Television host, born in Canton, Ohio, USA. He left school at age 16 and began working as a radio announcer in the Midwest. In the US Army in World War 2 he entertained with service shows in the South Pacific. After the war he had some minor film roles and then began to appear as host of a series of radio and television shows. In 1957 he was assigned to host the National Broadcasting Company's Tonight show, and he proved so successful that it was renamed the Jack Paar Show (195862). A natural conversationalist and interviewer, with a roster of favourite guests, he was known for his feuds on and off camera. Tiring of the daily grind, he retired and bought a local Maryland television station, and returned only briefly (1973) with a weekly television show. His publications include I Kid You Not (1960, with John Reddy) and Three on a Toothbrush (1965).
| Jack Paar | |
|---|---|
| Jack Paar | |
| Born |
May 1, 1918 Canton, Ohio, USA |
| Died |
January 27, 2004 Greenwich, Connecticut, USA |
"jack Parr" redirects here. After the war, Paar tried his hand at movie acting and comedy, playing opposite Marilyn Monroe in Love Nest (1951) and frequently appearing as a standup comedian on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The Tonight Show
An impressive stint as a guest host on Jack Benny's radio show caught the attention of NBC officials, who eventually offered him his best known role as host of The Tonight Show. Paar was the program's host from 1957 to 1962; after 1959 it was known as The Jack Paar Show.
It was during Paar's stint as host that The Tonight Show became the entertainment juggernaut that it remained for the next five decades; no other host generated the degree of obsessive fascination in the press or the public that Paar did, partly because his version of the television talk show was so amazingly unpredictable, with memorable occurrences like a slurring drunk Judy Garland talking about her rival Marlene Dietrich playing only the applause sections of a recording of Dietrich's recent European concerts while at a party that they both happened to attend. Kennedy later granted the first interview after his brother's assassination to Paar on Paar's primetime show. The focus was always on compelling conversation and Paar's guests tended to be literate raconteurs such as Peter Ustinov rather than scripted actors selling their current films, while Paar himself was a superb storyteller.
During this time, Paar also made occasional appearances on the television game show What's My Line?. On episode 215, Paar filled in as guest panelist for Steve Allen, his predecessor at The Tonight Show.
Smart Television
Smart Television is the name of a PBS television documentary produced in 2000 celebrating the career of TV talk show host Jack Paar, featuring clips of Paar with guests including Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, Judy Garland, Bill Cosby (in his first network appearance), Peter Ustinov, Richard Burton, John F. Kennedy (in his first interview after his brother's assassination), Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and many others compiled from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as more recent interviews with people who worked with Paar.
Highly emotional
Paar was often emotional and unpredictable. NBC replaced that section of the show with news coverage and failed to inform Paar of their decision.
The decision to censor the joke so angered Paar that the next night, February 11, he announced on the air that he was leaving the show, saying "I've made a decision about what I'm going to do. After finishing this monologue, Paar abruptly walked offstage, leaving his flustered announcer Hugh Downs to finish the show for him.
Less than a month later, Paar was convinced to return;
The move to prime time
Paar's emotionality made the everyday routine of putting together a ninety-minute program difficult to continue for long. Paar made it clear that he was not planning to continue with the Tonight Show because, as a TV Guide item put it, he was "bone tired" of the grind, and he signed off for the last time on March 29, 1962.
Paar then began hosting a prime-time Friday night show on NBC, entitled The Jack Paar Program. In fact, on January 3, 1964 the group made their prime time debut on Paar's hour in film clips Paar had leased from the BBC, with Paar gently making fun of the band (the Beatles first U.S. television appearance was in a feature story on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite). Paar's show had a world view, debuting acts from around the globe and showing films from exotic locations; During the first half of 1964, another running feud pitted Paar against the show immediately preceding his program, David Frost's satire series That Was The Week That Was. A typical exchange would have That Was the Week That Was "signing off" the NBC Television Network just before the Paar program, with Paar responding that the show immediately preceding his was Henry Morgan's Amateur Hour (Morgan was a frequent guest on the earlier show).
Paar's prime time show aired for three years, including guests such as Brother Dave Gardner, Peter Ustinov, Lawrence of Arabia's brother, Richard Burton, Oscar Levant, Lowell Thomas, Muhammad Ali singing to piano accompaniment by Liberace, an occasionally inebriated Judy Garland, Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby (whose nickname for Paar was "The Boss"), Bette Davis, Robert Morley and many others. The final closing segment of the series, broadcast on June 25, 1966, featured him sitting alone on a stool, sharing a discussion that he had with his daughter Randy, who called Paar's departure a sabbatical.
Later career
Paar came back for another late-night show in January 1973 on ABC; this time, as one of a group of rotating hosts (including a young Dick Cavett, a former Paar writer) on ABC Wide World of Entertainment, he appeared one week out of each month, which was the most Paar was willing to appear. (Paar later claimed he wouldn't have appeared at all unless ABC committed itself to keeping Cavett's show on the schedule in some manner.) His announcer for this series was Peggy Cass, and perhaps the most notable aspect of the series was the fact that comic Freddie Prinze made his national television debut on it. While Cavett had no problem interviewing young rock acts, Paar once expressed the view he had trouble interviewing people dressed in "overalls." In 1986, NBC aired a special featuring Paar, titled Jack Paar Comes Home; the following year, a second special Jack Paar Is Alive and Well was broadcast by the network. Both of these specials were largely made up of kinescoped clips from Paar's prime time program, to which he maintained the copyright. In the course of promoting the first special, Paar guested on Johnny Carson's version of Tonight for the first time on November 18, 1986.
PBS television devoted an edition of the prestigious American Masters series to Paar's career in 1997, and in 2003 revisited the topic with another hour-long examination of the Paar phenomenon, appropriately entitled Smart Television.
Death
Paar, who enjoyed many years of relatively good health and made rare guest appearances on The Tonight Show (under Johnny Carson and Jay Leno) and Late Night with David Letterman, as well as Charles Grodin's CNBC talk show, died at his Greenwich, Connecticut home in January 2004 at age 85, with his wife and daughter by his side.
As Richard Corliss noted in Time Magazine's obituary, Jack Paar had divided television talk show history into two eras: Before Paar and Below Paar.
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