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Caine Mutiny. In 1942, when Paar was 25, he was called up into the Army and was put in the 28th Special Service Company as member of an entertainment troupe. Jack's first weeks in service were miserable. "I still talked like an announcer, and they didn't understand me." Even in Special Services, the average draftee did not dig his insistence on clean fingernails. Things were better overseas. Crossing to Guadalcanal on an Army troop transport, he took on a Caine-type commander who kept the soldiers on a near-starvation diet. One day during an alert, Paar got into a lifeboat and announced: "I've been asked to make an announcement that there was a Japanese submarine in the vicinity, but unfortunately the Navy gun crews have driven it off. I say unfortunately because the Japanese submarine was trying to bring us food." Recalls Paar sadly: "The men laughed until they cried. That was the greatest joke of my life."
On the South Pacific's one-a-day, island-hopping vaudeville circuit, Paar became the open enemy of all brass. Once, in New Caledonia, a show was delayed and 5,000 men were kept waiting by a Navy commodore, who finally arrived with a nurse on his arm. "We were going to have six lovely girls do the dance of the virgins," announced Paar. "But they broke their contracts by being with the commodore." The commodore threatened a courtmartial. "The Army got me out of it," claims Paar, "by promising to send me to Okinawa."
Deus ex Machina. His wartime success got Jack a job in Hollywood shortly after he came home. RKO and later 20th Century-Fox put him under contract but rarely got around to putting him in front of a camera (he did once play opposite an unheard-of starlet named Marilyn Monroe). In 1947 he was hired as the summer replacement on NBC-Radio's Jack Benny Show. His fresh, natural style was a success, and in the fall American Tobacco put the Jack Paar Show on the air on ABC. It lasted until Christmas Eve. In his radio days Paar squabbled with everyone, fired a whole set of writers, feuded with a Daily Variety columnist named Jack Hellman (Paar put a nameplate—"Hellman"—on a chimpanzee and paraded it through Hollywood).
But on the ABC show, says Jack, "a fellow named Ernie Walker ruined me. He sold the network a bill of goods that he had a machine to analyze comedians." Walker's machine reported that Jack got laughs all right but that he had no character, like Benny's "cheapness," Gracie Allen's "dumbness." "There is nothing to tune back to each week," reported Walker, and the Paar option was dropped. Today, says Jack, he is just as glad that he did not play along with the phony character bit: "I have no character except what I am—complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable and lonely."