The Girl That Jack Built

Jack ("I'm live!") Paar had hardly launched himself as NBC's bright weeknightly answer to late movies when he began playing Pygmalion to a professionally addled Galatea from Ohio, orange-topped Dolores ("Dody") Martha Goodman, "aged 29" (real age: 43). By last week, seven months later, the comedienne that Jack built had "disenchanted" her creator, and Paar felt less a Pygmalion than a Frankenstein. "Sweet little Midwestern Dody," he snorted. "Brother! And we did it--we made her."

In the beginning, vague, fey Dody, a dancing veteran of show business, could not utter an unfunny word in the show's informal panel chatter--and all the laughs seemed to strike her as a complete surprise. Paar sang her praises (a "small gold mine," a treasure "straight from the moon"), assured viewers: "Honest, this girl is for real." Soon Dody was getting heavy fan mail, interviews and $920 a week.

Vulnerable Spot. Then something went agley. Dody began basking in her new limelight--and looking as if she expected her laughs. She also started irritating Paar, who has a temperament as tender as a tenor's. She complained on the air that Jack wouldn't let her do the song-and-dance turns she wanted to. Once she pointed to the red light signaling silence for a commercial on Paar's desk and chirped: "Oh, I'm not supposed to talk when that's on, am I?" (Retorted Jack: "Dody, you know I told you not to talk about that.") When Paar appeared with a new toupee, Dody hit the vulnerable spot: "Don't you look different tonight, Jack?" Once when Jack felt compelled to call Dody down for being late to rehearsal, she rushed up to him in tears and cried: "Why won't you talk to me, Jack? Why do you hate me?"

After that, they rarely spoke off the air except through intermediaries. In December Dody was cut down from five to three performances a week. Her shrewd manager renegotiated her five-year NBC contract, guaranteeing her $26,000 for the next 26 weeks, whether she appears with Paar or not, and freeing her for other work. In the deal the Jack Paar Show gladly arranged to drop her as a "regular" last week.

"Good Night." NBC stoutly denied any feud on the show, but last week the feuding drowned out the denials. "I'll tell you why we cut her," Paar erupted before one show. "Does one say 'Your fly's open' on the air? Or do you take out a falsy before the camera? No other person has ever confronted me with such embarrassment or provocation. Oh she's terribly bright--very shrewd, calculating. You notice how she fiddles at her skirt scratches, waves to the audience. That's her method of competing. I tell her not to and she says I'm jealous of her. I even have trouble keeping her mouth shut when

a performer is on. Here is our dilemma--this I really don't know--is she ungracious or calculated?"

Retorted Dody: "I acted the same in the beginning, but slowly the things he hired me for he is criticizing me for now. Now everybody can bounce off me but I'm not supposed to bounce off them. Jack will take an innocent remark the wrong way. Now, when I just look at him it makes him mad."

On their last shows together, Dody twitched and squirmed more nervously than ever, bridled when Paar asked her to tell a story she insisted wasn't very funny (It wasn't.) Paar displayed tightly controlled correctness when Dody announced that she was leaving "on vacation." As he signed off for the week, he smiled: "Have a good vacation, Dody. Good night, Dody." Said Dody next day: "I think he wanted to appear that we were very friendly." But off the air Jack said that he felt miserable about the whole thing. Added he: "My mistake was to let her rise. The only thing she cared about was fan mail and publicity--not about the show. Friday may well have been her last time on the show. I'm not a fraud. I won't say nicely and politely that yes, she will come back from time to time. What does she want? Her own show and more money. Well, she had her own show right on our show. This is the greatest overbuilding job I've ever done."

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