Yes, I know that I likely spend a lot more time covering the world of game shows than many of you might think is warranted (although, as I noted as late as yesterday, there’s also more than a few to whom whatever happens in that world is of paramount importance). I usually have little desire or intention to devote consecutive musings to it. I’m a firm believer in building out and extending audience appeal whenever possible–catering exclusively to a hyper niche is a sure sign of assuring irrelevance.
But that was before I learned that I lost a longtime friend yesterday. No, I wasn’t as personally close to Winston Conrad “Wink” Martindale as many of my friends and professional colleagues were. I never produced a TV show with him, let alone entered into a professional partnership to create content. I never shared a stage with him. Indeed, I don’t have a single picture with him, at least in my possession. In a more disposable era, plenty were taken.
But the venerable personality, who passed somewhat suddenly in Palm Springs yesterday at 91, was someone who I knew well enough to have been invited to his Beverly Hills home on a couple of occasions, getting a glimpse into the real person far beyond the public image that to a majority of folks was merely an effervescent game show emcee and deejay that made him a perfect model for the 80s Roman candle fad toy MR. GAME SHOW. Wink arguably deserved that title himself in more recent years, helming an impressive list of short-lived projects for a variety of syndicators and cable networks. That made him an omnipresence at the many NATPE conventions I attended, enough so that whenever we were introduced by someone who assumed we were strangers Wink would often reply, “Oh, him again”.
One only needed to look at a wall in his den to realize that Martindale was a true lover of music; a gold record commemorating an early achievement and dozens of photographs with an even more historic Tennessee native dominated it. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Beth Harris provided details in her piece yesterday:
In 1959, Martindale moved to Los Angeles to host a morning show on KHJ. That same year he reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with a cover version of “Deck of Cards,” which sold over 1 million copies. He performed the spoken word wartime story with religious overtones on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Martindale..also did one of the first recorded television interviews with a young Elvis Presley…Martindale was in the studio, although not working on-air that night, when the first Presley record “That’s All Right” was played on WHBQ on July 8, 1954. Martindale approached fellow DJ Dewey Phillips, who had given Presley an early break by playing his song, to ask him and Presley to do a joint interview on Martindale’s TV show “Top Ten Dance Party” in 1956. By then, Presley had become a major star and agreed to the appearance.
Martindale and Presley stayed in touch on occasion through the years, and in 1959 he did a trans-Atlantic telephone interview with Presley, who was in the Army in Germany. Martindale’s second wife, Sandy, briefly dated Presley after meeting him on the set of “G.I. Blues” in 1960.
There amidst that wall of photos were dozens of candids of Wink and Sandra–how she introduced herself as she served sweet tea–from that set, plus plenty of others from her personal connection. One look at her in those photos, and even at the time 30 years later, could easily explain the attraction. And as you can see, age hasn’t diminished that much.
And there was a Bible, as well as several works of art with Jesus featured in them. It was obvious their home and their partnership was rooted in faith, and even clearer Wink drew his strength and passion as much from Him as he did from Sandra.
If you didn’t have access to him as I sometimes and others more often did, you more than likely knew him from his more successful shows of the 70s and 80s, the blackjack game show GAMBIT that followed THE PRICE IS RIGHT “over most of these CBS stations” and his seven-year run helming TIC TAC DOUGH during an era where it was often syndication’s highest-rated prime access series. I spent a lot of time watching him, ever associating him with Los Angeles-based productions that seemed glitzier and giddier than the New York-based shows I frequently saw taped, often hosted by his equally ubiquitous and longtime friend Bill Cullen. Martindale eventually ranked second to Bill in the number of shows he hosted, and as a result became a readily available and recognizable punch line in his later years. He eventually became a spokesman for the Orbitz travel website and, most recently, for KFC. That exposure made him at least familiar to a younger generation that likely never saw his earlier shows. And acceptable enough to even my genre-loathing superiors at Game Show Network who allowed him to make a guest apperance on our big-budget primetime breakout THE CHASE at a time when they were doing all they could to dissociate themselves with those “old, old, old, old, old” folks that they felt were hindering their efforts to evolve.
I caustically reminded those doubting witches that Wink had proven his breadth of appeal years earlier when we, at the behest of some shockingly uninventive producers, participated in a segment for a show I helped greenlight that my FOX colleagues thought was going to be the young-appeal solution to a daypart we had royally screwed up with the underperforming and ultimately tragic LATE SHOW that began with Joan Rivers and then Arsenio Hall, not to mention the launch of a network, and ended with a far less successful emcee than Martindale (Ross Shafer) and a time slot downgrade. Here’s how THE LOS ANGELES TIMES’ Steve Weinstein described it in a Sunday supplement (you remember those?) Fall preview story from early September 1989:
“After Hours,” a glitzy magazine show that is designed as an alternative to the late-night talk shows, will air nightly at 11:30 on Channel 11 beginning Sept. 18. Press releases for the show characterize it as “zapless television,” because the program “presents stories and personalities in such a quick fashion, the viewer gets the impression that the channel changing is being done automatically.”
I happened to be in Vancouver watching Wink shoot episodes of one of those short-lived game shows, THE LAST WORD, when he confessed he was going to be a subject of a segment for AFTER HOURS they were shooting there. They would film Wink roaming through a progressive neighborhood filled with young people, clubs and, because it was Canada, lots of legal weed shops. The goal: to see how recognizable he’d be to that crowd. When he found out our stations were carrying that show as well as his, he invited me to join him and his intended solo strolling companion, LAST WORD producer and HOLLYWOOD SQUARES creator Merrill Heatter. “What a great cross-promotion idea”, he exclaimed.
If for no other reason than curiosity to see a side of Vancouver that appealed to me, I tagged along. Merrill, as usual, looked the part of a tanned Hollywood mogul and easily interacted with the better-looking partygoers half his age, goading them into trying to guess who his friends were. Aside from the demographic chasm, the fact that most of Wink’s earlier works were only seen sporadically in Canada was somehow forgotten. Unsurprisingly, few people recognized Wink–although the ones that did were genuially giddy. The eye rolls from myself and Merrill when Wink finally found a fan pretty much summed up my realization that a show that was being oversold so enthusiastically–it was being produced by those progressive titillators from Playboy!! –was, in fact, duller than dish water.
Thankfully, no footage of our late night stroll exists. But there is a sample episode of the long-forgotten show that’s out there on You Tube. It’s easy to see why it outright bombed and it reminded me that whenever possible to never buy a show without at least a proof of concept. I’m forever grateful to Martindale for at least being open enough to give me at least an attempt at a few more minutes of fame, but when all was said and done it was a reminder that as a program buyer I messed up.
One might even say I was hoodwinked.
G-dspeed, Winston.
Until next time…