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There was never anything on TV quite like I've Got a Secret (CBS, 1952-1967). A strange but delightful hybrid of What's My Line? and Ripley's Believe It or Not, it had a simple premise. A guest emerges from the backstage curtains, whispers a secret into the ear of host Garry Moore, and a panel of semi-celebrities tries to guess the secret by asking a series of yes-or-no questions. If they fail, the guest wins eighty bucks and a carton of Winstons.

That's it. But anything could happen on I've Got a Secret, and for most of the show's run it happened live. The guests could turn out to be the Wright Brothers, or the guy who prepared Albert Einstein's tax returns, or a teenager with ten full-grown snakes concealed in his clothes.

There was often a top star on the show, who would appear toward the end of the episode to take part in some sort of stunt (like Johnny Carson shooting an apple off Garry Moore's head from across the stage with a bow and arrow). Those bits are pretty good, but the heart of the show is the parade of ordinary people from middle America with something extraordinary to share.

Occasionally, these guests are familiar enough to us in Nitrateville, if obscure to the studio audience. One middle-aged woman ("I was Rudolph Valentino's leading lady") turned out to be a still-recognizable Lila Lee. I was surprised and immediately suspicious to see a career Navy man announce his own secret: "I was in the 'Our Gang' films." He looked so familiar, but I couldn't quite place him. He turned out to be telling the truth, sort of: it was Frank Coghlan Jr., who'd played a small part in Giants vs. Yanks back in 1923 before having a more impressive run as Pathe's resident child star (which he didn't bother to mention).

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But as I said, it's the ordinary folks who really make the show. They remind me of the people Uncle Fletcher would talk about on radio's Vic and Sade... only here, they're real!

Among them:

"During my wedding ceremony, my husband fainted, the best man fainted, and my maid-of-honor fainted" (June 4, 1958)

"Our grandfather was a soldier in the Revolutionary War" (April 26, 1961)

"I've been struck by lightning eight times" (December 26, 1956)

"I can drive a golf ball through a 600-page phone book" (March 11, 1959)

"I'm a screamer: I've screamed in 83 movies" (November 28, 1966)

"My Social Security number is 001-01-0001" (December 18, 1957)

"We're going to eat the last piece of our wedding cake tonight. It's 25 years old" (January 6, 1960)

"I hit a foul ball into the stands this season, and it hit my mother" (September 30, 1963)

My own favorite? John John, Patrick Patrick, and Thomas Thomas: "We live in Walla Walla" (December 11, 1957)

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Happily, good-looking kinescopes exist for most of the show's run, though quite a few episodes from the early 1950s were either never filmed at all or the kinnies are lost. Like its sister shows from the Goodson-Todman stable, I've Got a Secret has been licensed to the Game Show Network. But they're seldom broadcast anymore, since that channel now prefers to run its own original programming (when it isn't airing infomercials or excruciating marathons of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?). Alpha Video offers a DVD with a couple of episodes that somehow escaped copyright renewal, but otherwise a hopeful viewer's only options are YouTube clips and iOffer.

It's a shame this show isn't more familiar today. Where else are you gonna see Louis Armstrong introduce the guy who'd given him trumpet lessons 53 years earlier?

The show aired constantly as I grew up and I thought I was very familiar with it but I don't recall ever seeing the 'stunt portion' of the show?
Was that segment discontinued at one point during it's run?

The show aired constantly as I grew up and I thought I was very familiar with it but I don't recall ever seeing the 'stunt portion' of the show?
Was that segment discontinued at one point during it's run?

No, but "stunt" might not be the best word for it. Typical segments would be Buster Keaton judging the panelists in a pie-eating contest, or Alan King timing the panelists to see whether the men or the ladies could pack the trunk of a Studebaker with camping equipment the fastest.

Sometimes the celebrity segment was disguised as an "I've got a secret" segment: Gypsy Rose Lee's secret turns out to be that her dress weighs 28 pounds (she ultimately shucks it off and the dress is weighed on stage to prove it). A curiously squirmy David Niven reveals that he's been sitting on a block of ice throughout the panel's questioning. Paul Newman announces that panelist Henry Morgan had bought a hot dog at the World Series game that day from a hot dog vendor who was... Paul Newman in disguise.

The show aired every night on the game show network after What's My Line until about 2 years ago. I was more of a What's My Line fan. I recorded it every night. It's like a history time capsule because many times the guest would be an astronaut or some big news maker. They occasionally would talk about current events and other stuff like in the early 60s they had the nanny for Caroline and John-John Kennedy. As a movie fan, the list stars that went through there as mystery guests are a who's who. Everyone from Buster Keaton to Charleton Heston. And it's kind of sad when they talk about their newest film playing at one of the "big Broadway theaters". I wish they would bring it back.

As a kid of 10 or so, I didn't know what "misanthropy" meant, but I always looked forward to panelist Henry Morgan. Browsing YouTube recently, I found appearances by a couple of mid-century iconic or near-iconic musical notables: electronic pioneers Gershon Kingsley and Jean-Jacques Perrey (of The In Sound from Way Out!) and, of all people, John Cage. Unfortunately, the latter's secret was not "I wrote a piece of music consisting of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence." His performance of "Water Walk," scored for, among other things, bathtub, rubber duck, pressure cooker, prepared piano and five radios was minus the sound of the latter due to a union jurisdictional dispute over which had the right to plug them in.

Some of those "secrets" were a bit suspect. On one show, the guest's secret was that he was a magician. Betsy Palmer "volunteered" to be his assistant, then proceeded to perform the old Robert Houdin "broom trick"--a levitation illusion that can only be peformed if the assistant is wearing a heavy truss under her dress (Did Betsy always wear one of these to the show, just in case?)
On an earlier show, Monty Woolley secret was that he slept with his beard outside the covers. When a panelist asked him if this was true, he is said to have replied, "Of course not. Some damned idiot named Allan Sherman wrote that line for me!"

Gloria Swanson's "secret" on the 24 August 1960 program was that she was going to show silent film clips and the panel would have to ad-lib dialogue. I haven't seen it but the show was discussed on AMS when it was re-run almost 10 years ago. The film clips came from Are You Fit to Marry? (aka The Black Stork), a Wharton film from 1917, and Times Square, a Gotham-Lumas production from 1929 (probably one of the studio's last).

Much more information, including a not-yet-complete episode log, is available at
http://ivegotasecretonline.com/

-HA

Count me in as a huge fan of both "I've Got a Secret" and "What's My Line." One of my favorite IGAS episodes featured a man in his nineties. His secret was that he was in the audience when Abraham Lincoln was shot! (He was only five years old at the time.) He was the last living witness.

I remember that John Cage piece and how the audience giggled through it, which made me feel embarrassed for him. What more inappropriate place could there be to present avant-garde music than a TV game show? What were they thinking? Another misfire was a guest whose secret was that he claimed to be able to identify what region of the U.S.A. anyone was from just by listening to them speak for a few moments. When they tested him on a few different people, he guessed wrong every time!

Garry Moore, the host of IGAS, had a reputation as one of the nicest, warmest and kindest people on television. He was such a wonderful host, good-humored, genial and sincere. When Steve Allen took over as host, the show was never the same for me.

"What's My Line" was a serious addiction of mine when it used to play on GSN. It wasn't just a game, it was like being invited to a sophisticated New York cocktail party and mingling with the celebrities. Everyone was dressed to the nines, and the banter between host John Charles Daly and the panelists was more fun than the game itself. Daly and Bennett Cerf, the owner of Random House, loved to rib each other. Dorothy Kilgallen, the acid-tongued newspaper gossip columnist, was extremely bright and took the game with deadly seriousness. Actress Arlene Francis exuded glamour and warmth but was also extremely witty. I miss WML a lot!