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What's My Line? Takes Off  The first move gave Line added exposure because of its lead-in. Arthur Godfrey virtually owned CBS Radio and Television in the day. At one point in the early 1950s, Godfrey was said to be responsible for 11 percent of CBS's entire corporate profits from the advertising output of his daytime radio and television shows, his Monday night Talent Scouts and the Wednesday night Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. Godfrey's evening variety hour fed a healthy audience to What's My Line? At the time, CBS was delving gingerly into the genre of game shows for television. In 1948, four years before the eye became the logo for the network, CBS gave a shot to a couple of cheap prime time offerings, Riddle Me This and Winner Take All, the latter the first entry from the factory of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman. Shortly after the premiere of Line, CBS would import another Goodson-Todman creation that Goodson would frequently say was his least favorite, Beat the Clock. Gradually, the production weaknesses of Line began to subside as the steady hand of Franklin Heller as director eliminated the dreadful early mistakes. Over the first six months, subtle personnel changes evolved. The addition of radio and television personality Arlene Francis was an inspired bit of casting. Psychiatrist Richard Hoffman cycled off the panel first from the premiere to make way for Francis. She added an energy, personality and wit missing from the rather droll debut foursome. While audiences enjoyed the parlor guessing game of identifying civilian occupations, the celebrity mystery guest segment with a blindfolded panel developed a growing appeal. The early masqueraders were not the meganames (baseball star Phil Rizzuto, socialite Elsa Maxwell, Sen. Estes Kefauver, to name a few) but the anticipation of who would trudge out from behind the curtain was a pointed weekly moment for viewers. Goodson seriously wanted to keep former New Jersey Gov. Harold Hoffman on the panel. A well-known toastmaster and raconteur, Hoffman brought a sense of class---as Goodson saw it---to the show. As detailed after his death on A&E's Biography, Goodson was frustrated for much of his life in a quest to be part of the New York hoi polloi. He saw What's My Line? as an elegant parlor game and was not interested in frontloading the panel with entertainers. He liked the balance of a politician, a journalist, a breakthrough woman on-air personality and a poet. Their walks of life were as varied as the jobs of the contestants who sought to stump them. Yet, Goodson faced some of the earliest examples of network pressure. CBS viewed the panel a bit stoic. The network wanted a funnyman to liven up the proceedings. Several names were floated. Jerry Lester, who would soon pioneer on NBC's Broadway Open House, was considered. Jan Murray, only a year away from his own Dollar a Second, was mentioned. Hal Block was an unlikely candidate. Chicago-born, Block did not have a large resume. In 1940, he wrote a forgettable film musical, "I'm Nobody's Sweetheart Now." Block had done some journeyman radio work but had been moderately successful in the Catskills and the Pennsylvania mountain resorts. Boisterous, loud and at times acerbic, Block often was reminiscent of the kid who was sent to the principal's office every third day. Yet, he was quick with a one-liner. The perception of CBS executives was that Block could provide counterpoint to the elegance of Francis, the intellectualism of poet/author Louis Untermeyer and the sometimes polarizing Dorothy Kilgallen. Block was hired. Gov. Hoffman was dismissed. Another possible reason Block was chosen was economics. Not a major name in television or radio, Block came cheap. According to a variety of published sources, the salary for regular panelists on Line for the first five years was $260-per-week, which was the equivalent of performers' union scale at the time. The "below-the-line" (non-personnel) production costs were $300 per week. Daly was paid a reported $500 weekly. Add up the figures and you have the most frugal economics in television. The decision, ultimately, to move What's My Line? to its Mount Rushmore time slot of Sundays at 10:30 was somewhat puzzling and against the grain of broadcast wisdom at the time. During the 1949-50 season, CBS turned over programming to local stations when The Fred Waring Show ended at 10 p.m. Throughout most of radio's history, the four networks signed off at 9:30 in the Eastern and Pacific time zones. The prevailing theory was listeners and viewers were tired after a weekend of leisure and perhaps one or two Sunday church services. Broadcasters felt the audience sought an early bedtime Sunday nights in order to be fresh for the impending work week. Yet, two factors convinced CBS to open up the later hour on Sundays and send What's My Line? to pioneer. One was the potential availability of more Broadway stage performers as mystery guests. Most evening theatre performances ended between 9:30 and 10, which would open up opportunities for bigger names to stump the panel. The other element: CBS had developed a strong one-two ratings punch with Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town and The Fred Waring Show from 8 to 10 on Sunday nights. Advertisers had shown interest in the potential of audiences staying up after Waring's choral fest. Plus, CBS had signed a contract with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer to sponsor its Wednesday night boxing matches. Line was regarded by the brewery as having a different audience from the fights that would provide an incompatible lead-in. Stopette inventor Dr. Jules Monteneier and his ad agency agreed to go along to Sunday nights in an agreement similar to one the American Tobacco Company agreed to which paved the way for Jack Benny to move from NBC to CBS on radio in 1947. CBS agreed to rebate the agency an unspecified dollar amount per rating point What's My Line? would lose with the time change. CBS committed to the time slot for one year. As a bridge between Waring and Line, CBS inserted a lightly-regarded game show that had floated between CBS and ABC since 1948. Celebrity Time, emceed by Conrad Nagel, was CBS's second prime time game show under the title Riddle Me This. Ironically, one of the game's first regular panelists was What's My Line? moderator John Daly. Lever Brothers picked up sponsorship of Celebrity Time. Stopette and a new squeeze bottle shampoo invented by Monteneier backed Line. One other element was added to the Sunday night mix. The male panelists and Daly began dressing in tuxedos to add the air of a formal evening in New York City. The grand entrances of the panelists did not become part of the show's lore until comedian Fred Allen joined the show in 1954. What's My Line? was poised to become not only the signature game on CBS but the first to attract the biggest names in show business to its proceedings. One of the few drawbacks: nearly 30 percent of the U.S. did not see What's My Line? until 1958. The reason? As primary sponsor, Stopette and its ad agency controlled the time slot. In television's first decade, agencies would not buy specific local markets if its products were not sold in those cities. Stopette was not on the shelves in a number of small-to-medium Southern cities or Midwestern markets. The procedure was similar for Perry Mason and Have Gun---Will Travel, two CBS stalwarts not shown on the full network until 1960. Among the cities without Line until the late fifties: Columbus, Ga., Tallahassee, Fl., Savannah, Ga., Spartanburg, S.C., Jackson, Tn., Memphis, Lancaster, Pa., Meridian, Ms., and Lexington, Ky. Not until Stopette was sold to Helene Curtis in 1958 as part of its family of cosmetics was the Sunday night chase for the mystery guest beamed nationwide. The late George Gingell, former general manager and editorial director of WRBL in Columbus, Ga., outlined the plight before his death in 1977. "I'd have people who traveled on business or on vacation and they'd call me and ask, 'Why aren't you showing What's My Line?'," Gingell said. "I'd have to tell them it was out of our control but they wouldn't believe me." For most of the fifties, WRBL offered such syndicated stalwarts as 26 Men, Douglas Fairbanks Presents and Science Fiction Theatre in the late Sunday half-hour. "When we knew we were going to get What's My Line? in 1958, we'd run the promos from CBS and have our local announcer voiceover, 'Coming soon to Channel 4.'," Gingell said. "We created a lot of anticipation and we bought a sizable ad in the Green Sheet of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer on the Saturday before. Needless to say, we built a big audience for What's My Line? in Columbus." The ratings did not go through the roof in the fall of 1950 for What's My Line? on Sunday nights. Though the most significant competition was DuMont's live crime drama They Stand Accused, building a later viewing habit took patience. One problem came when Waring suddenly lost 32 percent of Sullivan's audience, leaving a much smaller spillover into the 10-11 hour on CBS. Goodson was not so certain the move from Wednesdays was the wisest decision when Godfrey's Wednesday night hour soared to sixth in the Nielsens and Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts cracked the top 20 (though a mystery hour, Teller of Tales, between the two bombed). Nonetheless, What's My Line? began to get attention in the New York media, if for no other reason than its celebrity surprises. The first year as a Sunday night staple, the mystery guest roster was an eclectic one. Bob Cummings was the first. Also from Broadway, films and TV: Joan Blondell, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Sam Goldwyn (on a special Saturday night telecast), Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Celeste Holm, Boris Karloff, Veronica Lake, Margaret O'Brien, Phil Silvers, Gloria Swanson, Rudy Vallee, Ethel Waters and Ed Sullivan. From sports came Leo Durocher, Bob Feller, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom and Sugar Ray Robinson (baseball legend Jackie Robinson did the same for game shows as he did for the major leagues when he was the first black to appear on a game show Aug. 16, 1950). Music brought Benny Goodman, Oscar Levant, Lauritz Melchior, Richard Rodgers, Margaret Whiting and (on New Year's Eve) Guy Lombardo. From the entertainment media entered Hedda Hopper as well as Sullivan. Bennett Cerf would join the show for the first time in October 1950, originally as a guest panelist. By his fourth appearance, that droll wit and Cerf's superb gamesmanship made him a member of the family. Steve Allen visited for the first time in March 1951. The two would be permanently intertwined with the show, even after Allen left to do The Tonight Show. What's My Line? barely cracked the top 40 in that first Sunday night season (though in New York, the telephone Trendex ratings listed Line in 18th place). The primary reason the show was not a blockbuster hit nationally was its absence from many of the smaller cities. CBS was pleased. The entertainment media was paying attention to the show. Even having to settle for a week-old kinescope on the West Coast until the coaxial cable joining both coasts was completed the following year, the Hollywood elite made What's My Line? as much of an appointment as reading the next day's issue of Variety. The era of the panel show finally had a standard bearer and a decade of copycats were on their way.  For legal reasons, TVgameshows.net and its webmaster cannot examine or listen to any personal proposals or portfolios for new game shows of any kind. 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