a meteoric disappearance   (quote)

One night a couple of decades on, Jack returned to the show, as a guest on Johnny's couch; if you freeze the frame, the two silver foxes could almost be brothers. But then you look closer—the rueful tilt of Jack's head, the angular snap of Johnny's. Carson's voice is brisk and assured; Paar's is wistful and oddly childlike. Johnny didn't do "mercurial." If the talk show is an oxymoron, Carson invented an identity to match: affable and remote, familiar and unknowable. Paar made an entertainment out of his own pathologies: as Newsweek put it, "Russian roulette with commercials."

 -Mark Steyn, A Meteoric Disappearance: Jack Paar (1918-2004)