Johnny Carson: we’ve had a lot of revelations this week about his life and long run on the Tonight show. Now that I’ve got the whole manuscript of Henry Bushkin‘s eye opening memoir about his late friend and former client, there’s even more.

In the mid 1970s, Carson found a live hand grenade on his front lawn with a death threat and instructions. It did turn out the grenade was a fake, Bushkin reports, but “the threat was taken seriously” in light of recent episodes like Patty Hearst and the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. Plus, Frank Sinatra Jr had been famously kidnapped in 1963.

Carson was told to deliver $250,000 in cash to a specific spot. The FBI didn’t want to let him go, but Carson finally convinced them to let him do it. The threat had said that if he didn’t deliver the money, harm would come to his family. “Don’t insult our intelligence by dismissing this matter,” the note read.

Bushkin recalls that Carson still had that .38 revolver I wrote about earlier this week. Bushkin says he had a license to carry the gun. Johnny had a bad with him that looked like it was filled with money, but it was just “cut up paper stacked and wrapped in 125 bill sized bundles.”

Bushkin says a helicopter hovered over Carson at 4,000 feet so it wouldn’t be noticed. Johnny drove the money to a nearby laundromat in Burbank, as instructed. Police immediately apprehended a 26 year German national named Richard Dziabacinski and his wife. They went to jail for a year, and got five years’ probation.

Carson was certainly a Nebraska cowboy in his heart. Earlier this week I told you that Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson’s lawyer, noticed he was wearing .38 pistol on a holster under his coat. Now that I’ve been able to go through Bushkin’s book, coming out on Tuesday, I noticed another similar anecdote. Carson was dating Alexis Maas, who would be his fourth wife. He told Bushkin in 1985: “Look, I’m not going through this bullshit again. If I ever get married again, put a .38 to my head and if we don’t have a pre-nup, pull the trigger.”

Bushkin recalls that the police at the time covered up the whole incident and refused to admit that Carson himself was involved in the drop. One FBI agent told Bushkin of Johnny: “He has brass balls.”

PS I think this book is going to fly off the shelves next week. Bushkin knows everything about Carson and the whole time period from 1967-87. We are never going to have stories like this about Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, Ferguson. Maybe Letterman. What a read!

Now that I have the full manuscript of Henry Bushkin’s tell all about Johnny Carson, I thought we’d get some insight into brutal falling out between Carson and Joan Rivers. And we do. Bushkin essentially lays the blame for the 1986 war of the comics at the feet of Joan’s late husband Edgar Rosenberg.

Skipping to the end of the tale, Bushkin says that Rosenberg lied to Rivers about trying to reach Carson and discuss her offer of moving to Fox and starting her own show. Bushkin says he never received a call from Rosenberg to put Johnny and Joan on the phone. But Rosenberg swore that he’d called Bushkin and received no answer.

Carson never spoke to Rivers again after she left her Tonight show guest hosting spot for Fox. He banned her from being on any NBC show. Her Fox show was canceled, and Rosenberg, sadly, committed suicide.

Bushkin notes that if Rivers had only contacted Carson before the announcement of her Fox show was made, he would have congratulated her. Bushkin says that Carson always admired Rivers as a great comedian. But he did not “fear her.”

Ironically, Carson and Edgar and Joan had already had a history. In the spring of 1979, when Carson was declared a free agent and suddenly had no contract with NBC, it was Rosenberg who stepped in. He set up two meetings for Carson with ABC executives. One of the meetings, Bushkin writes, was held in “international waters” on a yacht in the Mediterranean.Carson, Bushkin writes, called Rosenberg “Inspector Clouseau” because everything he did was clouded in mystery.

At the time,, Carson was so angry with NBC and almost made the move. ABC offered to double his salary and let him own his show. He could also control the time period following the show.

But NBC intervened. In the spring of 1980 they gave Carson a $25 million a year contract for 3 days of work a week, 37 weeks a year. The rest was time off and vacation. And Joan Rivers was his guest host on Monday nights until she left for Fox.

Bushkin’s book, titled “Johnny Carson,” is published next Tuesday by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Madonna didn’t show up but she did send an email as her mentor, Seymour Stein, received the first ever CBGB Icon Award last night. A couple hundred record industry types came down to the Bowery Hotel, where Stein’s long long time friend and colleague producer Richard Gottehrer  presented the award to Stein, founder of Sire Records.

Madonna was more interested in being photographed at the “12 Years a Slave” premiere than showing up for the man who discovered her and made her what she is today. But she did send that email.

No less an eminence than former Warner Music Group owner Edgar Bronfman, Jr, paid his respects, and I ran into all sorts of people including Lyor Cohen, Craig Kallman of Atlantic Records, famed rock photographer Bob Gruen, rockers Bebe Buell and Jim Walls, former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum chief Terry Stewart, musician Andy Paley, and New Radicals singer songwriter Gregg Alexander, who’s co-written the music for next year’s hit film “Can a Song Save Your Life?”

Mandy Stein, Seymour’s daughter and the director a CGBG’s documentary called “Burning Down the House,” read Madonna’s email tribute to Stein. He signed her at Sire Records in 1983, and the rest is history. Gottehrer told the story of how Sire Records was born, and how and he Stein used to travel to Europe to pick up acts no one wanted. The result was a lot of hits from “Ode to Billie Joe” to Sweden’s Focus playing the instrumental “Hocus Pocus.”

Eventually Stein picked up the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Pretenders. Now all of them including Stein himself are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

After the awards ceremony, everyone headed over to the Sunshine Landmark Theater for the premiere of Randall Miller’s “CBGB” movie and opening night of the CBGB Film and Music Festival. The movie is a tribute Hilly Kristal, who’s played with perfect eccentricity by Alan Rickman. There are several outstanding supporting performances, too, from Freddy Rodriguez as a junkie Hilly takes in at CBGB, to Mickey Sumner’s ragged, spot on turn as Patti Smith. Ahna O’Reilly is quite good as Mary Harron, and I really liked Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint and Jusin Bartha, respectively, as Cheetah Chrome and Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys.

The music is great, and it was fun for me to relive some personal history. But Miller and screenwriter Jody Slavin have made more of a docudrama and than a movie. After a while, the whole thing just sort of dribbles down to an ending. Very little is really fleshed out. And there are time line errors– Patti Smith was not singing “Because the Night” at CBGB in 1975. Sumner is so good I wish they’d let her do something from “Horses.”

At least there is a movie, and Hilly Kristal will not be forgotten. The people who put him out of business will never have a movie made about them, that’s for sure. And the CGBG spirit lives on.

I guess Conrad Hilton’s already flipped in his grave a few times. This is nothing new. Paris Hilton’s new video “Good Time” with Lil Wayne features several F bombs. It’s a dance single meant to be provocative. Is it really? No. Just the language is coarse and vulgar. What else is new? That’s hot!

Paul McCartney introduced a new song from his new album called “New” last night on Jimmy Fallon. “Save Us” is a straight ahead rocker. Paul is a wonder of energy and melody at 71. His voice sounds pretty good, too.