On September 3,
1967 What’s My Line, the longest running game show
in the history of prime time television, ended a 17 year run
on CBS, all but the first few months in the same
familiar Sunday nighttime slot. And for all 17 years the
program was hosted by the suave, but sometimes supercilious, John
Charles Daly, who in that entire run missed only four shows.
The Irish
American Daly was born in 1914 in South
Africa where his father was working as an engineer. After
the senior John Charles died of a tropical illness the family
returned to its roots in Boston. He was educated
at the Tilton School, a progressive boarding school in Tilton,
New Hampshire and at Boston College, one of the most
prestigious American Catholic institutions. He was
particularly devoted to Tilton, on whose board of trustees he served and
to which he donated substantial sums for the restoration and preservation
of its historic building. Daly credited his suburb
diction and vaguely Mid-Atlantic accent to his training
there.
After a brief stint
as a reporter on an NBC station, Daly’s radio career
began to take off when he signed on the local Washington, D.C. affiliate
where he was soon doing double duty as the network correspondent
at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House. Soon
he was regularly introducing Roosevelt’s speeches to the
nation. Late in 1941 he transferred to the network
in New York where he became anchor of The World
Today broadcast.
He arrived in New York
in time to be the first voice that broke the news of the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor. Later, he broke the news of F.D.R.’s
death. In between, he broadcast the news from London and
was a war correspondent in North Africa and Italy. After
the war in addition to his reporting duties he hosted CBS is There which
recreated historical events that were “covered by actual radio
reporters.” That program later became You Were There on
television with Walter Cronkite.
After a brief stint as
a panelist on a short lived game program producers Mark
Goodson and Bill Todman tapped him to host What’s
My Line which premiered on February 2, 1950.
In 1953, Daly
abandoned CBS news and became Vice President of ABC and
the face of its fledgling TV news department anchoring its
evening news program. He became one of the few people to be featured
proximately at two networks over a long period. Daly abruptly resigned
in November 1960 when the network chose to run cartoons instead of
the first half hour of coverage of the Kennedy-Nixon election.
It would not be the
last time Daly resigned on principle. After the end of the What’s
My Line’s run, he was appointed Director of the Voice
of America but quit after a few months on the job because the head of
the U.S. Information Agency made personnel
changes without consulting him.
After that Daly
retired. He died at the age of 77 in Chevy Chase,
Maryland on February 24, 1991 leaving behind his second wife, the
former Virginia Warren, daughter of Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court Earl Warren, and six adult children from his two marriages.
What’s My Line, under Daly’s stewardship, was a quintessential
New York show. Its celebrity panelists were for the most part
not Hollywood or music industry types. The
members of the panel on the first show were poet Louis Untermeyer,
former New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman, psychiatrist Richard
Hoffman, and Dorothy Kilgallen, a gossip columnist for
the New York Journal-American. Kilgallen remained
a regular on the panel until her death in 1965 at the age of 52.
Soon a regular panel
included Untermeyer, Kilgallen, Broadway actress Arlene
Frances, and comedy writer Hal Block. Frances
remained on the show the rest of the run and into a later syndicated version,
wearing the same heart shaped diamond pendent for every show.
Untermeyer was swept
up in the anti-Communist hysteria of the period and was forced
off the show over the objections of Daly and the producers at the
instance of the sponsor, Stopette deodorant. The
poet’s place on the panel was taken by publisher Bennett
Cerf of Random House. Cerf also stayed on the
program the rest of its time on the air and appeared on the syndicated version
until his death in 1971 at age 73.
Block left the show in
1953 and the comic’s spot on the panel was filled for a year
by Steve Allen and then by the acerbic Fred Allen until
his death in 1956. After that the fourth spot was not regularly
filled but frequent panelists include Frances’s husband Martin Gable, Orson
Bean, and sometimes by regular panelists on other Goodson-Todman programs
like Betsy Palmer, Bess Myerson, and Robert Q.
Lewis.
Daly ran the show with
a certain dignity and formality. He always referred to
the panelists as Mr. or Miss. After 1953 he insisted the dress
code be more formal. Gentlemen wore black dinner
jackets and bow ties. The ladies were in formal gowns,
and frequently white gloves.
About the only thing
that changed on the show was the set. New sponsors
would have their names emblazoned on the panel’s desk. The
moderator’s background changed from paneling to drapes and back
again. But the game remained the same.
Daly would invite contestants
to “sign in please” on an ordinary blackboard. In the
earliest shows they would parade in front of the panel who were invited
to make wild guesses as to their occupation, but later they came
directly to Daly, who rose to greet them. Contestants who could stump
the panel for 10 questions could win a whopping $50 and a slice
of immortality. A panelist could ask a question until he or
she got a “no” for an answer, causing Daly to flip over a low tech
card on his desk and move to the next panelist. Essentially it
was just a version of the old parlor game 20 questions. The
entertainment came from repartee between the panel and Daly, Daly’s
sometimes convoluted attempts to clarify a contestant’s answer,
and the occasional accidental double entendres of the panelists
guesses.
The most popular
feature was the Celebrity Guest. With the panel blindfolded—the
women’s masks often adorned in rhinestones—the famous personage would
sign in to inevitable cheers from the studio audience. The
panel followed the same procedures to guess his or her
identity. Well known stars often tried to disguise their famous
voices. Almost all major Hollywood and Broadway stars, as well as recording
artists appeared at one time or another. But Celebrity Guests also
included the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright,
and Salvador Dali.
In 1967 CBS announced
it was cancelling all of their long running nighttime game shows
in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience. On the final show
old clips were shown and former panelists brought back for a
visit. The last mystery guest was…. John Charles Daly.
Goodson and Todman revived
the show for daily syndication in 1968 and it ran successfully until 1975
hosted first by Wally Bruner and then by Larry
Blyden. It frequently ran in the half hour between the network
news casts and prime time programming. Despite its success, the
syndicated version is barely remembered today.
