‘Gong Show’ was highlight of odd career
CHUCK BARRIS /
Chuck Barris, the “Gong Show” creator, songwriter and novelist who sought to add to his already eclectic resume with a made-up — or was it? — story about being an assassin for the CIA, died Tuesday at his home in Palisades, New York. He was 87.
“The Gong Show” was just one of Barris’ 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 foibles in the second.
Barris also wrote the pop song “Palisades Park,” which became a hit for Freddy Cannon in 1962.
During the payola scandals of the 1950s, Barris 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 once said.) But by 1959, Barris was ABC’s director of West Coast daytime programming.
With “The Gong Show,” which had its premiere on NBC in June 1976, Barris reached a new level of fame. The show featured a series of performers, most of them amateurs, and a panel of three celebrity judges. Barris 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. In keeping with the ridiculousness of the proceedings, the prize they vied for was ridiculous: $516.32 on the daytime version of the show, $712.05 on the prime-time edition.
The show ran on NBC until 1978 and then in syndication. Critics complained about its crassness and cruelty, but at one point the daytime version was attracting 78 percent of viewers ages 18 to 49.
Barris gradually withdrew from television, spending most of his time in France and turning to writing. His first book, “You and Me, Babe” (1974), was a novel about a television producer whose marriage failed; it drew 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.
But it was his next book that gave Barris 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 producer in the 1960s he was also an assassin for the CIA. A film version in 2003 was directed by George Clooney.
Was the claim true? Barris played coy, but various spokesmen for the CIA said Barris had had nothing to do with the agency.
Barris continued to write books, including in 2010 “Della: A Memoir of My Daughter,” the story of his only child — from his marriage to Levy — who as a girl sometimes turned up on “The Gong Show.” She died of a drug overdose in 1998, at 36.
Barris’ second marriage, to Robin Altman, ended in divorce in 1999. He is survived by his wife, the former Mary Clagett.
Meals on Wheels has confirmed a $50,000 donation from former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
The group that provides food for seniors in need thanked Kaepernick for his donation on Tuesday. It came a day after President Donald Trump took a swipe at Kaepernick during a campaign-style rally in Kentucky by taking credit for the lack of suitors for the free agent. Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” ahead of 49ers games last season as a protest of police treatment of minorities became a topic of national debate.
Meals on Wheels faces a sharp funding cut under Trump’s proposed budget.
Kaepernick is also promoting a campaign to raise money for drought relief in Somalia.