Profile of Bud Collyer on Famous Like Me

Bud Collyer (b. Clayton J. Heermance, Jr.June 18, 1908 – d. September 8, 1969) was an American radio actor who became one of the nation's first major television game show stars.

New York-born, Collyer originally sought a career in the law and worked his way through Fordham University by radio acting. Though he became a law clerk after his graduation, making as much in a month of radio as he did in a year of clerking convinced him to make broadcasting his career, changing his surname and becoming a familiar voice on all three major radio networks by 1940. Among others, his radio roles as Terry and the Pirates (Pat Ryan), Renfrew of the Mounted (the title role), and Abie's Irish Rose (the title role, again), not to mention announcing for a number of radio soap operas. But his best-remembered radio role arrived in early 1940: the title role in The Adventures of Superman on the Mutual network, a role he did in the 1940s radio drama and subsequent Superman cartoons.

Collyer got his first helping of game shows when he co-hosted ABC's (the former NBC Blue network) Break the Bank with future Miss America Pageant mainstay Bert Parks; and, when he was picked to host the radio original of the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman team's first game, Winner Take All--the latter also becoming, in due course, the first hosting seat for another game show titan, Bill Cullen.

Collyer went on to host the television versions of both shows, but in 1950 that he got the slot which genuinely made his name: Beat the Clock, a stunt game pitting couples (usually but not exclusively married) through timed, usually whacky stunts, for which the prizes usually came to cash or television sets and other products made by sponsor Sylvania. For eleven years (1950-61), Collyer---whose trademarks included securing his long-tubed stage microphone in his armpit while demonstrating the basics of a stunt for his contestants---presided over the slapstick, sometimes getting clobbered himself by as much whipped cream as his contestants were using or withstanding. At the height of the show's popularity, an installment of The Honeymooners---which surfaced years later, when Jackie Gleason released the so-called "Lost Episodes"---featured blustery Ralph Kramden and scatterbrained Ed Norton appearing on and playing Beat the Clock. Unlike the show's familiar parody of The $64,000 Question (The $99,000 Answer), Gleason's Beat the Clock episode used the actual show, including Collyer and his famous sign-off: "Next week may be your turn to beat the clock."

But Collyer in 1956 became equally if not more familiar as the host of a new Goodson-Todman production, To Tell The Truth on CBS. This panel show featured four celebrities peppering questions as three mystery guests claiming to be the same person, in a bid to determine just who was the person in question, until Collyer purred the famous phrase, "Will the real Such-and-So---please...stand up," always with the pauses---and the actual person would do precisely that. The sequence provided an especially riotous moment in 1962, when Collyer purred, with a particularly pronounced twinkle, "Will the real Bob Miller---please...stand up?" . . . and two Bob Millers---both pitchers for the newborn New York Mets---rose.

Among the celebrities who served as To Tell The Truth panelists during the fourteen-year run of the show were Orson Bean, Ralph Bellamy, Polly Bergen, Kitty Carlisle, Peggy Cass, Bert Convy, Hy Gardner, Phyllis Newman, and Tom Poston.

There was a side of Collyer's career that tied controversy. During his 1950s heyday with Beat the Clock and To Tell the Truth, he was a leader in an overtly anti-Communist faction of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. That faction supported such publications as Red Channels (the famous list of 151 reputed Communists or reputed fellow travelers, as the term was then, in radio and television) and interest groups shared its authors' politics---groups like Aware, Inc. (co-founded, in fact, by the man who wrote Red Channels's introduction), purporting to screen broadcast performers for actual or alleged Communist ties, pressuring networks and advertisers to shun them under threat of boycott.

An opposing faction, led by CBS radio personality John Henry Faulk and (ironically enough) To Tell The Truth panelist Orson Bean, defeated Collyer's faction in an election to run the New York local. (This was the election Faulk claimed provoked Aware to name his slate and pressure him off the air---not because he was himself a Communist but because he had once entertained at gatherings deemed pro-Communist---which in turn provoked his famous libel suit, winning in 1963.) Whatever Collyer thought of Bean's actual or alleged politics, or Bean Collyer's, they were nothing but professional and courteous to each other on air. Such was Collyer's professional way with any colleague or guest, no matter what he or they thought or did off the air.

Collyer's other game hosting slots included a short-lived (two years) game, Feather Your Nest, and the ABC game Number, Please in 1961.

Collyer died of a circulatory ailment in Greenwich, Connecticut in September 1969---on the same day To Tell The Truth revived in syndication, hosted by his old friend Garry Moore until 1978. In the same year as Collyer's death, a new Beat the Clock---hosted by veteran game M.C. Jack Narz, and with almost no alteration at all from the original---returned in syndication for three years. A family man as well as a television and radio man, Collyer was known to have contributed to various Christian religious works, including authoring at least one religious book and making a recording of the Today's English Version New Testament. In fact, he habitually bade farewell to departing game contestants with "Goodbye, and God bless you."

External link

• ROXANNE - Star Of Beat The Clock
• IMDb entry

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