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Jack Harold Paar (May 1, 1918 – January 27, 2004) was an Americanmarker radio and television comedian and talk show host, best known for his stint as host of The Tonight Show.

Radio and films

Paar was born in Canton, Ohiomarker, the son of Howard and Lillian M. Paar. He moved with his family to Jackson, Michiganmarker, 30 miles south of Lansingmarker, as a child. Paar left school at 16. He first worked near home as a radio announcer at WIBM in Jackson and later as a humorous disc jockey at Midwest stations, including WJRmarker in Detroit, WIRE in Indianapolis, WGAR in Cleveland and WBEN in Buffalo. In his book P.S. Jack Paar, he recalled doing utility duty at WGAR on the night Orson Welles broadcast his famous War of the Worlds over the CBS network (and affiliate WGAR). Attempting to calm possible panicked listeners, Paar announced, "The world is not coming to an end. Trust me. When have I ever lied to you?"

During World War II, as part of a special services company entertaining troops in the South Pacific, Paar was a clever, wisecracking master of ceremonies. More than once, his pointed jibes at officers nearly got him into trouble. After WWII, he came to the attention of RKO Radio Pictures, which hired him to emcee Variety Time (1948), a compilation of vaudeville sketches. Paar later recalled that RKO didn't know what to do with him. His producers, trying to decide what kind of screen characters he could play, compared Paar with other RKO stars. Finally, according to Paar, one of the executives had an inspiration, and figured out who Jack Paar really was: "Kay Kyser, with warmth." Paar projected a pleasant personality on film, and RKO called him back to emcee another filmed vaudeville show, Footlight Varieties (1951). Paar was featured in a few films, including a role opposite Marilyn Monroe in Love Nest (1951).

Like fellow humorists Steve Allen and Henry Morgan, Paar dabbled in motion pictures but was much more comfortable behind a studio microphone, broadcasting. He caught his biggest break when Jack Benny — who'd been impressed with Paar while entertaining in Guadalcanal in 1945, and who'd taken the young humorist under his wing — helped steer Paar toward performing on NBC as Benny's 1947 summer replacement. Historian John Dunning, in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, has written that Benny wanted to produce the Paar replacement show himself (he owned the series through his "Amusement Enterprises" company), but settled for letting his own writers serve as consultants to Paar's writers.

Paar was enough of a hit, with listeners and critics alike, that the American Tobacco Companymarker, which sponsored him for Lucky Strike cigarettes (as they did with Benny at this time), decided to keep Paar on the air, moving him to ABC for the fall season. The show ended, according to Dunning, when Paar objected to American Tobacco's suggestion that he come up with a weekly running gag or gimmick - something to which Paar objected, saying he "wanted to get away from that kind of old-hat comedy, the kind being practised by Jack Benny and Fred Allen." As a result, American Tobacco dropped Paar before the full season had been done, earning Paar an image (as Dunning phrased it) as a spoiled kid that "pursued" him.

Paar returned to radio in 1950, hosting The $64 Question for one season; however, after its sponsor pulled out in the spring of 1951, and NBC insisted everyone involved take a pay cut, Paar quit (the original host, Phil Baker, replaced him). He got his first tastes of television in the early 1950s as well, appearing as a comic on The Ed Sullivan Show and hosting two game shows, Up To Paar (1952) and Bank on the Stars (1953), before hosting The Morning Show (1954) on CBS. In 1956, he gave radio one more try, hosting a disc jockey effort, The Jack Paar Show, on ABC. Paar once described this show as "so modest we did it from the basement rumpus room of our house in Bronxville."

Paar was twice married to his first wife Irene Paar. After divorcing, the couple remarried, only to divorce again. Paar found happiness with his second wife, Miriam Wagner, to whom he was married for nearly 61 years. (She appeared on his 1956–57 ABC radio show, with their daughter, Randy.) They were married from 1943, until his death in 2004.

The Tonight Show

Jack Benny's continuing patronage of Paar impressed NBC enough that, at last, he received the plum of his career: an offer to succeed Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show. He hosted the program from 1957 to 1962. At first, the show was called "Tonight Starring Jack Paar"; after 1959 it was officially known as The Jack Paar Show. The series became on September 19, 1960, one of the first regularly scheduled videotaped programs in color. Only a few minutes of video of Paar's talk host career in color are known to exist today; NBC's policy at the time was to preserve programming on black-and-white kinescopes, but even so, the videotapes of most of Paar's Tonight Show appearances were taped over and no longer exist, a policy that continued through the first ten years of Johnny Carson's subsequent hosting of the same series.

It was during Paar's stint as host that The Tonight Show first became an entertainment juggernaut; other than Johnny Carson, Paar generated the most obsessive fascination and curiosity from press and public of anyone who ever hosted the show. Paar strove for compelling conversation as well as humor; his guests tended to be literate raconteurs such as Peter Ustinov or intellectuals such as William F. Buckley, Jr., as opposed to just actors or other performers selling their current work, while Paar himself earned a reputation as a superb storyteller.

He also surrounded himself with a memorable group of regulars and semi-regulars, including Cliff Arquette (as the homespun "Charlie Weaver"), author-illustrator Alexander King, Tedi Thurman (NBC's sultry "Miss Monitor") and comedy actresses Peggy Cass and Dody Goodman. Paar's oft repeated expression, I kid you not (something Humphrey Bogart as Capt. Philip Queeg uttered often in The Caine Mutiny), became a national catchphrase. In 1959, Paar's gag writer Jack Douglas became a bestselling author (My Brother Was an Only Child, A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Grave: An Autobiography) after his regular appearances with Paar. Douglas' pretty Japanese wife Reiko often appeared, as did Hungarian sexpot Zsa Zsa Gabor, French comedienne Genevieve and several British performers appeared as well; Paar enjoyed conversing with foreigners and knew their accents would spice up the proceedings.

During this time, Paar also made occasional appearances on the television game shows Password, To Tell the Truth and What's My Line? On episode 215 of the latter, Paar filled in as guest panelist for Steve Allen, his predecessor at The Tonight Show.

Controversy

In 1959, he was criticized for his interview with Cubanmarker leader Fidel Castro. Later that year, during the show's regular swing through the West Coast, Paar again made the front pages of the national newspapers by asking a visibly-inebriated Mickey Rooney to leave the program during the December 1st telecast. Two years later, he broadcast his show from Berlinmarker just as the Berlin Wallmarker was going up. Paar also engaged in a number of public feuds, one of them with CBS luminary Ed Sullivan, and another with Walter Winchell. The latter feud "effectively ended Winchell's career", beginning a shift in power from print to television.

Highly emotional

Paar was often unpredictable and emotional. The most salient example of this kind of on-screen behavior was demonstrated on the February 10, 1960 show, when one of his jokes was cut from a broadcast by studio censors. The joke in question involved a woman writing to a vacation resort and inquiring about the availability of a "W.C." The woman used that term to mean "water closet" (i.e., bathroom), but the gentleman who received the letter misunderstood "W.C." to mean "wayside chapel" (i.e., church). The full text of the joke reveals multiple double entendres that are tame by today's standards, but too much for the network to bear in 1960. NBC censors replaced that section of the show with news coverage and failed to inform Paar of their decision.

The decision to censor the joke so angered Paar that the next night, February 11, he announced on the air that he was leaving the show, saying, "I've made a decision about what I'm going to do. I'm leaving The Tonight Show. There must be a better way to make a living than this, a way of entertaining people without being constantly involved in some form of controversy. I love NBC [...] But they let me down." After finishing this monologue, Paar abruptly walked offstage, leaving his flustered announcer Hugh Downs to finish the show for him.

Less than a month later, Paar was convinced to return; on March 7 he opened his monologue with the now-famous line, "As I was saying before I was interrupted...I believe the last thing I said was 'There must be a better way to make a living than this.' Well, I've looked...and there isn't." He then went on to explain his departure with typical frankness: "Leaving the show was a childish and perhaps emotional thing. I have been guilty of such action in the past and will perhaps be again. I'm totally unable to hide what I feel. It is not an asset in show business, but I shall do the best I can to amuse and entertain you and let other people speak freely, as I have in the past."

The Move to prime time

Paar's emotional nature made the everyday routine of putting together a 90-minute program difficult to continue for long. Paar made it clear that he was not planning to continue with The Tonight Show because, as a TV Guide item put it, he was "bone tired" of the grind, and he signed off for the last time on March 29, 1962. However, NBC did not want to lose him to other networks; they offered him a weekly prime-time hour, giving him carte blanche as to whatever he wanted to fill the hour with. Paar agreed, deciding on a slight variation of his late-night format.

Paar then began hosting a prime-time Friday night show on NBC that fall, entitled The Jack Paar Program. Popular belief holds that The Ed Sullivan Show introduced the Beatles to American television audiences; in fact, on January 3, 1964, the group made their prime time debut on Paar's hour in film clips Paar had leased from the BBC, with Paar gently making fun of the band (the Beatles' first U.S. television appearance was in a feature story on The Huntley-Brinkley Report on November 18, 1963). Paar's show had a world view, debuting acts from around the globe and showing films from exotic locations; most of the films were made on travels made by guests such as Arthur Godfrey or Paar himself (e.g., several visits with Albert Schweitzer at his compound in Gabonmarker, West Africa and Mary Martin at her home in the jungles of Brazil). During the first half of 1964, another running feud pitted Paar against the show immediately preceding his program, David Frost's satire series That Was The Week That Was. A typical exchange would have That Was the Week That Was "signing off" the NBC Television Network just before the Paar program, with Paar responding that the show immediately preceding his was Henry Morgan's Amateur Hour (Morgan was a frequent guest on the earlier show). The mock feud suddenly evaporated when NBC moved That Was the Week That Was to a Tuesday night time slot for the 1964–65 season.

Paar's prime time show aired for three years, including guests such as Brother Dave Gardner, Peter Ustinov, Lawrence of Arabia's brother, Richard Burton, Oscar Levant, Lowell Thomas, Cassius Clay reciting his poetry to piano accompaniment by Liberace, an occasionally inebriated Judy Garland, Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby (whose nickname for Paar was "The Boss"), Bette Davis, Robert Morley, Cliff Arquette (as Charlie Weaver), Dick Gregory and many others. The final closing segment of the series, broadcast on June 25, 1965, featured him sitting alone on a stool, sharing a discussion that he had with his daughter Randy, who called Paar's departure a sabbatical. Noting the origins of the term, he said that his own field was, though not completely used up, "a little dry recently." Then he called to his German shepherd, who came to him from the seats of what was, for once, an empty studio, and walked out. Johnny Carson precisely copied this format of hosting a clip show from a stool for his own farewell episode of The Tonight Show in 1992. Paar then continued to appear in occasional specials for the network until 1970.

Later career

Paar came back for another late night show in January 1973 on ABC; this time, as one of a group of rotating hosts (including Dick Cavett, a former Paar writer) on ABC's Wide World of Entertainment, he appeared one week out of each month, which was the most Paar was willing to appear. (Paar later claimed he would not have appeared at all unless ABC committed itself to keeping Cavett's show on the schedule in some manner.) His announcer for this series, Jack Paar Tonight, was Peggy Cass, and perhaps the most notable aspect of the series was the fact that comic Freddie Prinze made his national television debut on it. He later expressed discomfort with what the medium had developed into. While Cavett had no problem interviewing young rock acts, Paar once expressed the view he had trouble interviewing people dressed in "overalls." The show, which was in direct competition with Tonight, lasted one year before he quit. Dissatisfied with the one-week-per-month formula, he complained that even his own mother didn't know when he was on.

In 1986, NBC aired a special featuring Paar, titled Jack Paar Comes Home; the following year, a second special Jack Paar Is Alive and Well was broadcast by the network. Both of these specials were largely made up of kinescoped clips from Paar's prime time program, to which he maintained the copyright. In the course of promoting the first special, Paar guested on Johnny Carson's version of Tonight for the first time on November 18, 1986. He appeared again to promote the next one on December 17, 1987.

Smart Television

PBS television devoted an edition of the American Masters series to Paar's career in 1997, and in 2003 revisited the topic with another hour-long examination of the Paar phenomenon, appropriately entitled Smart Television. The program features clips of Paar with guests including Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, Judy Garland, Bill Cosby (in his first network appearance), Peter Ustinov, Richard Burton, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy (in his first interview after his brother's assassination), Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and many others compiled from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as more recent interviews with people who worked with Paar.

Death

Paar's health declined in the late 1990s. Paar made rare guest appearances on The Tonight Show (hosted by Johnny Carson and Jay Leno) and Late Night with David Letterman, as well as Charles Grodin's CNBCmarker talk show. He died at his Greenwich, Connecticutmarker home on January 27, 2004, with his wife Miriam (née Wagner) and daughter Randy by his side. He had long been in ill health, having undergone triple-bypass heart surgery in 1998. He also suffered a stroke a year before he died.

Richard Corliss noted in Time's obituary: "His fans would remember him as the fellow who split talk show history into two eras: Before Paar and Below Paar." In the spring of 2004, a memorial for Jack Paar was held at The Museum of Television & Radio in New York City. Ron Simon, one of the television and radio curators at the Museum, was host and moderator. The memorial also included appearances and speeches by television talk show host Dick Cavett, TCM host Robert Osborne, and Paar's daughter, Randy.

References

  1. Jack Paar The Museum of Broadcast Communications
  2. The Museum of Broadcast Communications
  3. Jack Paar
  4. Pioneers of Television: "Late Night" episode (2008 PBS mini-series) "Paar's feud with newspaper columnist Walter Winchell marked a major turning point in American media power. No one had ever dared criticize Winchell, because a few lines in his column could destroy a career, but when Winchell disparaged Paar in print, Paar fought back and mocked Winchell repeatedly on the air. Paar's criticisms effectively ended Winchell's career. The tables had turned, now TV had the power."


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