Lawyer-turned-best selling author Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, leads off this edition of What's My Line?. This one aired in September 1957.
Also on the program: Jim Backus, at the time known for the Mr. Magoo cartoons, as Dorothy Kilgallon helpfully notes in her intro, is on the panel, and George Sanders is the other mystery guest on the show.
Around this same time, there was an unsold pilot for a series based on another of Gardner's book series, Cool & Lam. We'll have that up another time.
Did you notice how Erle Stanley Gardner had to remind John Daly to plug the premiere of Perry Mason that Saturday night (which was, after all, the reason Uncle Erle was there in the first place)?
ReplyDeleteI thought that Dorothy Kilgallen had a shot at guessing Gardner; they certainly might have met while covering murder trials for newspapers, something they'd both done for years.
Now that I think of it, Dorothy's question about a beard might have been a semi-guess about Rex Stout - unless I'm wrong …
Missed the plug.
ReplyDeleteI found the Cool & Lam video on YouTube over the weekend, and will have it up before the week is over. Gardner makes a brief appearance there, too, to introduce his "other" creations.