Bad Father
Johnny had three children with his first wife- all sons. He never had other children with his next three wives, only with his first wife. Back in these days, some people saw mental illness as a socially-unacceptable issue and felt that people who suffered from mental illnesses should not be allowed in public. Johnny was one of the people who felt this way, and the fact that one of his sons suffered from a mental illness was not acceptable to him. He refused to visit his son while he was in a mental hospital. Devastatingly, his son Rick’s life ended abruptly after he got into a car accident that killed him instantly. Johnny paid a tribute to his son on his show, but that does not fix the years of troubles they had that he’d now never be able to fix.
Bad Father
His Arrest
Johnny Carson was not immortal to the fact that people do unacceptable things when they’re drunk, and given the fact that he battled alcoholism and was drunk quite often, you can probably guess that he got himself into bad situations quite frequently. In 1982 Carson was pulled over and arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. He was charged with a misdemeanor but was let off with probation and a mandated driving class for alcohol responsibility while operating a vehicle. Johnny was no longer allowed to drive unless he was going to or from work, and he was not allowed to have any sort of living creature– human or animal– in the car with him.
His Arrest
