Gene Rayburn

**Gene Rayburn** (22 December 1917 – 29 November 1999) was an American radio and television personality. He was the host of several incarnations of *Match Game*.

## Early Life

Born **Eugen Peter Jeljenic** in Christopher, Illinois, the younger of two children of Croatian immigrants, Rayburn's father died when he was an infant and his mother moved to Chicago, where she met Milan Rubessa. After she married Rubessa 10 November 1919, Rayburn took the name Eugene Rubessa. He had an elder brother, Alfred, who was killed when Rayburn was a child, and a younger half-brother, Milan Rubessa Jr. Rayburn graduated from Lindblom Technical High School and attended Knox College. At Lindblom, he was senior class president and acted in the plays Robert of Sicily and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.

After three years as a page and tour guide at NBC studios at 30 Rock in New York, Rayburn began announcing at various radio stations, eventually landing back in New York at WNEW. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served in World War II. Gene chose the stage name "Rayburn" by randomly sticking his finger in the phone book.

## Career

### Radio and Stage

Rayburn was an actor and radio performer. He had a morning drive time radio show in New York City, first with Jack Lescoulie (*Anything Goes*) and later with Dee Finch (*Rayburn & Finch*) on WNEW, now WBBR. Rayburn's pairings with Lescoulie and Finch helped to popularize the now-familiar morning drive radio format.

Rayburn later took the lead role in the Broadway musical *Bye Bye Birdie* when Dick Van Dyke left the production to star in *The Dick Van Dyke Show*. At one point in his stage career, Rayburn's stand-in was future *Match Game* panelist Charles Nelson Reilly.

### Television

Breaking into television as the original announcer on Steve Allen's *Tonight*, Rayburn began a long association with game show producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman in 1953. He first appeared on Robert Q. Lewis's *The Name's the Same*; Rayburn frequently sat in for regular panelist Carl Reiner. In 1955, he took over as host of the summer replacement game show *Make the Connection* from original host Jim McKay (and appearing with his WNEW morning show successor Gene Klavan). From there he hosted shows such as *Choose Up Sides*, *Dough Re Mi*, and the daytime version of *Tic Tac Dough*. On radio, Rayburn became one of the many hosts of the NBC program *Monitor* in 1961 and remained with the show until 1973.

In an uncredited role (he reportedly did not want his name to appear), Rayburn played a TV interviewer in the movie *It Happened to Jane* (1959) starring Doris Day. Rayburn was also a frequent panelist in the 1960s and 1970s on *What's My Line?* and *To Tell the Truth*.

### Match Game

From 1962 to 1969, Rayburn hosted *The Match Game*. In the original version, which aired from New York on NBC, Rayburn read questions to two panels, each consisting of a celebrity and two audience members. The questions in the original game were ordinary, like "Name a kind of muffin," or "John loves his  blank ." Rayburn usually played it straight, though he would make jokes as the situation warranted. Because it was a live show, very few episodes were recorded; only four are known to exist. The show was canceled in 1969 to make room for the topical, short-lived game show *Letters to Laugh-In*.

Goodson-Todman revived *Match Game* in 1973 for CBS, this time as a California-based game show. Rayburn returned as host and introduced a new format in which two contestants tried to match the responses of six celebrities. Writer Dick DeBartolo, a veteran of the original show, created funnier and often risqué questions ("After being hit by a steamroller, Norman had to slide his  blank  under the door."). Rayburn reveled in this freewheeling new approach and often indulged in funny voices, banter with the celebrities, and mock arguments with the technical crew. It soon became the highest-rated show on daytime television. A concurrent nighttime version, *Match Game PM*, aired from 1975 to 1981. Rayburn was nominated for two Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Host or Hostess in a Game or Audience Participation Show.

During the years when *Match Game* was taped in Los Angeles, Rayburn lived in Osterville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and would commute to California every two weeks and tape twelve shows over the course of a weekend, five daytime shows and one nighttime show per taping day.

In 1983, a year after the syndicated *Match Game* disappeared, the show was revived as part of the *Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour*, with Rayburn hosting the *Match Game* segment and sitting on the panel of the *Hollywood Squares* segment. The show lasted nine months on NBC.

Rayburn knitted socks as a publicity stunt during his time on Rayburn & Finch, and later became proficient at needlepoint; he passed the time on long plane rides from New York to Los Angeles with his hobby. In 1974, Goodson made a surprise on-air appearance to congratulate Rayburn on making the show number-one among daytime television programs, and presented him with a bag in which to carry his needlepoint. During his time in the Air Force, Rayburn was trained in meteorology and occasionally demonstrated his knowledge of the weather on *Match Game*.

### Other Appearances

During and between his *Match Game* years, Rayburn served as guest panelist on two other Goodson-Todman shows, *What's My Line?* and *To Tell the Truth*. Also during the run of the 1970s Match Game, Rayburn and his wife Helen appeared on the game show *Tattletales*, hosted by Bert Convy. Three years after the original *Match Game* was canceled, Rayburn hosted the short-lived Heatter-Quigley Productions show *The Amateur's Guide to Love*. In 1983 he hosted a pilot for Reg Grundy Productions called *Party Line*, which later became Bruce Forsyth's *Hot Streak*.

Rayburn appeared as a contestant during a tournament of game show hosts on the original version of *Card Sharks* in 1980 and was a celebrity guest on *Password Plus* several times between 1980 and 1982. He appeared on *Fantasy Island* as a game show host; he and another host played by Jan Murray were game show rivals who vied to win the woman they both loved by creating the ultimate game show, with life-or-death consequences. He once hosted a local New York City show on WNEW-TV (now WNYW), *Helluva Town*, and between game show stints in 1982–83 he returned to WNEW as host of a weekly local talk and lifestyles show called *Saturday Morning Live*.

Rayburn also hosted 1985's *Break the Bank* and *The Movie Masters*, an AMC cable game show that ran from 1989-90. Just before production was to begin on a new Rayburn-emceed *Match Game* revival in 1985, an *Entertainment Tonight* reporter publicly disclosed that Rayburn was 68, much older than many believed. Rayburn had trouble finding jobs after that, blaming the reporter for revealing his age and subjecting him to age discrimination.

Rayburn portrayed himself on a *Saturday Night Live* sketch in 1990, which featured Susan Lucci as her character from *All My Children*, Erica Kane. He returned as one of Kane's many previous husbands, to stop another marriage, officiated by his old *Choose Up Sides* co-star Don Pardo, with the host of a game show portrayed by Phil Hartman. He also continued to make appearances on talk shows throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, usually to discuss classic game shows, including appearances on *Vicki!* and *The Maury Povich Show* and *The Late Show with Ross Shafer* (Shafer hosted the 1990 *Match Game* revival). Around the same time, Rayburn also made an appearance on New York shock jock Howard Stern's late-night TV variety show as one of the stars of his *Hollywood Squares* parody, "Homeless Howiewood Squares", in which homeless people were supposedly the contestants.

Rayburn co-hosted with his wife and Peter Emmons the Drum Corps International finals of the DCI Championship for two years, which were telecast nationwide on PBS from Philadelphia's Franklin Field in 1976 and Denver's original Mile High Stadium in 1977.

One of his last TV appearances was a 1998 interview with *Access Hollywood* intended to coincide with the 25th anniversary of *Match Game '73*. Portions of the interview have been rebroadcast on Game Show Network, which in 2001 showed portions of another previously unaired interview during the first airing of its *Match Game Blankathon*.

Rayburn's final TV appearance was an interview for the A&E *Biography* episode profiling the life of his longtime boss, Mark Goodson. Though taped in late 1999, the episode itself did not air until 4 June 2000, several months after Rayburn had died.

## Personal Life

Rayburn was married to Helen Ticknor from 1940 until her death in October 1996. They had one child, a daughter, Lynne.

Though in poor health, Rayburn appeared in person to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. A month later, on 29 November 1999, he died of congestive heart failure at his daughter's home in Gloucester, Massachusetts at age 81. He was cremated and his ashes spread in the garden of his daughter's home.