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What's My Line?: The Inside History of TV's Most Famous Panel Show, by Gil Fates
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"Will the Mystery Guest enter and sign in please!" With these nearly-Immortal words, America's most popular, most prestigious, longest running, and most successful television game show, WHAT'S MY LINE?, ushered in the famous, near-famous, and sometimes, infamous. Movie stars, senators, film makers, generals, opera singers, governors, writers, comedians, Supreme Court justices, composers, athletes-all gathered to chitchat, exchange compliments and play games with peer notables on Sunday evenings. Now Gil Fates, the show's longtime producer, goes behind the scenes to provide an entertaining, chatty, insider's view of just what it was that made WHAT'S MY LINE? a smash success and set the precedent for all TV game shows. And in so doing, he highlights over two decades of glittering personalities. More celebrity party than game show, WHAT'S MY LINE? was truly a phenomenon. Begun in a loft above Grand Central Station with pigeons looking on from the rafters, it outlasted and outclassed all other game shows. Broadcast "live" at the same time every week, 52 weeks a year, it ran for seventeen years on the same network with no repeat broadcasts. It was slotted into Sunday nights at 10:30, an hour that audience researchers had solemnly proclaimed too late for the nation's television watchers ...but thirty million Sunday night viewers promptly proved them wrong. The program changed a nation's habits, and the accepted way to finish the weekend soon became watching WHAT'S MY LINE. Bishop Fulton Sheen, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Carol Channing, Jimmy Durante, Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Steve Allen and John Daly- a veritable celebrities' Who's Who of the fifties and sixties. Filled with show-biz gossip and told with verve, style, and humor, WHAT'S MY LINE? is a unique, nostalgic, inside view of the television classic that not only paralleled the development of television, but paved the way for the current game show craze.
- Sales Rank: #1394103 in Books
- Brand: Prentice Hall
- Published on: 1978
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 239 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Entertaining though not 100 percent true
By Margaret Grace Beers
The best thing about this book is author Gil Fates' tone. I know something about his young adulthood that is nowhere to be found in the book. He graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His generation of UVA students had to understand and write term papers on the Greek classics, philosophers and Shakespeare. There was no such thing as a communications major or broadcast journalism major at UVA in the 1930s.
Despite Mr. Fates' background in a place and era where / when young people ignored popular culture such as Jack Benny's network radio program, his writing in this book is easy to understand. Rarely does he use the King's English. But occasionally he refers to something that probably goes over the head of many 1960s / 1970s television addicts.
Mr. Fates describes metaphorically the pro - Joe McCarthy booklet called "Red Channels" as "Almanac de Gotha."
Allan Sherman, with whom Mr. Fates worked off-camera on "I've Got A Secret" for its first six years, had some grandiose plans for that show that inspire Mr. Fates to trot out some European literary characters. Mr. Fates' literary style grows on you. You won't find anything like it in a book written by a "Price Is Right" veteran employee. People who worked with Bob Barker had grown up watching TV.
Moving on to the book's accuracy:
Other sources have confirmed Mr. Fates' claim that Allan Sherman had grandiose ideas that flopped on live broadcasts of "I've Got A Secret." These sources include kinescopes of the broadcasts that the basic cable channel called GSN has revived.
But if you watch certain kinescopes of "What's My Line?" and compare them to this book, you notice that Gil Fates has described some episodes inaccurately or dishonestly.
Examples include: his description of Louis Armstrong's 1964 appearance as a mystery guest has errors. The author says Satchmo could not very well disguise his speaking voice, and the panel guessed him right away. In fact, Satchmo sounds like a young woman the first few times he answers the "yes or no" questions, and each panelist needs at least two turns at questioning and a conference before someone identifies the great man.
During Melina Mercouri's 1962 mystery guest segment, a well-built man whose identity was never determined crashes the stage inside the television studio that was known as CBS Studio 52. You can see this on You Tube. Getting within camera range, the man starts pitching a dating service while Ms. Mercouri observes him with mixed emotions. Then Gil Fates (face not visible) and announcer Johnny Olson (face visible) forcibly remove the strange man from the stage. This book implies moderator John Daly lost his cool. The book has him protesting, "Now see here, young man!" In fact, Mr. Daly remains very calm, never angry or frightened, and he says something very different from what Gil Fates quotes him as saying. This part of the book flows smoothly into a later part of the book in which the author describes Mr. Daly with slight disdain. The latter resisted Mark Goodson's attempts to have contestants demonstrate their gimmicks, such as a sword swallower doing her thing, on-camera. All the way until September 1967, Mr. Daly resisted successfully the idea of showing instead of telling. Never again did a game show host have such power. Bob Barker wanted to make many more on-the-air appeals on behalf of abused animals than Mark Goodson let him.
Gil Fates had these kinescopes available for viewing while he wrote the book. Evidently, he used his biased memory.
If you contact the legendary 1960s CBS programming executive Mike Dann, 90 years old as I type this, he can tell you that Franklin Heller, the director in the control booths of the various "What's My Line?" studios for 17 years, objected strongly to the publication of this book in 1978.
Mr. Heller was an erudite man who did something very few live television control booth directors ever did: open a literary agency. (That was circa 1968 after his television career ended.) A friend of authors such as Richard Condon, Mr. Heller liked the verbose John Daly much better than Gil Fates did. Interesting, isn't it, that the television careers of both Mr. Heller and Mr. Daly ended with the final "What's My Line?" CBS telecast in 1967 ? One became a literary agent and the other became director of the Voice of America and later part of a Washington, DC political think tank. Meanwhile, Gil Fates waded into the new garbage-strewn landscape of game shows that were videotaped in advance in color.
Another assertion in the book can be debunked with newspapers and several websites, not You Tube. The author says the second of the two men who hosted the dumbed-down syndicated version of "What's My Line?", Larry Blyden, died before his employer, Goodson Todman Productions, compiled a 25th anniversary special for ABC. The sense of loss that Mr. Fates, Mark Goodson and others in the company felt (now that both their syndicated "What's My Line?" and Blyden as a human being were dead) inspired them to create a requiem for something that they had nursed like a baby for 25 years. Wrong. The 1975 ABC special, available for viewing on You Tube, not only was in the can but was actually telecast in a 90-minute time slot starting late at night on May 28, 1975 and continuing into May 29. Mr. Blyden was alive. Not until June did he die in a car accident while traveling in Morocco. Nobody had advance notice that he was going to die.
I'm giving the book four stars because most of it is true. Another reason for my rating is that it's a rare opportunity to understand the creation of game shows, some brainy and others idiotic (such as certain sequences of "I've Got A Secret" and Larry Blyden's episodes of "What's My Line?"), from the point of view of a University of Virginia graduate who knew what the Almanac de Gotha was.
You should know some more important things that are not in the book. Alright then, they are more opinion than fact. Even after Allan Sherman stopped working on "I've Got A Secret" in 1958, the slapstick part of the show remained idiotic. I recall one GSN black and white rerun of panelist Henry Morgan riding on a child's rocking horse like an egotistical nutcase. It dates from after Mr. Sherman's departure. John Daly deserved a lot of credit for never letting "What's My Line?" sink to that level of stupidity. Sadly, after he ended his television career in 1967, Goodson Todman Productions was free to insert garbage into the new syndicated "What's My Line?". Viewers said hello to pies in the face. Viewers in some syndication markets, such as Washington, DC., stopped watching. (Check microfilmed issues of The Washington Post to confirm that WMAL Channel 7 and WRC Channel 4 moved it around the daytime schedule and into oblivion.) The book refuses to acknowledge that the show started to suck during its last year of production: 1974. Some talented performers including Jerry Orbach can be seen participating in the idiocy during that year because they needed jobs in an era when the "Match Game" and "Hollywood Squares" used mostly caricatures like Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde.
Gil Fates, needing a job to support his wife and children and lacking the superior brains of Mr. Daly, Franklin Heller or Merv Griffin, worked on the dumbed-down "What's My Line?" for six-and-a-half years. As has been the case with many TV shows and movies, the process of videotaping or filming was a lot more fun than was viewing the finished product. This book makes working with Larry Blyden and a pie-throwing Alan Alda much more fascinating than watching the beautifully preserved color videotape. Gil Fates was lucky to have such a fun workplace to go to for 25 years. His career sustained his enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm pervades the book.
46 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
A Salty Reminder That Reality Television Need Not Cause Pain
By Jen Averbush
Canadians and Americans who get the Game Show Network can watch reruns of "What's My Line?" in the middle of the night seven days a week as of this writing. Those who need sleep can use their VCR timer to capture a few episodes that will show them the dignity with which an entertaining TV show can treat obscure people if it wants to. You don't have to cause pain and stupidity like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones do.
This book is an excellent beacon of light to those who get hooked on "Line" and need sleep. Mr. Fates shows you the human-resources skills that were necessary to produce a show that depended so much on obscure people. You can sense the excellent people skills he developed from producing the show for 25 years. Even on the live black & white version that supposedly focused on New York sophistication, the entire staff's credibility rested on the selection of guests from Iowa or Alabama or Hong Kong who walked on that soundstage rigid with stage fright.
Mr. Fates is compassionate when he relates the many problems that result from doing a weekly live reality show. The color syndicated version wasn't live, but there you get the difficulty of taping five episodes in one day. If you think union actors can cause trouble, wait until you read about Shelby Lyman, the British TV chess commentator whom the open-minded Goodson Todman company booked on "Line" during his coverage of the famous Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky chess match in 1972. While Mr. Lyman waited backstage in the RCA Building to tape his segment, he learned the panel would dispense with blindfolds, implying they don't recognize him on sight. He became enraged and split, cancelling his segment. Take that, Kitty Kelley and you other closed-minded writers who claim that someone's Q rating matches their potential as a troublemaker!
Mr. Fates is kind enough to tell readers a lot more about the ordinary folks who did the show for 25 years than about troublemaking celebrities. You can find many veterans of "Line" and the staff of Goodson Todman who will tell you he was one of the nicest people on the New York TV scene in the 1960s and 70s. His kindness shows through the book. He uses the old 1950s standby of the newspaper "blind item" to rat on a few famous folks who either caused trouble or got stars in their eyes when Dorothy Kilgallen died.
On that note, I will get a little mean and say that "Line" fans on Usenet have identified the "lady very large in television" on page 107 as Barbara Feldon, the "truly gorgeous and terribly bright singer-actress" on page 110 as Polly Bergen and the sleep-deprived "successful TV funnyman" on a page I forget as Joey Adams. Contacted several times on these matters before his 2000 death, Mr. Fates remained a gentleman, noting that all three people still worked "in the business." Turns out he was right, as you will note if you type their names in newspaper databases.
Even without naming names, the book is a fascinating guide to the power that everyone who appears on television can assume. Read it! May it serve as an inspiration to a 21-year-old communications major at Simon Fraser University or UCLA who might succeed with a "Line" revival, driving the brain-dead Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones out of "the business." Let's face it, the current NBC version of "To Tell The Truth" with Paula Poundstone is stupid as well. Bring back the humanity!
31 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
What's My Line ? - How About Surprisingly Good Book
By Robert Fine
What's My Line? is the story behind the historic game show of the 1950 and 60's. The book, authored by Gil Fates, former exectuive producer of the show follows the show from the intial program in 1950 to its conclusion in 1967, with a great many stories in between. The book is well written and allows us to get inside the studio before the 10:30 pm airing each week.
Fates' comments on the panel (Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Killgallen) of regulars and host John Charles Daly provide interesting insights into the popularity of the show and why it became such an American way of life. The book is quickly paced, funny and for those who can't get enough show business insider stories, you won't be disappointed.
The photo section should have been longer, but all in all a book that should be of interest to those who have seen the show (now airing Sunday's on Game Show Network) or those who have simply heard about it.
What's My Line? How about a surprisingly good author, Gil Fates and a terrific book
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