Chuck Barris; famed for 'Gong Show,' CIA claim . By Neil Genzlinger New
York Times . NEW YORK - Chuck Barris, the "Gong Show" creator,
songwriter, and novelist who sought to add to his already eclectic
résumé with a made-up - or was it? - story about being an assassin for
the CIA, died on Tuesday at his home in Palisades, N.Y. He was 87. "The
Gong Show" was the last of Mr. Barris's hit game show creations. In the
1960s, he came up with "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game,"
making a spectacle of his contestants' romantic yearnings in the first
case and their honeymoon-period bliss, adjustments, and foibles in the
second. Mr. Barris might have earned a brief mention in the obituary
pages with one of his earliest accomplishments: He wrote the pop song
"Palisades Park," which became a hit for Freddy Cannon in 1962 and an
emblem of that period of good-time rock 'n' roll just before the
genre's harder, louder side emerged. Decades later, in 2007, Cannon, a
Massachusetts native, wanted to rework the song into a rally ditty for
the Boston Red Sox. But, he told The Boston Globe, he received a
complaint from Mr. Barris, a New York Yankees fan, and so "Down at
Fenway Park" ended up being a Cannon original rather than a repurposed
Barris. Mr. Barris wrote "Palisades Park" along an odd path to an
eventual career in television. He was born in Philadelphia to Dr.
Nathaniel Barris, a dentist, and the former Edith Cohen; his father
died when he was young. After graduating from Drexel University in his
home city in 1953, he was accepted into a management training program
at NBC in 1955. But, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, the
department he was placed in - daytime sales - was eliminated, and he
found himself trying, unsuccessfully, to sell the devices then known as
TelePrompTers. During the payola scandals of the 1950s, he was hired to
keep a young ABC star, Dick Clark, of "American Bandstand," out of
trouble. ("He sat around doing nothing all day but drawing on a pad of
paper," Clark told The Inquirer.) By 1959 he was ABC's director of West
Coast daytime programming. But he wanted to make his own shows, and in
1965 he came up with "The Dating Game," in which a bachelorette or
bachelor would choose a date from among three unseen members of the
opposite sex after asking them questions. He followed that the next
year with "The Newlywed Game," another question-and-answer show that
put just-married couples' compatibility to the test. Both shows stayed
on the air into the mid-1970s and spawned assorted sequels ("The
All-New Dating Game" and "The New Newlywed Game"). Mr. Barris's next
game shows were less successful, but just as it seemed he was losing
his touch, he came up with the concept that would catapult him to a new
level of fame: "The Gong Show," which had its premiere on NBC in June
1976. The show featured a series of performers, most of them amateurs,
and a panel of three celebrity judges. Mr. Barris himself was the
brash, irritating host. The performers, who were often terrible, would
be allowed to go on until one of the judges couldn't stand it anymore
and sounded a gong, putting an end to the spectacle. Those who weren't
gonged were rated by the judges on a 1-to-10 scale. In keeping with the
ridiculousness of the proceedings, the prize amount they vied for was
ridiculous: $516.32 on the daytime version of the show, $712.05 on the
prime-time edition. The show, which ran on NBC until 1978 and then in
syndication (with revivals in later years), became a cultural
sensation. Critics complained about its crassness and cruelty, but Mr.
Barris, like purveyors of burlesque and circus sideshows in earlier
generations, knew there was a large audience for lowbrow. At one point
the daytime version was attracting 78 percent of viewers ages 18 to 49.
"In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death," Mr.
Barris said in a Salon interview in 2001. "A really bad review means
the show will be on for years. The ghost of "The Gong Show" is evident
in numerous reality-television shows of more recent vintage - the early
rounds of any given season of "American Idol," for instance. By the end
of the 1970s, Mr. Barris's television production company was busy and
profitable, but he was itchy to try something else. What he tried,
disastrously, was "The Gong Show Movie," which he directed and, with
Robert Downey Sr., wrote. It was released in May 1980 and flopped. Mr.
Barris gradually withdrew from television, selling his holdings,
spending most of his time in France, and turning to writing. He had
already written one book, "You and Me, Babe" (1974), a novel about a
television producer whose marriage failed; it drew heavily on his own
rocky marriage to Lyn Levy, a niece of the powerful CBS chief William
S. Paley, in the 1950s. They were divorced in 1976. That first book
sold well, but it was the next one that would give Mr. Barris yet
another burst of notoriety: "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (1984), a
supposed autobiography in which he claimed that while traveling in his
role as a television producer in the 1960s he was also an assassin for
the CIA. The book got only a smattering of attention, but it caught
some eyes in Hollywood, and in 2003, after many delays, a film version
came out, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Mr.
Barris. The film brought Mr. Barris, by now in his 70s, a fresh round
of publicity and endless variations on the obvious question: Was it
true? He generally played coy, delivering elliptical answers that
neither confirmed nor denied. The CIA was more direct: Various
spokesmen said Mr. Barris had had nothing to do with the agency. Mr.
Barris's second marriage, to Robin Altman, ended in divorce in 1999. He
leaves his wife, the former Mary Clagett. Which of his several careers
was his favorite? In 2007, during an appearance at a California
bookstore, he dealt with the question. "When you go to that great game
show in the sky," he asked himself, "would you rather be known as an
author or as a TV game show producer? "That's the easiest question of
all," he responded. "I would love to be known as an author, but I don't
think it's written that that's the way it's going to be. I think on my
tombstone it's just going to say, 'Gonged at last,' and I'm stuck with
that.
