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Joe Florenski: That’s more or less the same for me. I realized what a lingering impression Paul left on me over the years, and I became even more fascinated when I started looking into his life. I never knew that the character of Uncle Arthur and the voice of Templeton the rat were the same man until a roommate gave me the Paul Lynde lowdown. S.W.: I only vaguely remember seeing him on “Hollywood Squares,” but I watched a lot of “Bewitched” and caught “Charlotte’s Web” more than once, too. What made you want to research Paul Lynde in the first place? You’re both in your mid-30s and were quite young when Paul was in his prime. Would the real Paul have been so difficult to work with? Most likely. Steve Wilson: Joe and I contacted him to do a little routine with us for the tour, but he had all sorts of demands, like airfare for his makeup person.
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In appropriate fashion, a “Paul Lynde impersonator” was invited to join the biographers on their odyssey, but he was deemed too “difficult” and subsequently dropped from the bill. I spoke with Wilson and Florenski on the eve of their cross-country book tour. Regardless, this frustrated character actor and bit player, this “Liberace without a piano,” has finally landed right where he always dreamed he would one day be: in the center of the stage, with the spotlight all to himself. “Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story,” by Steve Wilson and Joe Florenski, would surely have made the scion of Mount Vernon, Ohio proud - although, it’s safe to say, he would have been none too pleased with the photo of his obese younger self decked out in a snug Boy Scout uniform. Now, nearly 24 years after his death at the age of 55, the man Mel Brooks once described as being capable of getting laughs by reading “a phone book, tornado alert, or seed catalogue” is at long last receiving the kind of serious attention that he always craved and felt he always deserved. Marshall: In a recent column, Billy Graham said he would like to urge young people to reserve sex for the only place it belongs. Lynde (frightened): Was anyone else identified? Marshall: True or false: Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason were recently seen in Central Park dressed as women. Peter Marshall (host): Is the electricity in your house A.C. Exhibits A, B and C, from “Hollywood Squares,” circa 1974:
#PAUL LINDE TV#
Never merely a limp wrist for hire, somewhat arch and more than a little bitchy, and yet strangely likable, he was deemed “safe” for the whole family’s consumption, which only made his spicy dollops of gay wit dropped into the tasteless gruel that was 1970s TV that much more palatable for middle-American consumption. Although he never officially came out, this Trojan horse in a silk shirt was a presence invited into millions of homes at a time when most weren’t exactly hoisting triangle flags for all their neighbors to see.
Indeed, over the course of a 27-year career that was filled with many more downs than ups, Lynde did perhaps more than any other single celebrity to open America’s minds and hearts to the notion of a gay man cracking wise on a daily televised basis. What took so long? In an age where celebrity biographies and memoirs outnumber actual celebrities, when even the life and career of Erik Estrada are deemed worthy of a 208-page meditation (opening line: “Any man’s beginning reaches back past his point of origin … to the deepest roots of his heritage”), how is it possible that the strange, sad life of legendary gay comic actor Paul Lynde (“Hollywood Squares,” “Bewitched,” “The Munsters,” and an untold number of variety shows) has not already been observed, analyzed and dissected through a rainbow-tinted lens?