Longtime TV host Art Linkletter has died at the age of 97 and I'm getting e-mails from people who are waiting for me to post some great anecdote or personal encounter with the man. I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint these folks but I do have a few thoughts to offer.
Art Linkletter was darn near the last of a breed — those guys who came out of radio, got into television and functioned as hosts. They weren't comedians. They weren't musical performers. They weren't actors. They were just hosts, often of game shows, and there were a lot of them around in the early days of TV. What did Art Linkletter do? He was a host.
I'm afraid he was never a favorite in our household. Much of America saw him as warm and genial and beloved, I suppose…but everyone I knew saw him as unctuous and enormously condescending to the people who got plucked from his audiences to appear on his shows, House Party or People Are Funny. He just had this way of acting like they were all colossal boobs and that it was his job to make sure they came across that way. There also seemed to be no product he wouldn't sincerely endorse if they were paying him enough.
Some of the obits are recalling the event that turned him into a staunch anti-drug crusader. In 1969, his daughter Diane jumped to her death from an apartment window. Dad blamed it on LSD and the drug culture and permissiveness…this, despite the fact that the coroner determined she'd had no drugs whatsoever in her system at the time. Some campaigns to curtail drug use are admirable but Linkletter's just struck me as self-serving. Half of it seemed like a desperate attempt to convince everyone, himself included, that his daughter's death was not a suicide and he had therefore not been a bad father; that she was murdered by drug-pushers. The other half of the message seemed to be that to fight the plague of drugs, we had to all vote Republican.
At the time, I was rabidly anti-drug and reasonably Conservative and even I found Mr. Linkletter's little speeches offensive and counter-productive. To his credit, he eventually backed way off them. I seem to recall a brief news cycle years later wherein he recanted his position on marijuana, decided it really didn't lead inevitably to "the hard stuff" and even endorsed its legalization. But by that point, he was just a guy who sold cheap life insurance to seniors in commercials and no one particularly cared what he said.
He obviously had a long and prosperous life. When Disneyland opened, Linkletter did some hosting duties for Walt…and since Walt couldn't afford to pay the going rate for Art's services, they worked a barter. Linkletter's company got the concession to sell Kodak film in the park for some lucrative number of years. I don't have the stats handy but Scrooge McDuck would have envied the kind of money Linkletter wound up making off that arrangement. His other investments also did nicely for him so he probably lived quite well when his TV career went away.
I used to see him around town all the time but I never said hello to him. Usually when I meet a celebrity of any tenure, I can think of something the person did that I liked…so I can say, "I really enjoyed your work in that." I couldn't think of anything in that vein regarding Art Linkletter so he remained unapproached by me. Oddly enough, the one time I liked him was the last time I saw him anywhere. When Steve Allen passed, there was a tribute evening out at the Alex Theater in Glendale…performers who'd worked with Steverino telling tales, doing their acts, etc. Linkletter was the Master of Ceremonies and though he was around 87, he was sharp, funny and darn good at what he did. I found myself actually wondering why he had so totally disappeared from TV apart from the occasional commercial.
Anyway, as you can tell by now, I don't have a great story to tell you about Art Linkletter. But you know who does? Laraine Newman does. Here's a link to the tale of her TV debut…as one of the kids who was brought on to say clumsy, adorable things on Mr. Linkletter's House Party show.
(And I can't resist pointing something out. I have this ongoing fascination with the way in which everyone I know eventually intersects with everyone else I know. I've been working with Laraine a lot lately…and by the way, as a comic actress, she more than lives up to her reputation, which is that she's one of the best. From this article, I learned that her writing teacher is Claudette Sutherland. You may recall that recently, I did a couple of lectures up at UCLA about the show, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and for one, I interviewed an actress who was in the original Broadway cast. That actress was Claudette Sutherland. My life is kinda like Facebook but without all the annoying invasions of privacy.)