This Day in TV History (Jack Paar Signs Off ‘Tonight Show’)

March 29, 1962—Exhausted from his high-wire broadcast act, talk-show host Jack Paar, who had walked off The Tonight Show in a huff two years before when a joke was censored, stepped down for good after five seasons, having utterly transformed his last-night perch.

Providing taped farewell messages that night were Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Billy Graham, Bob Hope and Jack Benny—famous figures of their time, now legendary. But the on-air guests, for the most part, were more of a time capsule: comics Jack E. Leonard and Buddy Hackett, opera star Robert Merrill, and Alexander King, a journalist-press agent-memoirist-raconteur who practically became a fixture for Paar.

The DNA of Paar runs through every host who does a monologue. But it’s a safe bet that most Americans who remember his successor, Johnny Carson, will have a tougher time calling to mind the man who turned a variety-show format inherited from Steve Allen into the gabfest we know today.

Paar established some essentials of the late-night format—notably, the monologue, the guest host and the sidekick (in Paar’s case, first, briefly, Franklin Pangborn, then Hugh Downs)—but the form was far looser, the hours longer, and the host far, far more unpredictable. 

Today, a host might tend toward schtick (Leno), edginess (Letterman), or the class clown who can’t believe his good luck in landing this particular gig (Fallon). Paar was of another order entirely: by his own admission, “complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable, and lonely. My personality is not split, it’s shredded.”

So, what was his show like? From what I’ve read, the blogger Showbiz David gives a pretty adept summation: 

“Paar was like no one else I had ever seen. Brilliant and witty, raw and restless and unpredictable. Daring to take risks born of his open-minded political views. His guests did not venture onto the set to pitch records or movies. Or more TV shows. They came on to talk because they had the gift of witty gab.”

Viewers really did not know what they would get with Paar:

·         * He might be chatting with Nixon—or to that young, bearded revolutionary in Cuba, Fidel Castro.

·         * He might talk to saintly humanitarian Albert Schweitzer—or allow free rein to a wickedly funny Judy Garland, as in the following YouTube clip.

·         * He might invite Mickey Rooney to leave his show after the multiply-married actor made an erratic, drunken appearance, then make up with him later—or engage in enduring feuds with columnists Dorothy Kilgallen and Walter Winchell.

·        *  He might delight the audience with a slightly off-color joke about “water closets”—then make their jaws drop when he walked off the air after discovering network censors had deleted the material without telling him beforehand. (He stayed off the show for several weeks.)

Late-night TV, particularly as Paar practiced it, can be punishing. Coping mechanisms are many and various: hobbies (Leno’s motorcycles), sessions with psychiatrists (Letterman), plenty of time off (Carson). But Paar seemed to have fewer of these, and he decided to call it quits in early 1962.

Paar was still only in his mid-40s when he gave up the host’s seat, but he never reached the same heights again. NBC obliged his wish for more normal, family-friendly hours with a weekly variety show, but it was gone in three years, without making the same cultural impact as his talk show. 

In 1975, ABC convinced Paar to come out of retirement to take up battle against Johnny Carson. It’s true that no challenger was really ever able to take on “The King of the Night” in his 30-year supremacy of The Tonight Show, but Paar’s, because of his history, was particularly anti-climactic.  Carson’s stranglehold on Hollywood guests was particularly strong, and some of Paar’s targets—marijuana, long-haired kids, and gays—were off-putting in those times. Paar seemed like a show-biz Rip Van Winkle--asleep for a decade, then awoken to find a world changed completely in his absence. The show was gone within a year. The host who seemed impossible to replace in 1962 was all but forgotten by the time of his death, at age 85, in 2004. Though segments of his show survive on YouTube, entire episodes are far, far harder to come by, as NBC made it a practice to erase old shows so the tapes could be re-used--a practice they continued with Carson.)

And yet, it seems unfair to leave him sad and diminished. Paar couldn’t sing, dance or act, but he had a feeling for the intimate communication fostered on the small screen. Several years after going off the air, he gave a writer on his show, Dick Cavett, a sense both of his possibilities and those of the “boob tube.” At first, Cavett, remembering the call in his recent essay collection, Talk Show, was astonished by what he heard from his old boss: “Kid, I’ve only got one piece of counseling for you. Don’t do interviews.”

As Cavett started to ponder how he could retain his new job if this advice were taken, Paar elaborated, with words that would be taken to heart by his listener, but by not many others in the current talk-show environment:

“I mean don’t just do interviews, pal. You know. ‘Interview’ smacks of Q-and-A and David Frost and his clipboard and ‘What’s your favorite color?’ and crap like ‘most embarrassing moments.’ Don’t do any of that. Make it a conversation.”