The Living Mystery Guests of What's My Line

Unlike the Academy Awards, we always care about Classical Hollywood on this blog (yes, I am never letting go of them skipping Mitzi Gaynor in the In Memoriam, and no, it is not something I need to get over), and one of the things that I like to do is make a point of celebrating those few figures that are still left from this era.  Film is a romance for me, and knowing there are people around from the great era of Hollywood (the 1930's to the 1950's) known as "Classical Hollywood" and the following era of the 1960's & 1970's known as "New Hollywood" is weirdly comforting...that that magic is still in the air somehow.

So I thought it'd be fun to take a look at one of the quintessential television shows of the era that ended up frequently celebrating cinema stars of the time, What's My Line.  For those who are unfamiliar, What's My Line was a game show, initially released in 1950, that ran all the way until 1975, though the original run on CBS, when it was a primetime television show presented by war correspondent turned game show host John Charles Daly, is my favorite run of the program.  The show was a success in its day, winning Golden Globes for Best Series & Best TV Star (for Daly), and was a Top 30 Nielsen hit for about half of its run.  If you watch it today, you'll notice it's weirdly sophisticated, even for a TV show of the era.  Everyone is frequently referred to by their last name, perhaps an offshoot of the South African-born Daly's upbringing at a posh New England prep school, wore elaborate gowns and three-piece suits, and had impeccable manners (all of the men made a point of standing when greeting another guest, specifically a female guest, and everyone wished each other good night before the end of each episode).  The show featured a chic panel, including Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, actress Arlene Francis, and comedian Steve Allen, the creator of The Tonight Show.

On the show, the panel would guess people's occupations, frequently ones that were silly or novel, and if they didn't guess it, the contestant would get money, at most $50.  Every night, there was a "mystery guest" and this is where the cinema connection comes in.  The guests would wear blindfolds, and a mystery guest would come in, oftentimes to rapturous applause, and they'd have to guess who the recognizable person was, with them usually disguising their voices.  It is kind of madness how many famous people ended up being on the show (including three presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, & Ronald Reagan, all before they took office), but the movie stars are really the ticket for me.  You can see some of the few early TV appearances of headliners ranging from Bette Davis to Henry Fonda to Errol Flynn to Maureen O'Hara.  Doris Day made her TV debut on the program, and you can watch some of the funniest conversations imaginable with Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Martin & Lewis, and Ernie Kovacs (my votes for the funniest Top 5, though it pains me to cut a clearly smitten Bennett Cerf flirting shamelessly with Rhonda Fleming).  It's a delight.  You need a pick-me-up, just start watching some of the original run.

The original run is key here.  The show originally went off of CBS in 1967, with the network wanting to move away completely from primetime game shows, with Daly himself serving as the final Mystery Guest.  That was 58 years ago, and so I was curious who was still alive who had, at one point, served as a Mystery Guest.  As you can see, everyone I just name-checked has passed, as have all of the major panelists, but surprisingly a robust number of Mystery Guests (the show was weekly, so it has almost 900 total episodes) are still with us.  Only counting Mystery Guests who were public figures and named on the show (contestants like, say, "Santa Claus" or the Von Trapp children, or relatives of the panelists, I'm not counting because it's too difficult to ascertain if they're still alive), there are 51 total Mystery Guests still living.  Let's take a look at them, huh?

Joey Heatherton

Cinema

Of the 51, nearly half of them were largely known for their work in movies, not super surprising given that CBS would've only really wanted stars of its own shows to be featured on the program (occasionally others were snuck in, though, which Daly relished by mentioning their networks in violation of the etiquette of the time, where you only mentioned your own network's name on your channel).  Only few of these were male movie stars, including Robert Wagner & George Hamilton, and then quite late in the run Warren Beatty & Michael Caine (very much a distinction between Old and New Hollywood there).  The remaining 20 film stars were actresses, and it's kind of interesting to see who did & didn't end up on the show.  For example, despite being guessed quite often, Marilyn Monroe never appeared on What's My Line, but many of her "rivals" of the era like Sheree North, Jayne Mansfield, and the still living Mamie van Doren did.  Van Doren is one of a number of ingenue stars who got into the series very early on in their careers, alongside Terry Moore, Jane Fonda, Nancy Kwan, Julie Newmar, Elizabeth Ashley, Jill St. John, Joey Heatherton, Hayley Mills, & Chris Noel (the fact that only Fonda graduated to proper icon status while the remainder didn't kind of makes this time capsule more fun-even fame is fleeting, and if you don't know one of those names, update your Letterboxd so you do!).  Other actresses who were slightly more established at the time included Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Joanne Woodward (who appeared with her husband Paul Newman), Barrie Chase, Sophia Loren, Joan Collins, Shirley Jones, Carroll Baker, Geraldine Chaplin, and Ursula Andress.  We'll talk about this a bit more in a second, but the fact that so many of these were "sex symbols" does not feel like an accident; oftentimes some of the beautiful women would walk out to wolf whistles and shouts from the appreciative audience (so a classy show...with an asterisk).

Carol Burnett

Television

While film was the dominant place to find screen actors on the show, television stars oftentimes were featured.  The problem for us to find living television stars is that TV stars of that era were more often-than-not washed up film stars (we did a whole season of Saturdays with the Stars about this phenomenon if you search back on this blog), so they were usually older than what we'd expect now.  Going by what they were famous for at the time, only two actresses who were known for TV when they appeared are still alive: Carol Burnett, who would've been on the show for her work on The Garry Moore Show (as well as her Broadway success in Once Upon a Mattress), and Mia Farrow, who at the time had not yet made Rosemary's Baby and so would've been best-known to audiences then as the leading actress on the TV sudser Peyton Place (and as Frank Sinatra's then-wife).  Sinatra, it's worth noting, was a guest panelist that evening and was the one to identify his wife, though he never appeared as a Mystery Guest, likely due to his longstanding feud with Dorothy Kilgallen (he was only on the show after her death).

Music

Thanks to the teen idol fads of the era, the gender split on Music is actually much more equitable.  Given it was a stodgier show, it's kind of surprising that some of the biggest pop stars of the era went on the show, though, like Marilyn, Elvis Presley never made an appearance (and neither did The Beatles, though their manager Brian Epstein did appear).  In total 10 singers of the era appeared on the show as Mystery Guest and are still with us (five men & five women).  They range from hits with the teenybopper set like Paul Anka, Tommy Sands, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, & Fabian, to chicer, late-in-the-series acts like Nancy Sinatra & Diana Ross, to largely forgotten musicians now like Abbe Lane (a night-club singer noted for her rather shocking outfits) and Michael Stoller, best-known today for composing a number of hits for Elvis Presley including "Jailhouse Rock."

The "Legitimate" Theater

A running joke for my brother & I (my brother also loves this show) is that the panel would regularly ask "are you in the legitimate?" or "are you legitimate" to the guests, which sounds rude, but at the time meant that you were best-known as a stage performer.  The show was aired in Manhattan, so the panel was quite familiar with what was showing on Broadway (Kilgallen, being a gossip columnist, was the best guesser in large part because her following of celebrities meant that she knew who was in town and what shows were playing, but it appeared that everyone was a regular devotee of the performing arts).  Amongst the six living theatrical stars of the era feature three future Oscar-winners for Best Actress.  At the time, Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, & Liza Minnelli had yet to make their big-screen debuts (at least on their first appearances), but were sensations on the New York stage in shows like My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, & Flora the Red Menace.  Other stars include stage icons Pat Suzuki & Leslie Uggams and West Side Story leading woman Carol Lawrence.

Elaine May with Mike Nichols & John Daly

Comedy

Comedians, like TV stars, tend to gain fame a bit later in their careers, so we only have two comedians still with us from this era...and weirdly both would go on to be famous directors.  One of them, Woody Allen, actually holds the current record for most appearances on the original run of a living person, as he was a panelist multiple times in addition to being a mystery guest.  The second comedian is Elaine May.  May at the time was famous for her comedy duo with Mike Nichols, and appeared alongside Nichols (who, of course, would also become a great film director), in her Mystery Guest appearance.

Vonda Kay van Dyke

Beauty Queens & Models

You'll note that I haven't mentioned who was, chronologically, the first Mystery Guest in the history of What's My Line, and that's because we haven't gotten to her yet.  During the 1950's & 1960's, beauty pageants were a much bigger deal, and given that the show had a propensity for adoring "glamour girls" (the term of the era for a sexy, attractive young woman), it's not a surprise that a lot of the Mystery Guests ended up being beauty pageant winners.  This includes the earliest living Mystery Guest Lee Meriwether, who would go on to fame as an actress in Batman and Barnaby Jones, but was only known to the country when she appeared as a Mystery Guest as the then-reigning Miss America.  Two other Miss America's, Maria Fletcher & Vonda Kay van Dyke (who is, fun fact, the only Miss America to also be Miss Congeniality) appeared, as did two Miss Universe's (Carol Morris & Maria Fletcher).  The show also had two models.  While the concept of the "supermodel" didn't really exist until the late 1960's, one of the earliest supermodels was Jean Shrimpton who is (chronologically to the show) the last living Mystery Guest on the program, and before that Candice Bergen appeared with her father.  Bergen would of course become a major film & TV star, but honestly at the time was probably best known for being Charlie McCarthy's "kid sister" and a noted fashion figure & model, not yet having given her screen debut.