Craig Tennis, Talent Coordinator for Johnny Carsons Tonight Show, Dies at 85

Craig Tennis, who booked acts including Billy Crystal, Tiny Tim, Freddie Prinze, Bill Withers and Gabe Kaplan as the head talent coordinator on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, has died. He was 85.

Tennis died Tuesday of heart disease at his home in Fallbrook, California, his wife of nearly 39 years, iHeartMedia news anchor Brie Tennis, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Tennis joined The Tonight Show in 1968 when it was based in New York and moved with the program to Burbank in ’72 before quitting in ’76. Trying to anticipate what Carson would like, he found and auditioned new talent and prepared them for what would be perhaps the most important gig of their careers.

Tennis often spotted talent at The Improv clubs owned by Budd Friedman, he noted in the 2017 book The Improv: An Oral History of the Comedy Club That Revolutionized Stand-Up.

“It was my job to use the club as an educational tool for both me and them,” he said. “I would know pretty much the 20 minutes they would do [and how] we could cut them down to six.

“My rule was that you’d better have that second appearance ready and it better be better, because Carson was going to want you back in 10 days, and you had to score that second time. The third time meant that he was going to start looking at you as a potential threat, and if you could get past a fourth and fifth time, that meant you were going to be OK.”

On the air, Carson would tease Tennis in running monologue jokes about the women he dated.

In 1980, the talent coordinator authored the book Johnny Tonight! about his experiences on the show. “This may sound eerie, but I firmly believe that no one — including Johnny’s own family — really knows him intimately,” he wrote.

Craig Giroux Tennis was born in Manhattan on July 24, 1940. His mother, Janice Kelly, acted on Broadway and in a few films, and his father, Guy Giroux, was an actor as well.

Raised in Sioux City, Iowa, where he was adopted by his stepfather, Neil Tennis, he graduated from Central High School in Sioux City and then the University of Colorado in 1963.

While working in New York as PR executive, Tennis joined The Tonight Show on a temporary basis, but it took him only three of four weeks before he became full time. “They loved his ideas,” his wife said. During those years in New York, he hosted an annual holiday party that Carson would attend (no small feat).

After he exited The Tonight Show — he had “gone as far as he could go,” his wife said — and was replaced by Jim McCawley, Tennis moved to The Alan Hamel Show, a talk show based in Vancouver.

He then served as an associate producer on Saturday Night Live for a few months in 1980, wrote episodes of The Love Boat in 1984 and worked on The Midnight Special, David Letterman’s NBC daytime show and several broadcasts of the Emmys and Battle of the Network Stars.

A devoted runner since the 1960s, Tennis also penned stage comedies and compiled more than 7,000 quotes for the 2011 book Show Business Is Faux Business.

In 1986, he was among the showbiz types who opened a bar on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City called Re$iduals (it’s still there, and it’s where he met his wife).

“All of the 12 partners,” he told the Los Angeles Times back then, “are New Yorkers, by birth or circumstance. We wanted the kind of bar we’d known in New York, a neighborhood bar for this end of the Valley. We draw from the area from CBS to Disney.”

Survivors also include his daughter, Kelsey, and his brother, Kit.