“Judy Garland Time!” Paul Lynde and the Kenley Players

Read tattered copies of TV Guide, circa 1968, and you’ll realize that Paul Lynde, then the new owner of a Hollywood mansion that required some upgrades, rarely turned down work. Over those 12 months, he appeared on Bewitched, The Flying Nun, and I Dream of Jeannie, variety shows starring Bob Hope, Dean Martin, and Jonathan Winters, and talk shows with Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, and Mike Douglas. He popped up most frequently on daytime game shows, including such obscurities as How’s Your Mother-in-Law, before accepting an offer that fall to permanently fill the center seat on the Hollywood Squares, the show for which he is forever associated.

A staff of writers provided Lynde with “ad-libs” that introduced a daily dose of gay wit to daytime television:

Peter Marshall:         In “The Wizard of Oz,” the Lion wanted courage and the Tin Man wanted a heart. What did the Scarecrow want?

Paul Lynde:   He wanted the Tin Man to notice him.

In Ohio, the Mount Vernon native is also remembered for his work in summer stock. Motivated, as usual, by money, Lynde agreed in 1969 to appear with the famous Kenley Players in Warren, Dayton, and Columbus. A nervous performer, he hated working on stage, but the response from his fans and local critics kept him coming back. “When I do a show in Ohio it’s Judy Garland time,” he once said. “It’s a very emotional experience.” Lynde broke Kenley box-office records and patiently signed autographs for hundreds of fans each night.

By the time of his last appearance a decade later, Lynde had toured John Kenley’s circuit eight times, more than any other headliner in the company’s long history. He eventually earned a weekly salary that made him “the highest paid performer on stage today, including – God help us all – Laurence Olivier.”

Never that closeted, Lynde stayed true to himself while visiting Ohio. In Columbus, he partied at the Kismet, often accompanied by fetching “bodyguards.” He dressed in a caftan, a ’70s fashion statement that, like the man-purse, some took as code for homosexuality. An oft-repeated story: in a nightly ritual, Lynde returned to the stage at Vets Memorial to take post-curtain questions from the audience. Someone asked him, as they always did, why he’d never married. Clad in his favorite caftan, smoking a thin brown cigarette, Lynde shot back, “Do you live in a cave?” A lesser Lynde witticism, for sure, but one forgiven by the fact that his writers were thousands of miles away.

Lynde died in 1982 and is buried in Amity, Ohio. The Kenley Players, which presented other gay actors, including Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, and Alan Sues (the “poor man’s Paul Lynde”), left Columbus in 1981.

Joe Florenski, a GOHI board member, is the co-author of Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story. He is currently working on a history of the Kenley Players.

This entry was posted on 07/22/2008 at 07/22/2008 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.