13th installment aired on Dec. 21, 1963.
“I’ve often thought back, to tell you the truth, that I made a big mistake by leaving, but that’s hindsight,” Cross said. “Who knows what would have happened later on if I’d have gotten too cocky and he got mad at me.”
Perhaps Cross was on to something — Stark was named Tonight Show producer in March 1963 but fired four years later.
Born in Brooklyn on Feb. 26, 1928, Cross was the son of vaudevillian Alan Cross. He attended Fort Hamilton High School and the University of Rhode Island and began in television as an NBC page at Rockefeller Center in 1949, taking visitors on tours around the building.
“It gave me a chance to talk to people,” he said. “At that time, I had some ambitions to become a comedian. I didn’t have any place to practice my jokes. I kept it a secret from all of the tour guides’ supervisors.”
Later, Cross made it into a trainee program that taught participants how to produce TV shows. “We went to school at NBC,” he said.
He worked at NBC as a production coordinator before Kovacs, newly arrived from Philadelphia, hired him in 1956 to produce his five-days-a-week CBS show.
A year later, Cross became a producer on Paar’s Tonight Show, but he said the host didn’t like him, so he left. But when Paar quit in March 1962, Cross got a call asking him to keep things afloat until a new host could be found.
“We went on the air the following week, and it was madness,” Cross said. “I had to set up a staff in Hollywood in a hurry, about 50 people I might add, and they had never done The Tonight Show there. It was chaos, but it was fun.”
Cross produced and lined up the guest hosts that included Lewis, Groucho Marx, Joey Bishop, Jack Carter, Mort Sahl, Art Linkletter, Robert Cummings, Merv Griffin, Arlene Francis and Jimmy Dean until Carson arrived.
Before Carson welcomed Marx, Mel Brooks, Tony Bennett, Rudy Vallée and Joan Crawford as his first guests on on Oct. 1, 1962, he and Cross had a gin and tonic, the producer recalled.
Years later, Carson and Cross met again in a Burbank studio after The Tonight Show had moved from New York. “I came in and knocked on his door and surprised him,” the producer said. “He was kind of withdrawn … there was an edge to it. He doesn’t forgive people for his perception of being disloyal. He never had from the beginning. Once Johnny turned on you, it was goodbye.”
Cross also produced game shows hosted by Bert Parks, Emmy Awards broadcasts and the wacky filmed segments for Laugh-In before effectively leaving the TV business in the mid-1970s. He then had a thriving career in real estate.
In addition to his son, survivors include his grandchildren, Kara and Jaime.
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