Television: The Girl That Jack Built

Jack ("I'm live!") Paar had hardly launched himself as NBC's bright weeknightly answer to late movies when he began playing Pygmalion to a professionally addled Galatea from Ohio, orange-topped Dolores ("Dody") Martha Goodman, "aged 29" (real age: 43). By last week, seven months later, the comedienne that Jack built had "disenchanted" her creator, and Paar felt less a Pygmalion than a Frankenstein. "Sweet little Midwestern Dody," he snorted. "Brother! And we did it—we made her."

In the beginning, vague, fey Dody, a dancing veteran of show business, could not utter an unfunny word in...

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