The People Getters

It was 5 p.m., and crowds were beginning to swarm across Manhattan toward the trains and buses and subways that would take them home. But for pretty Diane Lawson, 30, it was time to get to work. Diane, a pert, yare redhead, began to patrol the streets. When she spotted a likely prospect, she stopped him with a time-honored approach: "Pardon me, but may I speak to you a minute?"

Diane Lawson was not practicing the world's oldest profession, but one of its newest; she was collecting contestants for TV's talent-hungry quiz shows. Once they heard her pitch, the people Diane propositioned probably figured that they were headed toward quizdom's glory. Few realized that the road to the big payoff would be a maze of interminable interviews and pseudoscientific character analyses.

Up & Down. By 8:30 Diane had 15 aspiring contestants crammed into her seedy Seventh Avenue office. Not all of them had been picked off the street--some hopefuls apply by mail, some are chosen from a show's studio audience, others are found by research, e.g., when a show-packaging firm needed a couple that had just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, phone calls to catering services finally found one. Wherever they came from, Diane's victims were first subjected to a deceptively friendly interview. Within minutes she knew whether they had the scrubbed All-American look that goes big on Dotto, or whether they were "up" enough (i.e., extraverts and potential hams) for Haggis Baggis.

The discards were ushered out with ego-salving white lies ("These shows require married people over 35"). The names of a few losers went into Diane's future files under such headings as Sexy Men, Sexy

Women, Muscle Men, Sophisticated Ivy League, Jolly, Scrambled Egghead.

The remaining candidates were shunted into a private office, where Diane's assistant, Doris Hoffman, gave them a fast tryout for Haggis Baggis. "Give me an explorer who starts with M," snapped Doris at an unsuspecting male. "Give me an article in an office that starts with S," Doris said to a woman. The responses were slow and inept, and Doris blew up like a temperamental movie director. "Do it like this," she cried. "An explorer that starts with M?" She snapped her fingers, tore at her hair, looked agonized, then beamed and shouted: "Oh, that must be the guy they named the straits after--Ma, Ma something. Oh yeah! Magellan. See? You gotta ham it up. Don't just blurt it out. Hold it back, stretch for it. But whatever you do, say something! Give it the old bedazz. You can't just sit there like big blobs of liver."

Jekyll & Hyde. Although Diane's firm, Lawson & Lawson, is the only one of its kind, other agents, mostly women, work the same beat for specific shows. And they stick to much the same criteria. "The ideal daytime quiz couple," says one of Diane's competitors, "comes from Indiana. The boy is 26, the girl 24; they are white and Protestant and they have two kids. Of course, on the intellectual evening shows, like Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question, they can't be so choosy --they have to have some brains, too."

Most of the women who work at contestant-collecting claim that the job requires only one real talent: the ability to recognize a phony. "But the one thing we always notice," says one Lawson rival, "is that people tend to change like Jekyll into Hyde the minute they win 25 bucks. They go kind of nuts with that carrot in front of 'em. They win something and boom! All the things you picked 'em for go out the window. All they're thinking about is the damned money."

In the hope of catching the Jekyll-Hyde transformation before it gets on-camera. few show's rely solely on their "people getters." They have their own interviews, their own exhaustive questionnaires. Some of them even require references. Diane, who supplies contestants for both Dotto and Haggis Baggis (on a regular retainer) and also sends a few to Lucky Partner and Name That Tune (which pay by the head), conducts her own interviews-in-depth. She is opposed to the popular practice of giving written tests before screening contestants. "Anyone can look bad on written questions," says she. "And anyway, what good is it, however bright you are, if nobody wants to look at you? Look at the meatballs they get on Twenty-One.'''

A onetime millinery model who got into her present work by accident when she pitched in to help her husband, who then worked for Name That Tune, Diane likes to think that she is tired of all the interviewing and pavement-pounding. "I've been waiting for years for a cop to tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Lady, what yuh doin'?' God, I wish it would happen so that I could relax."

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