Jack Paar--No Kidding : The Talk-Show Legend Is Now a Museum Piece

He sounds the same as ever--ebullient, a little nervous, blistering in his comments.

Jack Paar, one of television’s genuine legends, is 72--”but I act like 35,” he says with the same old confidence. “I always did.”

No TV series has had a more consistently brilliant group of hosts than NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” and Paar was the one in the middle, between Steve Allen and Johnny Carson.

Allen delivered a wondrous comic lunacy. Carson was, and is, the quintessential Peck’s Bad Boy in conservative clothes. Paar’s unique gift was in creating sophisticated, witty conversation with a strong sense of emotion and even danger--keeping viewers on edge, like giddy passengers on a runaway train, wondering how it would all end.

He once walked off the show for a month because NBC censored one of his jokes.

“My life is anecdotes,” Paar said by phone the other day from his Greenwich, Conn., home as he prepared to come to Los Angeles, where he will be honored tonight at the Museum of Broadcasting’s annual TV festival.

Not long ago, for instance, he was to be flown from Greenwich to a New York hospital for treatment: “So they flew the helicopter in and they were gonna land on a baseball field, but there was a game going on and they wouldn’t let them land. So they had to take me by ambulance to White Plains (N.Y.), and then they flew me. That’s the way my life has been.”

Paar’s festival appearance tonight at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will, of course, focus on his “Tonight Show” years (1957-62), as well as his prime-time series and specials that followed, during which the mercurial comedian blossomed into a social diarist of the first order.

But what if he had a television show today? What would he be doing?

“I really don’t know. The thing that would worry me is that audiences have stopped laughing. They now clap, whistle and yell ‘Yo.’ I don’t know what the hell that means.

“In the stuff I’ve compiled (for the festival), you hear honest-to-God laughter. You see people dressed in jackets and ties. It was a whole different era. I don’t belong in this era now. I don’t want people to go ‘Yo,’ whistle and yell at me. A lot of that has been encouraged by egging the audiences on and encouraging young people to take over the studios. That’s no place for me.”

In going through his material, Paar concluded that “I’ve got, I think, the best stuff of the ‘60s of anybody. And it’s not all jokes.” His guests ranged from John and Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon to Judy Garland, Oscar Levant, Noel Coward, Richard Burton and Bea Lillie.

Paar fans will also remember how he created a remarkable stable of regulars, including humorist Alexander King, French chanteuse Genevieve, Washington hostess Elsa Maxwell, Cliff (Charley Weaver) Arquette, writer Jack Douglas and his Japanese wife Reiko, Peggy Cass and Hans Conried. His announcer-sidekick was Hugh Downs, now co-host of “20/20.”

“We never put any guest on because they had a program coming up Tuesday,” said Paar. “Absolutely never in my career did I do that. You didn’t get on if you didn’t have anything to say, if I didn’t trust you.”

Paar may not have a television show, but his stiletto is still at the ready:

* “I knew it was time to leave when performers began appearing in their underwear.”

* “I notice that Madonna doesn’t wear a brassiere but has two tin funnels. It looks like something Jack Haley wore (as the Tin Man) in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ I hope no one ever has to give her the Heimlich maneuver.”

* “I am from a different age, when conversation was not on a cue card.”

In that age, Paar was a national byword. A 1961 editors’ poll of newsmakers placed him ahead of such movie stars as Elizabeth Taylor in the field of entertainment. But the recent past has been rough, he says--detailing his medical problems with the same chipper irreverence he might bring to an opening monologue:

“I had a total knee replacement. I was on crutches for six months and couldn’t walk. And then I had two heart attacks. Then I got pneumonia. Then I had a hernia operation. And then a prostate operation. So I’ve been in and out of hospitals just constantly for the last year and a half. Some of the closest pals I have now are doctors. I don’t do anything else but try to stay alive.”

Revving up, he adds: “My knee is normal, but inside it’s plastic and metal. And wouldn’t you know it--two weeks ago the President was in New York and I was invited to the dinner at the Hilton, and going through security my knee set off the damn alarm. That could only happen to me.”

Paar says he spends a lot of time with his grandson--”he’s the joy of our lives.” But apparently he doesn’t spend much time watching today’s television.

“I’m a news person. I never miss ‘Crossfire.’ Of the entertainment shows, I watch only four, and I will always put down my book to watch them. I like ‘Murphy Brown’ and I like ‘Designing Women,’ although the acting in that show is better than the writing.

“And I love--because they’re all my friends--’The Golden Girls.’ And I love that show after it, ‘Empty Nest’--because of the dog, that nurse and the two daughters (Dinah Manoff and Kristy McNichol). When those two girls are going at it, the writing is superb. I never miss that show.

“Other than that, well, I never watch specials. I haven’t seen Bob Hope in 20 years, honest to God. I’ve seen Johnny Carson maybe five times in 25 years. He’s awfully good, but it makes me nervous to watch him do what I did and not be in it.”

And then some analysis:

“I’ll tell you who could have made it (as a late-night star) had he had a better producer and better writing--Pat Sajak. As a conversationalist, he’s highly underestimated. But he should never have done the monologue. I told him, ‘Don’t do the monologue.’ You don’t learn to do that overnight. Carson and I had years of experience. I had years in the Army (doing shows), and Carson had years on quiz shows, where there was wit involved.”

During his heyday, Paar was involved in on-air feuds with various public figures, and he was one of the few television stars who didn’t fear locking horns with critical gossip columnists, understanding full well the national power of his medium.

“I guess I was the first to do that,” he says. “And in every single case, I think I won. I never lost a libel suit. Walter Winchell sued me for a million dollars and nothing happened. But I’ll tell you something now. I think Winchell still was the best columnist of his type that there ever was. It was the most readable. It was mean, but it got to me.”

The irony, of course, was that Paar was a master gossipist himself on his shows, and knew precisely how to wield that weapon to maximum effect.

But along with the feuds and the temperament--and controversial broadcasts such as a visit to the Berlin Wall--Paar also registered tremendous triumphs on “The Tonight Show.” The separate appearances of John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, the year that they opposed each other for the presidency, were TV landmarks.

“I never tried to get too deep into politics,” says Paar, “because although I was closer to the Kennedys, I was also close to the Nixon family. The Nixons were at my home for dinner. The kids grew up together. So I tried never to be partisan, although I was deeply involved with Bobby (Kennedy). But Barry Goldwater I thought was a wonderful guy, a wonderful companion.”

Paar thinks the “power” of “The Tonight Show”--and “not me so much”--was the main reason that such highly placed political foes agreed to appear.

“The show was the No. 1 public relations thing to get on,” he says. “And yet press agents never could get near me. It was the show. I guess I made it more powerful--I don’t know. I only went to the 10th grade, but I spent my entire life reading, and I am well-read and informed and have been everywhere.”

Paar did, however, get into hot water over his early support of Fidel Castro. “I thought Castro was going to work out and be fine, a Robin Hood. I was there for the beginning--the first one to talk to him, and for some time I believed in him, and I would talk.” Paar drew blistering political criticism. “Hell,” he says, “I’m a Republican, if you want to know.”

Following the disastrous, U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by anti-Castro Cuban exiles, President Kennedy, according to one report, recruited Paar for a Tractors for Freedom campaign after learning that a prisoner exchange might be possible for farm machinery and medical supplies.

“Secretly, I was asked by the President and the attorney general,” says Paar, “to head up a fund to get those guys out of Cuba. We raised millions of dollars, all of which was returned when the Kennedys got the money from another source.”

In the end, though, Paar’s permanent place in memory is as a sardonic and incomparable provocateur of the TV screen. The electricity and intelligence that he generated brought out the absolute best in his guests. And who can forget Nixon plunking away on the piano in a 1963 appearance on Paar’s weekly series?

“I never made the big money,” says Paar. “Carson makes more in a month than I made in a year. But that’s all right. We saved what we had. And I live well. I have a nice home. I still have a martini every night and a little wine. And I have a Rolls-Royce--I’ve had the same one for the last 10 years. I have no regrets.

“I don’t know exactly how to say this, but it seems to me that the industry didn’t recognize what I did. I was nominated five times for an Emmy, but got nothing. But I think maybe things are kind of reviving because, as I said to Miriam (Paar’s wife), either the hospital or the doctors are giving out reports that I’m dying because everyone’s so damn nice to me all of a sudden.

“And when the Museum of Broadcasting said, ‘We want to honor you,’ I said, ‘Do you know something I don’t know?’ ”