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By midnight it is plain that the show is a hit. A cameraman smothers a laugh and says, "Jack's flying. He'll be home now." Henny Youngman, a charter member of the Lindy comedians Jack so often criticizes, has dropped in to watch—as many show business pros do. Says Youngman: "This guy gives 200%; he wants to be double good. He gives out a feeling of love, that's why they look at this man. This is a tough damn job."
A few moments after 1 a.m. the lights go down, and Jack is surrounded by exuberant writers. "Rosenbloom was great," says one. "Douglas killed them," chimes in another. Jack says: "I thought me was pretty good, too." He wipes off his makeup, grabs his briefcase and pushes his way to his car—he never joins the rest of the cast at the corner bar. At home in Bronxville. where Miriam is waiting up, he has a cup of soup and a beer. At 3:15 a.m., after reading two scripts that Writer Douglas has put together for future shows, Paar turns out the light.
Balloon Breaker. To last through this kind of performance five nights a week takes a talent spawned by radio, toughened by Hollywood and burnished by the demands of an unforgiving clutch of television cameras. No comedian in the U.S. can boast a more abundant supply of the necessary skills than Jack Paar. He has been practicing them almost all his life.
A sort of migrant Middle Westerner, thanks to his father's job with the New York Central Railroad, which kept the family forever on the move, Jack Paar was born in Canton, Ohio on May 1, 1917. With time out for a stretch in Detroit, he did most of his growing up in Jackson, Mich. But wherever he went, his childhood memories are almost all somber ("I never had a childhood. I was born an old man"). When he was five, an older brother was killed by a car. All that comes back to Jack from his tenth year is the death of his best friend. "I went to the funeral,'' he remembers now, "and I didn't know what to do. My heart was breaking, and all I could think of was to break balloons through the service. Then I went home and bawled."
He stuttered badly as a boy, but cured himself by cramming buttons in his mouth and reading aloud. At 14 he spent six months in bed recovering from tuberculosis. He quit high school at 16. He was already working as an office boy and part-time announcer at a station in Jackson (WIBM) for $3 a week. Oldtimers still remember his style. "This is Jack Buh-Buh-Buh-Boo Paar, your announcer," he would croon, or "This is your young and popular announcer, Bing Paar." He kept a discarded microphone in the attic at home. It was hooked up to nothing, but he sat before it by the hour, reading aloud from plays, books, magazines. At 18 he left home and began to bounce around the country on his own, handling microphones in Indianapolis, Youngstown. Cleveland. Pittsburgh, Buffalo. He was married by then, for the second time to the same girl, and for the second time the marriage was breaking up. ("The first time we were divorced it was my fault. The second time it was her fault. When we felt that we were even, we quit.")