Jack Paar has died

Jack Paar, Unpredictable TV Host Who Kept Americans Up Late, Dies at 85
By RICHARD SEVERO

Published: January 28, 2004


ack Paar, the prickly, often emotional and always unpredictable humorist who turned late-night television into a national institution when he was host of the "Tonight Show" from 1957 to 1962, died yesterday at his home in Greenwich, Conn., his son-in-law, Stephen Wells, told The Associated Press. He was 85. .

"Before Jack Paar, there were various variety shows doing the midnight watch," the critic John J. O'Connor wrote in The New York Times in 1997. "He simplified the format into a talk show, complete with the sofa-and-desk set that remains a fixture. His secret? Interesting guests, far more so than the celebrity hordes working on product plugs today, and an uncanny ability to listen carefully and actually engage in clever and often witty conversation."

In introducing highlights from his programs some years ago, Mr. Paar said, "I hate the word `talk show.' It makes it seem as if all I did was invent a davenport."

But in truth Mr. Paar's couch became a sounding board for social gossips like Elsa Maxwell and national political figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Barry M. Goldwater. It was also a hangout for witty regular guests like the irascibly neurotic Oscar Levant and the equally fine raconteurs Alexander King, Peter Ustinov and Clement Freud.

William Grimes, watching some old Paar shows, observed in The Times that it was "clear that good talk was the foundation of Mr. Paar's success, along with an ability to coax, and sometimes coerce, colorful stories out of guests who, in television's earlier days, did not always seem to know what exactly they were supposed to do."

"Long before David Letterman," Mr. Grimes continued, "Mr. Paar had an anarchic streak that inspired him to pair guests like Liberace and Cassius Clay, or Jayne Mansfield and Zsa Zsa Gabor, or to get in the ring with a professional wrestler or to shuffle the cue cards in the middle of a Robert Goulet-Judy Garland duet."

In time he was joined by a kind of repertory company that included Hugh Downs, his announcer; José Melis, his pianist; Cliff Arquette, who portrayed a down-home character named Charley Weaver; Genevieve, a French chanteuse who mangled the English language; and the comedians Jonathan Winters, Dody Goodman and Peggy Cass.

Mr. Paar's couch in the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center in New York also became a launching pad for dozens of unknowns who would get national exposure on his show, among them Bill Cosby, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers and Godfrey Cambridge.

"Everyone thinks Ed Sullivan discovered the Beatles," he once complained. "That's not true. I had them on before he did. I did it because I thought they were funny, not because I liked the music. I'm a Muzak kind of guy — my home's like living in an elevator."

In 1960 he wrote a book with John Reddy, "I Kid You Not," echoing his best known catch phrase.

An avid traveler, Mr. Paar liked to bring the world beyond show biz to his audience. Tom Shales of The Washington Post remembered, "He took his viewers to Africa, to Cuba (immediately after the revolution), to Hawaii shortly after it became a state and to the late and unlamented Berlin Wall. Paar was a true television auteur; his shows were all reflections of his own insatiable curiosity and fascination with the world."

Mr. Paar's show was so successful that no one is really certain why he suddenly left it while it was still being watched by seven million Americans on NBC every night. Mr. Paar said years later, "I've never really had a good answer to that."

But many Americans remember an earlier farewell. Mr. Paar quit his show twice, the first time in 1960, after NBC censored a joke that included the letters W. C., for water closet. Tearful and angry, he looked straight into the camera and said: "I am leaving the `Tonight Show.' There must be a better way of making a living than this." Three weeks later, he was back, proclaiming, "As I was saying before I was interrupted . . . "

 

No really he's gone for good.

 

Did he have anything to do with the term "Paar for the course"?

 

no but he used to do neat things to jane mansfield

 

Hold on, I thought he came up with the term 'Paarty, Harty!!!!' i've heard things got a little rowdy on the Tonight Show set 'back in the day' with the open bar in the green room !!