Johnny Carson's Marriage With Joanne Is Even More Disturbing Than You Think.

Johnny Carson stands at his desk. October 1972. The band is between songs, the audience is still settling into their seats, and Carson opens the monologue with a joke about his own divorce. The audience laughs. Twelve million people watching from their living rooms laugh with him. What almost none of them know is that the joke landed three days after his lawyers finalized what newspapers were already calling one of the most expensive divorce settlements in the history of American entertainment. His wife of nine years, Joanne, wasn't in the audience.