Monday, Aug. 16, 1954
The Good-Luck Kick
Every Wednesday night, Bill Cullen plays a parlor game in Manhattan. Then he flies to Los Angeles to play a parlor game there on Thursday nights. Then he flies back to New York to spend four hours chatting on NBC-Radio. For these jmd similar radio-TV chores, Master of Ceremonies Cullen earns about $150,000 a year. He says wonderingly: "I guess I'm the luckiest guy in the world."
Sugar & Caustic. Fifteen years in the industry have honed Bill Cullen to the supersharpness required of a good M.C. His patter is sometimes irrelevant, but it is always fast; his smile gleams as brightly as the lens of his eyeglasses; and, whatever else may happen, he is never speechless. In making his way up to a top network job, 34-year-old Bill Cullen has closely analyzed his profession and decided that there are three kinds of masters of ceremonies: "There's the Drooler, who sugars out 'God bless you and that sort of stuff; there's the caustic guy; and then there's the man in the middle, who is neither."
Though he aims at being the man in the middle, Cullen thinks he has not quite hit it yet: "A few years ago, I was pretty disagreeable. To avoid the drooling, I'd bite 'em. I did it too much. Groucho Marx can get away with it but me. I couldn't. I'm not that good." But if he has to choose, Cullen would rather be snide than syrupy. He has had to lick another tendency--overenthusiasm: "You know. Bert Parks and John Reed King started this routine of building up a climax and shouting at the correct answer, screaming 'That's right! That's right!' I got over that, finally."
Cullen credits most of his good luck to a disaster that struck him at the age of 18 months. A polio attack left him with a permanent limp. Always drama-minded, Bill decided that radio "was the one place that a ham like me--and, believe me, I'm a ham--could limp and still get a job." He started as an unpaid announcer at Pittsburgh's station WWSW. Within five years, he was getting $300 a week. In 1944, he headed for New York and CBS: "But I don't kid myself. All the good announcers were overseas in service, so I got the job." Because of his limp, he shied away from TV until 1952, when he became a panelist on CBS-TV's I've Got a Secret, "where I could sit down."
Serious & Sad. Cullen underestimated TV cameramen. On Place the Face he is continuously on his feet, but few viewers are aware of his limp. Says Cullen: "To show you how good the camera work is. I've had people stop me on the street and say, 'Hey, Bill, what happened to your leg?' like it happened . over the weekend."
Next week, while Bert Parks is on vacation, Cullen will fill in for him on ABC-TV's Break the Bank. A week later he will start on the CBS-Radio version of Stop the Music. Next month, when Place the Face leaves the air, he will move to a new M.C. job on CBS-TV's Name That Tune. He has a filmed TV question-and-answer show called Professor Yes 'n' No that is seen in 30 cities, and coming up this fall is another radio show with Arlene Francis.
While in transcontinental flight between quizzes, Cullen sometimes broods about his work: "I think to myself: here I play parlor games on Wednesday night, parlor games on Thursday night, and merely chat all afternoon Saturday--for this I get three grand a week! You can't help but realize that it's all pretty useless." But this mood is infrequent: "Mostly, I try not to take myself seriously because when I do, I get sad. I've got no beefs. I'm just a guy who's on a good-luck kick and I hope it lasts."
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