Alexis Maas married Johnny Carson, the longtime host of NBC’s Tonight Show, on June 20, 1987, in a ceremony kept deliberately private. Nine days later, when Carson’s publicist finally confirmed the wedding to reporters, he gave two different accounts of how the couple had actually met, without anyone seeming to notice the difference.
He told the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that Carson had met her on a beach near his Malibu home two years earlier. He told the New York Times something else: that Carson had met her four years earlier, at a stock brokerage where she worked. No beach in that version at all.
Neither account has ever been reconciled. The wedding itself, unlike the story of how they met, is easy enough to document.
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What’s Actually Documented About the Wedding
Judge William Hogoboom performed the ceremony at Carson’s home on the Malibu coast, with only Carson’s brother, Dick, and the judge’s wife present as witnesses. The couple had been engaged since the previous December, and left for Wimbledon within days of the wedding. Carson was 61. His publicist described Maas only as being around 35, a Pittsburgh native who had never married before. No reporter that week got an exact birthdate from anyone.
Carson had already made a joke of his record on marriage by then, once comparing his advice on the subject to the captain of the Titanic giving lessons in navigation.
Three Marriages That Left a Record, and a Fourth That Didn’t
None of that squares with how Carson’s first three marriages played out. Jody Wolcott married him in 1949 and divorced him in 1963, after they raised three sons together. Joanne Copeland, a former model, married him in 1963, a year after he took over the Tonight Show, and divorced him in 1972; she went on to host her own television talk show and kept a public profile for decades afterward. Joanna Holland married him in 1972, filed for divorce in 1983, and finalized it two years later with a reported twenty million dollar settlement. Her death last July, at 93, was followed by a wave of articles about the wife who came after her, most of them recycling the same unverified details.
| Wife | Married | Marriage Ended |
|---|---|---|
| Jody Wolcott | 1949 | 1963 |
| Joanne Copeland | 1963 | 1972 |
| Joanna Holland | 1972 | 1985 |
| Alexis Maas | 1987 | 2005 |
A column published that same summer offers a clue to why he might have wanted this marriage kept quiet in the first place. It caught Carson fidgeting through a rare at-home interview, and noted he only smoked during commercial breaks, when the studio lights went dark and the audience that had just spent an hour watching him couldn’t see him do it. Three of his marriages happened inside the part of his life that got watched every night. His fourth mostly didn’t, though it would be five more years before he gave the show up entirely.
The Marriage That Outlasted the Other Three
None of this means Carson became an easier man to live with. His longtime lawyer, Henry Bushkin, wrote about it in his 2013 memoir. The couple were on their honeymoon, on a cruise off Italy, when Carson snapped at his new wife over an offhand remark at dinner. If she said something like that again, he told her, “this marriage won’t last another three weeks.”
It lasted eighteen years instead, longer than any of his three marriages before it. Mike Thomas, who completed Bill Zehme’s biography of Carson after Zehme’s death, told Fox News this was the calmest of the four marriages, and that Maas simply “let Johnny be Johnny.” Carson gave up the show in May 1992, five years into the marriage, and with it the one hour a night that had strained every relationship that came before this one.
What’s Been Added to the Record Since He Died
Carson died on January 23, 2005, of emphysema, at his home in Los Angeles. His ashes went to Maas, and in keeping with the family’s wishes, there was no public memorial.
What’s happened since is harder to pin down, and this is where the record starts filling in with things nobody actually reported. Maas inherited Carson’s Malibu estate and sold it in 2007 for $46 million, to producer Sidney Kimmel. Kimmel sold it on in 2019, and the property went back on the market last September asking $110 million, nearly twelve times what Carson originally paid for it in the 1980s. Maas herself appeared once, credited only as herself, in a 2012 PBS documentary about Carson’s life. Outside that single credit, she has given no interview and made no public statement in more than two decades.
That hasn’t stopped a specific birthdate from becoming fact online. Google’s own AI Overview now states hers with total confidence: July 15, 1952. Nobody has ever explained where that date actually came from. A different, unsourced claim has also taken hold, that Maas now runs the Johnny Carson Foundation, the charity that received more than $150 million from Carson’s estate. Public tax filings say otherwise. The foundation’s president is Allan Alexander, a Beverly Hills attorney with no listed connection to Maas. What she personally inherited has never been reliably reported either, though that hasn’t stopped estimates from $150 million to $450 million circulating as settled fact.
Three of Carson’s marriages ended in courtrooms, with settlements and, in two cases, ex-wives who kept talking to reporters for years afterward. The fourth didn’t, and neither Carson nor Maas ever explained why it worked when the others hadn’t. More than two decades since his death, that silence hasn’t stopped the record from filling in around it. It’s just meant most of what’s been filled in isn’t real.
