As NBC ramps up to inaugurate Conan O'Brien as the new host of The Tonight Show, they've put together something on their website that may interest you. It's a Tonight Show retrospective complete with photos and video clips of all the past hosts. Naturally, the clips of Steve Allen and Jack Paar are the most interesting because they're the rarest. Most of those hosts' episodes no longer exist so any footage at all is something of a treat.
You'll want to go to the site itself and browse around but I'm going to embed two clips here. The first is of Steve Allen doing a bit he often did, reading aloud angry letters from The New York Daily News, giving them the outraged delivery that their authors intended. These were, apart from the gag name signatures, real letters. Here's that clip — and by the way, you may have to sit through a brief commercial for these…
The second clip is from the first Jack Paar Tonight, though it doesn't have Jack in it. It's the intro of Mr. Paar…and the man you'll see doing it is the bizarre character actor, Franklin Pangborn. Books will tell you that Hugh Downs was Paar's sidekick and that was true…eventually. When they started out, it was Pangborn.
Paar's show was thrown together in a hurry. Steve Allen had been replaced by a multi-host aberration called Tonight: America After Dark, a total and embarrassing flop. Paar was quickly hired and shoved out onto the air without a lot of lead time. Amazingly, they didn't even take an hour or two to meet the man they selected as his announcer-sidekick before hiring him. Someone got the idea that Mr. Pangborn would be the perfect choice. Pangborn was a very funny presence in a lot of movies, including (memorably) W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick, usually playing little effete, prissy men.
The actor was then living in Los Angeles and not working much. The producers contacted him and made an offer which Pangborn immediately accepted, even though it meant moving to New York. No one on the Paar show had met him in person. No one had screen-tested him to see how he'd come across on a (mostly) unscripted live TV show, playing opposite the new host. It turned out he was terrible. He couldn't ad-lib and without a script, he couldn't even replicate his old screen character. He also turned out to be, according to several accounts, very nervous and paranoid backstage, unsettling everyone with paranoid fantasies of unnamed people trying to kill him. They got rid of him in a hurry and eventually, Mr. Downs — who'd been hired just to be an announcer doing commercials — eased into the sidekick role.
This only runs a few seconds but I was amazed to find it on the site. So here's Franklin Pangborn introducing Jack Paar on his first Tonight, which was on July 29, 1957…
If you like this stuff, go over to the Tonight Show Experience to experience more of it. But don't believe everything you read. The "Timeline" feature there says that Downs introduced Paar on the first show, even though the site has this clip of someone else doing that. And then it says, of Paar's last show, that "various guest hosts try to fill his shoes as speculation over who will replace him continues." That's all wrong. Carson was signed before Paar left. But the site's full of enough fun stuff that it's worth a long visit.