Clifton Fadiman: This Was Show Business

My mind has been fairly blown by learning about Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999), a radio and television personality whose name would have been pretty universally known in America from the late ’30s through the 1950s. Not because he has been forgotten so utterly, for that’s true of so many, but that there was a place for someone of his intellectual accomplishments in popular culture at all. It was a very different landscape back then.

What do I mean? Well, here are some of the things he did while not in front of microphones and cameras. He was an editor (eventually chief editor) at Simon and Schuster. He was the editor of the book review section of The New Yorker. He was the first editor of the children’s magazine Cricket. He wrote, edited, or otherwise contributed to scores of books, ranging from original translations of Nietzsche’sEcce Homo and The Birth of Tragedy to kids books. He was the guy behind The Lifetime Reading Plan, and was the man who had the idea to bring Ripley’s Believe it or Not out in book form. Above all he seemed to have a mission of bringing culture to the masses — boy, could we use more like him today.

Fadiman was associated with more than one popular broadcast program over the course of his career.

First, he was the host of the show Information, Please! on radio from 1938 through 1948, in RKO movie shorts from 1939 to 1942, on TV in 1952, and in book form as The Information Please Almanac, which influenced such things as the Book of Lists, which I wrote about here recently. Information, Please! was the most popular quiz show on radio. The idea of the show was that the public would write or call in and try to stump panels of witty intellectuals with information requests. They’d answer the question or not, depending on their abilities, but part of the tone of the show was they’d often make quips as their initial answers. The writer or caller would win a cash if they could stump the brains. Fadiman’s core panel consisted of Franklin P. Adams (“FPA” of Algonquin Roundtable fame), Oscar Levant, and sportswriter John Kiernan, and guests included the likes of Fred Allen, Leonard Bernstein,Ruth Gordon, Boris Karloff, George S. Kaufman, Clare Boothe Luce, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Basil Rathbone, Rex Stout, Deems Taylor,Orson Welles, and Alexander Woollcott.

Even more exciting (to us, at any rate) is Fadiman’s best known TV show, This is Show Business (initially titled This is Broadway) which ran on CBS television from 1949 through 1956, with radio simulcasts. It was CBS first TV show to be broadcast live from coast to coast. It was a talk and variety show. Performers would come and the show and do their act, and then have a conversation with a panel of guests about issues they were facing in their professional careers. Regular panelists included George S. Kaufman and Abe Burrows; towards the end Lillian Roth, Walter Slezak,Jacqueline Susann, and Dave Garroway were on the panel. But among the guests were the top people in show business, people like John Gielgud, Beatrice Lillie, Jack Benny,Ethel Waters, and scores of others.

Fadiman was also the final emcee of the tv game show The Name’s the Same (originally hosted by Robert Q. Lewis) and a frequent commentator on the Metropolitan Opera’s regular radio broadcast, among many other things. He was a repeat guest on the show Critic at Large, and a substitute host on What’s My Line?

Fadiman wasn’t a saint. If you browse through the many old clips of him on Youtube you will find one where he makes me unfortunate jokes at the expense of Chico Marx, who is sitting right next to him. The jokes are painful not only for their cruelty, but because they aren’t very funny. They also create an inaccurate impression that Fadiman was somehow above him. But Fadiman had nothing on the Marxes. He was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn. He just used his brains to get into Columbia rather than vaudeville. I note that they both wound up in show business.

For more on show business history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And please stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.