Francis Fords Ahead:
What’s My Line?
Last Update: June 2, 2001 -- Reruns section update, plus the passing of longtime panelist Arlene Francis.
Airing:
Monday-Friday, syndicated (various times in different markets) through September.Personnel:
Larry Blyden, host; Chet Gould, announcer. Regular panelists: Arlene Francis, Soupy Sales. A Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Production. Taped in New York City.Description:
What does this person do for a living?Game Play:
A contestant would enter and sign their name on a chalkboard. Host Blyden would then give a bit of background on the contestant to lead the panel a bit on the contestant’s full-time or part-time occupation, which would then be shown to the studio and home audience, but not to the four celebrity panelists. They would then take turns questioning the contestant with yes or no questions. A "No" answer would mean the turn passed to the next panelist, and ten "No" answers ended the game unless the panelists correctly identified the contestant’s occupation prior to the tenth "No" answer. Two rounds were played in this manner, with an occasional film or demonstration of the contestant’s abilities afterward. The contestant received $50 for their trouble (and I suspect a free trip to New York to appear on the program).End Game:
The final round was reserved for the Mystery Guest, a well-known personality. For this round, the panelists were blindfolded. The turn passed to the next panelists whether the answer to their question was yes or no, and the Mystery Guest usually disguised their voice to avoid instant identification. If the Mystery Guest’s identity wasn’t revealed after ten questions, Blyden would announce it.All of which was much more fun than it sounds here.
Background:
What’s My Line? made its debut February 2, 1950 on CBS. (To give you an idea of how long ago this was, Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury the week before, the war in Korea hadn’t yet begun, and Elvis Presley was 15 years old.) According to long-time WML director Franklin Heller, the game was invented by G-T staffer Bob Bach, who received a lifetime job booking Mystery Guests for the show in exchange for letting Mark Goodson take sole credit. In fairness, Goodson was a primary force in shaping the game, as he was with most all the shows that bore his name.Gil Fates, the show’s producer, wrote a marvelous book on the history of the show, What’s My Line? (clever title, eh?), and much of what is written here is taken from that book, including this – how the Mystery Guest spot evolved. Ironically, there was a bit of difficulty in trying to figure out how the Mystery Guest would be visible to the cameras and audience but hidden from the panel. Tossed out were the idea of disguising the Mystery Guest (a la Masquerade Party), having the panelists turn their backs, and a retractable screen. At this point, Fates said the obvious – "Why not blindfold the panel?" And so it was done.
The debut of What’s My Line? was not a success. The original panelists were gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, poet Louis Untermeyer, former New Jersey governor Harold Hoffman, and psychiatrist Richard Hoffman, all under the supervision of CBS newsman John Charles Daly. The first contestant was a hat check girl and the first Mystery Guest was New York Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto. Both Hoffmans were dropped pretty quickly, to be replaced by talk show hostess and actress Arlene Francis and comedy writer Hal Block. Untermeyer bowed out about a year later after he was listed in Red Channels, a publication of the Joseph McCarthy era that unfairly smeared him with a Communist sympathizer tarbrush, and writer/editor Bennett Cerf took his place.
Block was dropped in 1953, as his earthier style didn’t mesh well with the more urbane talents of Cerf, Francis, and Kilgallen. Steve Allen, who was then between talk show jobs, took his place, and he coined the famous WML? phrase "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" Allen’s clever off-the-cuffisms helped him garner The Tonight Show slot that would make his career, and as a result he departed a year later. Fred Allen replaced him, and although it was not a good fit (if anyone more talented than Fred Allen was handed more inappropriate television vehicles, I’d sure like to hear about it), the panel remained together until his death in 1956. After that, the decision was made to leave the fourth seat open for rotating guest panelists. The same decision was made after Kilgallen’s death in 1965.
What’s My Line? hummed along on CBS at 10:30 every Sunday night for 17 years. It attracted famous Mystery Guests, charming panelists, and decent ratings. America’s habit in the era was What’s My Line?, the late Sunday newscast, and off to bed. They were delighted by the wit of the three regular panelists and Mr. Daly (who moved to ABC News in 1952, then left the network nine years later). But all good things must come to an end, and as the show’s audience aged, it shrank. CBS dropped the program, along with its cousins I’ve Got a Secret and
To Tell the Truth, in 1967.With G-T down to just
Match Game, Ed McMahon’s Snap Judgment and a soon-to-be-cancelled daily version of TTTT by early 1968, Goodson was willing to experiment. Fates pushed a five-day-a-week syndicated Line through, and the show did very nicely. Cerf no longer appeared as a regular, but still played fairly frequently, Arlene Francis continued as a regular panelist, and the show added comic Soupy Sales partway through the first season. Daly elected not to continue with the program and was replaced by Wally Bruner, a newscaster who had been working for Westinghouse Broadcasting in Washington, D.C.It was a more freewheeling version of the show, with part-time occupations and hobbies now acceptable, and demonstrations and skits after some games, which often devolved into freewheeling chaos. The fears that five Mystery Guests a week (or a day, in truth, as a week’s worth of shows were taped in one day) couldn’t be found proved wrong (although some of the Mystery Guests were a bit more of a mystery than the show’s producers cared to admit). In any case, the show ran in individual markets in the morning, afternoon, or early evening, and did quite well.
In 1972, Bruner elected to leave the program and New York City, working on his own syndicated do-it-yourself program, Wally’s Workshop. He was replaced by actor and host Larry Blyden, who had helmed two other games, Personality (NBC, 1967-69) and The Movie Game (syndicated, 1970-72, replacing first-year host Sonny Fox). Fates admits in his book Blyden was chosen because of his talent, but also because as a Broadway actor, he was tied to New York City, and thus the show couldn’t be moved to Los Angeles, which was where Goodson-Todman Productions was slowly migrating. One’s preferred host among the three is a matter of taste. In my opinion, Blyden livened up the proceedings considerably.
End of the Line:
The show wrapped up production for the 1974-75 season in December 1974, and waited for the reorders from individual stations for an eighth season. But they didn’t come. This is the way syndicated shows work – one finishes the season not truly knowing if the program will continue in the fall (well, I suppose Wheel of Fortune is an exception to this rule). By March, it was clear the show was dead.Daly News:
John Charles Daly (left), born in South Africa, was somewhat embarrassed about garnering his fame from a panel show, but the money he made (at least a quarter of a million dollars a year) helped keep him calm about it. Daly was a major radio broadcaster in the 1940s for CBS News (he broke the story of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the air), and moved to ABC News in 1952, becoming that fledgling network’s one-man news department. He resigned in 1960, and turned his full-time attention to WML?, which may have not been for the better – Fates reports Daly was resistant to changes that might have extended its CBS life. I believe he wound up with the World Bank after Line’s CBS run ended. He died February 24, 1991, at the age of 77.
Cerfing the Web:
Bennett Cerf (right) was far more than a panel show regular. A humorist and founding editor at Random House (in 1927, when he was under 30), later its president, Cerf held down many jobs. Ironically, when Random House was sold to RCA in the mid-1960s, Cerf was urged to quit the show because it represented a conflict of interest, as RCA owned rival network NBC. Cerf urged RCA chairman David Sarnoff to change his mind, which he did. And WML? was cancelled within a year, in any case.Most of Cerf’s books were humor collections with thoughts such as this: "Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald they don’t recognize you." One final note: Cerf was heartbroken when an affronted owner at Random House refused to let Cerf acquire Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita because of its sexual content. How times have changed. By the way, Cerf was editor to some literary heavyweights, but he thought the most intelligent author he ever worked with was Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. (Did you know Geisel wrote Green Eggs and Ham after Cerf bet Geisel couldn’t write a children’s story using only 50 words?) Cerf died in 1971 at the age of 73.
Dorothy Days:
Dorothy Kilgallen was the only panelist who seriously wanted to win the game. Bennett Cerf once caught her weeping after a telecast, sobbing, "I haven’t one occupation in three weeks!" This sometimes grated on viewers, but as director Franklin Heller said, "It was deliberate that everybody hated Dorothy. If they were all sweet and lovely it would have been boring, so one of them had to be a pain." A longtime columnist for the late New York Journal-American, her "The Voice of Broadway" was a must-read, but made her many enemies, including Frank Sinatra (who didn’t appear on WML? until a year after Kilgallen’s death). She died in her sleep November 8, 1965; she was only 52. There are a number of theories dealing with the circumstances behind her death, but until anything is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, I see no reason to perpetuate them here.Francis Fords Ahead:
Soup’s On:
Soupy Sales hosted children’s programs all over the country. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York all played host to Sales, his odd outfits, puppets White Fang and Black Tooth, and tens of thousands of pies between 1953 and 1965. Sales had a couple of network shows with ABC and syndicated shows in 1965 and 1979. At the top of his game in 1966, he left his show to star in the film Birds Do It, which flopped (why take your kids to the movies and pay good money for what they’ve been getting for free on the tube?). Two years later, Soupy did a couple of guest shots as a panelist, then became a regular. A bright man despite his goofy schtick, his fierce determination to nail the Mystery Guest every time resulted in what Larry Blyden called "Fates’ Law:" if a panelist guesses the Mystery Guest incorrectly, he or she is out for the round. Sales hosted Junior Almost Anything Goes for ABC in 1976, did a daily radio show on WNBC in the mid-’80s (between Don Imus and Howard Stern – what was the station thinking?), and still pops up on television now and then. His two sons played in the band Tin Machine with David Bowie.
Wally’s World:
Wally Bruner brought interesting people to what, by all rights, was a very small syndicated show by virtue of his journalism career – in addition to his Washington experience, he was also a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, and was nominated for a Peabody for his work in 1965. Gerald Ford, then House Minority Leader, came on as a Mystery Guest after Brunner extended the invitation. (Ford, by the way, was one of three presidents to appear on the show – Jimmy Carter came on while governor of Georgia, and Ronald Reagan was both a Mystery Guest and panelist in the 1950s.) Fates notes in his book Bruner wasn’t eager to continue with the program, however, and so the decision was made to let him out of his contract in 1972. He died in 1997.Blyden by the Light:
On the other hand, Fates was a big Larry Blyden fan. Blyden appeared in several Broadway shows during the three years he hosted WML?, and won a Tony for Best Supporing Actor in the revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He starred in two sitcoms, Joe and Mabel in 1956 and Harry’s Girls in 1963. He only appeared in one movie, but it’s a must-see: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, starring Barbra Streisand, Yves Montand, Blyden, Bob Newhart, and Jack Nicholson (who was the casting director?). I don’t think Blyden really wanted to host game shows, but it was a way to keep him in front of the nationwide audience while waiting for something better to pop up. After WML? was cancelled, he signed up to host Showoffs, but died in a car accident less than a month before the game was due to debut.Lineup:
Other frequent panelists in the syndicated edition included Gene Rayburn, who lived in New York permanently (despite Match Game taping in Los Angeles), Bert Convy (before Tattletales), Alan Alda (like Rayburn, an East Coaster), and the incredibly gorgeous Meredith MacRae (Petticoat Junction). New York TV and radio personalities Sherrye Henry, Melba Tolliver, Gene Shalit, and Jim Bouton also appeared frequently toward the end of the run.Quotes:
The Home Game:
They do exist. One was released in 1955 or so, the other in 1969, and both pop up on eBay occasionally. Matt Ottinger says the second is better, but personally I can’t imagine really playing this with made-up occupations and Mystery Guest personalities. It would be too easy for an unintentionally misleading answer to throw off the whole game. Gil Fates’ book on the show is a much-coveted item among game show fans and was last seen going for over $50 on eBay.Reruns:
It’s out of daily rotation on Game Show Network, but still shows up on Sunday nights. Keep your eye on the front page for listings.Revivals:
It’s been talked about. A couple of years ago, Miramax Pictures talked about doing a revival, but didn’t bother with anything like rights. (I can’t picture Quentin Tarentino on the panel, anyway.) In 1998, there were headlines that the show would come back as a summer replacement on CBS, but CBS then pointed out no one had told them this, and that was that. Then in 1999, CBS did announce it as a summer replacement series, with Night Court’s Harry Anderson as host, but not enough preparation time and some infighting among CBS execs 86ed that idea as well.In 2000, CBS actually went so far as to do a few run-throughs of the show, with Anderson as host. The panelists ran the gamut from Betty White (yay!) to Dr. Laura (boo!), but CBS, caught up in Survivor mania and giving a huge chunk of its prime time schedule to the hapless Big Brother, put it on the shelf again.
Curt Alliaume, Executive Producer:
This is a wonderful format that needs very little adjustment; I just don’t know how well it would play with TV viewers with itchy fingers on the remote. (Of course, I’m just as bad as the next guy when it comes to that.) A What’s My Line? revival would need bright, top-drawer panelists (Jerry Seinfeld, Janeane Garofalo, and Paul Reiser jump up as possibilities), so it would take some work.My Grade:
B+.Read More About It:
What’s My Line? is a copyrighted title of Mark Goodson Productions/Pearson Television and/or CBS. This page is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Mark Goodson Productions, Pearson Television, CBS, their subsidiaries, affiliates, or successor organizations. No challenge to their ownership is implied. Photos originally appeared on eBay.
Read a book today.