Peter Marshall & Adrienne Armstrong: Backstage With The Original Hollywood Square

The growth of the Game Show Network has a new generation asking the same question that bugged game-show viewers decades ago: Who exactly are these people? Whatever game-show hosts and celebrity panelists did to get famous—Broadway musicals, Vegas nightclubs, radio dramas—pales next to the sheer volume of their five-times-weekly appearances on daytime television, so it's easy to get the impression that their fame came exclusively from their game-show appearances. Who remembers that Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall played the suave singing straight man to Tommy Noonan's wacky comic throughout the '50s? The pair appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show regularly and made a couple of movies, and Marshall moonlighted in New York and Las Vegas musical theater. But Marshall relegates those early years to roughly the first 10 pages of his memoir Backstage With The Original Hollywood Square (written with the aid of his longtime assistant, Adrienne Armstrong), then jumps right into a string of his best anecdotes from the 15 years he spent hosting one of the most popular game shows in television history. Backstage is haphazardly assembled and frequently clunky; it reads like a long interview, transcribed and then arranged into rough chronological order. Marshall contradicts himself, leaves stories half-finished, and spends little time connecting the dots of the show's rise and fall. None of which really matters, because the book is still indispensable for Marshall's lengthy reminiscences about the Hollywood Squares regulars. He tosses off key facts about their pre-Squares careers (who knew that Wally Cox once roomed with Marlon Brando?), recalls some of their best on-air "zingers" (Marshall: "The French call it 'wooden mouth'; what do you call it?" Paul Lynde: "I don't know, but it'll cost you extra"), and dishes about their off-screen boozing and womanizing. (Who knew that Cliff Arquette had such a thing for prostitutes?) Series like Hollywood Squares and Match Game encouraged the impression that celebrities hang out together after their shows, and according to Backstage, that was no illusion. Marshall claims that his cast was close enough to rely on each other for rides to the studio, to drive over from their Toluca Lake homes to fill in at the last minute, and to share drinks at a topless club after the taping. It was, perhaps, a fair tradeoff for being remembered primarily as squares.