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The Early Days of What's My Line?  The early set had to be the cheapest in television. An easel with white flipover art paper for the contestant sign-ins looked as if it was hung on the wall with nothing more than a gigantic clothespin. John Daly's flip cards with the dollar figures were so clumsily assembled, the righthand ring drooped. The show had no theme music. The audience was at times uncertain when to applaud and how to react. Daly smoked so much on camera, the fog rivaled that of Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show set years later. Having contestants do a walkdown to be physically examined and actually perform requests by the panel was downright silly. Poet Louis Untermeyer would have been a target of sexist charges today if he asked a female contestant to do the equivalent of a Rockette kick, as he did on one of the earliest shows. The truth is: What's My Line?, one of the great traditions of American network television for nearly two full decades, almost did not survive past the third show. One of the richest sources of information about the show was in executive producer Gil Fates' 1978 book on the show. Yet, one can find an equally interesting treasure trove in a chapter by director Franklin Heller in Max Wilk's book "The Golden Age of Television." Heller never directly takes credit for saving What's My Line?; he predominantly outlines the disaster which brewed in the first two episodes and how it was fixed in the third week. When What's My Line? premiered Feb. 2, 1950, it was designed as a harmless, quiet Thursday night piece of fluff which rotated with the variety program The Show Goes On starring Robert Q. Lewis. The choice of John Charles Daly as host was not as controversial as it would have been 15 years later. Daly brought credibility to the guessing game which may have been missing with a conventional entertainment personality as emcee. He was hired by Edward R. Murrow as a CBS News correspondent during the outbreak of tensions in Europe in 1939. Barely in his late twenties, Daly brought the nation some of the key war bulletins leading to the end of the conflict in 1945. He anchored CBS Radio's The World Today, one of the network's two key daily newscasts of record, in the mid-1940s. As the television era began, Daly was considered to be a prime candidate to make the transition to the video medium. While authoritative vocally, Daly had a personality and a sense of humor which was missing from some of the older, stoic members of "Murrow's Boys." Some consideration was given to offering Daly the job as the first television anchor for CBS News. In fact, Daly was inclined to accept it in 1948 until he discovered the salary was less than he would have been making from commercial fees for his radio newscasts. The job went, instead, to Douglas Edwards. Murrow was not at all crazy about his journalists moonlighting on entertainment programs. He felt intensely to cross the line from news into popular television was a direct compromise of credibility. Yet, he found himself in a dilemma. News, in broadcasting's earliest era, was crafted to bring prestige and acclaim to networks. Journalism was light years away from being considered a profit center. The only way Murrow's staff could make any serious keeping money was to take jobs on the entertainment side of the network. A strict set of guidelines were established to minimize a weakening of credibility. Daly and any other CBS News correspondent was never to be referred to as a "host" or "emcee." That was fine for Bert Parks or Bud Collyer. Daly was always to be introduced as the "panel moderator" of What's My Line?. The same went for Edwards when he presided over the far sillier Masquerade Party for a summer and for Walter Cronkite when he took the helm of It's News to Me in 1955. No one from CBS News was to engage in any product endorsements. Nor were any personnel from CBS News to be involved in any physical stunts or staged comedy sequences. Murrow, himself, broke down and crossed the barrier when he brought Person to Person, largely a celebrity interviewfest, as a Friday night mainstay to CBS in 1952. Ironically, the week before What's My Line? debuted, Daly was featured in the same Thursday at 8 time slot----as an actor. For 17 episodes, he played newspaper editor Walter Burns in the live half-hour drama The Front Page. The series was based on a popular play focusing on the interactions between Burns and his star reporter Hildy Johnson. Daly was allowed to accept the role because of his years as a journalist. The series finale gave way to Line the next week. As Wilk wrote, the first episode was "to be charitable, a mess. If there were mistakes to be made, they were made that night, up to and including a panel of 'experts' that included two gentlemen who were both named Hoffman (psychiatrist Richard Hoffman and former New Jersey Gov. Harold Hoffman)." New York Journal-American columnist Dorothy Kilgallen would be the only long-term survivor from the premiere. Untermeyer made it through a little more than a year but departed under darker circumstances. As seen a week ago on GSN, the opener featured a cornucopia of ineptitude, production-wise. Consistently errant camera shots were a rule of the evening. At times, the tops of the panelists' heads were chopped off onscreen. A floating boom microphone was frequently in the picture and on more than three occasions, questions were missed because of late mike pickups. At times, swish-pans to move from one end of the panel to the other were dizzying. The second show was equally disastrous. If anything, camera movement was even more unpredictable. CBS liked the basic mechanics of the game and the feedback was strong on the celebrity mystery guest element. The production was another story. The first two episodes aired as sustaining (unsponsored) broadcasts. The network issued an ultimatum: a potential sponsor would be watching the third show. Either get the production issues corrected or What's My Line? would be history if the sponsor did not take the bait. Enter Heller, one of television's pioneering directors. He told Wilk one of the big problems with Line was too much camera movement and lens changing. "I figured once I could get those cameramen and their flowered shirts controlled and fairly immobile, we might be able to let this show emerge." He did something almost no one at CBS had considered. Heller drew up a floor plan for the cameras and crafted a production design that called for the cameras to remain stationary. Further, he redesigned the set to place Daly and the contestant stage right and the panelists stage left to minimize awkward entrances and exits from the contestants. Heller demanded and received one other concession from CBS: an hour of rehearsal time in the Maxine Elliott Theater beginning at 6:45 before the 8 p.m. live telecast. Working with mock panelists and contestants, the camera operators developed a better feel for the flow of the production. At the end of the broadcast, Dr. Jules Monteneier, inventor of squeeze bottle deodorant Stopette, called CBS. "I don't know what you did to it," he said, according to Heller, "but I'll buy it." For the next eight years, either as the sole or alternating sponsor, Stopette was the advertising face of What's My Line?. However, the tradition of Sunday night at 10:30 was still eight months away from its launching pad.  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