Putting Family Above Fame, Son Shows True Meaning of Devotion

NEW CITY, N.Y. —  At first, the father spoke to the son.

He spoke of the family’s migration north, and the hard times growing up in New York City. He spoke of driving a cab and picking up celebrity fares: Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant. He spoke of his own father, a hard-drinking raconteur sometimes seen in the company of ex-heavyweight champ Jack Johnson.

The father was 82, lying in a nursing home bed, dying of lung cancer. The son, now 59, had quit a $750,000-a-year television job to hear the father’s tales, their two lives suddenly intertwined by a diagnosis of one’s impending death.

“I had this moment of clarity: ‘This is it. My father is going to die,’ ” recalled John Johnson, one of New York’s best-known news anchors. “I said, ‘I can no longer just fit my father into my schedule.’

“So I excused myself.”

“I excused myself”--it sounds so simple. But Johnson left a four-year guaranteed contract worth $3 million. This was no leave of absence or extended vacation. There was no promise of any return. And he did not hesitate.

On Aug. 8, 1997, Johnson did his last show for NBC’s New York City station and abandoned its Rockefeller Center studios. He swapped his huge nightly viewership for an audience of one: his cancer-stricken father.

Four days each week for the next nine months, he made the 368-mile round trip to a Long Island nursing home. When his father’s condition worsened, Johnson moved into a nearby hotel to stretch their dwindling time together.

From Sophocles to Springsteen, writers have pondered the father-son dynamic. The man and the boy butt heads over turf, establish boundaries, bury their emotions. The boy becomes a man.

And then, so often, it ends: Somebody dies, and the survivor is left with a lifetime of words and sentiments unspoken.

John Johnson would not accept that fate.

“I didn’t believe that I could go on living a decent life without having spent some time with my father,” Johnson said, sitting in his secluded home north of Manhattan, surrounded by family photos. “I very much needed that.”

Johnson saw his decision as obvious. Others--his agent, his accountant, even his father--were stunned. WNBC-TV Vice President Dennis Swanson, a longtime friend who accepted Johnson’s resignation, understood.

“Surprised? Not really,” Swanson said. “You get to that point in your life where things take on a little different perspective. For John, his father became his highest priority.

“There was nothing to discuss about that.”

*

Sometimes, the father and the son said nothing.

The son would patiently feed the father, reversing the roles of infancy. He would provide one of the cigarettes that the father still craved, or watch as the father slipped into sleep. The son would remember what he knew of the father’s life.

John Johnson Sr. was the son of a laborer who followed the dollar from Virginia to New York City, a father who died too young and left his family almost destitute. John Sr. met his wife while roller-skating through Harlem; he was 16, she was 13.

They were later married, and stayed that way for 58 years.

Their only child, John Jr., arrived shortly before World War II. The family moved briefly to Washington, D.C., where the school system remained segregated. The education was abysmal; the mother taught the son to read and write.

John Sr., with a high school diploma, was scrambling to support the family--”working two, three jobs,” his son recalled. The family moved back to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, where the elder Johnson was “a janitor, a cabdriver, finally ending up in the post office,” the son said.

John Sr. was tougher than the times, tougher than the neighborhood. The father relaxed with a smoke or a glass of Scotch. He enjoyed fried foods and shunned exercise. He took care of his family.

“My father was away working all the time,” the younger Johnson recalled. “By the time he had stopped working, I was well out of the house.”

And well on the way to a successful career. The son had inherited the father’s work ethic.

John Jr. started at the ABC television network in the late 1960s, assisting on-camera reporter Frank Reynolds in the documentary division. A Reynolds sick day led to Johnson’s first on-air appearance, and he soon became a New York-based network correspondent--one of the first blacks to hold that position.

Johnson’s first story was the 1971 Attica prison riots, and he quickly developed a first-rate reputation. Johnson’s job became his top priority, even as he married twice and had four children--two sons, two daughters.

“My television career took its toll on my family,” Johnson said reflectively. “To be successful in television, you have to be married to the job.”

But Johnson, like his father, took care of his family. His children became college graduates, solid citizens. And he moved his parents out of Bed-Stuy and into suburban Long Island, setting them up in a nice home in a nice neighborhood where they enjoyed a bit of reflected celebrity.

Their son had left the network for local television, and they watched him most every night.

When Johnson’s mother fell ill with cancer in 1994, he was in Los Angeles covering the O.J. Simpson case. Irene Johnson, her son’s biggest fan, never missed a broadcast. When her son took an anchorman’s job in March 1995, she was extremely proud.

And then, a few days later, she died. Johnson had a vague feeling of guilt, that he should have been around more. When faced with word of his father’s spreading cancer, he moved to preempt a repeat of his mother’s last days.

“My father liked seeing me on television,” Johnson said. “But in the end, my father liked seeing me . . . instead of just watching me.”

*

Near the end, the son spoke to the father.

He spoke of the times when the father would roller-skate through Harlem, zigzagging recklessly without a care in the world. He spoke of the father’s piece of the American dream--the house and the car in the suburbs. He spoke of a devoted wife and “a decent son,” the love of a good family.

He did not talk about the TV job he had left. The son had returned to his first love, painting, filling canvases with work influenced by the time shared with his father.

Their nine months together changed the son’s view of the world. His new vision does not include a 25-inch screen. Nor does it hold any regrets.

“I made the right call,” John Johnson Jr. said confidently. “There’s no doubt about it.”

Before cancer finally claimed the father’s life on April 20, these were his last words: “I’m proud of my son.”

The feeling was mutual. At his father’s funeral, Johnson stood before the assembled mourners and delivered a eulogy.

“I think my father did his job,” the son told the crowd. “And I think I did mine.”