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I never did get a new office, and after a year on the anchor desk, CBS took me off The Morning Show. I spent 1956 as host of the network’s Saturday-morning Cartoon Theater, a series done on film where I interacted with Heckle and Jeckle and other popular characters. I was also a panelist on To Tell the Truth, which didn’t go that well. Every night, the show’s producers, Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, came in and shook hands with the three panelists—actually, not all three. They avoided me.

For some reason, they never acknowledged my presence. They didn’t like me. I said to myself, “My career here is going to be rather short.” I was not altogether wrong. Yet when they were working out the idea for a new game show called The Price Is Right, they had me emceeing it. We brought in people off the street and tried to figure out the show. I went home numerous nights and said to Margie, “This is the dumbest idea. People are just trying to guess how much things cost. That’s a show? It’s never going to go.”

Despite my opinion, they got it off the ground, giving the hosting job to Bill Cullen, and it became a TV staple. More than fifty years later, it’s still going.

I then tried my hand at a few pilots that didn’t work and bided my time as the network tried to figure out what to do with me.

They didn’t try too hard. There was one executive, Oscar Katz, the vice president of programming, who was not a fan. He didn’t think I had enough talent. In a meeting with other executives trying to find a place for me, he once said, “The kid just doesn’t have it.” I knew what he meant. At times, as I knocked around the network, I kind of agreed with him.

7

LAUGH LINES

It was the spring of 1958, and Garry Moore asked me to sub for him when he went on a month-long sailing vacation. That should have been a sign that I was on my way up at CBS. I had made numerous appearances on his show in the past, including one of my favorites, a skit with Chuck McCann featuring the two of us as Laurel and Hardy (me as Stan Laurel and Chuck as Oliver Hardy). But just as I began to find my comfort zone, two things happened that seemed to foreshadow my future at the network.

First, a zookeeper came on with an anteater, which relieved itself on the stage. It would have been funny if not for a noxious odor that quite simply stunk up the entire studio.

Then, on another show, I was chatting with Garry’s sidekick, Durward Kirby, who pointed at someone in the audience. As I turned to look, his fingernail sliced into my nose. I bled like a pig. Durward finished the show for me while I went offstage and got bandaged.

While my bleeding stopped, it was too late to save me at CBS. After a three-year run, they let me go. They said they didn’t know what to do with me, and frankly, I didn’t know what to do with me, either.

I drove home and told Margie that I had lost my job. My voice cracked several times as I relayed the details. She put on a good face, but I saw the concern in her eyes. I’m sure she saw the same in mine. I reminded her that we had been in worse spots, but it was really more for my benefit. With a wife and three children, and a house at the end of a cul-de-sac, I shouldered the responsibility of keeping everyone fed, warm, and feeling secure, and I was scared to death.

Around that same time, my agent set me up with a reporter who promised to do a little puff piece that would keep my name in circulation. The reporter asked me to describe my career goals.

“I want to eat,” I said.

He laughed.

I wasn’t joking.

I liked the life we had made for ourselves. Our neighborhood was full of families similar to us. The couples were young, upwardly mobile, with kids the same ages as ours. Everyone knew one another. Every Saturday night someone had a party. We had dinner, with a lot of drinking before and after, and played charades, which got pretty competitive. Once I got so wrapped up in the game that I broke out in hives.

Until this time, I didn’t drink. Margie and I always kept a bottle of Early Times whiskey in the cupboard for company,