Carson’s first three marriages ended in divorce court and generated years of headlines. His fourth, to Alexis Maas, barely made the papers, and still has not.
Alexis Maas was the fourth and final wife of Johnny Carson, the longtime host of The Tonight Show. They married in June 1987, and the marriage lasted until his death in January 2005, longer than any of his three previous marriages.
Those who worked alongside Carson, or competed with him, often described someone very different off camera. The television host Dick Cavett said he had never met anyone as uncomfortable in ordinary social situations. The screenwriter George Axelrod was more direct: “Socially, he doesn’t exist. The reason is that there are no television cameras in living rooms.”
That discomfort did not keep his personal life out of print. His first three marriages each ended in divorce, and divorce proceedings are a matter of public record. Settlement figures, court filings, and the details of each split were reported at the time and have stayed on the record since. His fourth marriage never went through a divorce. It ended only when Carson died, and in the years before and after that, almost nothing about it was ever added to what his publicist said when he announced it in 1987.
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Key Facts
- Grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and worked at a stock brokerage before marrying Carson
- Married Carson on June 20, 1987, at his home in Malibu, California
- Had no children with Carson
- Has never given an interview or been photographed on the record since 2004
- No public record shows she has remarried since Carson’s death in 2005
How She Met Johnny Carson
Carson’s publicist, Jim Mahoney, announced the marriage on June 29, 1987, nine days after it took place, and gave two newspapers two different accounts of how the couple had met. He told the Los Angeles Times they met on a beach about two years earlier, which points to 1985. The same day, he told the New York Times that Maas had worked at a stock brokerage in the Malibu area and that Carson met her there four years earlier, which points to 1983 instead. Neither newspaper mentioned the other’s version, and the discrepancy has never been resolved anywhere else.
Maas had never been married before. The 1987 wire reports describe her only as being in her thirties, with Mahoney’s estimate to the Los Angeles Times landing on about 35. A birth date now attached to her online, July 15, 1952, does not match that reporting. Someone born in July 1952 would have turned 34, not 35, at a wedding held in June 1987, which suggests the date is an error that has been repeated rather than checked. Her actual birth date has never been confirmed by any primary source.
Their Wedding in Malibu
The ceremony took place at Carson’s beach house. Superior Court Judge William Hogoboom officiated, and Carson’s brother, Dick Carson, an Emmy winning director whose credits included Wheel of Fortune, was the only family member there. Five years later, Hogoboom described the day to PEOPLE.
“Just his brother, Dick, my wife and me” were there, outside Carson’s home, with the Pacific behind them.
The bride’s parents listened in over a speakerphone from the East Coast, since they could not get to California in time.
Carson was 61 at the time, and Maas was about 35, putting the age gap between them at roughly 26 years. The couple had gotten engaged the previous December, according to the wire report that ran in the New York Times. They left for England shortly after the wedding and attended the Wimbledon tennis championships on their honeymoon, a detail confirmed independently by both the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press that same week.
A Marriage That Left Almost No Trace
Carson’s marriage to Jody Wolcott ran from 1949 to 1963 and ended in a divorce that court records describe as volatile, with infidelity on both sides. His marriage to Joanne Copeland ran from 1963 to 1972 and ended with a settlement near $500,000, plus monthly alimony, covered in detail by the press at the time. His marriage to Joanna Holland ran from 1972 to 1985 and ended with an 80 page settlement awarding her $20 million in cash and property, coverage that continued for years afterward.
His marriage to Maas never reached a courtroom. It ended only when Carson died, so it never produced the divorce filings, settlement figures, and alimony disputes that had followed each of the earlier marriages into print. Wikipedia’s own biography of Carson gives each of his first three wives several sourced paragraphs. It gives Maas one sentence, without a citation.
Real events did happen during those eighteen years that might otherwise have drawn some comment from her. Carson’s son Kim Arthur “Ricky” Carson died in a car accident in 1991, four years into the marriage. Carson retired from The Tonight Show the following year, after three decades hosting it. A heart attack in 1999 led to bypass surgery. In September 2002, he revealed that he had emphysema, saying at the time that he was not terminally ill. Maas made no public statement around any of it. There is no quote from her anywhere in the press about his retirement, his surgery, or his diagnosis.
Carson’s Death and What Followed
Carson died on January 23, 2005, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, of respiratory failure caused by the emphysema he had disclosed three years earlier. His body was cremated, and the ashes went to Maas, with no public memorial service held, in keeping with his family’s wishes.
George Schlatter, the producer behind Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In and a friend of Carson’s for decades, told PEOPLE not long afterward: “The real love of his life was Alex.”
Her only appearance on camera since is in the 2012 PBS documentary “Johnny Carson: King of Late Night,” part of the American Masters series. Both PBS’s own list of who was interviewed for the film and IMDb’s cast records show her represented only through archive footage, not through any new interview given for the project.
Did She Remarry? Where Is She Now?
No source has ever reported that Maas remarried after Carson’s death, and no obituary or death record for her has surfaced in the more than two decades since. Based on the age given at the time of her wedding, she would be in her mid seventies today.
The most recent dated photograph of her that has surfaced shows her with Carson at an event in Beverly Hills on February 3, 2004, less than a year before he died. Nothing in the public record places her anywhere after 2012, when the documentary aired.
Of Carson’s four wives, Joanne Copeland died in 2015 and Joanna Holland died in 2025. Maas’s status is the only one of the four that has never been confirmed either way.
Who Inherited Johnny Carson’s Estate
Carson’s estate was widely reported at the time of his death to be worth around $300 million, though Celebrity Net Worth’s later reporting on the same records puts the figure closer to $200 million.
Maas inherited the Malibu compound Carson had bought in 1984 for $9.5 million. She sold it in 2007, along with two neighboring parcels, for $46 million.
A separate share of the estate had already been placed in a trust years earlier. That trust became public in August 2010, when a regulatory filing showed it had transferred close to $156 million to the Johnny Carson Foundation, the charity Carson founded himself in 1981. The gift reportedly caught the foundation’s own board off guard. The Foundation remains active today, with total assets reported around $120 million in its most recent public filings, and it continues funding causes around Los Angeles and at the University of Nebraska, Carson’s alma mater. Public filings show no role for Maas at the Foundation, whether as an officer, a trustee, or a listed contact.
The rest of the estate was divided between Maas and Carson’s surviving sons at the time, Christopher and Cory, since his third son, Ricky, had already died in 1991. Christopher Carson died in June 2025, according to PEOPLE, leaving Cory as the only one of Carson’s three sons still living.
What Still Isn’t Known
Maas has never given an interview about the marriage. Nobody has found a photograph of her taken after 2004. And nothing has ever surfaced to explain what actually drew her and Carson together, beyond two conflicting stories his own publicist gave to two different newspapers on the same day in 1987.
The same gap between the man on camera and the man everywhere else, the one Cavett and Axelrod both described, seems to extend to his marriage as well. His first three marriages became public through divorce court whether he wanted that or not. The fourth did not, and 21 years after his death, it still has not.
