Black and White Class
By James Lileks

“What’s My Line?”—America’s long-time favorite guessing game—aired with no repeats from 1950 to 1967. Then it lay forgotten, a part of TV history. Until recently: The old tapes have now been revived by the Game Show Network.

 

The program currently runs in the dead of the night (when modern audiences are presumably so desperate for entertainment they’ll watch black and white shows). Like most TV from the period, it looks crude and ancient, like security-camera footage from King Tut’s tomb. The set appears to be six feet wide, and you feel the presence of giant cameras moving like elephants on casters. When someone introduces a panelist as a redhead it seems impossible. They’re like living marble, these people.

 

And yet, the dialogue is often so smart and witty it leaves a modern viewer pining for this lost broadcasting era. If only some producer would marry the smart sets and classy camera angles of Now with the classy people and smart language of Then.

 

The show’s premise was simple—the panel tried to guess the guest’s profession. Some jobs seemed designed not to fit the guest. If it was a squinty pious-looking geezer, there was a fair chance he designed bras; if the guest was a dainty little slip of a thing she was probably a bullfighter. But most of the time you’d get people cut from the familiar bolts of white America—big florid-nosed men who sold hangover pills, frumpy old-movie Ma types who tested alarm clocks, elegant women with Emily Post accents who happened to be ambassadors to picturesque nations.

 

But no one watched to learn about the guests. People watched to play the game with some warm friends: Bennett, Dorothy, Arlene, and John.

 

The host was John Charles Daly, a network-news anchorman with such class, verbal dexterity, and casual authority he’d be banished to C-SPAN today.

 

Bennett Cerf—he of the Cheney hunch, little-boy grin, and nasally voice—ran Random House Publishers, wrote newspaper columns, and flew across the land to give lectures to garden-club types when he wasn’t gameshowing. He fought to get Ulysses published. He was Ayn Rand’s editor (would you want that job?). He was the quintessential middlebrow intellectual: smart without making others feel stupid. Bennett could probably explain surrealism to you, but he’d give you a wink to let you know he thought it was bunkum, too.

 

Dorothy Kilgallen was a Hearst newspaper columnist with a head like a popcorn kernel, wary eyes, and a steely and meticulous way of questioning a guest. Her column was called “The Voice of Broadway,” but it wasn’t all show-biz chatter—her off-hand reporting (“Which actress employs a maid who was a spy in the last war?”) frequently got her noticed by J. Edgar Hoover, as her thick FBI file attests. She died of a drug-and-alcohol overdose shortly after interviewing Jack Ruby in 1963, assuring her eternal fame on conspiracy Web sites.

 

Arlene Francis was with the show from day one. She was charming, bright, cheerful, and gay, as they would have said then. Now she’s mostly forgotten, despite years on TV and the stage.

 

The fourth member of the panel varied. One week you’d get Jerry Lewis in full “Hey Lady!” mode. The next week it would be eye-wagging Groucho Marx. A young Johnny Carson made an appearance (looking like a gopher startled from his hole by a large explosion, he seemed out of his league). There was John Q. Lewis, with his thick, black, smart-man glasses; there was gap-toothed Ernie Kovacs; genially confused Robert Young; elegantly hapless Walter Pidgeon; and others who brought Panavision class to the black-and-white box.

 

“What’s My Line?” came out of a time when Hilton meant Conrad, not Paris, so the celebs had more heft. The actresses all had that theatah voice; the old comedians still made big faces for the folks in the back rows of the vaudeville hall. You got guests like Salvador Dali, who answered every question “Yes.” (Are you a public figure? An artist? A writer? Have you been in the newspapers? Dali was all that!)

 

Mrs. Average America was often slotted in as a guest. If she stumped them all, John Daly was delighted; he loved it when the guests won. She would stand and exit stage left, pausing to shake hands with the panel, and in that simple exchange you had a tidy illustration of the times (and ours): The men stood.