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"A Genuinely Nice Man"
Gia Prima recalls the music and laughs she and Louis Prima shared with the late Johnny Carson.
By
Alex Rawls
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| When Louis and Gia Prima appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show in 1964, Carson credited a bottle of prune juice for Prima’s wild dancing. |
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I felt like I lost a family member when I heard about the loss of Johnny,” singer Gia Prima says about the recent death of Johnny Carson. “He was a genuinely nice man — very quiet and shy and reserved on a one-to-one basis, but he was absolutely the greatest at what he did, that’s for sure.”
Carson, 79, died Sunday, Jan. 23, of emphysema. During his 30-year tenure as host of The Tonight Show, he featured Gia’s husband, legendary New Orleans musician Louis Prima, in 1963, 1964 and 1971, recalls Gia.
On the first appearance, Gia remembers, she and Louis were backed by The Tonight Show’s band, led by Skitch Henderson. “I was very pregnant,” she says. “It was about a month before I was ready to deliver our daughter, Lena. We made a quick appearance, sang one of our duets, and spoke with Johnny for a while. Louis was starting his own record label at the time and spoke a lot about that on the show.”
The 1964 performance was noteworthy for Carson giving the last 45 minutes of the then hour-and-forty-five-minute show to Prima, who performed his lounge act almost in its entirety, backed by Sam Butera and the Witnesses, with Gia serving as his foil and female singer as she had since 1962.
Coming out of a commercial for Sunsweet prune juice, Gia recalls, “Johnny held up a big bottle of Sunsweet and said, ‘If you want to move like that —,’” jokingly alluding to a connection between prune juice and Louis’ wild dancing.
Later in the show during a regular bit of shtick in Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Louis asked drummer Jimmy Vincent to do impersonations. Vincent mimicked TV doctor Ben Casey by pretending to operate on his snare drum. Then, when Louis asked him for an impression of Johnny Carson, Vincent held up the bottle of prune juice.
But the bits between Carson and the bandleader didn’t stop there. “He and Louis just loved each other,” Gia says. “Johnny played the drums and during one of our shows at the Sahara, Johnny was in the Congo Room at the Sahara — the big showroom — and we were in the Casbar Theater at the same time. We did ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ and one of Jimmy’s impersonations was of Mandrake the Magician. He would pull the backdrop curtains over his head and put a gorilla mask on. When he threw the curtain back, he’d be playing drums with this gorilla mask on, and then he’d rip the gorilla mask off and sometimes there would be another mask under the gorilla mask. Eventually, he’d pull them all off and it would be Jimmy.
“One night, Jimmy pulled the curtain over his head, and Louis was getting the audience all revved up for when he’d throw the curtains back, and when the curtains went back, Johnny Carson was playing drums. The audience died, and so did Louis because he didn’t know it was going to happen.”
Louis Prima appeared on The Tonight Show once more in 1971 and performed a medley of hits with just Butera and the Witnesses — Gia had to stay home that night with their sick son. The appearance was noteworthy because it was in color, but she mostly recalls how much Carson enjoyed drumming. “He was good,” she says. “He loved those drums. Many times, he’d come and sit in on drums with us. We had a lot of fun in those days.”
More than 2,000 Tonight Show programs are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Television & Radio (www.mtr.org). For more information about Louis Prima and his legacy, visit www.LouisPrima.com.
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