The Peggy Cass Centennial

Peggy Cass (Mary Margaret Cass, 1924-1999) would be 100 years old today.

Cass was one of the thousand or so older celebrities you’d see on game shows and talk shows as a kid in the ’70s without having any conception about who they were or why they were there. I knew her almost entirely as one of the panelists on the game show To Tell The Truth, on which she seemed fun-loving and a little daffy (hence the photo I chose above, which illustrates her personality better than any straighter looking photo I could find on the internet does). She reminded a little of, say, Maureen Stapleton, or Shirley Booth. With those women, though, you could identify the source of their celebrity. You saw them in movies, and so forth. But for some reason, over all this time (a half century), I had the erroneous idea that she had been a big band singer. I’m sure I got this idea from hearing my mother say “I love her”, which was something she ordinarily said about the singers of her youth, such as Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, or Louis Prima. But I was way off base. Cass was indeed originally an actress before being consumed by panel shows. It’s just that her roles in film and television were relatively few.

Cass had played the role of Agnes Gooch, the funny secretary in the original 1956 Broadway production of Auntie Mame, as well as the 1958 film adaptation. (Almost all biographical articles claim that that is STILL what she is best known for, which is preposterous. I’ll eat my hat if 95% of those who remember her at all don’t remember her primarily for panel shows.) Other early claims to fame included a stint as a regular cast member on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar (1958-1962); a key role in the ensemble of The Thurber Carnival (1960) on Broadway; and a starring part on the short-lived sit-com The Hathaways (1961-62) opposite Jack Weston and a troupe of performing chimps. You can also see her in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).

Mostly, Cass was a creature of the theatre. She had studied at HB studios, appeared on Broadway over a dozen times from 1949 through 1985 (usually as a replacement for bigger stars in major hit plays), and was in lots of regional and touring productions of plays and musicals. As a television actress she guest starred on Lux Video Theatre, Campbell Summer Playhouse, Alfred HItchcock Presents, The Phil Silvers Show, Love American Style, The Love Boat, and lots of soap operas. She was on the very first episode of Major Dad, and was a regular on the short-lived Fox sit-com Women in Prison (1987-88). She also did variety programs like The Red Buttons Show, The Arthur Murray Party, and The Steve Allen Plymouth Show.

Cass’s presence in 1970 film Paddy with Milo O’Shea, and the Rankin-Bass holiday special The Leprechaun’s Christmas Gold (1981) belies something about her origins: she was Boston Irish, through and through. As a girl she had attended Cambridge Latin, and she acquired a reputation for having a “encyclopedic mind” and her popularity on game shows. You can see her in scores of episodes of Password, Match Game, What’s My Line?, Pyramid, and others. And over ONE THOUSAND episodes of To Tell the Truth between 1960 and 1978.

This too is a characteristic shot of Cass, laughing it up with fellow To Tell the Truth personalities Garry Moore (host), Kitty Carlisle, and Bill Cullen. I didn’t know it at the time, but in retrospect it’s easy to see what an old-school configuration this was. This line-up of people would have been fully in keeping with the sensibilities of television’s earliest days, and was no doubt perceived as pretty old-fashioned by the end of its run in the late 1970s. If that was so, how much more creaky must have it seemed when it was revived in 1990! Broadway stars! What is this, the Stone Age?

For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.