A MOUSE CLUBHOUSE EXCLUSIVE 2007 INTERVIEW
PETER MARSHALL
talks about his career, "The Hollywood Squares,"
and "Big Bands at Disneyland"

by Scott Wolf

The first time I met Peter Marshall I was doing cue cards on a game show he was hosting called "All Star Blitz." One thing I remember is that everything reminded him of a song and he'd often start singing a line from the song. A former big band singer himself, he was the perfect choice to host the Disney Channel series, "Big Bands at Disneyland" back in the day when you could go to Carnation Plaza Gardens and see the last of the original big bands.

If you want to know more about Peter's life as host of "The Hollywood Squares," be sure to get his book "Backstage with the Original Hollywood Square," but in this interview is the other half of the story.

Check out his website www.boysinger.com I'm thrilled to bring you this interview of entertainment history.

Scott Wolf: How did you get involved hosting "Big Bands at Disneyland" (picture right with Woody Herman)?

Peter Marshall: When the Disney Channel started, I can't remember the guy who started it but he was a lovely, lovely man. He asked Steve Allen and myself to do like twenty four hours of interviews. I interviewed everybody. We were at the studio and I remember a wonderful interview with Ralph Bellamy and people who had done Disney films.

SW: What were the interviews for? Were they on the air?

PM: Yes, they were on air. They were little sound bites between shows, like, "Here's another Disney star..." That kind of thing. A minute here, thirty seconds there. That kind of stuff. There were so many people.

So the Disney people called me and asked if I'd like to host "Big Bands at Disneyland" and I said, "Absolutely!" I would introduce the big band leaders, do an interview and then take them off. We had people like Count Basie's orchestra, Glenn Miller's, Woody Herman and I interviewed Woody, I interviewed Cab Calloway and Bob Crosby and Kay Starr was the girl singer. Ella Mae Morris was singing, and I interviewed Ray McKinley. The Jimmy Dorsey band and the Artie Shaw band and I interviewed Artie Shaw (pictured). Lionel Hampton - that was the best band of all by the way. Les Brown, the Tommy Dorsey band and Buddy Rich who was an old friend. So it was fun.

It was a great series to do. We'd do one a week. It started in June of '84 and it ran thru September.

SW: What I love is that it took place at Carnation Plaza Gardens and when I started working for Disney and they gave me a pass, I'd go all the time and you would see those big bands at Plaza Gardens. Not for a TV show or anything, but just for the Guests. I got to see Lionel Hampton and Les Brown and a lot of them, and your show captured that great feeling of seeing the bands there. Since it was the '80s and '90s I think it probably exposed some people to live big bands for the first time.

PM: Oh absolutely.

SW: Did you do short interviews or was there more that we didn't see? I know on the air they were only a few minutes.

PM: Yeah, they were just little interviews but it was a lot of fun.

SW: They really were great shows. They had a little mini biography of them and you really learned about the bands but got to hear them. You were the perfect host for that. Did you know a lot of those people before you worked with them?

PM: I did, yes. I did know quite a few. I worked with Cab Calloway years ago at the old Chi Chi in Palm Springs.Bob Crosby I'd run into and Kay Starr I know quite well. Woody Herman and Ray McKinley I didn't know but I knew most of the musicians except the young guys. Like Buddy Rich always had kids out of north Texas state that were eighteen, nineteen, twenty three year old kids so I didn't know any of them, but like with the Tommy Dorsey band I knew Buddy Morrow (who conducted the Tommy Dorsey orchestra by then), I knew Connie Haines - I knew all the singers and a lot of the musicians.

SW: And what's interesting with that show is that wasn't during the big band era. It was really the end of the original bands and band leaders. By that time a lot of them were in their eighties.

PM: I'm about the only guy left who sang with those bands that can talk about and when I do my concerts I talk about my days. It was a great era and I'm glad I was a small part of it.

SW: When did you first start singing?

PM: My first professional job was at the age of fifteen. I had been a pageboy at NBC when it was radio. I was the youngest page in the history of NBC. I was 6'3". I've been on my own since I was fourteen.

I was an usher at the Paramount, the world famous Paramount, I was fourteen. I'd go to school and I ushered at night or I'd page at night.

My sister Joanne Dru the actress (pictured right) and my mother, we were all living in New York. We had a girl live with us. Her name was Alice Walsh. She married Bob DeSouza and his father was Chairman of the Board of NBC. So a little nepotism there, that's how I got the job.

They taught you and it was wonderful. If you wanted to go into sound effects they had a sound effects school. I wanted to be a disc jockey at the time, or know about that anyway. So I learned how to run a combination board.

My sister was married to Dick Haymes at the time and he was very famous. He was singing with Harry James and I wanted to be a singer. I emulated Bob Eberly and Aames and Sinatra was around and of course I saw everybody at the Paramount, Peggy Lee when she was singing with Benny Goodman and Sinatra was with Tommy Dorsey and on his own.

I got a job at the Adams Theatre in Newark, New Jersey in the early '40s with a band out of Detroit by the name of Bob Chester, so that was my first professional job.

SW: Did you have any training in singing?

PM: No. You've got to remember I'm not an opera singer. I sing ballads. I'm a band singer. Fortunately for me you can hear me on a stage. So on Broadway I didn't have to belt like most people do. I have a frequency that kind of goes into the back.

So I used to make like fifty dollars a week, which in 1941 or '42 was a lot of money. In fact, I sent about thirty or thirty five a week to my mother.

So that's how I got started. It was my first professional job.

SW: Where did you go from there?

PM: Well, I had no education whatsoever, the war was on, when I was sixteen I decided I was going to go back to high school... I hadn't finished high school. My home was Huntington, West Virginia, so I went back to Huntington and finished high school. If you didn't have a high school diploma during the war they'd put you right in the infantry. So I went back, got a diploma, came out to California. I wasn't quite eighteen and I was drafted. I'm what they call a Cal Vet. I was drafted here and the first thing you know I was overseas. During the war I served in Italy.

After the war ended they were going to ship us all to Manila. We were going to invade Japan. I was walking down Villa Roma in Naples. A guy said, "Hey LaCock," which is my real name. It was John Raby, it so happened he had been a radio actor at NBC when I was a page. I think he was either a Captain or a Major, I was a lowly Private. He said, "What's happening?" and I said, "I'm with an artillery outfit. They're sending us to Manila." He said, "No, no, I'm head of I&E," which is Information & Education. He said, "I've got two job openings. Would you like to be a reporter or a disc jockey?" I said, "Well, I don't spell that well, but I sure know how to run a board." So they made me a Sergeant and I actually became Program Director of AEF Naples, American Expeditionary Force radio. I had a big 50,000 watt station that I ran, I was nineteen years old.

SW: What kinds of programming did you have?

PM: They used to have things called v-discs, it was for victory discs I guess and they would send us "The Jack Benny Show" and "Burns and Allen" and "People Are Funny" and all of those shows. So that's what we programmed.

I used to have a show... "It's eleven o'clock in Naples and time for 'Yours For the Asking.'" It was a disc jockey show heard all over Europe and I used to play Sinatra and Haymes and Helen O'Connell and Helen Forrest and Harry James, Benny Goodman, all the great bands and it was very popular all throughout Europe.

The war had ended by then but I didn't have enough points to go home.

SW: Points?

PM: For every month you served, for every combat month you would get certain points and when you accumulated enough points they would send you home.

So I had seen no combat thank goodness. I'd seen a little but you can't call it combat. A couple of bombings and things like that. I lost a lot of good friends. So from '44 to '46 I was in Italy.

SW: All the horrible times and yet it's when some of the greatest music came out.

PM: That's when music was music. From the '30s all through after the war, and after the war it sort of ended. People didn't want to go out anymore. Television came in. Television killed a lot of things. It killed motion pictures and especially nightclubs. Now, of course, they've since made a resurgence, but from the '30s and up until about '49, '50 or '51 and then the bands started dwindling down. But, that was a great era for me. I was very lucky I grew up in a great era. I saw a little of Vaudeville.

SW: You actually went to Vaudeville?

PM: Yeah, I saw Phil Silvers and Rags Ragland when they had a comedy team, Abbott and Costello, some great acts. A lot of those acts I got to work with later on at the Latin Quarter in New York. But, I came in at the right time. I saw a little Vaudeville, but you could walk down Broadway and there was the Paramount, the Capitol, the Strand, the Roxy, the Loew's State. There'd be Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, whomever, playing all the theatres and all the hotels, the Astor, the Commodore, the Edison, Pennsylvania. They all had bands so there were bands everywhere. It was all great music, they were playing the Gershwins, and (songwriters) Cole (Porter) and (Jerome)  Kern, and the young writers like Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy van Heusen, Harry Warren, all those great composers, they were playing all their music.

Then we had radio which was my favorite medium of all-time. With radio you could build your own sets and cast your own people. It just opened up the imagination so much. Radio was quite wonderful in those days. The funny thing is today I'm back on radio.

SW: With the Music of Your Life stations.

PM: Yeah, with Music of Your Life, I've been doing it for years.

SW: When did your military service end?

PM: When I got out of the army I went to Florida and I got a job in radio at Fort Pierce. I gave that up, went to Miami Beach and I had a radio show where I sang. It was called "Peter and the Wolf." My pianist was Wolf Catlett.

SW: And we're Peter and the Wolf right here again.

PM: That's right. That's true.

SW: But, what was your show?

PM: It was just fifteen minutes of me singing and talking. There were a lot of fifteen minute shows in those days on radio. Even Dinah Shore had a fifteen minute show, Dick Haymes, Sinatra, Jack Smith. They had fifteen minute shows.

So in Florida I met my first wife. I went to New York where I struggled. Went to California where I did a couple of things. I had a group called the Upstarts with some very talented people. Bill Norvis and Patty Thomas. On the old Bob Hope USO tours, the early days, when he had Frances Langford, there was a blond girl who danced. That was Patty Thomas.

I didn't want to continue with the Upstarts, I just wanted to be on my own. I was offered a show by Ross Hunter. My first show. It was a musical called "Tongue in Cheek" and I played the juvenile. Then I teamed up with a fellow named Tommy Noonan (pictured below). We put an act together and we were very successful for many years.

SW: It was a comedy act, right?

PM: Yeah, on the west coast we were as big as Dean (Martin) & Jerry (Lewis).

SW: What made you suddenly get into comedy?

PM: My sister was dating his brother and they married, it was the actor John Ireland and my sister Joanne Dru. So I met his brother who was Tommy Noonan, they had different names. I had a dental bill of about $67 that I wanted to get paid off, so I said, "Let's put something together." We opened at a place called the Zambawanga down at Slauson here in L.A. They picked us up and then Billy Gray heard about us. We were at the Billy Gray's Band Box which was very popular, and it was a very Jewish audience and we were these two goyum up there and they loved us. We weren't out of work for two years. We went from all over L.A. to Vegas. We opened the Desert Inn in 1950. We went east and worked the Latin Quarter, we worked the Martinique in New York. We were very hot, very big and we were awfully good.

SW: So you got your dental bill paid off?

PM: I got the dental bill paid off.

From Tommy Noonan, we broke up because he was signed at Fox. We were supposed to do "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." We were signed as a team opposite Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Darryl Zannuck was in New York and caught a kid by the name of Elliot Reed in a show and signed him, unbeknownst to him that they had signed us as a team. So they paid me off and Tommy did "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." He played Gus, and they loved him so much they signed him for a contract. So he really couldn't go on the road.

So I teamed up with Tommy Farrell (pictured right). Glenda Farrell was a very famous star at one time at Warners. Her son was Tommy Farrell. We were together for about four years.

Then Monte Proser, a wonderful producer who opened the Copacabana, he started it, he opened the Tropicana in Vegas. He said, "If you and Tommy get back together, I'll give you a job for six months to a year." So we got back together and we stayed together for about two years, then I was offered a job to to go to London with Chita Rivera to do "Bye Bye Birdie," so I said, "Tommy, I don't want to do this anymore." He understood and that started me on my own.

After that I went to Vegas, I did more shows in Vegas, "High Button Shoes," "Anything Goes," "Bye Bye Birdie" in Vegas with the New York company, and "Panama Hattie." Then I was signed to go to New York with Julie Harris to do "Skyscraper." I was her leading man, and Charles Nelson Reilly was in it. The day after I finished it I came home and they offered me a job called "The Hollywood Squares." I thought it was a thirteen week job and it turned into sixteen years.

SW: I know you did a Kelloggs commercial. Didn't that help you get the job?

PM: The Kelloggs commercials, I did thirty five of them. That was like 1963 and '64. A wife of one of the producer's of "Squares" saw the Kelloggs commercial and said, "That's the guy you should look at. He's part of a comedy team," and they called me. Timing is everything in the business. "Skyscraper" closed a week earlier than we should have in New York. Had that run another week they would have gotten somebody else. They were talking to Dan Rowan. Two days after I arrived home a week early I got the call. Had that not happened I never would have gotten "Squares." You take a left instead of a right and your life changes. It's amazing.

SW: Had you ever done a game show?

PM: Well, actually, I did a show called "Stimulus" for a friend of mine. I only did about seven or eight shows for a local channel. Just for fun. But, I really knew nothing about game shows, but they needed someone who had worked with comics and I'd been a straight man for all those years.

SW: That's true. That was really your job on "Hollywood Squares" was being a straight man to everybody else.

PM: That's exactly what my job was. Then I would work Vegas while I was doing "Squares," I'd work Vegas about twenty six weeks a year.

SW: Doing concerts?

PM: I did an act. I opened for everybody. I opened for Cosby and for Jerry Lewis and the Mills Brothers, Joan Rivers... Then I had the "Peter Marshall Variety Show" for two years. It was ninety minutes every Sunday night.

SW: Do you consider yourself a singer or a game show host?

PM: Oh yeah, I'm a singer. If somebody asked, "What do you do for a living?" I sing. That's what I do. I did four concerts this month.

SW: But "Squares" was enjoyable for you?

PM: Oh, I loved doing "Squares." Oh gosh yeah. It was the most fun. I didn't have to rehearse, I didn't have to learn anything. I just walked in, read questions and laughed and they paid me a ton of money. It was great.

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