MARK GOODSON

Active in the television industry from its earliest days, Mark Goodson was a highly successful producer whose game shows included What’s My Line?, To Tell the Truth, and Family Feud. In this interview, Goodson recalls his experience in the industry in the early 1950s at the height of the McCarthy period.

I’m not sure when it began, but I believe it was early 1950. At that point I had no connection with the blacklisting that was going on, although I heard about it in the motion picture business and heard rumors about things that had happened on other shows, like The Aldrich Family. …

Soon afterwards, CBS installed a clearance division. There wasn’t any discussion. We would just get the word — ‘drop that person’ — and that was supposed to be it. Whenever I booked a guest or a panelist on What’s My Line? or I’ve Got a Secret, one of our assistants would phone up and say, “We’re going to use so-and-so.” We’d either get the okay, or they’d call back and say, “Not clear,” or “Sorry, we can’t use them.” … You were never supposed to tell the person what it was about; you’d just unbook them. They never admitted there was a blacklist. It just wasn’t done. …

Anna Lee was an English actress on a later show of ours called It’s News to Me. The sponsor was Sanka Coffee, a product of General Foods. The advertising agency was Young & Rubicam. One day, I received a call telling me we had to drop one of our panelists, Anna Lee, immediately. They said she was a radical, that she wrote a column for the Daily Worker. They couldn’t allow that kind of stuff on the air. They claimed they were getting all kinds of mail. It seemed incongruous to me that this little English girl, someone who seemed very conservative, would be writing for a Communist newspaper. It just didn’t sound right.

I took her out to lunch. After a little social conversation, I asked her about her politics. She told me that she wasn’t political, except she voted Conservative in England. Her husband was a Republican from Texas.

I went to the agency and said, “You guys are really off your rocker. Anna Lee is nothing close to a liberal.” They told me, “Oh, you’re right. We checked on that. It’s a different Anna Lee who writes for the Daily Worker.” I remember being relieved and saying, “Well, that’s good. You just made a mistake. Now we can forget this.” But that wasn’t the case. They told me, “We’ve still got to get rid of her, because the illusion is just as good as the reality. If our client continues to get the mail, no one is going to believe him when he says there’s a second Anna Lee.” At that point I lost it. I told them their demand was outrageous. They could cancel the show if they wanted to, but I would not drop somebody whose only crime was sharing a name. When I got back to my office, there was a phone call waiting for me. It was from a friend of mine at the agency. He said, “If I were you, I would not lose my temper like that. If you want to argue, do it quietly. After you left, somebody said, ‘Is Goodson a pinko?’”

SOURCE : Griffin Fariello, Red Scare (New York: Norton, 1995), 320–324.