How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [49]
One of the great things about the celebrity-driven game shows of the sixties and seventies was that the game seemed beside the point. Game shows were more discursive, filled with small jewellike narratives where gay comedians could shine. Charles Nelson Reilly was a major influence on this form, but not as large an entertainment icon as Paul Lynde, the Oscar Wilde of sitcoms and game shows. His stints on the original The Hollywood Squares, even if they were largely scripted, are classic examples of the gay approach to humor. Lynde could be counted on for a raunchy, liberal, snide point of view when answering host Peter Marshall’s questions.
Like Reilly, Lynde was an accomplished Broadway actor who starred in Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway in the early sixties and in small roles in romantic comedies. Those were the days when show folks from the Big White Way still dominated the Hollywood and New York game shows. Seated in the middle square, Lynde commanded his space as thoroughly as any Shakespearean actor. His gestures—the way he used his hands and held his chin—were quite theatrical. And then there was the voice, nasal and a bit hissy. Peter Marshall, in his book about his time as host of The Hollywood Squares, said that Lynde received the most fan mail on the show, almost all of it from women.
Before I began writing this book, I mentioned Paul Lynde to a gay friend. “God, my grandmother loved Paul Lynde,” he said, and then reminisced about his grandmother’s favorite Lynde comeback on The Hollywood Squares. I was surprised, when I looked it up, that his grandmother had quoted it perfectly:
Peter Marshall: Paul, why do Hell’s Angels wear leather?
Paul Lynde: Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.
Can there be a gayer quote that that? You’ve got your leather, you’ve got your chiffon. And the precise way Lynde snapped out the line about it bespeaks familiarity with very feminine fabric. Yet my friend’s grandmother had no idea that Paul Lynde was gay. I didn’t, either, when I was a child. My parents didn’t. Most of straight America didn’t. It was a heavy case of the Liberace Syndrome. And yet we depended on Paul Lynde to be our bitchy clown, a role gay performers often took on in closeted days of yore.
In another exchange, Lynde skewered the mores of Bible Belt America and got away with it:
Peter Marshall: According to Billy Graham, is immorality contagious?
Paul Lynde: I know he was down with it for about a month.
It’s not surprising that most of seventies America lacked gaydar about its homosexual game-show contestants. Even Lynde seemed confused about how to present himself. In 1971 he gave a homophobic interview to People magazine: “My following is straight. I’m so glad. Y’know gay people killed Judy Garland, but they’re not going to kill me.”
“Paul Lynde appealed to straight people because he wasn’t threatening,” says Nelson Aspen, exercise guru, cookbook author, and a gay TV personality in Britain and Australia. “Everyone has a gay uncle somewhere, and he was it.” (At the same time Lynde was the most popular celebrity on The Hollywood Squares, he was also playing an effeminate warlock, Uncle Arthur, on the popular sitcom Bewitched [see below].)
In 1998, Bruce Vilanch, who wrote for a nighttime nineties version of The Hollywood Squares and became the “gay square” himself for a while, wrote a piece in The Advocate about how Lynde’s personality opened the way for other gay and gay-sounding men on the show:
From then on, it was “Tillie, bar the door.” Such out (or outwardly) types as Charles Nelson Reilly, Billy De Wolfe, Rip Taylor, Jim J. Bullock, Wayland Flowers and Madame, Dom DeLuise, Richard Simmons, and Jimmy Coco all found