TV Quote of the Day (Groucho Marx, on Speaking When Angry)

“If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.” — Groucho Marx, giving advice to contestants on his TV show “You Bet Your Life,” quoted in Eve Starr, “Inside TV” column, Greensboro (NC) Record, Nov. 3, 1954

TV Quote of the Day (Paul Lynde, on Hell’s Angels)

Host Peter Marshall: “Paul, why do Hell's Angels wear leather?”

Paul Lynde: “Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.”—Hollywood Squares

As a youngster in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I was addicted to quiz shows, including It’s Academic and the Art Fleming-hosted, Merv Griffin-created Jeopardy. 

But the quiz show with a difference—about as serious as a banana peel on the floor of a vaudeville show—was Hollywood Squares.

Moving across metaphorical tic-tac-toe boards, contestants had to decide whether or not to believe the celebrities in the boxes. More often than not, that meant listening to wisecracks by the likes of comics Rose-Marie, Marty Allen, Jan  Murray, Wally Cox, and Charley Weaver (real name: Cliff Arquette—yes, Rosanna’s granddad).

Center square came to be occupied by Paul Lynde, a stage, film and TV supporting actor who found his own measure of stardom on Hollywood Squares.

“Eccentric,” “fey,” “campy,” “flamboyant,” “bitchy”—it seemed as if, in an effort to capture his essence, critics trotted out every word but “gay,” which is what the actor—who died on this day in 1982 of a heart attack at age 55—was.

Technically, Lynde never admitted his sexual orientation. But if he never formally came out of the closet, he left less than a millimeter of doubt about it.

Theater historian Ethan Mordden, in his discussion of the golden age of Broadway drama, All That Glittered, sees the 1950 John van Druten comedy Bell, Book and Candle as full of encoded language about gays, in the guise of a lighthearted comedy about witches and warlocks. One of the latter, Nicky, is described as “impish, and somewhat impertinent.”

That could describe Lynde as well, particularly when he appeared as witch-housewife Samantha Stevens’s Uncle Arthur, “The Clown Prince of the Cosmos,” on the Sixties sitcom, Bewitched.

One of the actor’s big breaks occurred in the musical Bye Bye Birdie, when, as father Harry MacAfee, he asked grouchily, “What’s the Matter With Kids Today?” 

TV producers may have had that in mind when they finally promoted him, from supporting player to lead actor, in the short-lived, eponymous The Paul Lynde Show (1972).

Audiences never really took to the show, and critics pointed out, rightly, how much its premise—a conservative father barely tolerating his daughter and no-account, lusty son-in-law—resembled All in the Family. 

(I may be one of the few people alive who remembers this sitcom, and, for all its slavish imitation of the huge CBS hit, I doubt if Carroll O’Connor could have packed quite the same kind of inflections into his voice that Lynde’s Paul Simms did in upbraiding the friends of his daughter and son-in-law as “NUUUU-die LOOO-neys!”)

In the current TV environment, when people can say practically anything at any hour, Lynde and Hollywood Squares should be seen in the context of their time. 

Some of his responses would have been considered pretty risqué for that period. (Marshall: “Paul, can anything bring tears to a chimp's eyes?” Lynde: “Finding out that Tarzan swings both ways!”) 

Other responses would, if delivered today, be considered so politically incorrect that they would provoke boycott threats, and such vituperation as to short-circuit a career. (Marshall: “What is the official currency of Puerto Rico?” Lynde: “Food stamps.”)

Though many of the show’s viewers could have guessed that Lynde was gay, they might have had a tougher time figuring out that offscreen, he was a heavy drinker who often struggled with his weight and depression. 

How much of that was due to the particular context of his time, when his sexual orientation was a matter of shame, and how much the product of the insecurity that so often plagues figures in the entertainment industry?

This Day in Television History (Stempel Takes Down Quiz Show Industry)

August 27, 1958—Herbert Stempel, former champion on the TV quiz show “Twenty-One,” seething over the popularity of the man who unseated him, Charles Van Doren, told Manhattan prosecutor Joe Stone that the show was fixed. 

The charge started a series of revelations that were like acid raining pouring on the game show history—slow, inexorable, a stain on the reputation of the television industry.

Van Doren’s memoir of the scandal, printed last month in The New Yorker, held special interest for me, and not merely due to the fact that I’d seen the “American Experience” special and Robert Redford docudrama Quiz Show based on those events. 

The legend of his father Mark, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who taught the likes of Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac, left residual luster for the English Department when I entered Columbia University in 1978. 

The whole family, it seems, had some kind of connection to the school: Charles himself was an English instructor there at the time he rocketed to fame and notoriety; uncle Carl had been on the faculty before leaving to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer; and Charles’ son and nephew would both graduate from the college in the 1980s.

The blogger of My Open Wallet has an interesting analysis of Van Doren’s piece. Van Doren’s downfall, she believes, was “tied to a desire for money”—something she can’t understand, given that he came from a privileged background. 

As fine as her piece is, though, I believe it misses the point. Whatever money Charles received from his father, it would not have been through his own efforts.

The issue of identity, I think, was crucial here. As an instructor, Charles was so overshadowed by his father that even his own students didn’t take much notice of his celebrity on Twenty-One.

Or consider what to me is the most artfully constructed scene in the piece—his springtime walk down a country road with his father. The scene and the accompanying dialogue set up something out of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—an alternative path not pursued, ushering in a lifetime of regrets.

As Charles recalls the scene, his father was dressed “in overalls, denim shirt, and boots, like the farmers he was descended from.” Tellingly, this was “the father I loved best,” not the elegant, erudite academic he could never match on the turf of Morningside Heights.

Had Charles Van Doren’s account been written before Quiz Show, it would have provided screenwriters—and the marvelous Paul Scofield, playing his father—with wonderful elliptical dialogue, practically Jamesian in its undertones, as father and son find a lifetime of questions hanging between them but no way to resolve them, especially this one: “You know, I’ve never been certain you wanted to live my life over again—be a professor at Columbia or anywhere.”

New York Times blogger Stanley Fish takes issue with this same reserve, asking why Van Doren did not confront the issues that readers had on their minds: “Why did you do it? What was going on in your mind? What about the moral issues?” 

Fish seems to have missed a key point, something strongly implied in the country road scene between Charles and Mark: Father and son came from a time far removed from our own, before the Oprah-Larry King culture of going on national talk shows for absolution.

I did like another aspect of the piece: its reminder that, despite television’s attempt to drive the game-show hosts off the air, certain aspects of so-called “reality shows” hark bark to the worst aspects of the game shows: creation of artificial drama, manipulative music, and willingness to distort the character of real people. 

Van Doren reminds us, for instance, not just about the grubby ways that the producers of the show used to manipulate appearance (e.g., long, drawn-out answers, a contestant's patting his brow in the hot glass booths) but the more subtle but outrageous distortions of reality (Herb Stempel wasn't a down-on-his-luck City College student but a married man whose wife, wearing a Persian lamb-coat, had to be shooed from the set to avoid blowing his cover).