One for the Gifford!

Ahhhh, my kittens. We have been very, very busy in The Underworld as of late. Not only has my workload been akin to the opening of the Gates of Hades, but I was out of town for several days on a camping excursion and am rehearsing a small reading for an upcoming theatre project. (Lest you wonder what on Earth I would be doing “camping,” let me point out that I was in an air-conditioned trailer that was complete with a separate, screened-in gazebo, oscillating fan, patio furniture, a chandelier, twinkle lights, chiffon drapery and carpet! I kept looking for Barbara “Jeannie” Eden to pop up! And I'm not exaggerating. There was even a bolt of canvas spread between two trees onto which DVD movies were projected. So I was hardly “roughing it!”)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. It might surprise my loyal readers that I would profile such a figure as Frank Gifford (even though I did do a little tribute not too long ago to the wonders of baseball player Jim Palmer.) Most folks nowadays probably think of Gifford, if they think of him at all, as the aged husband of Kathie Lee Gifford who got caught in the mid-'90s with a skeevy airline stewardess and who watched his image and hard-earned reputation swiftly swirl down the toilet. I'll touch on that later, but first I want to visit the early years of Mr. G. Prior to all the scandal he lived through, he was, in turn, a handsome, athletic youth, a gleaming example of football playing at its finest, a charismatic television personality and an expert sports commentator.
Born Francis Newton Gifford in Santa Monica, California on August 16th, 1930, he was the middle child of an oil driller. As a result, the family moved around quite a bit in order to be near work. (A man from people with simple backgrounds, his parents names were Weldon and Lola Mae, his siblings Waine and Winona.) He took pleasure in playing ball as a kid and eventually proved to be exceedingly good at it during his years at Bakersfield High School. Already, his devastating looks were showing through, with a strong chin, seductive eyes and thick, pouty lips.
Unable to secure a scholarship at the University of Southern California due to mediocre grades (and lacking the funds to attend otherwise), he instead went to Bakersfield Junior College where he made the Junior College All-American team. Still, he studied hard enough to improve his GPA and make it into USC after all. There he continued to excel at football and became an All-American. He stayed there until graduation in 1952. This picture at left, by the way, is from his early pro-career.

Also, while a student in California, he made occasional forays into movie-making, appearing in bit parts or as a football player in films like 1951's That's My Boy (A Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy), 1952's Sally and St. Anne (a tender comedy involving Catholicism in which he played John McIntire's son) and The All American (released in 1953, with Tony Curtis.) He even appeared in 1952's Bonzo Goes to College, a sequel to the infamous Ronald Reagan hit Bedtime for Bonzo. That's Frank teaching Bonzo the proper stance to the right!
He was in the first round of draft picks to the NFL in 1952 and was chosen by the New York Giants. Thus began a stellar career in the game that resulted in eight trips to the Pro Bowl and five appearances at the NFL Championship Game. (This was before The Super Bowl, which debuted in 1967.) He also married for the first time in 1952, at the age of twenty-two, to a Maxine Ewart and they would proceed to have three children together. In 1956, he was named Most Valuable Player of the NFL in a championship win against the Chicago Bears. His skill as a runner even taught esteemed, legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi a thing or two, causing him to rethink his approach to defense.
That same year, he appeared on the game show What's My Line?, not as a celebrity guest in the blindfolded final segment, but just as a regular one, signing his name as F. Newton Gifford. Remarkably, the panel wasn't immediately able to identify a star player on a team that played in New York, where WML was filmed! In fact, he had come to the studio from playing a game that very day. His impressive build and drop dead looks had the audience howling already (and Dorothy Kilgallen even mused that he might be a football player before abandoning the idea), but it was Arlene Francis who really became enthralled. Perhaps a bit jaded by the not so sexy presences that were usually around her on the show, she leapt to attention when Gifford appeared and proceeded to purr about him during all of her time opposite him, making no bones at all about the fact that she found him deliciously handsome (her husband, Martin Gabel, be damned!) It's hysterical to watch her practically drool over him. This appearance gave viewers a chance to see the polite, demure, soft-spoken athlete out of his helmet.

During his career with the Giants, the only professional football team for which he ever played, he perfected three different positions – defensive back, running back and wide receiver. This final position was obtained after he suffered a traumatic, potentially career-crushing tackle in 1960 that left him with a severe concussion and led to eighteen months off the field, during which he contemplated retirement at the age of thirty-one. Instead, he came back, learned the new position and was selected to play in the Pro Bowl once more. In 1964, he retired from playing. His number (#16) was subsequently retired as well, a mark of his impact on the team.
In the off-season, Gifford had occasionally continued to make feature film appearances. He was one of many young men in the 1958 William Wellman WWII drama Darby's Rangers, starring James Garner, but his most prominent film performance came the following year in Up Periscope, a WWII submarine drama that also starred Garner. The color production depicted a plethora of tan, gorgeous men crammed into the guts of a sweltering submarine, necessitating them to remove their shirts frequently. There were several hunks on board, and Garner was certainly no slouch at this stage, but Gifford still wins points as the hunkiest of them all. In one sequence, he's injured in the leg and he's laid to rest, shirtless, on a cot with his pants cut open to the thigh. Someone wisely chose this moment for promotion on a lobby card, though it was so heavily doctored it almost looked like a painting! You can compare the art with the real thing here. Gifford also worked in the insurance business in the off-season, this being prior to the days of superstar salaries that sportsmen now command.
Once his playing career was over, Gifford segued into announcing with relative ease. His voice was so soft and gentle and soothing, a perfect companion to that chiseled, yet somehow still fleshy face. As a sports announcer, Gifford met many of the top people available, not the least of which was baseball legend Mickey Mantle, who is shown with him here.

Gifford also continued to perform, though not with the drive of someone pursuing an acting career. He worked on a 1963 episode of the Shirley Booth sitcom Hazel as himself. The episode was called “Hazel and the Halfback.” He appeared on the show as expressing interest in investing in a bowling alley in Booth's neighborhood. (Here, below left, the two grapple with his balls.) It was just a piece of stunt-casting, perhaps during a sweeps period, something that TV shows did before and that they still do now to lure in more viewers. He was, however, approached in 1965 to be the latest movie Tarzan (can you even imagine?!?), but ultimately the role went to darkly good-looking and hirsute Mike Henry, another ex-football player.

The first time I, myself, can ever remember hearing his name was in the 1974 movie Earthquake when Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner were squabbling over Heston's deceased football career. Heston was about to take an autographed football to the son of young widow Genevieve Bujold and, demonstrating no illusions about his own lack of popularity, said, “It's the ball Frank Gifford signed. That's the signature he really wants.” Because I love Earthquake and that scene, the name stayed in my psyche.

He also popped up on the popular game show Password and it is due to reruns of that colorful, classy and delightful show that I fell hard for Mr. Gifford. Search the world all you want. You will be hard-pressed to find a more gallant, well-mannered, thoughtful, classic-looking gentleman than this. (Hugh O'Brian was of a similar sort as well.) In spite of his slow-start towards education, he was articulate and knowledgeable, too. Every time the camera would cut to him, I was close to whatever the male equivalent of swooning is! (A blackout??) He's just simply the most humble, charming, dead-sexy thing imaginable. Apart from that, it's such a contrast to the type of football players we (mostly) see now. Gifford was from a time when ball spiking, celebratory ignorance, off-the-field arrests and so forth were practically unheard of. I'm a football fan, as a matter of fact, but I think we lost something when we began to idolize thugs, whiners and showboaters instead of players with a strong sense of sportsmanship.

In 1968, he and his then-wife Maxine appeared as themselves in the Alan Alda football-oriented film Paper Lion, all about Alda, a reporter, spending time as a player with the Detroit Lions in order to do an in-depth story.

To continue with the Charlton Heston connection for just a second, Gifford also appeared briefly as himself (as a commentator) in 1976's Two Minute Warning, a disaster movie that takes place at something vaguely resembling The Super Bowl (the producers weren't able to get the rights to use that name...) There was also a guest shot as himself on The Six-Million Dollar Man that same year. The two-part episode was about a young paralyzed boy who is given bionic legs, with his personal hero Gifford on hand to cheer him on to his own career as a player following the operation.

He also penned more than one book and was the subject of a few as well. As far back as 1956, a book had been written on him called Frank Gifford, His Golden Year. Then in 1960, his (premature) biography was released. (Then again, when people today like Miley Cyrus and Justin Beiber have biographies in the stores, I guess it isn't that unusual!) In 1977, he wrote Gifford on Courage, something he would have much need of as the decades passed! In 1995, he wrote his own autobiography called The Whole Ten Yards. In 1978, he married his second wife Astrid, who he was with until 1986. (I'm sorry, but I don't know when his first marriage ended.)
Gifford's continuing expertise at play-by-play and interviewing eventually led (in 1971) to his being added to the line-up of Howard Cosell and Don Meredith on Monday Night Football, an immensely popular program that saw many of its glory days when these three men worked on it together. He began as a play-by-play announcer, though, not a host. It was after the departure of first Cosell and then Meredith that Gifford became a color commentator in 1986. He remained a commentator of the seasonal weekly broadcast until the blow-up of the mid-'90s which led to his being relegated to a less prominent hosting spot in 1998 before departing altogether.

During these years, he also served as a reporter for Olympic games, golf, snow-skiing and even filled in occasionally as a guest host on Good Morning America. One stint on GMA would have a life-changing effect on him as it led him to meet a freshly-divorced singer and TV personality named Kathie Lee Johnson. Johnson (nee Epstein) was a former teen beauty pageant entrant (who had once worked for a summer as a babysitter/assistant to Anita Bryant!) who became a born-again Christian and rose to fame on Name That Tune as “The La-La Girl.” She was so-called because when it fell upon her to sing a song, she had to leave the name of it out so that contestants could “name that tune!” Thus, she might sing, “Big wheels keep on turnin'. La-la-la keep on burnin'.” (The answer, of course, being Proud Mary.)

Born Jewish, she was struck by the idea of Christianity at the age of twelve when she saw the 1965 film The Restless Ones, a film with Johnny Crawford and Kim Darby that was produced by and even starred Billy Graham. She then attended Oral Roberts University, married Christian songwriter Paul Johnson and appeared nightly on Name That Tune, sporting one of the most perfected Dorothy Hamill wedges ever seen. She then made the rather surprising decision to work on the inherently trashy (and thankfully short-lived) corn pone comedy Hee Haw Honeys in 1978. By the time she met Gifford, though, she had reinvented herself as a talk show personality and was on the cusp on entering her most famous phase, that of co-host of Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. Gifford's divorce from Astrid was finalized the same year (1986) that he and Kathie Lee wed.

The phenomenally successful morning chatfest Live with Regis and Kathie Lee introduced audiences to a whole new version of Mrs. Gifford. She was a lot of things, not limited to zesty, zany, opinionated, sentimental, vehement and brash, but she had a legion of fans in any case. Where she really started to lose ground in some circles was when she began to brag incessantly about her marriage and family. She and Gifford had two children, Cody (born in 1990) & Cassidy (born in 1993), and she babbled nonstop about the wonders of them all. It fed a backlash that started to get rather ugly. She became fodder for the tabloid press, papers like The National Enquirer, The Star and The Globe, who delighted in running unflattering pictures of her along with snarky stories.

The deck of cards Kathie Lee had built, in which she proclaimed the perfection of her home life (something Frank did as well in his 1995 book, a portion of which practically paid gooey worship to his wife according to many of those who read it), came crashing down in an unbelievable thud when, first, her clothing line reaped accusations of using underpaid, mistreated workers in Honduras. Then, The Globe broke a story about how sixty-six year old Frank and an airline stewardess had spent time in a motel room getting it on. They even had photographic and audio proof of the affair. A firestorm of scandal and controversy broke out, resulting in abject humiliation for Kathie Lee, who still had to go one the air nearly every day, and Frank, who wound up losing his position at Monday Night Football over it.

Thing was, it was later believed by many that the entire thing: the seductive blonde lady (trashy and leathery as she was), the conveniently procured evidence, the inside story, et al, was completely orchestrated by The Globe from start to finish. In other words, a trap set to ensnare Gifford for the sole purpose of tearing down his (what many thought to be) obnoxious wife. The stewardess (whose name I know, but I will not print because I do not wish to give her a sixteenth minute of fame, her fifteenth coming when she posed nude for Playboy after the story broke) was paid a mammoth sum in order to play her part. Kathie Lee cried a lot of tears, many in public. Frank was in the doghouse for a good long while, as well he should be.

Their marriage somehow survived the maelstrom, though it was very rough going. Frank's longstanding reputation as an honored, esteemed football player, announcer and spokesperson took quite a beating. Considering that he was, by now, getting on in years, he came out of the whole mess looking quite foolish, regardless of whether or not he was set up. I recently read that there are many men who seem to find any blonde, tan woman attractive, no matter what else may be wrong with them. I'm starting to think there may be something to that, especially when I see some of the hard trash out there who somehow seem to attract a lot of (sometimes affluent and powerful) men.

In any case, the Giffords reunited and proceeded to try to repair the damage to their careers and images. She left Live in 2000, replaced by Kelly Ripa, and began concentrating on her singing career. Later, she joined the morning show Today as a cohost. A celebrity ambassador for Childhelp, she has worked with that charity which targets child abuse prevention. She and Frank also raised money to create and sustain two New York City shelters for the support of HIV and crack babies (though she, or they, were unable to resist naming the establishments after their two children, Cody and Cassidy.)
As of this writing, Frank Gifford is eighty years old. Somewhere along the way, he began to lose that wondrous wave of thick, brown hair and there are the effects of sun and cigarettes on that once awe-inspiring face. Then again, he is EIGHTY, mere days away from eighty-one, in fact! (By the way, do not miss the caption on this old promotional card on the right!) When I did my posting on Jim Palmer, I ended it with a string of photos of him in those sexy underwear ads. Today, I'm going to leave Frank with a bunch of the print ads he appeared in through his long career. He was a Jantzen swimsuit and sportswear model for about a decade and he looks mighty good in these clean, sharp, classic pieces of clothing (the more abbreviated the better!) I love not only the way he looks, but also the intimate, chummy way he is posed with his pals in some of the shots. As always, click to enlarge! There's also a later ad below that has a bunch of people grabbing for his nuts! See if you don't find Frankie baby just a little bit sexier than you might have expected before you waded through all this.

I'm Into Games

The (almost) complete demise of GSN – The Game Show Network – as a place at which to view classic game shows has been a real pain for me. When the channel started, they showed almost round the clock broadcasts of classic episodes of such shows as Match Game, The Price is Right (the old ones – with a dark-haired Bob Barker!), Hollywood Squares (with Paul Lynde), Tattletales, $25,000 Pyramid, To Tell the Truth and many, many more. Sadly for me, I didn’t have the station at that time! I was a cable subscriber and didn’t get the channel until I moved to my house and ordered satellite.

Almost simultaneously, GSN began introducing new game shows of their own and started phasing out all the classic shows. You might still catch Let’s Make a Deal, Blockbusters, Match Game or Family Feud on a weekend morning, but in order to see To Tell the Truth, What’s My Line?, I’ve Got a Secret, Password or a number of other old shows, you would have to record them because they were shown either during weekdays or, in most cases, broadcast overnight at some ungodly hour.

Now, the station is almost completely devoid of classic shows and is a wasteland of shitty original programming and rebroadcasts of recent game shows (some of which were successful like Deal or No Deal and some of which that didn’t make it such as 1 vs 100.) Having already watched TVLand enact a long, slow slide into oblivion, it has been hard for me to watch GSN do the same thing. I guess either there is no market for old game shows (which, to me, are almost always endlessly amusing, enthralling and interesting) or else they just believe that there isn’t one.

I like just about any old show (and there have been some real oddballs along the way), but my favorites are always the ones with celebrity panelists. The old classics like What’s My Line? and To Tell the Truth were, especially in the case of the former, so classy and elegant. However, even later fare such as Liar’s Club (which had a panel of four stars trying to convince contestants of the true purpose of some unusual item, only one of whom had the real answer) retained a tacky charm. Club used to give me access to one of my guilty pleasures, the smarmy, ultra-slick, tan comic actor Dick Gautier. (Look... You either like him or you don't!)

The long-running What's My Line? has devout following to this day. One reason is because each episode had a special feature at the end in which the panel would be blindfolded and were made to quiz a major star personality in order to obtain his or her identity. Often, the stars would disguise their voices to try to stump the panel. Practically anybody who was anybody appeared in this segment including some of the top stars EVER. Miss Joan Crawford appeared several times, but so did many major celebrities. Even an up and coming singer/actress named Barbra Streisand was selected to be a mystery guest. (Come to think of it, there probably aren't a great deal of living celebs who can say they were a mystery guest on WML. Most of them are dead now!)

Another aspect of the show that charmed (and continues to charm) a lot of fans was the friendly, slightly sassy, elegant and, above all, charming presence of regular panelist Arlene Francis. Miss Francis was with the show for practically all of its considerable run and could always be counted upon for winking good humor. She wore a distinctive heart-shaped diamond necklace (a first anniversary present from her husband Martin Gabel) that became legendary and took on a life of its own. Rare was the day that she didn't have it on on the air. She even wore it many years later when she was a panelist on the far more racy and loose Match Game. In 1988, a street thug snatched it from her neck, thus robbing her (and the world) of one of TV's most recognizable pieces of jewelry.

Seeing stars on game shows allows the viewer to witness someone they may only know from the movies or TV act solely as themselves (or at least as close as possible given the fact that even in this format a performer is likely to be putting on some sort of face.) The candid, unabashed moments that spring up can really endear a celebrity to the public (or occasionally turn the viewer off.)

I especially like to see stars I am only familiar with from their screen work on a show fighting to win money for their contestant. Someone like Barbara Rush or Joan Fontaine (both on Password) would genuinely strive to do her best and would be disappointed in herself if she failed. Mary Ann Mobley, on To Tell the Truth (both the 1980 edition and particularly the 1990 edition hosted by Gordon Elliott and Alex Trebek) was drop-dead glamorous, but when it came to getting to the bottom of who was the real person out of the three choices, she was like a prosecuting attorney (in a way that I nonetheless found captivating, I must say.) That 1990 version of Truth, by the way, featured a steep staircase that panelists had to descend. The always regal Miss Kitty Carlisle (who appeared on every incarnation of the show) had to navigate it in high heels and long gowns, usually with the help of a fellow panelist (in this shot, Chris Lemmon, Jack's son.)
Hollywood Squares was another outlet for seeing stars off the cuff. I adored Paul Lynde and his zingers were funny, but unexpected hilarity also came from people like the young Burt Reynolds, freed from the shackles of his action hero TV and movie persona. Vincent Price, known in later years for his campy horror films, also proved to be quite a witty person, his totally unique voice offering great spins on the one-liners. The series also allowed viewers to glimpse some of H-Town's most beautiful and glamorous women such as Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elke Sommer and Barbara Bain, among many others. Match Game, especially in its earliest seasons when regulars Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard Dawson were in place and trading barbs with each other, was a terrific show, rife with double entendre and suggestiveness. When the format was revived years later, it suffered from the lack of social restraint. Since you could now write “Penis,” “Vagina” “Balls” and God knows what else on your card, there wasn’t a lot of room left for cleverness! Host Gene Rayburn was, to my child's eyes and ears, the king of lasciviousness, though watching him now he was actually quite erudite, well-read and tasteful. Match Game P.M. was a particular favorite of mine because the half hour was a self-contained game (unlike the daytime version in which games would stretch from episode to episode) and the caliber of stars tended to be a little brighter or at least a bit more unusual. Brett and Charles (who tended to wear some bizarre, deliberately ugly concoction) always sat next to one another, nit-picking each other endlessly and hysterically while Richard leaned on a Paul Lynde imitation for many of his laughs.
Regular readers of this blog (both of them! lol) know of my fascination with opening credits that show the stars’ faces and either display or announce their names. Match Game had one of the best methods for introducing the panel. A spinning, mod-looking square would spin around and reveal, in turn, the six celebrities as none other than the great Johnny Olson said their name aloud. You can imagine my delight in watching these old shows when the spinning frame would reveal Michael Landon, Joan Collins, Tab Hunter, Mary Wickes, Ethel Merman(!) and occasionally a new performer who would later become far more famous, such as Jamie Lee Curtis. One of my earliest "daddy" type crushes, CHiPs' Robert Pine, also appeared on the show occasionally in its later years. If his charming grin looks familiar, it may be because his cute son Chris Pine is now a popular actor thanks to the recent Star Trek redux.
As a kid, I used to daydream about my family being on Family Feud and would work out which five of us would be on it and in which order. Now that I’m older and my old time celebrity obsession is in full swing, I love to watch Feud eps that feature TV and movie stars playing for charity. The combinations of stars who are brought together can be quite staggering. It can also be eye-opening to see some folks who have been away from the limelight for a time and who may not have held up particularly well!

All-Star editions of Family Feud would bring together casts of shows that were either cult favorites (like The Brady Bunch) or then hits (like Eight is Enough.) There would also be groupings from Dallas, The Love Boat and other popular series. Stars enjoyed posing in offbeat ways while being revealed in the customary inset room filled with "antique" furniture and lamps. The Dallas gang lifted Larry Hagman into the air while The Love Boat men all pretended that they were flashing lone female Lauren Tewes. There would also be theme programs that bordered on the surreal (to hell with that. They WERE surreal!) Take, for example, the Heroes vs Villains episodes that put together combinations like Leonard Frey, Joan Collins, Beatrice Straight, Susan Lucci and Norman Fell as a team of villains! Some of the heroes included Marla Gibbs, Lynn Redgrave and Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas(!)

Then there was the week that brought performers who had been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This concept gave us teams that included a shockingly weathered, rail-thin Rory Calhoun and a less-than sturdy looking Dorothy Lamour! These veterans were playing alongside other folks such as Keenan Wynn, Cesar Romero, Gloria de Haven, Jayne Meadows and a still-lovely and elegant Arlene Dahl.
Tattletales was barely even a game, really. More a chance for three showbiz couples to answer questions about one another in order to win a little money for their respective sections of the studio audience. This show was unique in that it offered the public a chance to meet the spouses of the celebrities. Yes, there were quite a few celebrity couples, but often there were comedians or actors who brought their non-celeb wives to play. In the whirlwind, anything goes world of Hollywood, reruns of this show could probably be quite cringe inducing since marriages tend to have a brief shelf life there. (Take once happy, then not, Chuck Woolery and Jo Ann Pflug. I worshipped him, by the way and thought he was beautiful.) It wasn’t a requirement for the guests to be married. One infamous pairing had Dick Sergeant and “his lady” Fannie Flagg! Other times, closely connected costars from a series would appear, sometimes from daytime soaps. Due to the nature of the questions, though, it usually paid for the pair to be pretty familiar with one another.

The show was hosted by Bert Convy, he of the unbelievably thick Chia-Hair. I always enjoyed Bert and thought he was charming, attractive and good at being a host (certainly better than when he was an actor!) He hosted Tattletales, Super Password and Win, Lose or Draw among others. The odd thing is, in Peter Marshall’s autobiography (he being the longtime host of Hollywood Squares), he stated that there were only two people in the game show community that he didn’t like: Dan Rowan (of Rowan & Martin) and Bert Convy. He didn’t feel the need to state why although both men are deceased now. That remark has always confounded me and made me wonder what in the hell was up.

GSN used to sometimes run obscure shows like Double Dare, Body Language and the oddity Now You See It, which lined six (always horrifyingly dressed) contestants on a set of stairs as a wacky theme played. Half the fun is in seeing what people wore then and how they wore their hair! I just love taking in these vintage programs and always hope that someday they will dig them all back out or that a new channel will start to run them. (GSN II??)