Creator of ‘Gong Show,’ ‘Dating Game’
Chuck Barris, “The Gong Show” creator and host who claimed — though never too seriously — that he doubled as a CIA assassin during the height of his game show popularity, has died at his home in Palisades, N.Y. He was 87.
The popular game show creator, producer and host died Monday of natural causes, a representative for his wife said.
The “Gong Show” was among a handful of Mr. Barris’ creations that dominated the TV game show landscape in the 1960s. He launched “The Dating Game” in 1965, which was an instant hit with numerous imitations. Mr. Barris followed with “The Newlywed Game,” “The Game Game,” “The $1.98 Beauty Show” and a Mama Cass special, among others.
“Those were the happiest days of my life,” Mr. Barris said in a 2002 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “It was Camelot.”
Charles Hirsch Barris was born June 3, 1929, in Philadelphia, the son of a dentist. He was a salesman, an NBC tour guide, a gopher. He was also a songwriter, penning “Palisades Park,” which was turned into an up-tempo hit in 1962 by Freddie Cannon.
His game shows were often derided by critics as trashy and sexist, and Mr. Barris himself — dressed with ultrawide lapels on his jacket and shirt unbuttoned to roughly his navel — was loud and veered wildly between funny and obnoxious. But his shows became must-watch programming in America.
His Hollywood offices befitted the era, a 1969 Los Angeles Times article noted. The walls were decorated in a “freaky collage of pop-hippie art.” The staff consisted of “super-cool chicks in miniskirts clacking away on typewriters.”
But his golden touch deserted him when he produced “The Gong Show Movie,” which had the misfortune of being released the same weekend as “The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Shining.” The film tanked. So he walked away, selling off his holdings and moving to France with his future second wife, Robin Altman.
“I figured I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of what’s going on anymore, so I took off,” he told the Times in 2002. He told a friend he planned to write the great American novel.
Instead he started work on what would be “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” a purported autobiography in which he claimed to have been an undercover CIA agent, one minute an exuberant game show host, the next a shadowy hit man. Was any of it possibly true? The CIA said no, but Mr. Barris was coy.
“Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledge someone was an assassin?” he said in 2002. “Believe what you want.”
Far more real was his book “Della: A Memoir of My Daughter,” a sorrowful look inward after the overdose death of his only child. He wrote that he blamed himself for her fate, that he was so caught up in Hollywood that he had overlooked her needs until she dropped out of Beverly Hills High School and ran away from home. Years later, she was found dead in a Hollywood apartment.
In 2002, as George Clooney had just wrapped up work on the film version of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” — perhaps pushing the storyline even further from the truth, Mr. Barris sat down with the Times. He was upbeat, and at times, melancholy.
“I’ve created hit TV shows, but nothing has been great. I’ve written rock songs, but I’m not a big music star. I’ve penned a best-selling book, but I’m not Hemingway or Fitzgerald. I’ve never saved any lives. It’s just middle-of-theroad greatness.
“So I know what my legacy will be. It’s ‘The Gong Show’ and that’s a shame. It’s not the legacy I want to have. It gave the impression of me being a clown, a court jester. None of that’s true.”