Hawkshaw at Home

Tuesday is fun-and-games day in the nation's 41 million TV parlors, with no fewer than eleven quiz shows in about as many hours. Best of the big batch is a witty, unpretentious panel quiz on CBS called To Tell the Truth (9 p.m., E.S.T.), which came to television almost a year ago from the well-stocked cupboard of Goodson-Todman,* purveyors of What's My Line?

Like its successful parent, Truth trades more on parlor fun than private largesse, encouraging its 25 million viewers to get their vicarious thrills by playing Hawkshaw at home. The trick is for the panel of four (Polly Bergen, Kitty Carlisle, Ralph Bellamy, Hy Gardner) and home viewers to tell the real McCoy from a trio that includes two impostors or "side men." Each of the panelists is permitted a few questions to separate the cheats from the right chap, but the liars usually put on a more convincing act than the real item or "central character," and their own occupations often make nice contrasts to the truth.

Make It Tough. Such was the case last week when Moderator Bud Collyer introduced each of three men as "Thomas Carpenter, West Point cadet." One imposter was actually a Coast Guard ensign, the other a truck driver who had learned to brace his back in the Marine Corps. Both had spent the previous day at West Point, boning up on campus customs, getting regulation haircuts and uniforms fitted. Three of the panelists guessed the truck driver, an act he greeted with one of the most triumphant smiles ever flashed on the TV screen. Another time the panel had to pick out a Texan who had parlayed $350 into a vast oil fortune. "What is an important byproduct of oil?" one of the fakes, a minister from South Carolina, was asked.

"Cash!" said he, capturing both the audience and all four panel votes. Yankee second baseman Jerry Coleman, posing as Singer Don Rondo, once fooled three out of four panelists.

Making it tough for the panelists is the job of Producer Gil Fates, a sort of inverted Diogenes, who must first find "people everyone has heard of but no body has seen," but whose even harder search is for people adept at lying. Fates keeps enormous files of newspaper clips about odd characters, and complete cards on everyone who has ever entered his office.

Lie Like Mad. Each week Fates picks his impostors from about 70 applicants ("This is a great outlet for hams"), then puts them through intensive briefings with the "central character." "We like real switches -- such as the parachute salesman and the guy who sells accident insurance posing as an Empire State Building window washer, or the publisher of the Fisherman acting like the president of the Liars' Club." Side men are often asked to read up on the profession they are faking.

"Then," says Fates, "we tell them to go out there and lie like mad." Mad lying made the panel guess wrong about 70% of the time.

* Mark Goodson, 42, a onetime radio announcer, and Bill Todman, 41, a onetime copywriter, who branched out into journalism last week when their offer of $3,000,000 for the Pawtucket, R.I. daily Times was accepted by the owners.

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