Gene Rayburn
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| Gene Rayburn | |
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 Rayburn in 1979
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| Born | December 22, 1917 Christopher, Illinois |
| Died | November 29, 1999 Gloucester, Massachusetts |
Gene Rayburn (December 22, 1917 – November 29, 1999) was an Emmy-nominated American radio and television personality. Born Eugene Rubessa (IPA pronunciation: [ru'beʃɑ]) and an only child of Croatian immigrants, he graduated from Knox College.
Rayburn was married to Helen Ticknor from 1940 until her death in October 1996. They had one child, a daughter, Lynn. After the birth of their child, Rayburn was drafted into the U.S. Air Force.
Rayburn chose his stage name by randomly pointing at a page in the telephone book, after being told Rubessa sounded "too Italian". He became a popular radio personality in New York City on WNEW-AM. He was half of the first two-man team in morning radio, partnering with Jack Lescoulie and later Dee Finch.
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[edit] Television career
Before appearing in television, Rayburn was a very successful actor and radio performer. He had the drivetime New York radio show with Dee Finch called "Rayburn & Finch," which was enormously succesful. He also landed the lead in the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie.
Breaking into television as the original announcer on The Tonight Show, he eventually appeared as a panelist on the quiz show The Name's the Same. In 1955, he took over as host of the summer replacement game show, Make the Connection, from original host, Jim McKay. From there he hosted shows such as Choose Up Sides, Dough Re Mi, and Tic Tac Dough. On radio, Rayburn became one of the many hosts of the popular NBC program Monitor in 1961 and remained with the show until 1973.
During the 1960s, he occasionally substituted for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. In 1967, Carson would make a surprise appearance on the original black-and-white version of The Match Game during the same week that Tonight announcer Ed McMahon was a guest celebrity. In 1973, Rayburn recalled his guest-hosting duties as "the hardest job" he ever had.
[edit] The Match Game
In 1962 Rayburn first hosted The Match Game. The original version, which aired on NBC, lasted until 1969. The show returned to CBS in 1973 with a new format in which contestants had to match celebrity answers to humorous "fill-in-the-blank" questions. Millions tuned in and it soon became the highest-rated daytime TV show. From 1973 to 1977, it was #1 among all game shows, fueled mostly by the zany questions and Rayburn's witty style. His interaction with the panel and contestants and his antics, including breaking through the entrance doors, roller-skating on stage and climbing the audience, made the show a classic. The daytime revival of Match Game, which featured regular panelists Richard Dawson, Brett Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly, ran until 1979 on CBS and another three years in first-run syndication until 1982, with a concurrent night-time version, Match Game PM, airing from 1975 to 1981. Rayburn was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Host or Hostess in a Game or Audience Participation Show.
During the years when Match Game was taped in Los Angeles, Rayburn lived in Osterville, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, and would commute to California every three weeks to tape 15 shows over the course of a weekend.
In 1983, a year after the syndicated Match Game disappeared, the show was revived as part of the Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour, with Rayburn hosting the Match Game segment and sitting on the panel of the Hollywood Squares segment. The show lasted nine months on NBC.
[edit] Other game shows
During and between his Match Game years, Rayburn served as guest panelist on two other Goodson-Todman shows, What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth, where he exhibited the same inquisitiveness on serious subjects he showed on Monitor. Three years after the original Match Game was cancelled, Rayburn hosted the short-lived Heatter-Quigley Productions show, The Amateur's Guide to Love (1972). He also hosted a pilot for Reg Grundy Productions in 1983 called Party Line, which later became Bruce Forsyth's Hot Streak (which first aired in 1986 and was cancelled after 13 weeks).
The final game shows Rayburn emceed were: a 1985 revival of Break the Bank, where Rayburn was fired after 13 weeks and replaced by Joe Farago, and The Movie Masters, an AMC cable game show that ran from 1989 to 1990.
Right before production was to begin on a new Rayburn-emceed Match Game revival in 1985, an Entertainment Tonight reporter publicly disclosed his age, which was much older than many people believed. Rayburn had trouble finding jobs after that, blaming the reporter for disclosing his age and subjecting him to age discrimination.
[edit] Death
Rayburn's last TV appearance was a 1998 interview with Access Hollywood intended to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the CBS Match Game. Portions of the interview have been re-shown on the Game Show Network which in 2001 showed portions of another previously unaired interview during the first airing of its Match Game Blankathon.
Rayburn died at his daughter's home of congestive heart failure in 1999, one month after receiving a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
[edit] Trivia
- In a taping of Match Game '74, he unintentionally told a contestant, Karen Lesko, that she had "pretty nipples", meaning to say "dimples." The incident was cut from the original CBS episode and is not shown in GSN reruns either. Nonetheless, it has come to be known as possibly the most embarrassing "host screw-up" in game show history (Art James and his fiasco on live TV with a peanut butter jar that goes awry on a 1960s airing of Say When may be the other one). The moment has been aired on several present-day TV specials regarding game show mishaps.
- From 1978 up until Rayburn's death, he never spoke with Match Game regular panelist Richard Dawson. Dawson was a popular celebrity panel member who enjoyed joking around with the rest of the crew, yet in late 1977 until the summer of 1978, he appeared less interested in the game, probably due to the fact that he was hosting his own new hit game show, Family Feud. Years later, Rayburn recalled that Dawson was in later years, a "loner...with a monumental ego" who was "trying to kill the show."
- He knitted socks as a publicity stunt during his time on Rayburn and Finch and later became avid in needlepoint, so much to the point that he would constantly do some in plane rides from New York to "MG" tapings in Hollywood. In a 1974 Match Game episode, MG creator Mark Goodson made a surprise visit to congratulate the host on making the show #1 among daytime television programs and Goodson gave Rayburn a needlepoint bag as a gift in turn. In a later episode that year, panelist Richard Dawson showed off a picture of Gene knitting socks as part of the aforementioned publicity stunt.
- Rayburn once hosted a local New York City-based show on WNEW-TV (now WNYW-TV owned-and-operated by Fox), Helluva Town.
- Rayburn was of Croatian ancestry and he could also speak the language. On Match Game, when a contestant with the same ancestry would appear on the show, Rayburn would exchange a few words in Croatian with them.
- On one occasion on Match Game (CBS), the name of William F. Buckley Jr. (a famous conservative) was brought up. Rayburn said that Buckley was "...always wrong!" At one point, tabloids circulated that he supported North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, however this turned out be a falsified and fictional story. In an episode of the syndicated version of the show, he asked a contestant if a yellow star on her shoulder were a symbol of "communism." She denied it, and the show continued.
- Fred Wostbrock, the co-author of The Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows series, deemed Rayburn the "Frank Sinatra of game-show hosts."
- In an uncredited role (he reputedly did not want his name to appear), Rayburn played a TV interviewer in the 1959 movie, It Happened to Jane starring Doris Day. His involvement was plugged on an episode of Match Game '77.
- Rayburn took over for Dick Van Dyke on Broadway, in the musical, Bye Bye Birdie.
- Rayburn appeared on Fantasy Island as a game-show host -- he and another host were game show rivals who wanted to do the ultimate game show to win the woman they both loved; Roarke accommodated them with a game-show set, but the host's chair was more like a throne, and death was a real possibility. In the end, the two men, in a dead heat, were offered a final tie-breaker, a "sudden death" round.
- In between game show stints in 1982-83, Rayburn hosted a weekly local talk/lifestyles show seen live on WNEW-TV in New York City called Saturday Morning Live. His tenure was brief when he ultimately accepted the hosting assignment for The Match Game/Hollywood Squares Hour.
- Rayburn portrayed himself on a Saturday Night Live sketch in 1990, which featured Susan Lucci (as her character from All My Children, Erica Kane. Rayburn returned as one of Kane's previous husbands (alluding to Erica Kane's many marriages during her stint on that show), stopping another marriage with the host of a game show portrayed by Phil Hartman.
[edit] External links
- Gene Rayburn at the Internet Movie Database
- Gene Rayburn bio on the Match Game Homepage
