Show Business: Late-Night Affair

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His mother and Billy Graham think he should have been a minister. He himself thinks perhaps he should have tried to be a missionary, like Albert Schweitzer. Some of television’s unseen but much-heard word merchants think he would have made a fine gag writer. Walter Winchell plainly thinks he should have been put into an ablative nose cone on a one-way rocket trip to the moon. Sponsors of late movies think he should have stayed in daytime television, and all across the land, people who like to go to sleep early think he should have stood in bed — and given them a chance to get to bed too.

But about 5,000,000 fans — along with happy NBC executives, satisfied advertisers and fellow entertainers whom his show helped to success — think that Jack Paar should be precisely what he is: a first-rate, refreshingly different TV performer who in a single year has come out of nowhere and made a huge hit of a special kind of entertainment. What Paar brings into American living rooms five nights a week is both more and less than a comedy, variety or chatter show — it is a special show business blend that Paartisans consider uniquely satisfying.

He is one of a whole new class of TV-age entertainers—the just-talkers. But his appeal has little in common with Steve Allen’s brash sidewalk zaniness or Arthur Godfrey’s somnolent saloon drone. When Paar appears on screen, there is an odd, hesitant hitch to his stride. For a split self-effacing second he is a late arrival, worried that he has blundered into the wrong party. His shy smile—he has developed one of the shiest smiles in the business—seems to ask a question: “Is this applause for me?” Then he remembers: he is really the host. Almost diffidently he pulls up a chair. What Paar calls his “cute little Presbyterian face” beams puckishly. With his voice wavering between a whisper and a sigh, he begins to engage his guests in quiet conversation.

He is surrounded by a band, singers, guest comedians, skits. But what really gives the Paar show its shape is the L formed by a scarred desk and a well-worn couch. Behind the desk, Jack is barricaded; the couch supports a “panel” of regular or irregular conversationalists. Says Paar: “The show is nothing. Just me and people talking. Historic naturalness. We don’t act, we just defend ourselves.”

Most of the time, Paar is merely a good listener with a knack of asking the right questions. He may be as fast on the ad-lib draw as the next gag-toting desperado, but again and again he lets himself be “topped.” He is all the world’s straight man. And yet, Paar can hit. A caustic remark, a misconstrued question, a real or fancied attack in or out of the studio can provoke stinging repartee. When Winchell attacked him for a misstatement made by Elsa Maxwell on the show, Paar counterpunched fiercely, guessed—on the air—that Winchell’s “high, hysterical voice” results from his “too-tight underwear.” Often, Paar punches with less provocation —massive retaliation, as one of his former writers puts it—for no act of aggression. When Perfectionist Paar berates stagehands (“the tippytoe squad”) for being slow, his writers for providing dull jokes, the studio audience for not laughing, it is all done in fun—but there is a serious, waspish edge in the laughter.

The same element of unpredictability—the suggestion that a mild explosive has been put into the prominently displayed tumblers of Sponsor Lipton’s tea—derives from the widespread belief that Paar permits off-color humor. On the whole the charge is unjust. The show’s most celebrated blue note was struck while Paar was on vacation and Stand-In Jonathan Winters allowed Anthropologist Ashley Montague to talk about how lack of breast feeding gives American males a bosom fixation. Jack says he would never have permitted it (“After breast feeding, there’s just no place to go”). But Paar does occasionally tarry near the brink of the blue, and this brinksmanship is another reason why the Paar show provokes the implicit question: “What’s going to happen next?” — and why the show is a hit.

The Big Gamble. When asked about Jack Paar, the late Fred Allen once said: “Oh, you mean the young man who had the meteoric disappearance.” A year ago the description still fitted Paar, sometime minor movie actor and perennial radio-TV summer replacement. He had done well with a radio program and a daytime television show of his own, but never well enough to make it big. One TV executive dismissed him as strictly a “pipe and slipper type.” What happened next is told by NBC’s Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff: “We faced a critical decision. The America After Dark version of our Tonight show was a shambles. Sponsors were shunning the program. Some stations were defecting from the NBC late-night line-up in favor of old Hollywood movies. We were under heavy pressure to give up late-night live programing. After much soul searching we staked everything on an amiable young man named Jack Paar — and never has a network program gamble paid off more handsomely.”

As it moved into its second year last week, the show had chalked up five industry awards and a higher rating than successful Steve Allen several years ago in the same time slot. At a time when live shows are fading fast from every channel, the Paar show is seen over a record 115 stations and has collected as many as 38 sponsors, ranging from Minipoo shampoo to Corega denture fastener. One measure of the show’s import is the loyalty of most of the guests; they are paid only “scale” ($320 per appearance), but most of them love the show for its fun — and for the publicity.

Today it is already fashionable to forget how few people gave the show a chance to survive at all with a tough TV audience —night people already addicted to six-gun cowpokes or to the time-defying charms of late movies, with their youthful Gables and ageless Garbos. Could the All-American boy with the dimpled chin and the dinky toupee move the merchandise against such competition? At first NBC bigwigs were talking about a well-integrated variety show. Says Paar: “A television executive doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he can put it on paper. I let them all talk and write memos and I secretly made plans.”

The Characters. Paar’s plans consisted mostly of organized planlessness. During the past year Jack has tantalized a tame lion with doses of catnip, tangled with a pickpocket named Dominique, who lifted his wallet, belt and wrist watch, sweated through a few falls with a professional wrestler named Killer Kowalski. He has worn funny hats, taken off his pants, climbed up the studio walls. But always, the high points were provided by the talkers — guided or goaded, driven or drawn out by Jack.

There was Dody Goodman, corn-fed elf and professional birdbrain, whose irrelevance and irreverence were fun until Paar got rid of her in an unseemly family squabble (TIME, March 24). Elsa Maxwell appeared for weekly off-with-their-heads chats, chopped at so many well-known necks (including Winchell’s, Presley’s, Princess Grace’s) that Jack was only half kidding when he rolled his eyes and groaned: “Call the lawyers.” For a few frenetic nights, Zsa Zsa Gabor leaned over her cleavage and rattled her host into some now famous fluffs. “It will cut him!” she squealed, in the middle of his Norelco razor pitch. “It won’t cut anything!” roared Jack, who could have happily cut off Zsa Zsa’s blonde tresses when he realized what he had said.

Gradually a corporal’s guard of regulars formed, including gifted Pianist Jose Melis, suave Announcer Hugh Downs and Singer Betty Johnson, who all served as Paar’s foils. The regulars became as familiar as comic-strip characters. Leading characters at present : Genevieve, French singer with a haphazard haircut and accent to match, and an oldtime comedian named Cliff Arquette, with drooping pants and rustic repartee. Despite her sophisticated air, it is naively charming Genevieve who represents innocence on the show and Cliff, despite his cornball appearance, whose trigger-quick ad libs speak for sophistication. But the biggest character remains Jack Paar — and he represents neither innocence nor sophistication, but something in between.

Paar claims that he is just being himself on the show, and to a very large extent he is. Unlike an actor, he cannot take refuge behind a script or a false beard; he must convince the audience that he is exposing his true face. The result is that the traits of the “real” Paar are very like those of the TV Paar—the difference being that off screen they loom much bigger. Says he: “It is not true that my personality is split. It is filleted. On the air all I do is hold back. If I gave too much of myself on the show, it would be too much for the cable.” If the on-screen Paar can be kind and sentimental, the off-screen Paar often weeps like a baby. If the public Paar can be waspish and oddly defensive, the private Paar often seems like a hunted and inordinately suspicious man.

As he sees it, the soft green leaf may well be a nettle in disguise, and danger lurks on all sides. It is hard to trust people—”If they slap me on the back, maybe the next time they slap me they’ll have a knife.” On the other hand, so few people are really grateful to him: “It’s not that I need credit. But somewhere along the line the dog should be patted on the head.” If some neighborhood toughs honk their horns outside his house to annoy him, he speaks of being “hounded by degenerates.”

This feeling of being hunted may be explained by past failures, by the very real back-stabbing that goes on in show business, and by the pressure of Paar’s schedule—for in his life, almost every night is opening night. Each show is preceded by a private warmup, ranging from gnawing anxiety to panic. During the hours of preparation—which must end in laughter or failure—Paar is probably doing his hardest work. At noon on a recent, typical pre-show day, Jack was prowling his barn-red twelve-room house in suburban Bronxville, N.Y. His breakfast had been spoiled by an unfriendly newspaper comment on the previous night’s show; now he was worried about the coming performance.

What to do? He calls Assistant Producer Monty Morgan at his Manhattan office. “It looks pretty nothing tonight,” Jack complains. “The red flag is up. We’re in trouble, we’re really in trouble . . .”

2:05 p.m. Glumly Jack selects a Cuban cigar from his humidor. He is afraid to smoke cigars in public lest he look like a “wise guy.” Pipes too have been forced into the privacy of his home since Marlboro cigarettes became one of the show’s sponsors. Wandering aimlessly once more, like a man in search of work, Jack walks into the living room and picks up a newspaper. “What the hell can I say about the new women’s hemlines?” he asks sadly. “I’ve already advised them to have their knees lowered.”

2:50 p.m. He walks out to the swimming pool behind the house and seems surprised to discover that his nine-year-old daughter Randy is off swimming at the country club. “I never played with other kids. Most of the time Randy would rather sit and daydream like I do.”

4:25 p.m. A call from an NBC attorney informs Jack that as a bonus for signing his new contract (which runs for two more years), he gets six weeks of vacation with pay. Now his salary comes to $2,750 a week, plus a percentage of the income from commercials, but he has no time for pleasure. “I don’t know what in hell we’re going to do tonight,” he moans.

4:45 p.m. Still groaning about the “absolute lack of material” for the night’s show, Jack suddenly cocks his head to the sound of a car horn and catcalls in front of his home. “The degenerates again,” he says softly to a visitor. “See, Pal, I kid you not.”

4:57 p.m. Talent Scout Tom O’Malley calls to announce that old Prizefighter-Clown Maxie Rosenbloom will be available for the night’s show. “Tell Rosenbloom to be himself,” Jack warns. “No prepared jokes.” The warning is hardly necessary. Responsible for signing most of the guests on Paar’s show, O’Malley is well aware of the rules of the game. Forbidden are “Lindy” comedians—the brash, Berle-type gagsters given to dialect jokes and continuous excitement. Says Paar: “I’m not interested in comedians named Joey or Jackie—no rock ‘n’ roll, no jazz.”

5:10 p.m. After a brief dip in the pool (“I spend all my time keeping it clean and I’m seldom in it”), Jack settles down with a Jack Daniel’s softened by water. “Do you know that right now, tonight, there is not one single written word, and now—WHAT TIME is IT? We’re in panic NOW!”

5:27 p.m. Miriam Paar, Jack’s pretty and patient wife, appears at poolside with a dinner tray—brook trout, corn on the cob, string beans, mixed green salad. Jack tops it off with a chocolate sundae garnished with whipped cream and peanuts.

7:10 p.m. Dressed in a blue suit, pink shirt and dark glasses, Jack is ready for the hired limousine that has come to take him to the show. He settles into the back seat with a groan, convinced that he is on a short ride toward disaster.

7:54 p.m. Jack hurries into the rear door of the Hudson Theater on West 44th Street and climbs upstairs to his dressing room. En route, he is cornered by Chris Carroll, an old Army buddy now serving as feature editor of the show (i.e., the procurer of oddball talent—pickpockets, performing chimpanzees, professional wrestlers). “You want Paul Anderson on the show?” Carroll aks hopefully. “Strongest man in the world. Hold you up over his head.” Paar nods. Inside his dressing room, he sits down and studies a mimeographed “status report” of talent bookings; peremptorily he scrawls “O.K.,” “No” or “Investigate” after each listing.

8:01 p.m. Paar studies the scripts for the commercials, reads a part planned for a visiting comic, says “Whew!” and shoves the papers aside in disgust.

8:09 p.m. Writer Walt Kempley comes into the dressing room with the news that he has found a gun that shoots soft bullets. How about a duel with Genevieve to see who can draw the fastest? Often such gimmicks are the bright spots of a show (a mechanical fish-eating fish was brought back for numerous encores, as was a pair of “binoculars” that were actually half liquor flask). But tonight Paar is not in the mood. “I need a show,” he snaps.

8:16 p.m. Jack reads a skit called “Famous Last Words” and discards it as no good. Finally he begins to stitch together a few lines himself for his opening monologue, thinking aloud, jotting down the words in a stenographic notebook. “We have a wonderful evening planned just as soon as the show is over . . . This show comes to you in compatible color; this means my shirt and socks match.”

8:45 p.m. Onstage, Jack takes time to rehearse a skit, then wanders around asking questions, checking on props, apparently calm. Abruptly, he strides into his dressing room. On the dim, dusty stage of the Hudson Theater, technicians keep rummaging about the little world of cables, cameras, and dingy sets that will look sumptuous on the home screens. The band rehearses in shirtsleeves.

10:35 p.m. After a long, embarrassing interview with an English actress who was scheduled for a guest appearance, Jack comes onstage again, explains with a sour face: “She made a movie with Noel Coward, she did this, she did that. I said, ‘Can you talk about these things?’ She said she wanted to be a cook, a creative cook. That’s not believable. A good-looking girl with a build wants to be a cook? The audience would think she was lying, that I was lying. It would destroy the naturalness of the show. I had to let her go.”

10:58 p.m. Genevieve shouts: “Zhon-nee, I have no shoes, dahling. I cannot go without red shoes. I left them in apartment.” A stage manager marches off to get the shoes, muttering.

11:01 p.m. Paar is frantic. “That wastebasket is filled with routines by the writers. This is what I end up with—two sheets from my own notebook.”

11:14 p.m. Paar stands in the wings alone. The show theme strikes up. Out front, Announcer Hugh Downs, who has been warming up the audience, chuckles with the nightly enthusiasm: “Now here’s Jack.” In that instant Jack Paar strides onstage, smiling shyly, snapping his fingers. He makes his little joke about hemlines and the men behind the TV cameras smile at him as if they meant it. The show is on its way, following a complex timetable of station breaks and commercials as the network gathers stations and moves west across the night.

Tough Damn Job. From this moment on, Paar is assured, professional, unfaltering. During each station break, after every commercial, whenever he is off camera, he finds a moment to lean over to chat with a guest, give instructions to an assistant director, and check the time schedule. The peering cameras, the prodding teleprompters, the signaling technicians seem not to bother him; he is at home. With Jack Douglas, head writer of his show, whom he puts on as a guest from time to time, he ad libs quickly and surely. With other guests, he is gentle, humble, anxious not to seem brighter than anybody else.

By midnight it is plain that the show is a hit. A cameraman smothers a laugh and says, “Jack’s flying. He’ll be home now.” Henny Youngman, a charter member of the Lindy comedians Jack so often criticizes, has dropped in to watch—as many show business pros do. Says Youngman: “This guy gives 200%; he wants to be double good. He gives out a feeling of love, that’s why they look at this man. This is a tough damn job.”

A few moments after 1 a.m. the lights go down, and Jack is surrounded by exuberant writers. “Rosenbloom was great,” says one. “Douglas killed them,” chimes in another. Jack says: “I thought me was pretty good, too.” He wipes off his makeup, grabs his briefcase and pushes his way to his car—he never joins the rest of the cast at the corner bar. At home in Bronxville. where Miriam is waiting up, he has a cup of soup and a beer. At 3:15 a.m., after reading two scripts that Writer Douglas has put together for future shows, Paar turns out the light.

Balloon Breaker. To last through this kind of performance five nights a week takes a talent spawned by radio, toughened by Hollywood and burnished by the demands of an unforgiving clutch of television cameras. No comedian in the U.S. can boast a more abundant supply of the necessary skills than Jack Paar. He has been practicing them almost all his life.

A sort of migrant Middle Westerner, thanks to his father’s job with the New York Central Railroad, which kept the family forever on the move, Jack Paar was born in Canton, Ohio on May 1, 1917. With time out for a stretch in Detroit, he did most of his growing up in Jackson, Mich. But wherever he went, his childhood memories are almost all somber (“I never had a childhood. I was born an old man”). When he was five, an older brother was killed by a car. All that comes back to Jack from his tenth year is the death of his best friend. “I went to the funeral,” he remembers now, “and I didn’t know what to do. My heart was breaking, and all I could think of was to break balloons through the service. Then I went home and bawled.”

He stuttered badly as a boy, but cured himself by cramming buttons in his mouth and reading aloud. At 14 he spent six months in bed recovering from tuberculosis. He quit high school at 16. He was already working as an office boy and part-time announcer at a station in Jackson (WIBM) for $3 a week. Oldtimers still remember his style. “This is Jack Buh-Buh-Buh-Boo Paar, your announcer,” he would croon, or “This is your young and popular announcer, Bing Paar.” He kept a discarded microphone in the attic at home. It was hooked up to nothing, but he sat before it by the hour, reading aloud from plays, books, magazines. At 18 he left home and began to bounce around the country on his own, handling microphones in Indianapolis, Youngstown. Cleveland. Pittsburgh, Buffalo. He was married by then, for the second time to the same girl, and for the second time the marriage was breaking up. (“The first time we were divorced it was my fault. The second time it was her fault. When we felt that we were even, we quit.”)

Caine Mutiny. In 1942, when Paar was 25, he was called up into the Army and was put in the 28th Special Service Company as member of an entertainment troupe. Jack’s first weeks in service were miserable. “I still talked like an announcer, and they didn’t understand me.” Even in Special Services, the average draftee did not dig his insistence on clean fingernails. Things were better overseas. Crossing to Guadalcanal on an Army troop transport, he took on a Caine-type commander who kept the soldiers on a near-starvation diet. One day during an alert, Paar got into a lifeboat and announced: “I’ve been asked to make an announcement that there was a Japanese submarine in the vicinity, but unfortunately the Navy gun crews have driven it off. I say unfortunately because the Japanese submarine was trying to bring us food.” Recalls Paar sadly: “The men laughed until they cried. That was the greatest joke of my life.”

On the South Pacific’s one-a-day, island-hopping vaudeville circuit, Paar became the open enemy of all brass. Once, in New Caledonia, a show was delayed and 5,000 men were kept waiting by a Navy commodore, who finally arrived with a nurse on his arm. “We were going to have six lovely girls do the dance of the virgins,” announced Paar. “But they broke their contracts by being with the commodore.” The commodore threatened a courtmartial. “The Army got me out of it,” claims Paar, “by promising to send me to Okinawa.”

Deus ex Machina. His wartime success got Jack a job in Hollywood shortly after he came home. RKO and later 20th Century-Fox put him under contract but rarely got around to putting him in front of a camera (he did once play opposite an unheard-of starlet named Marilyn Monroe). In 1947 he was hired as the summer replacement on NBC-Radio’s Jack Benny Show. His fresh, natural style was a success, and in the fall American Tobacco put the Jack Paar Show on the air on ABC. It lasted until Christmas Eve. In his radio days Paar squabbled with everyone, fired a whole set of writers, feuded with a Daily Variety columnist named Jack Hellman (Paar put a nameplate—”Hellman”—on a chimpanzee and paraded it through Hollywood).

But on the ABC show, says Jack, “a fellow named Ernie Walker ruined me. He sold the network a bill of goods that he had a machine to analyze comedians.” Walker’s machine reported that Jack got laughs all right but that he had no character, like Benny’s “cheapness,” Gracie Allen’s “dumbness.” “There is nothing to tune back to each week,” reported Walker, and the Paar option was dropped. Today, says Jack, he is just as glad that he did not play along with the phony character bit: “I have no character except what I am—complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable and lonely.”

Who Loves Him? In New York, where he moved five years ago, Jack got a chance to go on talking on a shortlived CBS radio show called Bank on the Stars. Then he moved into TV as a replacement for Arthur Godfrey, finally replaced Walter Cronkite on the Morning Show, which he quit after eleven months (“Too much pressure for me to help soften up sponsors”). After that, guest appearances with Ed Sullivan kept him going until NBC signed him up to take over the Tonight show.

Perhaps the only person who knows him well and does not quite believe he has arrived is Jack Paar himself. Like any TV performer, Paar watches himself on a monitor set during the show, but he also seems to be watching himself on an imaginary monitor when he is not performing. Compulsive and candid talker that he is, he looks for signs of having said the wrong thing or having been misunderstood. He still broods “When will they start tearing me down?” Or “I wonder how many among my group really love me?” Says a former agent of his: “He has no armor. You can pierce him with a piece of Kleenex.”

A small kindness from anyone seems to be a large emotional shock, and Paar still weeps often. When he went through the motions of an on-screen reconciliation with Dody Goodman fortnight ago, he broke into tears. When he was told that a Lindy comic had liked his show, he was “Leaky Jack” once more, his eyes misting as his own hostility melted.

It may be necessary for Paar to live at the top of his emotions, because to such a large extent in his work, feeling takes the place of a specific talent. He is no actor, singer or dancer. He is a gifted comedian, but not in the Lindy stand-up-and-knock-’em-dead sense. His comedy is low pressure and has to be, if it is to be tolerated on a nightly 1¾-hr. show. “Nine hours a week,” says one awed performer of Paar’s stint. “My God, that isn’t overexposure, it’s practically nudism.” But Paar seems to have found the formula for beating the dreaded “overexposure” problem.

He has found a way of being unobtrusive in the somnolent, night-time living room, of providing just enough surprises to keep the audience from falling asleep but not so many shocks as to jolt them really wide awake. He has developed a knack for picking good guest performers, has made his show one of the prized showcases for new talent. The program can be dull and pointless but, as Paar himself says, “there’s nothing like it.” He adds with a wry smile, “I’m so lovable, I have a love affair with this whole continent.”

It may not be love, but it is certainly more than one of those quick-cooling TV infatuations, one of those flirtations that wither in weeks, leaving only an old pile of fan letters and musty ratings. The fact is that Paar is less a comedian than a personality—and personalities usually outlast comedians.