"The Newlywed Game" followed in the summer of 1966. This time, four newly married couples were quizzed on how their partners would answer personal (and winkingly intimate) questions. The prize for the winners was usually some household appliance, which they'd invariably go bananas over as the other three couples looked crestfallen. Barris later revealed the secret behind these reactions: He'd ask prospective clients what their dream gift would be, then match couples who answered similarly on the same show. The host was Bob Eubanks, a somewhat toothier version of Lange. Unable to use the word "sex" on the air, "The Newlywed Game" substituted "whoopee," as in "whoopee session." The word became a trademark of the show:

Eubanks: Where will your husband say your worst whoopee session usually takes place?
Wife: In the bathtub.
Eubanks: In the bathtub?
Wife: Yes, because the water always makes his peeny shrivel up.

Oh, the critics hated it all. Television has hit an all-time low, they wrote. Bad taste has taken hold of the airwaves. Barris is catering to the lowest common denominator. ("I don't even know what the lowest common denominator is," Barris would grumble to a newspaper reporter years later.) Lange was so upset by the vitriol that Barris says he had to talk him out of quitting "The Dating Game." He wrote in "The Game Show King" that he told Lange newspaper critics were originally movie and theater critics, and "free TV is beneath them."

"'In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death,'" Barris recalls telling Lange. "'If for some strange reason the critic liked it, the public won't. A really bad review means the show will be on for years.'" And, at least in the case of his first two shows, he was right. In one form or another, "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game" stayed on the air for decades.

In September 1966, ABC called again. It had a flaming stinker on its hands in "The Tammy Grimes Show." The sitcom was the first casualty of the new season, dead after four weeks. Could Barris turn "The Dating Game" into a prime-time show to replace it? At the time game shows were a daytime affair. ABC's programming chief suggested a more glamorous prize for the winner to spruce up the show. So rather than a night at one of Hollywood's finest restaurants, the nighttime winners would get a romantic vacation, chaperoned by a staffer from the production company. Barris would claim in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" that these trips abroad served as cover for him on his CIA assignments. (Whenever Barris relates this story, however the details change, one thing stays constant: He said he could have "The Dating Game" on the air in six weeks, hung up the phone and threw up.)

"The Newlywed Game" went to prime time three months later, but with no upgrade in the prizes. Barris wouldn't allow it. A wife might playfully whack her husband over the head with her cardboard answer card for getting an easy one wrong with a toaster at stake, "but put a yacht up there and you've got an entirely new show," Barris said. "The fun will turn to violence. What you'll have is 'The Death Game.'"

With two hit shows, Barris was hot. "Produce a hit television show and the Network Biggies will listen very carefully to what you have to say," he wrote. "Produce two hit television shows, one after the other, and the NBs will take almost anything you have to offer, sight unseen."

And that's what happened. Barris sold three more shows: "The Family Game," a "Newlywed Game" variant with parents and kids replacing married couples as contestants; "Dream Girl of 1968," a yearlong beauty pageant that foreshadowed the far spoofier "$1.98 Beauty Show" a decade later; and "How's Your Mother-in-Law?" a game with a courtroom setting that put the proverbial family nightmare on the hot seat, thus violating -- unsuccessfully, as it turned out -- the TV rule that you can't attack Mom.

Counting the nighttime versions of "The Dating Game" and "The Newlywed Game," Chuck Barris Productions was putting 27 half-hours on network television every week. The freewheeling flower-power style that Barris had used to run the company in its early years -- company meetings kicked off with folk music jam sessions, and employees could wear whatever they wanted -- gave way to a more corporate operation. Barris went public in 1968 as Barris Industries.

Other shows followed: There was "The Game Game," which was kind of complicated -- a contestant and three celebrities trying to figure out what a panel of psychologists would say was the best solution to a problem -- and not successful, validating Barris' theory that the simpler the show, the greater the chance of success. There was also a one-hour Mama Cass special, and "Operation: Entertainment," a variety show inspired by Bob Hope's Christmas shows. It was taped at domestic military bases.

By 1974, Barris' shows had dropped off the network schedules, one by one, with "The Newlywed Game" ending its first run in December. So that year Barris wrote a bestselling novel. He may have been the King of Schlock, but his heroes were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Tom Stoppard. Upon reading "Love Story" he decided he could write a better book, so he spent six months writing "You and Me, Babe," the fictionalized story of his since-ended marriage to Levy, which sold 750,000 copies thanks to heavy promotion. He dedicated it to his 12-year-old daughter, Della, who would soon make occasional appearances on her father's new show.

It was 1976 and Barris had yet another game in production. But the host, John Barbour, wasn't working out. He just didn't click with the show's concept. NBC gave Barris an ultimatum that no game show producer had ever heard before: You host the show, or no sale. And that's how "The Gong Show" got its lunatic of a host, and that's how Chuck Barris became a star.

Recent Stories