We also did a lot of outdoor stunts and jokes on the show. There was an office building next to the NBC studio at Sunset and Vine. It was about three stories, I guess. One day we hung a piano up there, coming out of the third-floor window on a cable. Then we had one of our guys on the street, holding a rope. We fixed it so it appeared he was holding up the piano by holding the rope—but of course he wasn’t. A young man came walking down Vine, and our man called out to him, asking him to help him for just one minute. Our man says, “Please, sir, I’m holding that piano up there, and it’s very expensive. Would you please just hold it for one moment while I go into the building for my helper? But for goodness sake, don’t drop it. Don’t leave. Hold that piano.”
The pedestrian said, “Sure.” So he’s holding the rope, and then there’s a little jerk on the rope, and the piano kind of moves, and all of a sudden the whole thing breaks off and the piano comes crashing down to the street. The fellow dropped the rope and took off running up Vine Street as fast as he could go. I’m calling out on a speaker to him, “Hey, it’s Bob Barker. You’re on Truth or Consequences.” But he just kept running and running. We never caught him or located him later, so we couldn’t give him his prize. More’s the pity, but the audience loved it.
• • •
We did another stunt outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre that played splendidly. We had a small truck parked in front of the theater, in the back of which was a cage filled with straw and a sizable chimpanzee. Only it wasn’t a chimpanzee. It was actually a fellow named Janos Prohaska, and he could convince you that you were with a chimp when he was in costume. He was amazing. Anyway, he’s in the cage, and Milt Larsen, one of our writers, was up there on the back of the truck. He held the cage door closed and waited for the right-looking guy to come by, someone perfect for the joke. Here came a man, a big broad-shouldered fellow, who we found out later had played professional football for the Los Angeles Dons. Milt says to the guy, “Excuse me, sir, would you help me for a moment? I have my chimpanzee in here, and this lock isn’t working properly. I have to go into the theater to get my tools. Would you just hold the door shut for me for a couple of moments?”
The man says yes, he’d be happy to. So the former football player gets up there and holds the cage door, and Milt says thank you and goes into the theater. There used to be a restaurant next to Grauman’s, and that’s where I was lying down beside our hidden camera. The cameraman and I are watching this gag unfold. We had hidden microphones all over the place. The chimp appeared to be over in a corner, asleep, but after Milt goes into the theater, the chimp wakes up and starts throwing a little straw around the cage. Now this big virile man holding the cage door starts talking baby talk to the chimp. “That’s all right, baby. Daddy will be right back. Just relax, baby, it’s all right.”
And the chimp moves around a little more and moves toward the door.
The baby talk continues. “It’s all right, baby. Back up, baby. Get back, baby. Daddy will be right back.”
He’s still baby talking to the chimp when all of a sudden the chimp grabs the cage door and flings it open. Now the guy has dropped the baby talk, and he’s yelling, “Back, you son of a [bleep]. Back, you [bleep]! Down!” And the chimp keeps after him, and now the man runs into the theater with the chimp chasing him, and he’s yelling the whole time, “Leave me alone, you [bleep]. Down! Back, you son of a [bleep]! Don’t touch me!” Bleep this and bleep that, and you bleepedy bleep bleep!
I was laughing so hard I couldn’t even get up off the floor. We called it our bleep consequence. We played it on the air just like it happened—with all of the bleeps.
So Milt comes out and tells him it’s all right. It’s not really a chimp. It’s Janos Prohaska pretending to be a chimp. And I’m still laughing on the floor, but I finally crawl out of the hiding spot and go up to this fellow, who’s not in a good mood. I said, “I’m Bob Barker and you are on Truth or Consequences.”
He says, “Yes, I know who you are.”
And then I tell him what fun the stunt has been, and how we have a great prize for him. I tell him we have a fancy new billiards table for him.
He looks right at me and says, “What the [bleep] am I going to do with that?”
It was the perfect end to the bleep consequence.
On another show we invited a bunch of kids who played in Little League baseball to be in the audience. They were all nine- or ten-year-old boys. Then we got two girls; maybe they were fourteen or fifteen. One girl was a professional softball pitcher. She could throw a softball like lightning. And the other girl, her sister, who was also a professional, was her catcher. We planted these girls in the audience, but not together, and pretended to the boys that we just picked them out randomly from the audience. I said something like “How about you, young lady, would you like to play? Yes? Come on.” I picked a few of the boys from the Little League group and said, “Let’s have a game.”
I told them: “We’re going to play softball. You three guys are going to hit, and you, young lady, you be the catcher. And you, would you be the pitcher, please?”
She goes all the way across the stage. And the boys are licking their chops, saying, “Oh, this is going to be fun.” I put a particularly eager young fellow up to hit, and this professional pitcher throws that ball so fast past him, he doesn’t twitch a muscle.
“Why didn’t you swing at it?” I asked.
He says, “That’s a phony ball.”
The audience roared with laughter.
“That’s not a phony ball,” I said, and I took it from the catcher. “Look at this, that’s not a phony ball.”
“Well then, she’s got a phony arm,” he said, and the audience howled even louder.
• • •
Things didn’t always go as planned on Truth or Consequences. That was part of the fun of the show. We had all kinds of things go wrong, but I just made the best of it, and the show rolled on. We had props that didn’t work. We had camera or microphone malfunctions. Sometimes a guest would react unexpectedly. But even when acts didn’t come off smoothly, there was always humor in them, and the audience seemed to love it. We’d have things that would fail miserably, but when they did, frequently I could make it amusing. Besides, people loved to see me standing there with egg on my face.
• • •
There were so many details involved with reunions that they occasionally went awry. For one, we had a deserving young marine flown home from Korea to surprise his wife. One of his wife’s friends arranged to have her sitting on a bench in front of our studio at Sunset and Vine, and on cue from us, a city bus (which we rented for the day) was supposed to pull up in front of the bench and the marine was going to step off the bus and take his wife into his arms.
I described exactly what we had planned to our studio audience and viewers. I emphasized what a fine record the marine had and how courageous the young wife had been during the months that she and the children had anxiously awaited his return. I built to the boiling point the anticipation for that glorious moment when husband and wife would be reunited. And then I went into a commercial.
After the commercial, I did a quick review to make sure that every viewer realized how fortunate he or she was to share this moment with this loving husband and wife. Then, at the exact time, to the second, that we had agreed for the bus to arrive on the scene, I cut to our outside camera.
The marine and his wife were sitting on the bus stop bench chatting. The bus had arrived during the commercial. I looked into the camera and said, “It must have been a great reunion. I wish we could have seen it.”
Some time later, after many flawless successes, another reunion went sour. This one was to be more dramatic than even the soap opera fare. This time we were reuniting a fine young sailor and his dear old mother.
The sailor’s sister brought their mother to the NBC studio in Burbank. The mother thought that they were to be part of a group touring the facility. The sister knew that the group con
sisted of folks I took out of our T or C audience to help our little caper—for which, of course, each would receive a prize.
This was the plan: As the tour group arrived onstage, every light in the studio was to go out except for one powerful spotlight casting a pool of light directly on center stage. As you might have guessed, on cue, the sailor was to step into the pool of light, the mother would rush to her beloved son, the sister would join them, and familial happiness would reign. But all of this was not to be the case. We have all had really bad experiences with the best-laid plans, haven’t we?
As usual, I did my breathless buildup for the momentous moment. I would like to think that I had the folks in our studio on the edges of their seats—the folks at home, too, if they were seated when I received the signal that the tour group was stepping through the door. I asked the lighting man to douse the lights.
He more than cooperated. He shut down every light in the place, including the all-important spotlight. The entire studio was in total darkness, and it stayed that way for about two minutes, during which I had to keep talking in a desperate effort to keep viewers from thinking NBC had gone off the air—and to keep them from changing channels!
What did I say? I have no idea. But I did get a letter from a lady who wrote, “Bob, you do your best work in the dark.”
By the way, eventually we got the sailor and his mother together and everyone lived happily ever after.
• • •
There were many memorable moments on Truth or Consequences. I have a treasure chest of memories of all the fun we had doing that show. Of course, it was special to meet all the celebrity guests we had. But the average-person guests, the noncelebrities, were just as memorable.
Everyone knows I’m an animal lover, and I will tell you about another reunion featuring a boy and his dog that touched me as deeply as any reunion we ever did. We heard about a sailor who was stationed in Florida who had received orders to come out here to one of the naval bases around Los Angeles. He was married and had a little son, about nine or ten years old. The son had a basset hound, but he didn’t have the money to move the dog. So they left the dog with a friend in Florida, and they came out to California. The boy got a job delivering papers so he could save up enough money to get his dog out here. But it was going slowly. We heard about this and of course had the dog flown out here, and somehow we arranged to get the boy to the show and have him end up talking with me in the hallway, where we had a hidden camera and a hidden microphone. The boy didn’t know we were on the air. During our conversation he mentioned his dog. He said he was working to save money and bring him out here. I said, “You really love that dog, don’t you?”
And he said, “Oh, yes, I do.” The dog’s name was Bo.
At that moment, one of our people from the show comes down the hallway, and he’s leading Bo on a leash. The boy looks up at the dog, and says: “That looks like Bo!”
And I said, “That is Bo.”
And he just bolted for the dog. He hugged him and kissed him and hugged him some more. It was a precious moment. I was so touched I could hardly speak. I had tears in my eyes. And I wasn’t the only one. The cameramen were all crying, and later I mentioned it to the director, and he said, “Not only you, but the agency reps in the booth had tears in their eyes, and that doesn’t happen often.” That is one of the most touching moments we ever had.
I had thirty-five great years on The Price Is Right, but Truth or Consequences will always hold a special place in my heart for many reasons. It was my first national television job; I had the opportunity to work with one of my heroes, Ralph Edwards; and Dorothy Jo and I began to enjoy more financial security. We didn’t change our lifestyle much, but the opportunity to do the show was a fulfillment of a dream we had had. It was also a glorious pioneering time in television, and so much of the country was energized and united by television. The whole entertainment industry was thriving. We were living in Hollywood, working in Hollywood, and I was having fun doing what I loved to do. Truth or Consequences was a fun-filled, richly rewarding eighteen-year ride for me. I’ll always cherish those early years.
I was delighted to have Ralph’s son, Gary Edwards, who was a little boy when I went to work for his father, in the front row five decades later, cheering me on as I taped my last The Price Is Right on June 6, 2007.
2
I Go to Work for Mark Goodson, Too
If the 1950s were the golden age of television, then the 1970s were the silver age, because that’s when we relaunched The Price Is Right daytime television show, which became a huge success that exceeded all of our expectations. The Price Is Right had been a successful television show for years before I ever became involved with it, but it had been off the air for eight years. We believed we were going to have a successful show, but no one could have predicted that I would go on to host the show for thirty-five years and that the program would become a landmark ratings star and an institution of daytime television history. Unless your hair is becoming gray and you have discovered a few wrinkles, The Price Is Right is probably the show for which you remember me. From the very beginning, I loved it and never stopped loving it.
• • •
To put the show in historical perspective, we need to go back to 1971. I had been doing Truth or Consequences on television since 1956. That’s fifteen years of hosting a national audience participation show. Before that, I had done live radio shows for six years with similar spontaneous entertainment formats. That is what I did. That is what I always did. Even before the Edison shows, I did shows from grocery stores, drugstores, theaters, and parks. I did man-on-the-street shows, and I did shows from department stores and hardware stores. I was always improvising, making conversation, and creating spontaneous entertainment with unrehearsed people. I didn’t act. I didn’t sing. I didn’t dance. I didn’t tell jokes. But I was experienced at audience participation. Some people like playing the saxophone. I liked doing audience participation shows.
When I started in this business, many of the great hosts were doing audience participation shows. Art Linkletter had his shows. Ralph Edwards was brilliant on his. Jack Bailey of Queen for a Day was another great one. I got my first radio show in Missouri when I was twenty-one years old, and it was the same kind of show I would go on doing until I retired at eighty-four. I enjoyed it when I was young, and I enjoyed it just as much when I became not so young.
Mark Goodson, one of the all-time great game show minds, had created The Price Is Right and put it on NBC back in 1956. The original host was Bill Cullen, and the show ran on NBC until 1963. ABC actually picked up the program briefly, but Price went off the air in 1965. Mark Goodson had a great talent for games and television. He was what is called a game show packager. A game show packager assembles all of the elements of the show—the idea for the show, host, cast, producer, director, staff—and, probably the most important of all, he sells the show to a network or in syndication. He puts the whole package together.
Mark Goodson and Ralph Edwards were two of the best in the business. Goodson also developed What’s My Line?, To Tell the Truth, and I’ve Got a Secret. He had great instincts. Both of them were savvy professionals.
Game shows take a lot of time to develop—tinkering with ideas, coming up with the right format, and just the right combination of chance, entertainment, and novelty. And when the shows are a success, they can be extremely lucrative. By their very nature, game shows are a huge profit center for the networks. They are relatively inexpensive to produce, and they can bring in substantial advertising revenue. For decades, daytime game show profits helped to fund the networks’ more expensive prime-time mistakes. The creators and men behind these shows were shrewd, whip smart, and financially astute businessmen. Many of them, like Mark Goodson and his partner Bill Todman, became enormously wealthy. Merv Griffin was another fellow, who, in addition to everything else he did, created Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. He made a fortune, too.
I have always said that game
shows within the television industry are like the stock market. There are times when they are enormously popular. Several shows within the genre will flourish, and programmers will be flooding the market with new game shows. Then there are times when game shows slump, popularity wanes, and the networks pull back. But like the stock market, after a while, the game shows surge back in popularity.
Goodson had talked to me at one time about doing another show called Beat the Clock for syndication. For me that was a problem because I was doing Truth or Consequences in syndication and my contract stipulated that I could not do another syndicated show. I didn’t want to leave Truth and I couldn’t do both, so Mark and I couldn’t get together on Beat the Clock.
But a few years later, in 1972, Mark contacted me about doing a network show. Contractually there would not be a problem—although my contract for T or C prohibited me from doing another syndicated program, I could do a network show. Mark wanted to bring back The Price Is Right on CBS, and he wanted me as the host. We met, and he told me about his ideas for various games he wanted to do on the show and how he wanted to structure the format. Mark told me he thought I would be perfect for the show and asked me if I was interested. I thought it was a great idea. After all, it was the kind of audience participation show I had been doing all my life, and I did not have to leave Truth or Consequences.
Before The Price Is Right came back on the air, audience participation shows had lost some of their luster. In fact, CBS had not had a game show on the network for four years. However, both Mark Goodson and I were confident that The New Price Is Right, as it was called then, would be very successful. Mark had fine-tuned the show to make it much faster moving, more audience friendly, and more dynamic all around. Also, the show was designed to give me every opportunity to interact with the contestants and the studio audience. It would have the feel of a live event—with more games, more variety, and, of course, bigger prizes.
Priceless Memories Page 3