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 Paul Petersen will now and forever be Jeff Stone to millions of babyboomers who watched him grow up before their eyes from 1958-66 as the son of Dr. Alex and Donna Stone on The Donna Reed Show. For others with a fond memory of the Cary Grant-Sophia Loren movie "Houseboat," they remember him singing that catchy "Bing, Bang, Bong" while riding in a convertible.
TV's only woman quiz show millionaire Nancy Christy admits to having a mad crush on Petersen when she was younger and Christy says she can still sing all the words to Petersen's early hit, "She Can't Find Her Key."
What game show fans of the 1960s remember: Petersen was the second-youngest game show host in history when he took over as emcee of Dream Girl of '67 at the age of 22. Only Jack Linkletter, 20 when he was tapped for NBC's nighttime Haggis Baggis in 1958, was younger.
Petersen crowned the ultimate winner, Kathy Austin of Virginia Beach, Va., on the Friday between Christmas and New Year's in 1967.
In the first of a four-part interview with TVgameshows.net, Petersen reflects on what led to his transition from teen acting/singing idol to emcee.
Some of the pictures are from Paul's own website:
paulpetersen.com.
 TVGS: Paul, so identified are you with The Donna Reed Show that many people forget you were a game show host, even if it was the beauty contest format transferred into a daily game on ABC.
PAUL: It is just one of the most interesting genres in television. It's persistent, like the family sitcom. It seems always to be there and I think it always will be.
TVGS: Dream Girl of '67 had an interesting history. Beauty contests had been popular dating back to the first Miss America Pageant on TV in 1954 but we'd never had one as a daily format. Dream Girl had already had two hosts and Bob Barker had even been brought in to substitute for a week. This was only about nine months after The Donna Reed Show had ended. How did you come into the picture?
 PAUL: It was very funny. Chuck Barris called my then manager and started asking if I would be interested. Chuck had a contract dispute with the first host (Dick Stewart) and it was a pretty serious one. (Ed. Note: Wink Martindale had taken over as host of the show from Stewart but was shifting over to host Barris's How's Your Mother-in-Law?) What was interesting was my negotiations. It took place in the midst of what appeared was going to be a strike.
TVGS: That was the AFTRA strike that shut down the entire industry, including the game shows, for a month in '67.
PAUL: That's the one. I was under contract at the same time to Universal. I said, "Look, I'm not an idiot. I have this Universal contract which I'm gonna keep. You've got me for a lot of money and if there's a strike, I could be hanging out to dry." It ended up with an arbitration which I eventually won because AFTRA did walk out and we had to suspend production.
TVGS: Beauty contests had always been a self-contained, one-night thing but this had to be different doing this as an elimination tournament. Of course, today, if producers were to redo this show, they'd probably take the contestants off to the side and do interviews with them about how they couldn't stand some of the other girls.
 PAUL: (Laughs) Exactly! I could easily see that happening. Let's get the catfights going! (Laughs again) Actually, it was different because we were not on a major lot, we were off in this theatre. I always had this kind of gut sensitivity towards beauty contestants. It reminded me of models and Miss America things. I was always keenly sensitive to these contestants. It bothered me that they were always stereotyped as being on that platform for one thing. I'm sure that may have been the case for a few of them but most of these were very intelligent girls and they understood we were producing a television show.
TVGS: Until the Nickelodeon shows came along in the late '80s and early '90s, you were the second-youngest to ever do a game show, at 22. You'd been somewhat of an emcee, I'm sure, when you did concert tours with your music but what prepared you to be a game show host?
PAUL: I'm not sure that I was prepared. I will say what helped is I don't mind being a straight man, being what today we call a traffic cop, moving things along. I knew I could do that. But it takes a while to get your sea legs because it is a more complicated procedure in that format than people realize. I tell people the best I have ever seen at being an emcee---even though it's not in the game show genre---is Oprah Winfrey. She is phenomenal. As a guest, to watch her pick up the time cues, listen to her audience, listen to her guests, look down at the prepared questions and make things seem coherent is amazing.
TVGS: So, for you, it was more of a case of "why not?"
PAUL: I'd say that's right. I will tell you, fearlessness plays a very big role. You know how human beings are. Some people are willing to try anything and everything and others are shy and tend to back away. I've always been the kind of person who has never been afraid to try something and that helped.
TVGS: The difference, from the vantage point of a viewer who had been accustomed to the two-hour pageants in prime time, was Dream Girl always appeared to be packing a lot of content into a half-hour, which was tough, perhaps even rushing at times.
PAUL: It really did feel like that at times. It was a show I think that didn't ever get its legs. There were a whole lot of references of it being the beauty version of Queen for a Day. There were all sorts of slams on the show which, frankly, I understand. It wasn't about talent at all, you didn't have time.
TVGS: That's the thing: you had no time for a girl to sing or play the piano or demonstrate more of who she was as a person.
 PAUL: That was difficult. You had to ask yourself what are these contestants bringing to the table. You did short interviews with them to try to give the audience something to relate to them as people. That is what I think we see in today's versions with a show like American Idol. We see that people over time really begin to invest in the contestants. They get involved in their life history.
TVGS: Since you were coming in as the third emcee, this had to be especially tough because you didn't have the benefit of being involved in the show from its development stage. How much rehearsal time did you have before you began taping?
PAUL: You never have enough prep time. That part of me is constant to the actor's lament. There's just never enough time. We did lots of runthroughs, we had lots of production staff meetings. I was trying to gear myself up. Yet, nothing replaces the experience of getting on the front lines. Even with veteran hosts who have done various variations of game shows, that's the case.
TVGS: This was also different from what you had done for the previous eight years and in your TV and film work before that----working in front of a live audience.
 PAUL: That's part of the key because you need that feedback; people need to know what to deal with. If you watch a long-running show, The Price Is Right or Wheel of Fortune, it's amazing how the contestants themselves are ready to go and the audience lets you know how they're reacting to what's happening. That's why Mr. Barker is the master he is. He knows how to react to every possible situation and if you watch him, he's always in tune with how the audience is responding.
TVGS: Paul, we talked about stereotypes and people have frequently suspected a lot of backbiting goes on between pageant contestants. Did that ever surface between the contestants on Dream Girl?
 PAUL: No, it never did. In fact, I thought the contestants were very generous with each other. They had sharp eye appeal and you could see that very sharp appraising glance. In that era, there was a certain camaraderie because all of these gals were thrust into the same circumstance. As we subsequently learned in things like Miss America, there is a notion that they're not being seen for the whole person. That was evident at times and I was sensitive to that.
In Part 2, Paul Petersen discusses the pace of taping a daily beauty contest format, the surprising lack of pitfalls in the production and whether he had any inkling of Chuck Barris's fertile imagination of being a CIA agent.
Paul Petersen, Part 2
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