Do You Trust Your Wife

With the death of Ed McMahon at 86 a couple of days ago, I decided to get my DVD called "Here Is...The Johnny Carson Show" and watch the show that he and Carson first performed on: "Who Do You Trust?" Like Groucho on "You Bet Your Life", Johnny has a couple, usually married, ask either one their occupations and other things about their life, and then quizzes them with easy questions for about a certain amount of money. Carson is quite witty with his remarks and does a live commercial for Jell-O in which he mispronounces "cup" as "crup"! McMahon does not say his famous "Heeerrreee's Johnny!" when he introduces the host and they don't have much banter but even then you can see some chemistry that carried them when they both left for "The Tonight Show". So on that note, "Who Do You Trust?" that I just saw comes highly recommended. By the way, the Army man in the third couple featured was stationed in Shreveport in my home state of Louisiana.

I remember watching this show in the afternoons, and some of the contestants made the chief kooks and bottle washers on Groucho's show look positively sane by comparison. My personal favorite is the guy who took air baths; he would lie down in front of an open window, let the breeze waft over him until he felt clean, then turn over and do the same thing to the other side. Johnny sniffed the air suspiciously, then asked, "And I suppose if you want to take a shower you use a fan?". My second favorite is a trumpeter who was hired by his local zoo to play music to get the alligators to mate. He did his job too well; he was fired after one day because the alligators were responding to the music. Carson: "What did you play them, 'Stimulator Alligator'?" (a play on Bill Haley's "See You Later, Alligator"). Also, unlike Groucho, Johnny was willing to take part in demonstrations of the contestants' interests, be it fencing, model-car racing, or scuba diving, all of which he did with varying degrees of success.

The prize money wasn't much: three questions worth $25, $50, and $75, and when I watched it in the later years the highest-scoring couple got to unscramble a name or phrase for, I believe, $500. But who cared? Try to avoid the last fifteen months, after Carson went to "The Tonight Show". Woody Woodbury tries too hard to be naughty, and his standard fishing-gear attire won't make any more sense now than it did then. And by the way, Bill Nimmo returned as the show's announcer; Del Sharbutt appears to have been an interim announcer between the time Nimmo originally left in 1958 and Ed McMahon joined the show.

When I started watching this show, its title was "Do You Trust Your Wife?" When they decided to use pairs of contestants that were not couples, they changed the show's title to "Who Do You Trust?" When Johnny Carson got the Tonight Show gig, I was hoping that Ed McMahon would go with him; luckily, that happened. *** The rest of this note exists simply to make it long enough to meet the 10 line minimum. Being a person of relatively few words, I don't like to waste them. However, if volume is what is wanted for the website, then here it is. I think we've gotten to the ninth line by now and should soon be at the tenth line. Here it is! The tenth line feels the same as the ninth line. Darn. ***

The Hula Hoop was very popular at this time and my father worked in New York. I don't know how our family got on the show, but I got to demonstrate my hula hoop abilities. I was seven years old, and it was nearing Christmas because I can recall the theater being very cold. After showing how well I hula-hooped, Johnny Carson quizzed me on some popular Holiday songs. I think I named three that the band played ( Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and Here comes Santa Claus ). I won ten silver dollars which I was made to give one to a few of my sisters (mainly because they didn't get to be on stage like me ) after the show. I ended up keeping the lion's share.My mom and dad went on to unscramble letters making two words on a large board kept behind a curtain. The answer turned out to be "Adalai Stevenson" which won some fair amount of money for our family. The show appeared to be live, but I'm now certain was edited. It took two days to complete because my parents came back to the studio to participate in the final 'quiz' the next day. That was fortunate for them because I found out later that they had "peeked' at the jumbled quiz board and figured out the scrambled words before they returned to the studio. I think that Johnny even invited my folks out for dinner afterward, but they were too nervous and politely refused.

As was pointed out by an actor playing the role of a sound man on a promotional spot at the time, to be grammatically correct, the show should have been entitled, "Whom Do You Trust?" But Johnny Carson was aiming his tribute to Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life" at the mass audience, not school marms. As Groucho had done on "You Bet our Life," Johnny would engage in banter with two guests who didn't necessarily know each other, let slip a few mischievous double entendres which were cute, funny, and pushing the limits of TV censorship all at the same time, and then pull out his quiz cards so that the guests as contestants could now try to win some money. "The next category is famous middle names. Which of you feels confident with this category. Who do you trust? Here's the first one: Robert Louis Stevenson. Oh, sorry. I'm not supposed to say the middle name." And at Ed McMahon laughing in the wings: "Well, you try saying that name without 'Louis' in the middle!" I remember that partly because the contestant failed to get the correct answer for the name that was then substituted for the author of "Treasure Island."

The main difference to "You Bet Your Life" was that whereas the Marx show was broadcast in the evening, causing a lot of kids to beg to stay up, "Who Do You Trust" was broadcast (on the East Coast, anyway) at 3:30 PM, causing quite a few kids to get home from school early. Later, of course, prepared with his several years of seasoning on daytime television, Johnny Carson became the King of the Night and as such, according to statistical studies, was an alternative to other nighttime activities and therefore a recognized form of birth control across America.