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Hi-Ho Steverino!: My Adventures in the Wonderful Wacky World of TV
The star of radio and television offers an anecdotal account of his years in television, discussing the Tonight Show, the Steve Allen Show, and his work with such comics as Don Knotts, Tom Poston, Buck Henry, Tim Conway, the Smother Brothers, and others.
- GenresBiography
308 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1992
17 people want to read
About the author
Steve Allen
98 books44 followersStephen Valentine Patrick William "Steve" Allen was an American television personality, musician, actor, comedian, and writer. Though he got his start in radio, Allen is best-known for his television career. He first gained national attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. He graduated to become the first host of The Tonight Show, where he was instrumental in innovating the concept of the television talk show. Thereafter, he hosted numerous game and variety shows, including The Steve Allen Show, I've Got a Secret, The New Steve Allen Show, and was a regular panel member on CBS' What's My Line?
Allen was a "creditable" pianist, and a prolific composer, having penned over 14,000 songs, one of which was recorded by Perry Como and Margaret Whiting, others by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Les Brown, and Gloria Lynne. Allen won a Grammy award in 1963 for best jazz composition, with his song The Gravy Waltz. Allen wrote more than 50 books and has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Allen was a "creditable" pianist, and a prolific composer, having penned over 14,000 songs, one of which was recorded by Perry Como and Margaret Whiting, others by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Les Brown, and Gloria Lynne. Allen won a Grammy award in 1963 for best jazz composition, with his song The Gravy Waltz. Allen wrote more than 50 books and has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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August 13, 2023
By the late 1980s the situation had again changed and the talk formular was once more considered of major importance. By this time Douglas and Griffin had finally concluded their long and successful careers, but Joan Rivers took advantage of popularity derived from Tonight Show appearances to start a similar venture of her own.
Comedian David Brenner started a daytime version, as did Regis Philbin, Phil Dohnaue, coming from modest beginnings in Dayton, Ohio, had become a dominant figure in daytime TV syndication, and Geralo Rivera and Oprah Winfred would shortly borrow his theme-show formula, to be followed by Sally Jesse Raphael. Tom Snyder followed the Tonight Show on NBC's 1:00 am program Tomorrow.
Though the Joan Rivers challenge to Tonight was not successful, CBS elected to start another program of the traditional late-night sort featuring game-show host Pat Sajak, and after a number of incredibly embarassing experiments with it's late-night house, the Fox network finally seattled on a mature but youthful-looking comic, Arsenio Hall, who would soon be followed by Jay Jeno, Chuck Woolery, Rick Dees, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones, Ron Reagan Jr., and, by late 1991, apparently everybody in the business who wasn't otherwise occupied at the time.
I'm often asked what I think explains the remarkable longevity and popularity of television talk shows. there is no one answer; a number of factors are involved. The basic ingredients of a typical talk show are, obviously,
(1) the host and
(2) his or her guests.
There's nothing particularly mysterious about the popularity of the latter factor - mankind has long been fascinated by the various military leaders, film stars, Broadway actors, nightclub performers, comedians, authors, musicians, sports heroes, political figures, and others who have gained national or worldwide prominence. This is particularly true in the United States where we've developed an apparaently instaiable appetite for celebrities - whether old, new, short-term, long-lasting, legitimate, manufactured, or scandalous.
Indeed, were it not for this popular if bizarre appetite, massive publishing empires would go out of business overnight.
The reasons for the popularity of talk-show hosts, however, are more elusive. What is the magic factor that separates successful hosts from the rest of their entertainment world colleagues?
First it has apparently nothing to do with talent. Talent, as the word has traditionally been understood in the arts, refers to the ability to perform a creative task with excellence. there's no such thing as talent in the abstract. When we emply the term we're referring to such specific activities as acting, doing comedy, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, or - to move outside the performing context - painting a picture, sculpting a statue, or writing a poet, novel or play. But for hosting talk shows such abilities have no necessary connection at all.
This is not to say that talk-show hosts have no talent. Some do; most do not. What's fascinating is that there have been success stories and failures in both catagories. There've been cases where highly talented entertainers proved to be poorly suited for the role of conducting a talk show. Jerry Lewis, as funny a comedian as our culture has produced, was totally miscast introducing other entertainers and interviewing them. The great Jackie Gleason, too, briefly attempted a talk-show formula with no success. You can't be much more talented than was Sammy Davis Jr., but he, too, proved inept at the talk-show assignment, as did another of my personal favorites, the gifted and loveable entertainer Donald O'Connor.
[I'll add an interesting note here O'Connor was meant to play Bing Crosby's partner in White Christmas (1954). He was unavailable because he contracted an illness transmitted by the mule, doing the Francis comedy films, (was in 5 of them) and was replaced in the film by Danny Kaye.]
[The final film in the series, Francis in the Haunted House, was made without any of the key creative personnel. Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide states that O'Connor quit, and Mickey Rooney replaced him as a new character.]
[In 1968, O'Connor hosted a syndicated talk show also called The Donald O'Connor Show. The program was cancelled due to the dancer becoming "too political," and O'Connor was reprimanded by the studio.]
[1952 - Singin' in the Rain]
[1954/1955 - 19 episodes of the Donald O'Connor Show]
[1968/1969 - 5 episodes of the Donald O'Connor Show]
[1981 - one episode of Alice]
[1982 quote - I never wanted to be a superstar. I'm working on being a quasar, because stars wear out. Quasars go on forever... I look for the parts where I die and they talk about me for the rest of the movie.]
[1996 - one episode of The Nanny]
[Now back to Steve Allen]
But if it's not talent, as that term is generally perceived, that accounts for success in the talk-show field, what is it? Well, until recently anyway, it seems to involve having an easy-to-take personality, being generally soft-spoken rather than pushy, not noticeably eccentric, and not so socially dominating that one will overshadow one's guests.
Dinah Shore, for example, succeeded as talk hostess partly because her personality is so relaxed that she may someday be arrested for loitering while on the air. As Dinah would readily concede, she is not particularly polished at interviewing. But because she is truly nice, viewers were willing to watch her five days a week.
A slightly naive quality seems to help a talk-show host succeed. It's not that a literal boyishness or immaturity is required, or the eternally boyish Regis Philbin would have been more successful than Johnny Carson, but a certain freshness of outlook must be retained. A jaded, bored talk-show host would not last long. The host, in a sense, represents the audience, and like the audience, he must actually be - or pretend to be - entranced with his guests and their doings, ideas, and comments.
One of the reasons for Phil Donahue's success is his intense concentration and interest in the subjects discussed on his program. Merv was also excellent at retaining the "Gosh, really?" freshness of his responses, even after more than twenty years at the game.
Talk-show hosts, of course, have to be at least moderately articulate, thouht not much more so than the average disc-jockey or afternoon game-show emcee. Having mystery served early in my career as announcer and disc jockey, it's not my intention to cast asperations on those two worthy professions. Some of the nicest people I have evere met have been radio announcers. In fact, if we apply the old woul-you-want-your-daught-to-marry-one? test it could easily be argued that a good, sensible announce is preferable to the average stand-up comedian. The point is that neither of the two professions made sense, for me, as a lifelong commitment, in the same sense, remaining in his original job - that of joke-writer for other comedians - would have made no sense for Woody Allen.
Another characteristic seemingly required for success as a chatter-program leader is a degree of blandness. The TV medium is so intiate that hyperinterse people - even if gifted - are perceived as vaguely annoying if seen often. This was Joan Rivers' problem with some viewers althought with the success of shows like Geraldo and Arsenio Hall the more flamboyant approach may finally have found its audience.
Those talk-show hosts whohave been most successful over the years - Jack Paar, Mike Douglas, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, your obedient servant, et al - were not only trained on radio but also had the advantage of prior experience as entertainers, which is to say we were accustomed to working with 'audiences' as wel as with guests. And they had the ability to engage in easy, relaxed banter with those who came to view their shows in the studio.
Another factor in the success of talk-show people is simply their appearance night-after-night rubbing shoulders. seemingly as equals, with famous actors, singers, politicians, and other celebrities. TV talk-show hosts are like radio disc-jockeys in this connection. While a few artistically talented individuals have briefly spent time introducting recordings early in their careers, no one would otherwise dream of relating talent to the work of disc jockeys. A disc jockey, after all, is simply a radio announcer; and a radio announcer is just someone with a pleasing voice, which may be interpreted as a winning personality by the radio audience. The major comedians of 1930s and '40s radio - Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns, Edgar Bergen, Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, Red Skelton - all had as announcers genial gentlemen who themselves became famous simply because they appeared, week after week, with the gifted stars on their programs. As mentioned earlier, neither occupation - radio DJ or TV talk-show host - calls for artistic talent as it is generally defined.
When I created Tonight, the original example of the genre, it was not a creative act of the traditional sort as was, for example, the later development of my PBS-TV series Meeting of Minds. The Tonight show formula emerged out of something as casual as a personal "workshop" process, discovering which entertainment forms were most effective for me and gradually constructing a new type of program based on those strengths. The low-key opening monologue, the jokes about the orchestra leader, the home-base chatter with the announcer sidekick, the kidding with the studio audience, the celebrity interviews - all of these were selecetd for personal convenience but in time came to seem the "natural" talk-show formula.
Inventing the talk program was, frankly, rather than inventing - oh, the paper towel. The result is useful, a source of enormous profits, and the world is somewhat better off for it. But it's hardly to be compared with doing a successful weely prime-time comedy series, painting an unforgettable picture, composing a beautiful musical score, or discovering a cure for a crippling disease.
.......
But why, then, do talk shows seem so important despite their almost nonexistent format and the simplicity of the host's task? The answer is simply, and a bit scary. What makes the programs seem so significant is simply that 'they're shown on television'. Ask yourself, in all seriousness - would you pay the price of a Broadway theatre ticket to go inside and see, oh, Maury Povich idly chatting with Miss Wyoming, an aging actress promoting a book she did not actually white in which the main attraction was the revelation of the identities of a number of fellow performers with shom she had sexual relations, a doctor promoting a new diet, and a transvestite demanding to know why the church refuses to let him study for the priesthood?
Of course you would not.
But add the factor of television exposure to these same dreary proceedings and now your former and quite sensible disinterest will be transmuted to an almost morbid fascination
Nevertheless, depisite its ingerently lightweight quality, it would seem that no other television form has so consistently affected, for better or worse, the national consciousness.
That conversation-programs can make books best-sellers, rush entertainers from obscurity to popularity overnight, hype box office for motion pictures, concertsm, and plays is clear. Foreigners can learn a great deal about our culture by doing nothing more than watching our talk shows.
American dramas and comedies give a distilled and distorted impression of social reality. Our newscasts too, thought they deal with reality directly, have time to show only thin slices of it. But the talk program - except for the fact that it presents mostly the prominent among us - at least shows us as we are, without scripts, being ourselves. We are heart discussing events of the day, currently controversial issues, the latest jokes and humorous references, politics, religion, sex, war, peace, revolution, sports - whatever is going on or in the wind.
While I am frequently introduced on television as "the Father of the talk show," or"as a talk show host, the granddaddy of them all." and so on, it was actually Jack Paar who set such programs more narrowly in their present mold.
I indeed did a talk show, but it's not correct to describe Tonight during my three-and-a-half years as host (1953-1956) as 'essentially' a talk show. It was something much more creative - an experimental TV laboratory.
One night we'd book, say, the Count Basie band and let them do twenty-five minutes of music. The next evening our show might be structred in the form of a debate between teams of political opponentsl on other occasions we might present a full-fledged, thirty-minute drama, ad-lib comedy routines in the street, or do exciting remote telecasts from Hollywood, Miami, Chicago or Niagara Falls.
Sometimes a guest would be so special - comedian Fred Allen, composer Richard Rogers - that I'd do an entire program with him alone, the kind of show Dick Cavett years later did so well with people like Orson Welles, Laurence Oliver, and Katherine Hepburn.
---
In any event, on certain evenings on Tonight, we'd invite three or four people in to "chew the fat," as my mother's family used to say, and those were our pure talk-show nights. But it was Jack Paar who "invented the couch".
Evidently perceiving that this particular approach was far simpler to execute than coming up with fresh and creative ideas every night, Jack simply decided to book amusing or interesting guests nightly, and leave it at that. He did it very well.
Comedian David Brenner started a daytime version, as did Regis Philbin, Phil Dohnaue, coming from modest beginnings in Dayton, Ohio, had become a dominant figure in daytime TV syndication, and Geralo Rivera and Oprah Winfred would shortly borrow his theme-show formula, to be followed by Sally Jesse Raphael. Tom Snyder followed the Tonight Show on NBC's 1:00 am program Tomorrow.
Though the Joan Rivers challenge to Tonight was not successful, CBS elected to start another program of the traditional late-night sort featuring game-show host Pat Sajak, and after a number of incredibly embarassing experiments with it's late-night house, the Fox network finally seattled on a mature but youthful-looking comic, Arsenio Hall, who would soon be followed by Jay Jeno, Chuck Woolery, Rick Dees, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones, Ron Reagan Jr., and, by late 1991, apparently everybody in the business who wasn't otherwise occupied at the time.
I'm often asked what I think explains the remarkable longevity and popularity of television talk shows. there is no one answer; a number of factors are involved. The basic ingredients of a typical talk show are, obviously,
(1) the host and
(2) his or her guests.
There's nothing particularly mysterious about the popularity of the latter factor - mankind has long been fascinated by the various military leaders, film stars, Broadway actors, nightclub performers, comedians, authors, musicians, sports heroes, political figures, and others who have gained national or worldwide prominence. This is particularly true in the United States where we've developed an apparaently instaiable appetite for celebrities - whether old, new, short-term, long-lasting, legitimate, manufactured, or scandalous.
Indeed, were it not for this popular if bizarre appetite, massive publishing empires would go out of business overnight.
The reasons for the popularity of talk-show hosts, however, are more elusive. What is the magic factor that separates successful hosts from the rest of their entertainment world colleagues?
First it has apparently nothing to do with talent. Talent, as the word has traditionally been understood in the arts, refers to the ability to perform a creative task with excellence. there's no such thing as talent in the abstract. When we emply the term we're referring to such specific activities as acting, doing comedy, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, or - to move outside the performing context - painting a picture, sculpting a statue, or writing a poet, novel or play. But for hosting talk shows such abilities have no necessary connection at all.
This is not to say that talk-show hosts have no talent. Some do; most do not. What's fascinating is that there have been success stories and failures in both catagories. There've been cases where highly talented entertainers proved to be poorly suited for the role of conducting a talk show. Jerry Lewis, as funny a comedian as our culture has produced, was totally miscast introducing other entertainers and interviewing them. The great Jackie Gleason, too, briefly attempted a talk-show formula with no success. You can't be much more talented than was Sammy Davis Jr., but he, too, proved inept at the talk-show assignment, as did another of my personal favorites, the gifted and loveable entertainer Donald O'Connor.
[I'll add an interesting note here O'Connor was meant to play Bing Crosby's partner in White Christmas (1954). He was unavailable because he contracted an illness transmitted by the mule, doing the Francis comedy films, (was in 5 of them) and was replaced in the film by Danny Kaye.]
[The final film in the series, Francis in the Haunted House, was made without any of the key creative personnel. Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide states that O'Connor quit, and Mickey Rooney replaced him as a new character.]
[In 1968, O'Connor hosted a syndicated talk show also called The Donald O'Connor Show. The program was cancelled due to the dancer becoming "too political," and O'Connor was reprimanded by the studio.]
[1952 - Singin' in the Rain]
[1954/1955 - 19 episodes of the Donald O'Connor Show]
[1968/1969 - 5 episodes of the Donald O'Connor Show]
[1981 - one episode of Alice]
[1982 quote - I never wanted to be a superstar. I'm working on being a quasar, because stars wear out. Quasars go on forever... I look for the parts where I die and they talk about me for the rest of the movie.]
[1996 - one episode of The Nanny]
[Now back to Steve Allen]
But if it's not talent, as that term is generally perceived, that accounts for success in the talk-show field, what is it? Well, until recently anyway, it seems to involve having an easy-to-take personality, being generally soft-spoken rather than pushy, not noticeably eccentric, and not so socially dominating that one will overshadow one's guests.
Dinah Shore, for example, succeeded as talk hostess partly because her personality is so relaxed that she may someday be arrested for loitering while on the air. As Dinah would readily concede, she is not particularly polished at interviewing. But because she is truly nice, viewers were willing to watch her five days a week.
A slightly naive quality seems to help a talk-show host succeed. It's not that a literal boyishness or immaturity is required, or the eternally boyish Regis Philbin would have been more successful than Johnny Carson, but a certain freshness of outlook must be retained. A jaded, bored talk-show host would not last long. The host, in a sense, represents the audience, and like the audience, he must actually be - or pretend to be - entranced with his guests and their doings, ideas, and comments.
One of the reasons for Phil Donahue's success is his intense concentration and interest in the subjects discussed on his program. Merv was also excellent at retaining the "Gosh, really?" freshness of his responses, even after more than twenty years at the game.
Talk-show hosts, of course, have to be at least moderately articulate, thouht not much more so than the average disc-jockey or afternoon game-show emcee. Having mystery served early in my career as announcer and disc jockey, it's not my intention to cast asperations on those two worthy professions. Some of the nicest people I have evere met have been radio announcers. In fact, if we apply the old woul-you-want-your-daught-to-marry-one? test it could easily be argued that a good, sensible announce is preferable to the average stand-up comedian. The point is that neither of the two professions made sense, for me, as a lifelong commitment, in the same sense, remaining in his original job - that of joke-writer for other comedians - would have made no sense for Woody Allen.
Another characteristic seemingly required for success as a chatter-program leader is a degree of blandness. The TV medium is so intiate that hyperinterse people - even if gifted - are perceived as vaguely annoying if seen often. This was Joan Rivers' problem with some viewers althought with the success of shows like Geraldo and Arsenio Hall the more flamboyant approach may finally have found its audience.
Those talk-show hosts whohave been most successful over the years - Jack Paar, Mike Douglas, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, your obedient servant, et al - were not only trained on radio but also had the advantage of prior experience as entertainers, which is to say we were accustomed to working with 'audiences' as wel as with guests. And they had the ability to engage in easy, relaxed banter with those who came to view their shows in the studio.
Another factor in the success of talk-show people is simply their appearance night-after-night rubbing shoulders. seemingly as equals, with famous actors, singers, politicians, and other celebrities. TV talk-show hosts are like radio disc-jockeys in this connection. While a few artistically talented individuals have briefly spent time introducting recordings early in their careers, no one would otherwise dream of relating talent to the work of disc jockeys. A disc jockey, after all, is simply a radio announcer; and a radio announcer is just someone with a pleasing voice, which may be interpreted as a winning personality by the radio audience. The major comedians of 1930s and '40s radio - Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns, Edgar Bergen, Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, Red Skelton - all had as announcers genial gentlemen who themselves became famous simply because they appeared, week after week, with the gifted stars on their programs. As mentioned earlier, neither occupation - radio DJ or TV talk-show host - calls for artistic talent as it is generally defined.
When I created Tonight, the original example of the genre, it was not a creative act of the traditional sort as was, for example, the later development of my PBS-TV series Meeting of Minds. The Tonight show formula emerged out of something as casual as a personal "workshop" process, discovering which entertainment forms were most effective for me and gradually constructing a new type of program based on those strengths. The low-key opening monologue, the jokes about the orchestra leader, the home-base chatter with the announcer sidekick, the kidding with the studio audience, the celebrity interviews - all of these were selecetd for personal convenience but in time came to seem the "natural" talk-show formula.
Inventing the talk program was, frankly, rather than inventing - oh, the paper towel. The result is useful, a source of enormous profits, and the world is somewhat better off for it. But it's hardly to be compared with doing a successful weely prime-time comedy series, painting an unforgettable picture, composing a beautiful musical score, or discovering a cure for a crippling disease.
.......
But why, then, do talk shows seem so important despite their almost nonexistent format and the simplicity of the host's task? The answer is simply, and a bit scary. What makes the programs seem so significant is simply that 'they're shown on television'. Ask yourself, in all seriousness - would you pay the price of a Broadway theatre ticket to go inside and see, oh, Maury Povich idly chatting with Miss Wyoming, an aging actress promoting a book she did not actually white in which the main attraction was the revelation of the identities of a number of fellow performers with shom she had sexual relations, a doctor promoting a new diet, and a transvestite demanding to know why the church refuses to let him study for the priesthood?
Of course you would not.
But add the factor of television exposure to these same dreary proceedings and now your former and quite sensible disinterest will be transmuted to an almost morbid fascination
Nevertheless, depisite its ingerently lightweight quality, it would seem that no other television form has so consistently affected, for better or worse, the national consciousness.
That conversation-programs can make books best-sellers, rush entertainers from obscurity to popularity overnight, hype box office for motion pictures, concertsm, and plays is clear. Foreigners can learn a great deal about our culture by doing nothing more than watching our talk shows.
American dramas and comedies give a distilled and distorted impression of social reality. Our newscasts too, thought they deal with reality directly, have time to show only thin slices of it. But the talk program - except for the fact that it presents mostly the prominent among us - at least shows us as we are, without scripts, being ourselves. We are heart discussing events of the day, currently controversial issues, the latest jokes and humorous references, politics, religion, sex, war, peace, revolution, sports - whatever is going on or in the wind.
While I am frequently introduced on television as "the Father of the talk show," or"as a talk show host, the granddaddy of them all." and so on, it was actually Jack Paar who set such programs more narrowly in their present mold.
I indeed did a talk show, but it's not correct to describe Tonight during my three-and-a-half years as host (1953-1956) as 'essentially' a talk show. It was something much more creative - an experimental TV laboratory.
One night we'd book, say, the Count Basie band and let them do twenty-five minutes of music. The next evening our show might be structred in the form of a debate between teams of political opponentsl on other occasions we might present a full-fledged, thirty-minute drama, ad-lib comedy routines in the street, or do exciting remote telecasts from Hollywood, Miami, Chicago or Niagara Falls.
Sometimes a guest would be so special - comedian Fred Allen, composer Richard Rogers - that I'd do an entire program with him alone, the kind of show Dick Cavett years later did so well with people like Orson Welles, Laurence Oliver, and Katherine Hepburn.
---
In any event, on certain evenings on Tonight, we'd invite three or four people in to "chew the fat," as my mother's family used to say, and those were our pure talk-show nights. But it was Jack Paar who "invented the couch".
Evidently perceiving that this particular approach was far simpler to execute than coming up with fresh and creative ideas every night, Jack simply decided to book amusing or interesting guests nightly, and leave it at that. He did it very well.
November 29, 2015
Despite its subtitle, this nearly 25-year-old book was less about the now late Steve Allen's "adventures in the wonderful, wacky world of TV" and largely about why many of his shows failed — the networks, the sponsors and the executives who never quite saw his brilliance. One chapter, for instance, was practically a day by day chronology of the failings of one show he was involved with in the 1980s. Allen, an inventive comic in the early days of TV, The Tonight's Show's first host and a man more erudite than today's TV talking heads, understandably never quite made the transition as television became, too often, more and more of Newton Minnow's "vast wasteland."
November 18, 2011
This book was a huge disappointment. In my mind, Steve Allen could do no wrong but this book just did not do it for me. It never grabbed me. To finish reading it was a chore. I finally got through it. I have read other entertainment auto bios and just breezed through them. This one just did not do it for me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews