“When It Was Magic Time in New Jersey” was originally published in the September 15, 1962 issue of Vogue.
Blessed with the gift for banter of a Calvin Coolidge and the conviviality of an Increase Mather, I am not what you would call a Television Natural. Although I once met a man on a plane who asked me what my line was, the man was not John Daly; none of my secrets would interest Garry Moore. And as for The Price Is Right, I not only have no idea what a fully-equipped Thunderbird costs, no idea what a fully-equipped pine-paneled snack bar costs, but in fact have some difficulty remembering, from paycheck to paycheck, what I cost.
Nonetheless, I once had my hour, however inadvertent, as a Television Personality: it wasn't "21" and it wasn't "64," but there I was, seen by the cognoscenti (all those acquaintances who could be alerted by telephone) for three consecutive nights on WNTA-TV, the New York channel which first gave the world not only me but Open End and Play of the Week.
As television careers go, mine began in relative ignorance (it ended, as things worked out, in much the same way) with a chance remark at a party that I was good at crossword puzzles. Since my bolt is in truth shot once I have hit upon the three-letter word meaning Japanese Sash, this was at best an overstatement of the facts, but it had been simply a case of wanting to seem agreeable: someone had said he liked to work crossword puzzles; did I?
Thirteen hours later, when I was called to account by an appeal to stand by as a contestant on what my informant called "some crossword show in Newark," I felt somewhat less agreeable. Uncomfortably, I could recall insisting, with a silvery laugh, that I was a perfect fiend for crossword puzzles, couldn't get enough of crossword puzzles; could remember suggesting in fact that we hunt up the crossword in that morning's New York Times.
At any rate, I assured myself that whatever Some Crossword Show In Newark involved, it could not be as disastrous as the time I had so convinced someone of my craze for dancing that he entered me in a dance contest at Small's Paradise in Harlem; nor could it be as bad as the morning I found myself, suffering from both vertigo and the recollection that I had only a week before declared my mania for skiing, on the chair lift at Squaw Valley.
At six-thirty that afternoon, I walked into a darkened Newark studio where Some Crossword Show was to begin at seven. (I appeared on the program two nights before I was certain of its name, Double Cross, partly because it seemed too late in the game to ask its name and partly because the pretty little girl who ran things referred to it as "Magic Time." I was pretty much in the dark as to whether "Magic Time" was some bit of televisiana in current usage among the In-group or simply the name of the program; her vox angelica delivery suggested the first hypothesis, but the sheer frequency of delivery lent considerable credence to the latter.)
I had been accompanied to Newark that night by the very acquaintance toward whom my modest claim had been directed; we were to be, he announced with misguided confidence, partners. Not long after he had remarked cheerfully that with any luck we would get our chance tonight and not long after I had stumbled on a cable, run my stocking, and burst into tears while attempting to reply in kind, we were apprehended by a young woman in a dirndl and flat-heeled shoes whose function in the operation never did become clear; my first thought was that she was scheduled to do her impression of a field-hockey captain from Wellesley, but we were never to know because she never appeared again. Assuring us that "the others" (Wellesley girls? Crossword fiends?) would arrive "toute suite, angels," she loped off, pausing only to add heartily: "You'll recognize Allyn Edwards, natch."
She was wrong there, but before long a man showed up who so clearly assumed that he had been recognized that I assumed he was Allyn Edwards, whoever Allyn Edwards was. (He was, in fact, the quizmaster.) For several minutes the three of us exchanged portentous simpers, and after five minutes we even exchanged a few words: I had an ashtray, and he wanted it.
Next in was the pretty little girl who wanted to know if we were ready for Magic Time. She wanted to be called "Mary Ann," and there was an interlude of deceptive merriment before she produced a clipboard so large that it might have held all the cues for fifty-two weeks of the Como show, frowned prettily, and asked me, in so many words, what made me interesting. "You know," she prompted. "Outside-interest-wise."
It was soon clear that nothing did, Mary-Ann-wise. Although she brightened when my partner said he had gone to Harvard ("We once had another very bright contestant; not only was he a graduate of Harvard," and here she paused meaningfully, "but he also worked for BBDO."), I could offer no such gimmick. With the delicate deliberation of a huntress hot on the track of the biggest game of all, Mary Ann asked then if the two of us were "friends." When we denied this canard, she abandoned her clipboard in perceptible disgust.
It was about this time when I first asked Mary Ann how to play the game. (So far were we from having the answers that we did not even have the rules.)
"It couldn't be simpler," she said suspiciously. "There's nothing to it."
My partner assured her that we would doubtless catch on, but would, nonetheless, appreciate some sketchy information.
Mary Ann glanced furtively at her watch and began edging toward the set. "You arrived late, you know." "The game," I repeated. "What is it."
"You've certainly watched it," she said, with an air of settling the question for once and all. Although we denied it, there was no convincing Mary Ann, who was by then conveying the distinct impression that she would, if pressed further, take the Fifth. She handed me a folding chair, put one finger to her lips (it was Magic Time), and we spent the next fifteen minutes watching the Champions (an affable army sergeant and a radio and television performer, equally affable, named John Reed King) down the Challengers, on grounds which eluded me. I decided that it had perhaps been an affability contest.
It was fortunate that my partner employed those fifteen minutes more constructively, because before you could have said Here's-Barbara-Britton-for-Revlon (unhappily for Double Cross, you couldn't have), there we were, introduced to Greater New York as a couple of advertising copywriters, a biographical note which was in my case inaccurate. Before I could stall for time by correcting it, however, we had plunged on into the game, whatever the game was. Representing, spuriously or no, the great wordplay tradition of Bruce Barton and Raymond Rubicam, I glanced at the monitor, watched myself smirk fatuously, and failed to identify a five-letter word meaning Huckster.
Nonetheless, the half-hour ended in a dead heat. Promising to appear the next night, we learned that the fun had just begun: part of the package was a dinner for the contestants at the Essex House in Newark.
The New York Times once called WNTA-TV a "three-ring circus." I don't know about that, but this was a three-ring dinner. At the head of the table, Mary Ann mourned For Love or Money, a network quiz which had at one time carried a peculiar merry sadism out across America: For Love or Money contestants were offered a choice between merchandise in the hand and an undisclosed amount of money in the bush, and the entertainment lay in watching their greed trip them up. For Love or Money was a table topic of greater interest than you might think, because John Reed King, one of the evening's Champions, had been its master of ceremonies. Mary Ann twinkled mischievously as she described Mr. King's way of telling contestants that they had passed up the combination-refrigerator-freezer-and-spin-drier for three cents cash. Unfortunately both for Mr. King and for Mary Ann, who had worked on the show, CBS dropped For Love or Money late one Friday afternoon while Mary Ann was alone in the office working (quite superfluously, as the situation developed) on the Monday show. Mary Ann became gamer and gamer during this recital: That's Show Biz, as I feel certain she would have been the first to say had not the affable sergeant beaten her to it.
It seemed that the sergeant was in show business himself, kind of, in a manner of speaking; he made training films for the Strategic Air Command. Although he was, every time I turned his way, panning in over Great Falls, Montana, the sergeant was no man to drop all his eggs over Great Falls. He had recently completed, he told me, a novella. "I mean a short novel," he explained. "A fictional work."
Apparently on a theory that we might all improve our dispositions at dinner and emerge, at Magic Time, as veritable Tic-Tac-Dough contestants, we were asked to dinner, the next night, before the program. We had that night a new pair of nonplussed standbys, both of whom worked for the same paper company and neither of whom could persuade anyone to explain the rules. Vis-à-vis their bewilderment, the sergeant's geniality, and Mary Ann's determination, even I was touched by an uneasy camaraderie.
Although the central principle of the game still eluded me, I was pronounced a Champion that night, apparently because my partner rang a bell and announced that the double answer to what was called "the double cross clue," both make good catches, could be nothing but Yogi Berra and June Bride. How he arrived at this answer gnaws at my imagination still, but Mary Ann and I both counted him a credit to Harvard. Wondering expansively if together we might not crack prime network time, I managed to get off, ad lib, a mild witticism: "Good for you, Bob," I said, and Mr. Edwards smiled approvingly. I parlayed that coup by smiling proudly at what I thought was the studio audience, and my elation was dampened not at all by the discovery that the scattered applause at our success had originated in a drove of duck-tailed gnomes snapping their fingers and dripping pizza around the set, hangers-on from the preceding program, Hy Lit's Teenage Dance Party.
Our moment of glory was, however, short-lived: on the following night those paper salesmen proved astute enough to figure out that the new double cross clue, ways to go, meant Airship and Dogsled. When I confided that I had been thinking more along the lines of High Road and Low Road, my partner comforted me by declaring that I had an extremely poetic turn of mind and could scarcely have been expected to notice that High Road and Low Road did not have exactly the same number of letters as there were spaces.
Combined, our winnings for the three nights totalled two pen-and-pencil sets, two bottles of "L'Aimant" Eau de Cologne, and two books by Bergen Evans; prizes which, in retrospect, more or less guaranteed that the fix had not been in. Although Mr. Edwards seemed to think that we had won two transistor radios as well, Mary Ann motioned no. I began to think that Mr. Edwards understood the rules about as well as I did, or possibly that Mary Ann made them up as the game progressed. There was about the entire program, as far as that went, something hauntingly suggestive of Tonight We Improvise.
Double Cross did gain me the interest and concern of all my friends, if not of the Internal Revenue. I received midnight calls from five acquaintances, three of whom wanted me to know that I could get better prizes and 3 ¼% besides by depositing $25 in the New York Savings Bank. (I countered with the fact that the New York Savings Bank would not transport me to and from Newark in a Carey Cadillac, as Double Cross would and did. As one of them conceded, "Sweetie, you got interests in Newark, this is strictly the deal.")
A sixth friend, after trying three bars, all tuned in on Men of Annapolis, caught my act right in the NTA offices in the Coliseum Building. He was first stopped at the door by a man (reportedly wearing a George Raft suit and a J. Press tie) who said they didn't have any television sets at NTA. Pressed, he allowed finally that NTA did, after all, have a set; had, in fact, two sets, and before long my friend was helping me on from a cobbler's bench arranged tastefully in front of one of them. When his disgust with my performance became audible, he was brought up short by the gentleman in the George Raft suit, who banged the cobbler's bench, delighted. "We hooked you," he crooned. "When you start talkin' back to the set, sweetheart, we got you hooked."
Nonetheless, my fan had the Double Cross monkey off his back before he was even downstairs, and can offer no more leads than I can as to what became of Double Cross. All America knows what happened to the fast guns: to the boys who shot it out way out there where the ratings began, to the women who stood beside them. But what of Mr. Edwards? What of Mary Ann? Whither the magic that was in Newark?