Television: Guy at the Office Party

Nobody can tell for sure what it is or why, but the yeastiest dish on TV this season is served up about midnight every Tuesday when the Popocatepetl of party-givers, Elsa Maxwell, rises onstage at NBC’s Tonight to barter inanities with cheeky, clef-chinned Jack Paar. To Elsa, Host Paar is “My King of Jest,” and Jack calls Elsa “Queen of the Wild Frontier.” “Elsa’s not afraid to say what’s on my mind,” explains Paar as, with wide-eyed innocence, he eggs her on to gossip haphazardly about Perry Como (“He puts me to sleep”), Princess Grace of Monaco (“Awfully boring. That castle’s the gloomiest place in the world−they probably use privies”), and Elsa’s recent loss of a libel suit to King Farouk (“I sat six hours on a board. My fanny was absolutely black”).

Before some 2,000,000 enraptured viewers, Elsa has called Confidential Publisher Robert Harrison “a sewer rat,” and allowed that “I have always wanted a falsie more than anything else in my life.” Once Spinster Maxwell confessed that she “would just love to have a baby.” M.C. Paar cringed and murmured a coast-to-coast aside: “Our first exclusive.”

Cute Girls. Cigar-smoking Elsa, a spry and engaging 74, is an aimless guest on Paar’s weeknight show (11:15 p.m. to 1 a.m.), and he may lose her to other commitments. Still, Paar seems to have collected enough Paar-snips and talented showfolk to rescue NBC from the debacle of its late America after Dark show and save Tonight for many another day. Though Tonight is still a money-losing proposition for NBC, 76 stations now carry the show instead of taking the craven’s way out with old movies. In last fortnight alone, Paar has picked up some $400,000 in new business, increased his number of sponsors to nine. To show its appreciation, NBC last week exercised its option to keep Paar at work on Tonight until next March. Says Paar: “I’m the guy at the office party who nobody noticed all year and suddenly the cute girls are talking to.”

The “girls” were a long time getting to Comic Paar, a Canton, Ohio, boy whose mother wanted him to become a minister. Instead, he quit school after the tenth grade to become a radio writer and performer, drifted into TV chiefly as a summer replacement. Now, sporting a toupee and a confident sneer of a smile, the new Paar, 39, zanily preens himself, takes pride in guest performers he has shuttled starward (Comedienne Carol Burnett, Singers Diahann Carroll, Trish Dwelley), exchanges mad colloquies with a redhaired, clodpated comedienne named Dody Goodman, and, against his agent’s advice, calls himself “the King.” (Explains Paar: “Overstatement is very funny.”) With an Ernie Kovackian flair for electronic jabberwocky and oddball gimmicks, he throws in some wild Italian movies or stages a midget-car race on the studio floor. For the most part, though, Paar just talks with his guests, bringing to the wee hours a sometimes mordant humor and off-color japery that smack of the old radio days when Bob Hope used to get cut off the air, e.g., “I went to the ballet last night. After all, we can’t all be Marlboro men.”

Hard Work. Paar’s peculiar combination of casual intensity and wit has caused one fan to call him “a cross between Billy Graham and Fred Allen.” He cracks that he is “Lawrence Welk without music.” Not far beneath his self-deprecating, unruffled exterior is a sensitive, often defensive man whose slight-looking build (6 ft., 174 Ibs.) shoulders a sizeable chip. Proclaiming his motto to be “Leave everybody to hell alone,” Paar lives quietly with his second wife, a daughter, 8, and swimming pool in suburban Bronxville, N.Y. “I’m so lovable,” Jack says. “. . . There have been all kinds of bets that I won’t last. I told them if it is a miracle and I’m still here after Jan. 1, who performed it? Tell me that!”