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8:09 p.m. Writer Walt Kempley comes into the dressing room with the news that he has found a gun that shoots soft bullets. How about a duel with Genevieve to see who can draw the fastest? Often such gimmicks are the bright spots of a show (a mechanical fish-eating fish was brought back for numerous encores, as was a pair of "binoculars" that were actually half liquor flask). But tonight Paar is not in the mood. "I need a show," he snaps.
8:16 p.m. Jack reads a skit called "Famous Last Words" and discards it as no good. Finally he begins to stitch together a few lines himself for his opening monologue, thinking aloud, jotting down the words in a stenographic notebook. "We have a wonderful evening planned just as soon as the show is over . . . This show comes to you in compatible color; this means my shirt and socks match."
8:45 p.m. Onstage, Jack takes time to rehearse a skit, then wanders around asking questions, checking on props, apparently calm. Abruptly, he strides into his dressing room. On the dim, dusty stage of the Hudson Theater, technicians keep rummaging about the little world of cables, cameras, and dingy sets that will look sumptuous on the home screens. The band rehearses in shirtsleeves.
10:35 p.m. After a long, embarrassing interview with an English actress who was scheduled for a guest appearance, Jack comes onstage again, explains with a sour face: "She made a movie with Noel Coward, she did this, she did that. I said, 'Can you talk about these things?' She said she wanted to be a cook, a creative cook. That's not believable. A good-looking girl with a build wants to be a cook? The audience would think she was lying, that I was lying. It would destroy the naturalness of the show. I had to let her go."
10:58 p.m. Genevieve shouts: "Zhon-nee, I have no shoes, dahling. I cannot go without red shoes. I left them in apartment." A stage manager marches off to get the shoes, muttering.
11:01 p.m. Paar is frantic. "That wastebasket is filled with routines by the writers. This is what I end up with—two sheets from my own notebook."
11:14 p.m. Paar stands in the wings alone. The show theme strikes up. Out front, Announcer Hugh Downs, who has been warming up the audience, chuckles with the nightly enthusiasm: "Now here's Jack." In that instant Jack Paar strides onstage, smiling shyly, snapping his fingers. He makes his little joke about hemlines and the men behind the TV cameras smile at him as if they meant it. The show is on its way, following a complex timetable of station breaks and commercials as the network gathers stations and moves west across the night.
Tough Damn Job. From this moment on, Paar is assured, professional, unfaltering. During each station break, after every commercial, whenever he is off camera, he finds a moment to lean over to chat with a guest, give instructions to an assistant director, and check the time schedule. The peering cameras, the prodding teleprompters, the signaling technicians seem not to bother him; he is at home. With Jack Douglas, head writer of his show, whom he puts on as a guest from time to time, he ad libs quickly and surely. With other guests, he is gentle, humble, anxious not to seem brighter than anybody else.